What a roller coaster of a week it’s been, Zoners! It’s so great to have Stephen and the ‘Colbert Report’ back, right kiddos? New shows are always salve for the soul, that’s for darn sure.

So on a personal note, I thought I’d share with everyone the good news – I got a job! I’m super excited about it, too. To paraphrase something Stephen said in an interview once, it requires all the things I know how to do. It’s an Exec Admin position with a technology company that configures and installs network systems for large companies. I’ll be reporting to the Vice President, and it is going to have me doing a lot of heavy Excel and Access reporting, which is my total fave. Plus I’m getting a 5% raise over my job where I got laid off, and basically a 25% raise from the job I had just six months ago. Life is good. Another added bonus of this job is that there’s tons of vacation time which start accruing from day one, which means I can start to plan my next New York trip very soon. A gal’s gotta have priorities, you know.

I’d also like to discuss a little site business if I could. As most of you know, our loyal friend Jenny with a Y had to step down from her Completist duties. Not only was she responsible for the R.A.P.S. posts every night, but she also has been keeping the calendar up to date for close to a year. I’m absorbing the R.A.P.S duties, but it would be super helpful if we could get one of you Zoners to volunteer to be the new Calendar Guru. If you’ve been looking for a way to help keep No Fact Zone the best Stephen Colbert fan site on the web and this sounds like a fun project to you, we’d love to have you on as an official Completist. Please e-mail me and we’ll see if we can get that position filled. Thank you to all of you who help with the site – I couldn’t do it without all of your hard work and support. No Fact Zone truly is a labor of love.

Also, we recruited this fantastic team of SCribes to help with the guides on a weekly basis … and then I got super busy (and stressed) with the job hunt and haven’t been able to keep up with getting the completed Episode Guides proofed and posted. With the new job, I should be able to get back into a routine in my life and get those back on track. So SCribes, expect an e-mail from me very soon!

Finally, here’s my discussion question for this week:

What’s your favorite prop-based humor that Stephen has done on the show?

This week, Stephen has become quite the prop comic. From Sweetness shooting poor suffering Tom Purcell, to the rotisserie chicken and viking hat, to those tarantulas that Stephen had crawling all over him, it has been quite the week for the prop department over at the ‘Colbert Report’. But there have been so many other memorable use of props over the course of the show. What are some of your favorite sketches that involved Stephen doing wacky things with even wackier items?

And as always, feel free to start a new comment thread about any open topic that you wish. The original intent of these FFFA posts was to allow the Zoners to have a weekly roundtable about any topic they felt like discussing, and they are always a fantastic community building experience. Please feel free to share your thoughts about anything you might like to talk about with other like-minded Colbert fans.

Screencap courtesy of Colbert Pics

• Friday Free-for-all: Lazy Sunday edition
• Friday Free-for-all
• Friday Free-for-all: Seriously, the Economy Sucks edition
• Friday Free-for-all

Normally I take this time each week to talk about the fandom, or other fun stuff. But today I’m going to tell you about my day.

At 3:00p today, I was laid off from my Purchasing position at the second largest large-format printing company in the country.

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• Friday Free-For-All
• Friday Free-for-all: Lazy Sunday edition
• Friday Free-for-all
• Friday Free-for-all

Howdy all! And welcome to Friday! I don’t know about you guys, but I was terribly impressed with the shows this week. A lot of times, when the ‘Colbert Report’ comes back from a break, it struggles a bit with finding its footing before it gets back in the groove, but I really think the break gave the staff (and Stephen, of course) a much needed break and they hit the ground running when they came in on Monday. Stephen has looked so relaxed and refreshed, and I don’t know what they’ve done to his hair this week but it’s just shiny and full and beautiful.

Also, we’ve been doing some cleanup here on the backend with the Episode Guide archive. I put out a call for recruits last week, and we got more of a response to the Episode Guide cleanup than I ever imagined we’d get! Thanks for all who volunteered, even though we weren’t able to use all of your help. I’d like to take a quick moment to say a very sincere Thank You to all of the people who were able to contribute to the the Episode Guide cleanup this week – verbaltypo, nerdygirl, LadyNocturne, FurElise, Porter, Tiger, Val, AnnG, Cole, and last but certainly not least MsInterpreted. When I asked for the recruits for this project, we had 26 guides that needed to be completed for our archive to be cleaned up. In the course of five days, this wonderful team has gotten *22* of them done! I still need to clean up and post the last of the already completed guides (and finish a few of my own), but we should have the project done by the end of the weekend. Huge Kudos to all! I’ll work on a schedule this weekend to get the new SCribes set up for getting the guides done on a nightly basis again, and we should be at 100% with the guides again on a daily basis very soon. But don’t fret – we’ll also be keeping the wonderful R.A.P.S. posts that give us instant feedback to what everyone else thought about the episode.

