Captain Spark continues his collection of dialogue snippets with the IWHBYD skull – there’s some hilarious stuff in there. He’s moving his website, so for now, these are only available in our Dialogue Databank.

Razgriz dropped us a note to tell us that FragNutz.org is offering free hosting to anyone interested in setting up a videogame site. More details of this offer can be found on their site. This might be a way to get your Halo site hosted!

Wonga. SketchFactor posted a Banhammer Update a few hours ago, over at Bungie.net (thanks, Dry Ice, for noticing) – in the first 24 hours of AU4.0’s existence, 2550 (wouldn’t it have been nice if it had been 2552, instead?) people have been permanently banned from Halo 2 Matchmaking. Nice! There’s also a mini-faq addressing some of the rumors swirling around – go read.

imSuck put together a music video for the song “Beverly Hills”, by Weezer. It cleared the MPRRS last night – so go ahead and grab a copy! Pretty funny, mostly using footage from the newest netmaps. Nice timing. 32.3 mb in WMP9 format, 30 mb in QuickTime format.

8BitOldie writes to let folks know that the Halo 2 CE mod team is almost ready to release Direct2U, an app that auto-updates team releases to make grabbing new content more painless than ever! Looks pretty cool!

IGN has put up an 11-minute video guide to new map strategies – available only to Insiders, it covers Gemini, Terminal, and Relic. After watching, I’d have to say that unless you’re REALLY a beginner, these aren’t going to help you much. But hey – every little bit helps, right? Thanks, BitMaP.

Cornballer pointed out that Aint-it-Cool News got a shot of the Red vs Blue crew hawking their wares at the San Diego Comic-con – amazing where they show up! (Scroll to the bottom of the page.)

Edwin Davis wrote to say he’s got some Halo screensavers up on his site – these work with MacOSX 10.4 (Tiger). One is our news feed, on your desktop… the other is flying Halo logos! Check ’em out. (These are pretty cool – but be warned, if you’re running a monitor off a PCI card, all you’ll get is a black screen and ‘Quartz Composer’ running around it – I guess these need the video bandwidth of an AGP connection.)

Anton P. Nym sent along a scan of an article from today’s London (Ontario) Free Press, covering the new Map Pack… but it’s online as well. Takes a shot at Nathan ‘Bentllama’ Walpole, a London native… always fun.

zugy posted an update on Project Torlan, the UT2004 Halo total conversion, and it includes a bunch of screenshots. Some of the maps look pretty fun – I especially like the one that looks to be a blend of Hang ’em High and Gephyrophobia. Check it out!

I might have forgotten, if not for prometheus – but Halo was announced to the world 6 years ago today. What a long, strange trip it’s been!

There’s some more info on the Comic-con Elite mentioned yesterday in this thread, including blurry pics and a link to an award the costume won.

Patriarch917 added the lyrics to ‘Hide’, his parody of the Goo Goo Dolls’ ‘Slide’ – we’ve put up a small page containing links to both of his songs, plus their lyrics – as he creates more, we’ll add to it!

GryphonOsiris wrote an ode to Ban Hammer – fun stuff.

The Auto-Update is now fully in force – if you log into Live, you must either accept it or be blocked from Matchmaking. Some noticed modders online this afternoon, even after they’d been updated – this doesn’t mean the update isn’t working; as Achronos mentioned on our forum, you’ll see a decline in cheating, rather than an instantaneous stoppage. Patience! Update: Some good info in the first post in this thread on the B.net forums, as well. Thanks, Dojorkan.

Jay Marrero sent along word of a tourney taking place in Orlando in October – full details can be found on the PGL Events page. $1000 on the line.

In the not-so-good category, we got mail from Tina and Tim Leyk – they thank the community profusely for their support, but wanted to pass on the bad news that as of October, they’re out on the street (no jobs, no house). Not sure what the community can do for them – but the PayPal link is still up, and linked from our front page. (The address changed recently – so if you’d tried to help and had gotten an error message, you can try again.) Personal hardship is always a bad thing…

Recently, Phatcorns mentioned on our forum that a new book had hit the shelves – It’s called ‘Machinima: Making Animated Movies in 3D Virtual Environments‘ and it uses several movies from HBO regulars (including Phatcorns’ ‘Out for Blood’ as examples. c0ld vengeance pointed out that his ‘Haliens’ is in there, too. Nice!

Last night, when Frankie posted a link to the Autoupdate news piece on Bungie.net, Littlebigman asked if he could get hold of a large version of the Tartarus thumbnail used in the article. Frankie complied – and LBM sent it to us, so you can have it too (77k).

SSGT Cutter points out that the Master Chief is in another DoomToons today. The downsides of Cortana…