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The Sci-Fivers Subsite FAQ by Zeke |
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Q: What is Sci-Fivers?
It's the subsite of Five-Minute Voyager dedicated to science fiction that's not covered in other subsites. It's referred to by the abbreviation 5MSF (formerly S5). See the main Five-Minute Voyager FAQ for information about the site as a whole. Q: Who's in charge? The section head of 5MSF is Zeke. He adds new material now and then and handles submissions to the subsite. You can contact him at [email protected]. Q: Is 5MSF open for submissions? Very. The staff visit here pretty often, but the majority of our Sci-Fivers content comes from guest writers. This is also the subsite where you're least likely to find that the episode you want is taken. (Exception: the Movies minisite is not open for submissions.) Before you start, read through the Submissions FAQ. Q: What's a minisite? When a series in Sci-Fivers is represented enough times, it's moved to its own page rather than have it take up excessive space on the front page. These pages are called minisites and have their own graphics (because Zeke will take any excuse to make new graphics). There are currently two minisites: one for Babylon 5 (5MB5) and one for sci-fi movies (5MM). 5MB5 is open for submissions, but 5MM isn't. Q: Will there be more minisites? Definitely. The content for one is in progress now; it should be ready to go before the year is out. There are other potential candidates as well. Q: How come this subsite is emphasized in the site's address, www.sci-fivers.com.ar? A couple of years ago I ran a poll asking whether 5MV should change its name, and one candidate name was "Sci-Fivers." To my surprise, it won the poll. By that point I'd already decided to keep the name Five-Minute Voyager, but I decided to honour the results of the poll by naming my miscellaneous section Sci-Fivers. As a little contest, I asked if anyone could guess what I was going to use the name for. To my surprise, one reader actually created his own answer to that question by offering me a new site alias, sci-fivers.com.ar. It wasn't what I planned, but it was cool, so I took it.
Q: What's a Fiver By Committee?
It's a forum-based project I started way back in November 2002. I chose a movie most sf fans these days have seen -- The Matrix -- and broke it down into chunks. I posted a synopsis of each chunk, and anyone interested could attempt to make a fiver scene or two out of it. Then we'd take a vote to decide which should be used. The goal, of course, was to assemble this into a fiver of the whole movie.
In theory, this was a great way for people to get a taste of fiver-writing without taking on a whole episode. In practice... it was exactly that, it just took forever, mostly because I tended to drop the ball on it. The fiver was finally published in November '08, just under six years after we began.
The first and last scenes are by me; everything else is the work of countless forum members who made contributions or tweaked others' scenes. Listing them all would be problematic, so I've collectively dubbed them the Big Fiving Committee (BFC). This completes a cycle of acronyms with Fiver By Committee (FBC) and Completed Fiver Blocks (CFB), which is a thread I updated as we went along. (There's also a VVS joke here.) If you want to know who did which scene, read the archived forum threads.
A second Fiver By Committee is in progress, this time for Independence Day.
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