We’ve been listening to our readers’ criticisms about our blog, and without a doubt, the 1 complaint that I’ve heard more than any other regarding the blog is that people are displeased with our decision to disable the ability for readers to post comments. Well, we’ve heard your complaints and since we want our readers to enjoy their stay here, we’ve decided to once again allow readers’ comments.

However, there’s a condition: instead of all comments showing up immediately like before, from now on all comments will need to be approved by us before they’ll be published. It’s just a precaution, you understand. It isn’t that we don’t like you guys or don’t trust you, we just don’t want this place to turn into a circus like it was when we first started it. The reason we disabled the comments in the first place was because we were tired of getting trolled; it had gotten to the point where we were receiving more troll and hate comments than legitimate ones. Having said that, here are Da Rules for readers’ comments:

1. All comments must be on topic. They have to be in some way connected to the subject of the article. Any and all off-topic posts will be rejected and deleted, no questions asked. So if all you have to say here is something along the lines of “I remember you; you annoyed me in 2005 on TV.com!” or “I know who Lord Dolmus is!”, or “I’m studying to be a lumberjack, can you give me tips on how to chop down trees?” or “Lose weight now, ask me how”, then don’t bother typing it, because it’s not going to get published. It’s very simple: if your comment doesn’t in any way pertain to the blog posts in question, then your comment will be rejected or marked as spam and will not be published.

2. All comments must be respectful. Both to us and to the other people wishing to comment. We don’t expect everyone to share our unique perspectives on things, and it’s perfectly OK with us if you disagree with something that one of us says, just as long as you do it in an intelligent, mature, responsible manner. However, if you’re just posting to insult us or to troll the site, your post(s) won’t ever see the light of day, so don’t bother typing them. If you want your comment to be approved, then it should be something other than “I hate this site!” or “You guys suck” or “You’re pathetic”. Be on-topic, polite and mature about what you post or your comments will be rejected, no questions asked. We promise to keep our comments polite, respectful and professional, so we expect you to do the same. Fair’s fair.

3. Only registered users may post comments. No anonymous comments will be published. It’s nothing personal; just business. This is just a way to ensure that we only receive legitimate comments here, and a way of preventing hate posts from Internet Tough Guys who hide behind the anonymity of a computer screen, spam posts from trolls and kids whose posts scream “I’M THIRTEEN AND UNSUPERVISED!!”

4. It goes without saying that no racist, sexist, political, religious or homophobic comments will be tolerated. Any such commentary will likewise be rejected and deleted, no questions asked.

Basically, we ask that you keep your comments clean, be respectful and stay on topic. We also reserve the right to end comment threads at our discretion.

We look forward to hearing your comments in the coming weeks and months.

Are you ready for the summer? We are. Here at Twinsanity we’ve been enjoying baking our brains in the hot sun and chillaxing in front of the TV (what, you expect us to go outside?!) so much that we’ve decided to take the rest of the month off. Hey. bloggers need vacations too. But don’t worry: we’ll be blogging again come July. Just to keep your collective appetites wet, here are some of the upcoming Twinsanity entries slated for next month:

• The Retro Box: Yogi’s Gang – Yogi Bear and most of the Hanna-Barbera Zoo travel the land in a flying boat teaching kids to give a hoot and not pollute and to say their prayers, eat their vitamins and drink their milk. As much fun as it sounds.
• Overthinking It: Furry Confusion – Twinsanity takes a far-too in-depth look at the head-scratching phenomenon of the Funny Animal in cartoon society.
• The Retro Box: The Flintstones Comedy Hour – Flintstones, skits and rock songs. Oh, my!
• Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures Full Review – we follow up our Pac Preview Party entry to give our views on the show, so far.
• Cartoon Planet in Crisis – Cartoon Network has given their not-exactly retro cartoon block another time slot on Thursdays, so why is no one cheering?

These topics and possibly more will be tackled by Twinsanity in July. But now, if you’ll excuse us, it’s kegger time.

Just a quick alert to our readers: Starting today, we won’t be calling our blog site by the name Astral City anymore.

