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The This Just In FAQ by Zeke |
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Q: What is This Just In?
It's a collection of satirical news articles published at Five-Minute Voyager. The articles poke fun at diverse targets inside and outside the sf genre, not to mention at 5MV's staff themselves. It's referred to by the abbreviation TJI. (See the main Five-Minute Voyager FAQ for information about the site as a whole.) Q: Who's in charge? The section head of TJI is Zeke, who also writes most of the articles. You can contact him at zeke@sci-fivers.com.ar. Q: Is TJI open for submissions? No. At the moment, we're only accepting This Just In articles from the 5MV staff. (Issue #18 predates this policy.) Q: When are the articles published? When I started writing them, there was a new article every Sunday. That was fun, but it wasn't long before I was having trouble keeping up. Eventually I decided I just couldn't commit to a regular TJI schedule -- too much of the writing depends on being inspired with just the right concept. Nowadays, I think of This Just In as a periodical, sometimes going only days between updates and sometimes going weeks. We average a bit more than one article per month. Q: What's the deal with "this reporter"? Is he you or another character? Neither, really. Since TJI is meant to mimic the style of professional newspaper articles, I've always used the third person for it, and after a few articles the "narrator" started getting a bit of a personality. It wasn't really deliberate, but I found I liked it. "This reporter" is just a disembodied attitude, nameless and faceless, with only one personal characteristic: gender. He's a he when I write him and a she when Kira does. Q: Is it even possible to be as drunk as Jeice O. Garricker's parents were when they named him? Yeah, sorry about that. I was into weird names at the time. ("Hmmm, what's a middle initial you don't see very often?") The name is also a reference to Dragonball Z and the original Flash. There's no actual point to any of it. Q: Did you steal Joe Black from Meet Joe Black? Character, no; mental image, yes. Q: What do I do to get quoted in one of the articles? It doesn't really work like that, but one reliable method is to become a frequent poster at the forums. The TJI quotes are very often fanservice -- hence the strange names attached to many of them. Keep in mind, though, that we make up the quotes ourselves as part of writing the articles (with one exception I'll get to in a sec), so it's only a privilege if you don't mind our putting words in your mouth. And the choice of quotees depends on the subject of the article, of course. Q: What's the exception? Issue #20. The debate between me and Zuke was actually a massive forum thread, and I used the reply posts as quotes. I can't link to that thread, unfortunately, because this all came before the forums were accidentally wiped. Q: Why is Kira always so evil in TJIs? Why is the Pope always so Catholic? Q: Was the Beltran interview real? I know this doesn't sound like a frequently asked question, but it was actually asked by several people at the time. For the record, as the disclaimer on the main page says, nothing published at TJI is actually true. But based on true stories? More often than not. |
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