The Mix Foundation has announced the nominees for the award for Creative Achievement in Interactive Entertainment Sound Production at the upcoming 24th Annual TEC Awards. Halo 3 is up against Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, The Orange Box, and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. Winners will be announced on October 3. The full press release is here.(Louis Wu 21:00:46 UTC)

BlueNinja pointed out that he’s updated his ‘Views from the Edge’ blog with a bunch of new panoramas – there are even some Halo 2 versions! Go look. (If you’re looking for stuff since the last time we mentioned the site, it looks like the ‘Campaign: The Covenant‘ link about halfway down the June list is the first new one.)(Louis Wu 15:14:05 UTC)

Tony “ubald” Marcotte let us know that he’s created a new Halo render – this one is called ‘First Kill of the Day’, and it’s a pretty nice piece of work! The subject material is a little… disturbing, but maybe that’s just me. We’ve updated his local gallery here.(Louis Wu 13:58:37 UTC)

TrueDarkFusion pointed out that the third part of Forge Hub’s Forging Retrospective is now online. This one looks at Forge’s long-term popularity, in the face of not only other aspects of Halo 3, but other GAMES. Go read!(Louis Wu 13:45:28 UTC)

TTL Demag0gue let us know that Reclaimer 60 is now up – with word of a whole new cast of characters. Things are getting complicated!(Louis Wu 13:39:28 UTC)

Yeah, so if it had been anyone but ZZoMBiE13, I’d have said no… but hey, Another Halo Comic Strip is his baby, and the Guest strips that run on Sundays are his choices. I say this so that you don’t blame me for what you’re about to view.(Louis Wu 18:36:49 UTC)

If you want to keep track of how the 7 billion by 7/7 challenge is going, some folks over at WoW United (yes, a World of Warcraft website) have put together a nice tracking page – time, enemies left, day’s target, and more. (There’s a separate page that keeps track of the official Bungie.net total that’s updated every 15 minutes.) Thanks to DancingJesus for the heads-up. It’s not looking very good – we need a little less than 175 million kills left, and the total over the last 24 hours is less than 15 million. On the other hand, the WoW United page is counting down to the very START of Bungie Day (midnight between the 6th and the 7th) rather than the very END (midnight between the 7th and the 8th), so there is potentially 12% more time than they expected to finish the project. Are you doing your part?(Louis Wu 16:51:38 UTC)

Demented Decoy sent word that he’s been working on a series of screenshot-based comics called ‘Demented Weekly’ – so far, there are 4 issues (well, 3, the first one is more of a preview of the series). They’re downloadable in PDF format, and they follow the antics of the Across the Waves crew in Matchmaking. Swing by to grab ’em! (Louis Wu 14:54:22 UTC)

kr-1426 let us know that Arthur Wellesly has posted this week’s Fan Fic Pick of the Week for June 27 – swing by and read it!(Louis Wu 14:54:01 UTC)

John_117 pointed out a thread he started on Bungie.net, with an interesting picture comparison. (While you should visit his thread here, or his thread there, in order to comment, I’ve archived a copy of the picture for posterity – so that when someone goes back and reads this news post down the road a ways, they’ll know what it’s talking about.) (Louis Wu 14:52:28 UTC)

A few days ago, we mentioned a pretty fun goal the Halo community could shoot for – 7 billion campaign kills by Bungie Day (July 7). GhaleonEB, over at the NeoGAF forums, has been crunching the numbers each day since this challenge started… and it’s not looking good, at the current rate. Unless we pick up the pace, we’re going to fall short by about 50 million kills. The good news is, there are still 10 days left in the challenge, and speeding up the carnage just a little bit could make all the difference. If you haven’t done any Campaign killing recently… why not jump on and contribute? If you don’t care WHERE you play, and you just want the fastest way to build your kill count, jump into Crow’s Nest at Rally Point Bravo, on Easy – seems you can crank out 75 kills in about 3 minutes (then do it again!). Thanks to the whole NeoGAF crew for inspiration – I know we’ve got people on our own forum working on this, but they’re not discussing it.(Louis Wu 19:26:00 UTC)