Gravemind wrote a massively long ‘History of Mid-range Combat in Halo’, and posted it on his blog. Go read.(Louis Wu 20:56:58 UTC)

Hawty McBloggy found another infected action figure – go check it out. Scary!(Louis Wu 20:52:59 UTC)

Today’s episode of Another Halo Comic Strip shows you why you shouldn’t make AIs mad.(Louis Wu 19:09:10 UTC)

Luke Smith wants you to remember that Team SWAT is live now – the latest Double XP weekend kicked off 8 minutes ago. (Louis Wu 19:08:10 UTC)

Quikthnkr let us know that the Grifball Explosion Preseason Show 2 is now available for your podcast-listening pleasure. Team Cannonball and LBCountry were guests.(Louis Wu 18:37:20 UTC)

Adam Grumbo appeared in a Dell computer commercial a while back, dressed in his Master Chief armor – he just found a copy of that commercial (albeit with no sound) on YouTube. Go look! (Louis Wu 18:32:41 UTC)

retsamolah stopped by with details about the HBO League’s inaugural 1v1 season. (Never heard of the HBO League? Visit the site!) They’re currently in the planning stages for season 2, and this one’s gonna be 2v2. If you’re interested, there are more details in his post.(Louis Wu 18:29:40 UTC)

Gravemind noticed that Bungie has put up high-res versions of the Avalanche screenshots released yesterday in their Screenshots section. Go grab ’em!(Louis Wu 17:41:23 UTC)

In keeping with our ‘Thursday at HBO: All Movies, All the Time’ theme of the news this morning, we’ve got the contest winners from HaloGrid’s Broken Iris contest. All three winning videos are available in streaming and download forms thanks to GTV. Two of the winners are straight-up music videos (they even use the same Broken Iris song), the third is a WWII machinima. Go watch! Thanks, Hellhawk.(Louis Wu 16:08:01 UTC)

Another one from trigger119 – the Halo Humpday Challenge against the ForgeHub guys was filmed, as planned, last night… and you can watch it (albeit without audio commentary) at GamingTV. Some bizarre gametypes there – I’m not sure what was going on. The first game had everyone (4 Bungie-ites, and 5 ForgeHubbers) on the same team – only two people scored kills. The second game had everybody against Frankie. The third game looks like a straight-up Hill game, with Bungie losing badly. (I’d watch the footage, but the Justin.TV player crashes for me each time I try to fast-forward.) I guess we’re going to have to wait for Bungie’s writeup to understand what actually happened…(Louis Wu 15:11:02 UTC)

trigger119 stumbled on a trailer for Contamination, an upcoming machinima vid from rtidwell. Nice cinematography!(Louis Wu 14:56:23 UTC)

Ducain sent along this link to a video done by SneakyPete. It’s been a while since I watched a Halo 1 (well, in this case, Halo PC) trick vid… but man, this guy is GOOD. Check it out – for nostalgia, for smiles, just for the heck of it. YouTube-hosted.(Louis Wu 14:54:00 UTC)

I’ve been meaning to post this all day – but things keep getting in the way. We’ve posted six more HD cutscenes in the Halo 2 Cutscene Library – starting with Juggernaut, and running all the way through Edification, these cover all of the Arbiter and Oracle levels. Thanks, as always, to Clan Infectionist (and HaLo2FrEeEk), and to Wraith7n, for the mirror help. Go download now!(Louis Wu 19:49:35 UTC)

For folks who were worried that Avalanche might be less of a remake of Sidewinder, and more of a ‘spiritual successor’, as Guardian was of Lockout, and Valhalla was of Blood Gulch… SketchFactor stopped by our forum to reassure that it’s really “a true re-imagining of Sidewinder but with a few changes made to better accommodate Halo 3 gameplay.” He also has some very intriguing questions for you about what you’d like to see in the future – read his post for details!(Louis Wu 19:44:26 UTC)

Dan the Stick thought there wasn’t enough cake on our front page, so he sent along a link to DigitalPh33r’s blog – with pictures of a home-made Master Chief cake his girlfriend and her mother made for him. A lot of Halo cakes are just decals applied to the top layer of frosting – this one has a design that’s actually squirted on there. Pure awesome.(Louis Wu 19:40:47 UTC)