This year at No Fact Zone, my focus is going to be to make the reader’s fan experience both unique and meaningful. With ColbertNation.com bringing us much more official content, as well as a shiny new forum, it is important that we work hard here to both compliment the support that is finally being given given to the fans by Comedy Central, as well as make your visit here something that you find a worthwhile experience. Our uniqueness here, and what gives us worth, revolves around the fact that we are truly organic, that this is a “labor of love” by the fans, for the fans, and a way for us the fans to express our fandom in a very personal way.

Which brings me to a subject which I’d love to hear your thoughts about in regards to the Lessig interview last night. I found the concept of the mash-up in regards to web content quite interesting. What we do here at No Fact Zone is definitely building on the works of other artists, specifically Stephen Colbert and the ‘Colbert Report’ writers. Not only do we disucuss our feelings about the show and the humor created by the artists, but we also feature things such as fan art and other fandom creations inspired by Stephen and the show.

My creation, my “art” if you will, is this blog. And it’s so much more than talking about Stephen’s beautiful head of hair, although obviously that’s part of it. Through my passion, to express my “art”, I have taught myself HTML, taught myself how to blog, and learned how to do so much online that I’ve never done before. I take my art and make it about expressing my thoughts and feelings about another artist.

The main point that Lessig made that really hit home for me is that this “mash-up” art mentality, taking something that is already created and building upon it, is itself a very valuable form of art. This concept has really given me pause, and brought back to the forefront some thoughts about blogging that have been mulling around in my head for quite some time.

I am proud of my work here at No Fact Zone as are all the staff, but none of us would be creating anything if it were not for our inspiration from Stephen. I’ve been reading the new blogging book by the Huffington Post (The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging), and they say that the number one rule for blogging is to express your passion. And our passion is the show. Building a blog around the actions of another, however, is definitely epitomizing this “mash-up” mentality that Lessig brought to the forefront last night.

There have been moments where I have really done some self-examining, especially at times like this last show break, where there’s not much news and I’m wondering how much of this blog shold be “me” in proportion to how much should be Stephen and the show. Is it fair to the fans of Stephen for me to use this outlet to discuss myself as well as the show? Or how the show affects me personally? The book says that no matter what your passion, it’s your personality that makes or breaks a blog. I like to think that it’s the personality of the commenters who make or break this blog, and I am very satisfied with the strength of our community.

But it still comes around to “my” art, and having “my” art revolve around the show. It was wonderful to feel that in some way, this art of mine is similar to Stephen’s art. I loved the point that Lessig made about how Jon and Stephen base much of their own art on the ridiculous news around them. They take the news, and add to it to create their own unique, and marketable, product. Even Stephen mentioned the fans, and how the Green Screen challenge was the fans taking his work and adding value to it by mashing it up.

So I guess my question to you all is, what are your thoughts about “Mash-up” art? It can be about what we do here, but more than that, I’d like to hear about how Stephen has inspired your art. I know books have been dedicated to him, and portraits have been painted of him, and other fan sites have been created. Most of you who read this blog participate in other fandoms as well. Do you have any thoughts that this interview helped to bring out in you? Some of my favorite posts here at No Fact Zone are the ones where the Zoners really think about things with the show and their own lives. I really look forward to seeing the responses and discussions that these ideas facilitate.

• Friday Free-For-All
• Friday Free-for-all: Lazy Sunday edition
• Friday Free-for-all
• Friday Free-for-all: Seriously, the Economy Sucks edition

Is it just me, or do some ‘Colbert Report’ break weeks drag much, much more than others? Because this week is DRAAAAAGING! At least we have December 20th to look forward to on the “Colbert Christmas” DVD Advent calendar. Plus the ‘Best Of’ lists will be kicking in soon, and I know that we’ll be posting the heck out of those.

