5MV Update History

maintained by Zeke

FEBRUARY 2006

February 2

Psych! Doctor Who is coming, but not till after this. Today is Sa'ar Chasm's birthday (he is ollllld), and I decided the least I could do would be to finally publish the 5MB5 event that's been ready for a while now but got lost in the shuffle. Get ready for three days of 23rd-century excitement in an event I'm calling Babylon 5 Three-Dayge.

You know, Third Age.

Look, if you've got a better name... anyway, here's today's content.

• Sa'ar starts us off with "The Illusion of Truth," one of JMS's many don't-trust-the-media pieces.
• Next up is PointyHairedJedi with "Eyes." (Behold!)
• And rounding out the first day is a Top 10 list from Sa'ar: The Top 10 Breakup Lines From Babylon 5 Characters.

[Comments]

February 3

Welcome to Day 2 of Babylon 5 Three-Dayge, with the following content:

• Sa'ar completes his cliffhanger from Cliffhanger Week with "The Fall of Centauri Prime." Can you guess what scene I have to kill him for?
• Here's a Top 10 list I'm surprised I didn't write long ago: The Top 10 Signs That Your Girlfriend is a Vorlon.

[Comments]

February 4

It was a new age. It was the end of history. It was the day everything changed. The day was Babylon 5 Three-Dayge, Day 3. The place was FiveMinute.net.

• Sa'ar's final contribution to this event is "Grail." Five guesses which movie he references, and the first four don't count.
• Next is Derek Dean's first B5er: "Intersections in Real Time."
• And after yesterday's update, there could be no doubt that this was coming: The Top 10 Signs That Your Girlfriend is a Shadow (by me).

This concludes our brief excursion to Epsilon 3. There's still lots of B5 to cover, though -- and Sa'ar is staff now, so you can expect it to keep coming.

Up next: Doctor Who!

(Picky clerical note: I've interchanged the colour codes of 5MB5 and 5MFY. The lighter brown is easier on the eyes and thus should go with the subsite we'll be hearing from more often.)

[Comments]

February 7

The Doctor Who update is finally here! This is what you might call a micro-event -- it's just one day, but features two important fivers, representing the first and latest episodes of the current Who series.

• Part one is "Rose," my first Doctor Who fiver. This was first slated for the 5MDW launch in June, and in fact I got about a third of the fiver written around then. (Believe it or not, this isn't even close to my record for time difference between parts of a fiver.) Attentive readers will already have noticed that I love this episode, as I've referenced it more than once in other stuff.
• Part two is "The Christmas Invasion" by Scooter. This between-season special was our introduction to the Tenth Doctor, played by David Tennant. (It also introduced an alien race called the Sycorax -- bonus points for anyone who remembers another alien by that name!) Parts of Scooter's fiver make more sense if you know that there's a spinoff series called Torchwood coming up. We don't know much about it yet except that (a) it features Jack Harkness from last season, (b) "The Christmas Invasion" seems to have sown some of the seeds for it, and (c) the title's an anagram of Doctor Who.

So that's our double feature. The pairing couldn't have worked out better -- you'll notice that Scooter and I use nearly identical gags at one point. It's pure coincidence (neither of us had read the other's fiver when those bits were written), but it looks like inter-fiver continuity. Score!

[Comments]

February 9

Today you get a double-header from Derek. The half you'll be expecting is the latest Smallville episode, "Vengeance." (It's got vengeance!)

The other half you won't be expecting. Remember when Marc left, and I published an ENT fiver he'd written some time ago for a 5ME "guest event" that never materialized? He wasn't the only one -- Derek had written his too. (This is impressive if you know that the event never got past the hypothetical stage and thus never had a deadline.) So, now that the event is definitely off (though something like it may yet occur), there's no reason to hold back Derek's fiver any longer. Here's Five-Minute "Dawn."

Does this presage more ENT activity to come? Mmmmaybe.*

* Yes.

[Comments]

February 10

He's back with reinforcements! Nate has recently been producing DS9 fivers at a rate which is, frankly, terrifying. Here are two of them: "Looking for Par'Mach in All the Wrong Places" (an episode that makes me wish I didn't use entire titles as filenames) and "In the Cards." But before this DS9 phase he wrote a Next Gen fiver which has been waiting for ages, so here's that too -- "Manhunt." Sorry for the wait, Nate the Great. It was fate. (What's the date?)

