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Old 12-28-2015, 12:09 PM
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Zeke Zeke is offline
The lens that flares in the night
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You're in luck -- I've actually been working on a detailed history of 5MV for a while. Here's the relevant part. (We called the forum Deltachat, DC for short.)

Summer 2000! It was a turbulent time. The world was slowly recovering from the ravages of Y2K. Conan O'Brien was deciding what to do with his "In the Year 2000" bit. And the domestication of the dog continued unabated. But for us at Deltachat, it was mostly a three-month gap with no new Voyager episodes. What to do?

I don't know precisely why this came to my mind, but back in Grade 10, when we were studying Twelfth Night, I had once noticed on the teacher's desk something another student had handed in. It was called "Five-Minute Twelfth Night", and it conveyed each scene in a couple of lines. I only got to read the first two scenes before the teacher yanked it away -- maybe it was classified or something. But those scenes stuck with me.

Good artists create; great artists steal. I decided to try this comedy format myself. So I reread Jim's "Caretaker" summary to refresh my memory, and then I wrote my first fiver.

Naturally I posted it at DC. It went over really well -- better than I expected. I wish I'd thought to save the thread. (DC at the time was a Vantagenet board which pruned at ten pages or so. Low-tech, but we remember it fondly.)

So I did the latest episode, "Unimatrix Zero I." That fiver was popular too, and so I wrote more. What had begun as a whim turned into a project almost instantly. I'd been toying with the idea of making a website, and suddenly I had something to do with one.

Thus it was that, with six fivers under my belt, I whipped up the first incarnation of Five-Minute Voyager.
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FiveMinute.net: because stuff is long and life is short

[03:17] FiveMinZeke: Galactica clearly needs the advanced technology of scissors, which get around the whole "yanking on your follicles" problem.
[03:17] IJD: cylons can hack any blades working in conjunction
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