Clearing out the Fan Fiction queue this morning, there are now eight new pieces for you to read. So go read.

XerxdeeJ stopped by to tell us that his Halo-related blog ‘Tied the Leader‘ isn’t dead, it was just on vacation while he kicked off his marriage. In fact, the top article right now is a recounting of the weekend leading up to that momentous event. It’s a monster. Go read.

It’s certainly not the first time I’ve seen it speculated that Dr. Halsey (who has never appeared in-game, only in the Halo novels) might be the mother of Miranda Keyes… but it’s the most thorough examination of the evidence I’ve come across. Kudos, Dark One.

Pinkuh announced a new webcomic this morning – it’s called ‘Lost the Lead‘, and it will chronicle her adventures in online gaming. (Halo will play a pretty big role, but it won’t be ALL Halo.) Looking forward to it!

Treeskunk Productions, the folks behind ‘Outpost: Coagulation’ and ‘Lethal Tactics’, have released a trailer for ‘Project 117’, an upcoming machinima film that follows the Spartan IIIs, a group hunted by the very people they were created to protect, as they try once again to save humanity. 22.7 mb, WMP9 format. Great camera angles.

Fun article in Stars & Stripes – coverage of inter-base Halo tournaments within the British Royal Air Force. Those military Halo fanatics – they’re everywhere!

We showcase Bryn Casey’s original artwork here on HBO, but he’s far busier than just traditional painting and drawing. He also does some gorgeous rendering – you can see this work on Yayap.com. (Hit the fourth link in the navbar, and you’ll get to the Renders page… the first two are amazing. Well, they’re all pretty nice, but the first two are special.) If this news post does any damage, we’ll host those files locally… because folks should see them. Thanks to Exiled Zealot for pointing them out.

Wow. rapture posted a note on our forum, alerting folks to the fact that he’s resurrecting the HBO-COERCE HaloPC server for a couple of months – Battle Creek CTF Shotties, No Shields, Bay-bee! See you there.

A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned a pretty cool charitable act – BoneKin was going to let his XBL performance decide how much money he was going to contribute to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. Last week, apparently, this story was picked up by the San Antonio Express-News – nice! Thanks to N1NJ4, who scanned the paper article, and GreyThor, who found the online version.

It’s been a little while since I went through our Uploads folder – partly, this has been out of fear. There were over 300 items in it this time around (it’s been roughly 45 days since it was last cleared), and that meant a lot of downloading, and a lot of processing. Amazingly, very few people seem to read the page they upload from – even though it says ‘don’t upload movies here!’ we still got 54 of them. We got fan fiction, we got tricks writeups, we got story speculation (all items the page says ‘don’t put here!’). We also got some moron uploading a dozen or so wallpapers of some supermodel – smooth move, buddy. Yeah, we’re gonna post ’em for you. Sure. There were dozens of people who apparently just wanted to see if the upload page works – we got existing wallpapers, Bungie wallpapers, and other random crap like this. (It works. Thanks for checking.) We got folks uploading hack scripts, attempting to break into our server. (The directory that holds the uploaded files is not web-accessible – don’t waste your time.) But mixed in with all this garbage, we DID get a bunch of cool stuff; I’ll be updating the Wallpaper and Misc Art sections in the next couple of days. And there were a few other pieces that are worth sharing with the community – though they don’t really fit into existing sections. One of these came from Traize – it’s a picture of his girlfriend’s back, with her new tattoo nicely displayed. (It was sent in 2 weeks ago – apologies for the delay, Ali!) And a second ‘random item’ is a digital photo of a newspaper article submitted almost 3 weeks ago by Unrelenting (who apologizes for the lousy quality); it’s unclear what newspaper this came from, but the caption reads “Soldiers from the 210th Forward Support Battalion of the 10th Mountain Division play the ‘Halo 2’ video game during free time at Camp Liberty in Baghdad. With four game consoles linked, as many as 16 play at once.” I dunno… I’ve seen games turn ugly in real life… I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with real guns sitting so close to the players! Okay, that was my computer version of Spring -er, Fall Cleaning for the weekend; time to go outside and do some REAL cleaning. Update: Thanks to Subpoena, Unrelenting’s older brother, who pointed out that the paper is The Watertown Daily Times, out of Watertown, NY. (I couldn’t find the picture online, but I didn’t look very hard.)