[Comments]

February 15

Starting tomorrow we'll be focusing on one subsite for a while, so I want to get a couple of things moving beforehand.

• First, here's Derek's latest SV fiver, "Tomb."

• Second, I've started two important threads in the 5M.net Talk forum. Be sure to check those out. One is for eTrektion candidates, but the other is something on which I need as many readers' input as possible.

• Third, my Fans! CDs arrived today! Attentive readers will know of my love for Fans!, a brilliant webcomic by T Campbell. It ended its remarkable five-year run last April, and T recently announced that the archive CDs would no longer be available for purchase, so I got them while I could. (The archives are also available online; you need a GraphicSmash subscription, but if you haven't read Fans!, the subscription is more than worth it for that comic alone.)

  To mark the occasion, I'm publishing something here that I wrote when the comic ended: The Top 10 Problems Rikk, Ally, and Rumy Are Going to Have. The context is as follows: the longest-running plot thread in the comic was the love triangle between protagonists Rikk, Alisin, and Rumiko. In the last week of strips, T resolved this triangle in an extremely unexpected way, creating his biggest controversy to date. I was an active participant in the debate (on the negative side -- I thought, and still think, all three of them were out of character), and at one point, to inject a little levity, I wrote this Top 10 list poking fun at the whole thing.

  I didn't post it here at the time because it makes no sense to non-Fans!-fans. I'm posting it now for three reasons: I think it's one of my funniest lists ever, the arrival of my CDs felt like a sign, and there's precedent now for hopelessly obscure T10s. Enjoy -- unless you haven't read Fans! and intend to, because this'll spoil you stupid.

[Comments]

February 16

We do a lot of events here at 5M.net. Usually they're based on either launching a new subsite or significantly expanding the content of an existing one. But there's another kind of event we've never done, and which by definition we had to do sooner or later.

The end of a subsite.

In four years of operation, IJD GAF's Five-Minute Star Trek subsite has been one of our most popular and successful. But with only three seasons of content (four counting TAS), it was bound to run out faster than the other Treks. And so with 21 episodes left as we approached the fourth anniversary, IJD decided it was time to finish them off and make an event of it.

For the next seven days, we'll be publishing three fivers a day, leading up to the fourth anniversary on February 22. There'll also be Top 10 lists, TJI articles, and of course one of our trademark panel discussions. So without further ado, here's the beginning of the end....

• Five-Minute "A Private Little War," by IJD;
• Five-Minute "The Empath," by Kristina;
• Five-Minute "That Which Survives," by Derek;
• The Top 10 Rejected Plotlines for a Star Trek/Smallville Crossover Episode, also by Derek;
• and Minutemen, Part 1: "Bad Dudes", by me.

[Comments]

February 17

Welcome to Day 2, the continuation of the beginning of the end of Five-Minute Star Trek. Due to some smart scheduling by IJD yesterday, the remaining days will feature one fiver from each season. Here's what's on tap today....

• Five-Minute "Dagger of the Mind," by Sa'ar Chasm;
• Five-Minute "Metamorphosis," by Tarn-Vedra;
• Five-Minute "Day of the Dove," by IJD;
• and Minutemen, Part 2: "Trailerbound", also by IJD.

[Comments]

February 18

Welcome to Day 3, or the Big Three, if you will. Today we have....

• Five-Minute "The Naked Time," by Derek;
• Five-Minute "Patterns of Force," by Kristina;
• Five-Minute "The Paradise Syndrome," also by Kristina;
• Minutemen, Part 3: "Super Minutemen Bros.", by Derek;
• and Scooter's first and weirdest TJI, TOS subsite holds Everything-Must-Go blowout sale.

[Comments]

February 19

Day 4 is upon us. Here's the stuff:

• Five-Minute "The Conscience of the King," by me;
• Five-Minute "Friday's Child," by Scooter;
• Five-Minute "The Way to Eden," by IJD;
• and Minutemen, Part 4: "Khantra", by Sa'ar Chasm.

[Comments]

February 24

As you'll have guessed, the last three days of the 5MST event are being held up a bit. There have been problems on my end and IJD GAF's, and the two of us are responsible for most of the remaining content. As a result, Day 5 unfortunately can't be any sooner than Monday (when I get back to Waterloo). I'll do my best to make that estimate exact. In the meantime, I'll see if I can find a couple of small updates to make.

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