I thought I’d mention that my blog series over at Lorelle’s Blog is still going strong. Here’s a list of the articles published so far:

• The Art of the Fan-Based Blog
• The Art of the Fan-Based Blog: Cultivate Your Passion
• The Art of the Fan-Based Blog: Competition Means Collaboration
• The Art of the Fan-Based Blog: Create a Game Plan
• The Art of the Fan-Based Blog: Content, Content, Content
• The Art of the Fan-Based Blog: Content, Content, Content Part II
• The Art of the Fan-Based Blog: Copyrights for You and Your Content Sources

For our community participation project for the day, I do have a question for all of you, and I’d like your honest input with this:

What are some suggestions for improvements or additions you might like to see for the No Fact Zone website?

During my Christmas break from work, I plan on working on customizing a new template for the site to feature some of the really groovy bells and whistles that WordPress 2.7 has to offer. Our last template change didn’t go quite as well as I’d hoped (and MsI and Kina will understand why I simultaneously smile and freak out every time I think of changing the template now). But I know that with a little time and a strong theme, I can modify the site to do everything I can envision for it.

I’d like to thank all of you who have done your Holiday shopping by starting at the Amazon link in our sidebar, because it’s the funds that we have made this month that will help pay for the template I will most probably go with. I really want this site to run smoothly and look as good as possible, and I really think that to take it to the next level, we’re going to have to go with something that’s an actual “premium” professional template. And while this site is and always will be a labor of love, it’s nice to be able to do things to make the site better without dipping into my wallet too often. Thank you so much for your support.

So, back to ideas to incorporate into a new template. I have some features I definitely want to add to the site, such as:

• Gravatars
• Utilization of the Threaded comments feature in WordPress 2.7
• A “Search” button next to the search field
• A cleaner look for our Internet Explorer users (the navbar does wonky things in IE right now)

The last time I did a request for additions to the site, we were able to use a ton of the different suggestions, such as R.A.P.S posts, the Recent Comment widget, the Klassic Kolbert posts that we feature when the show is dark, a larger font for the blog entries, etc. I’m hoping that we can get even more suggestions from the power users of the site on how to make No Fact Zone even better.

And as always, this is a community-building thread. Feel free to share things that are on your mind, keeping in mind our goal of maintaining a family-friendly site.

• Friday Free-For-All
• Friday Free-for-all: Lazy Sunday edition
• Friday Free-for-all
• Friday Free-for-all: Seriously, the Economy Sucks edition

Oh my dear Lord, people! This week has been an insane flurry of news here at No Fact Zone. Don’t forget to enter our “Colbert Christmas” contest for your chance to win DVDs of the special.

We’ve got a ways before we’re done celebrating here, though. On Sunday, early in the day, we’ll post a Super Awesome Spectacular “Colbert Christmas” post, and we can *finally* bond as fans and friends in the comments as we soak in the spectacularness that is Stephen Colbert in Mukluks. Next week is “Interview Week”, where we’ll be featuring exclusive interviews with J.J. Sedelmaier (animator and pop culture icon), David Javerbaum (Executive Producer, ‘The Daily Show’) and Rob Kutner (writer, ‘The Daily Show’). In addition, as is our tradition, we will be doing some “Klassic Kolbert” reruns to help us make it through the rerun week.

Also, again on a personal note, don’t forget that I’m doing a little bit of blogging about the site over at my buddy Lorelle’s blog. This is how the blog series is going so far:

• Introducing the Art of the Fan-Based Blog Article Series
• The Art of the Fan-Based Blog
• The Art of the Fan-Based Blog: Cultivate Your Passion
• The Art of the Fan-Based Blog: Competition Means Collaboration

We’ve got quite a few more articles before the series is complete, so check Lorelle’s site often.

Normally at this point in the post, I ask a question to get the conversations going. But right now, all I can think about is the Christmas special and how wonderful it is and how cool Sunday night is going to be. But I don’t want to spoil it for those who are avoiding spoilers like crazy. So … tell me:

What are your plans for this weekend, other than spending Sunday night at 10p in front of the television?

And you can talk about anything you want. Just try not to post any spoilers for the special.

• Friday Free-For-All
• Friday Free-for-all: Lazy Sunday edition
• Friday Free-for-all
• Friday Free-for-all: Seriously, the Economy Sucks edition