We’ve decided to change the name of our blog from Astral City to Twinsanity. This may seem sudden, but Damon and I have actually been thinking about changing the blog’s name for a little while. We wanted a name that contained the word “twin” because, well, we’re twins. But don’t worry, it’s the same site piloted by the same team, just with a different name. Happy reading!

Greeting, all.

Since this is the first article here for the year 2013, and there don’t seem to be any notable topics to discuss here at the moment, I thought that I would talk about what plans myself and Damon have for the new year and for this site.

No major surgery is needed here. My chief concern is that Astral City has gotten kind of angry as of late, and I blame no one but myself for that. The truth of the matter is that Astral City is not a public discussion blog. At least, not anymore.When Damon and I started AC three years ago, it was supposed to be a fun site where we would discuss fun things with the friends that we made on Toon Zone.net. However, things have changed since then. At the end of 2010, the year that AC was launched, I was kicked off of the TZ forums  and I think that a lot of the dirty laundry that I had from being on TZ spread out over here, which wasn’t my initial intent (would it be nice if I were allowed to post on the TZ forums again? Sure it would.

Originally, our blog was open for comments by the viewing public, and while there were some intelligent commentaries made by a few members, many of the comments were from forum trolls who used the comments section solely to insult us with flame bait that wasn’t connected in any way to the articles’ topics. It had reached the point where we were forced to delete all but 1 or 2 of the comments, which I wouldn’t have minded so much, except that the trolls were the only people posting regularly. So we figured that if the hecklers and trolls were the only people leaving comments, then we don’t need to have comments at all. We then disabled the comments section, and it’s been that way ever since. As usual, it’s a couple of jackasses who have to ruin it for everyone else. I’ve thought about allowing comments again, but honestly, I don’t see any way of doing that which won’t once again leave us open for attacks by trolls and haters. So sorry, but comments will still be disabled. The truth of the matter is that Astral City is not a public discussion blog. Not anymore. We tried doing it that way, and it didn’t work out. So now AC is a release for myself and for Damon; it’s somewhere where we can discuss whatever we want any way that we want, without getting leaned on by forum moderators and without having to take abuse from trolls and haters. If I believed for even a moment that we could allow comments again without the blog getting trolled routinely, I would allow them again, but I just don’t see that happening.

My only real goal for AC is to make the blog a friendlier place and to keep the articles generally upbeat and fun. I’ve thought about creating a private blog so if I ever need to vent or just get something off of my chest, I can do it there and not here.

Also, both Damon and myself have thought about gradually moving away from the message board type of thing entirely and doing something a tad more creative on the internet. Because I’m a creative person; I’m an artist and a writer and as such, I know that I can do more on the internet than just rant about stuff. I’d like to do something along the lines of Rifftrax or Game Grumps for cartoons. More recently, we’ve had this idea about doing what The Aquabats did for music, only with comedy and animation. I’ve thought about doing internet reviews, but there are plenty of those already. I’d also like to make some webtoons, as I’m full of ideas. Of course, I’ll need to learn some new skills such as editing and the like in order to accomplish this, but I can always learn. After all, I’ll only be 44 next month.

Hey, guys and gals. This is the artist formerly known as Blackstar here. Just thought I’d give everyone a quick heads up on some very minor news:

Starting today, I’ve changed my username from Blackstar to Goldstar, so if you read any posts here at Astral City with the name Goldstar attached, you’ll know that it’s me. This is a move which I had planned to make back on Toon Zone, had I stayed there. Why the change? Well, it’s mainly that after some bad experiences that I’ve had with certain individuals at TZ, the username Blackstar has since become associated with unpleasantness and disdain, and I’d like to make a fresh start. I’m not that guy anymore, so I’ve decided to bury that username and all of the negativity that had become attached to it. Also, I just plain like the way that Goldstar sounds; The DC comics character Booster Gold was originally going to call himself ‘Goldstar’, but his high school nickname “Booster” stuck in everyone’s mind.

Anyway, I’ll be going by the name Goldstar from now on. Goldstar isn’t someone else; it’s still me, but with a different username. Thanks for reading.