Over at Team3D.net, F13ND has conducted an interview with Ogre 1 – it’s a look back at the WCG win last week, and a look forward to Singapore in November. Always fun to keep up on the top pros!

Eep – I missed this a couple of days ago! After the success of the sale of a blue version, Briar’s Armor is selling a green Master Chief outfit. There are only 4 and a half days left in the auction – starting bid, again, is $1500. Give it a look!

Over on the Bungie.net forum, pro_duece2 posted a series of pictures of some rapid-prototyped models of Halo pistols (both the original, and the Halo 2 magnum). (Rapid-prototyping is a technique for creating 3D models from computer drawings – these are made from plaster/epoxy composite.) On the off chance that his links die, we’ve mirrored the pics here:

• Side View, Halo 2
• Back View, Halo 2
• Side View, Halo
• Front View, Halo
• Halo 1 and 2 Pistols
• Halo 1 and 2 Pistols, plus an Airsoft gun

Pretty cool stuff! Thanks to Hunt3r for the heads-up on this one.

We don’t normally post news verbatim from press releases, but this one was good, as-is. It came from the good folks at machinima.org:

The annual Machinima Awards (“the Mackies”), presented during the 2005 Machinima Film Festival is nearing its submission deadline. The awards, honoring the best in Machinima, include the following categories:

• Best Picture
• Best Direction
• Best Virtual Performance
• Best Virtual Design
• Best Sound
• Best Writing
• Best Editing
• Best Technical Achievement
• Best Commercial/Game Machinima
• Best Independent Film
• Best Off-The-Shelf Machinima
• Best Machinima Series

Please note that all entries must be in high-quality video format at broadcast NTSC resolution of 720×480 (AVI/MOV with DV codec, or Mpeg2 on data DVD). DIVX films will be rejected.

We encourage Machinima filmmakers from all over to submit to the festival – the deadline is Oct. 6th, so get movin’! For more information about the festival and the Machinima Awards, visit festival.machinima.org.

There are a bunch of people in this community with a pretty good shot at this stuff – get cracking!

Yesterday, the IMDB entry for the Halo movie was changed – with the inclusion of Uwe Boll as Director. This caused no small amount of uproar on Halo forums around the net – even sites like Joystiq speculated on whether this was true. It’s not true. Joseph Staten, Halo 2’s writer and the Bungie employee who is currently most involved in the movie negotiations, had this to say:

“Nope. Absolutely not true. Trust me, when we’ve got something big to announce about the film (such as the director), we won’t just be sneaking it onto IMDB.”

Hopefully, this will put the rumors to bed… thanks, Joe!

Red vs Blue Episode 61, ‘Fair Competition’, is up for sponsors right now. (This means it’ll be up for the general public sometime tomorrow night.) A new character is now fully part of the cast… and I’m thinking, cross between Scooby Doo and Strongbad. With added odors. Fun stuff! Thanks to Keyes for the heads-up.

The Rockets on Prisoner Awards Ceremony has been delayed for a while now – but That Weasel dropped into our forum to point out a Preview video – nothing’s been cancelled yet! Check it out.

Dyslexia has written a review of MLG Seattle – fun writeup of a tourney near the end of a tumultuous season. Give it a read! Thanks, 3Suns.

Friday’s Halo Babies went live sometime recently – SBZ told us about it just a little bit ago. I always wondered about that stuff…

The Bungie Weekly Update has been posted – it’s a report from the floor of the Tokyo Game Show, filed by none other than Frankie. It’s completely devoid of Bungie-related material – but then, the folks back in Kirkland didn’t do much except move in and hold their annual Pentathlon (which will be covered NEXT week), so I suppose it’s okay. If you’re a gamer, there’s some pretty cool stuff in the report – go read!