serpx posted a couple of links to nice Wallpapers he’s put up at DeviantArt. Silvery…

Today’s Calvin and Halo, from Blackstar, shows a disturbing side of 6-year-olds that unfortunately doesn’t go away with age.

BOLL has (once again) updated the HBO PAL; now you can export your settings, and reimport them on another machine (or even just another browser on the same machine). I’m pretty sure that tomorrow we’ll receive the update that gets HBO PAL to do your laundry for you.

A note on Bungie.net points out that the website will be offline at 1 pm pdt today (8 pm UTC) in order to add some code for the return of the 7th Column. By this afternoon, pacific time, you should be able to set up new Groups (previously Chapters) on that site!

Ross Mills notes that ‘Game’ stores in the UK have a deal running right now; if you pre-order Halo 2, and pay a minimum of £3 towards the purchase, you’ll receive a Halo 2 poster when you actually purchase the game. It’s not clear WHAT poster you get; it’s possible it’s one that was showing at E3, but then again, it’s possible that it’s not. If and when we find out more, we’ll pass along the info.

A couple of days ago, Andrew, from XboxOttawa, pointed out in our forum that today’s Ottawa Citizen newspaper would be running an article in its Tech section that covers machinima and several groups that use Halo to make it (including XboxOttawa). If you’re somewhere that that newspaper is available, grab a copy! (If you’re not, we’ll bring you a press scan after it’s off the shelves.)

GamesRadar has put up the full text of the October 2004 Halo 2 article in Edge Magazine. We’ll have a press scan for you in a couple of weeks, with all the pretty pictures as well, but the real meat is in the text – and that’s online now. Go read. (Thanks again, Rams.)

Gamespy has posted a Xbox Fall Preview Guide – and Halo 2 rates an ‘awesome’ (as usual). I can’t figure out how they ordered them – Halo 2 is referred to in the opening paragraph (“not all of the titles are as anticipated as a certain first-person juggernaut”) but shows up on page 4. Guess it doesn’t matter. Go read. Thanks to Rams, of HaloPlanet, for the heads-up. Update: TruneX points out that the order is dictated by release date. DOH!

New item in the Joyride arsenal – the Armory Series 1 Weapon Battle Pack. Rocket launcher, shotgun, sniper rifle, MD6 pistol, plasma pistol, and needler are all included – the pack retails for $9.95. If you’re ordering, you might want to drop in your requests for the first round of Halo 2 figures; they start shipping in about 3 weeks.

Boxer gets us word of today’s Adventures In Disaster in time to make the normal news; makes you feel bad for the poor grunty.

Hehe… Microsoft Watch, a site devoted to – well, watching Microsoft – recently pointed out a blog entry by a Microsoft employee who commented on the huge percentage of Microsoft employees who participated in the Beta program that ended recently… and speculated about what that might mean for Microsoft’s overall productivity in the days immediately following November 9. Way to go, Bungie – you’re dragging the entire planet down!

Wow. We cleared the Wallpaper queue. I can’t REMEMBER the last time I could say that. Check the Wallpaper Section for 10 new pieces (14, actually, if you count size variants), including a few really nice creations. Wow. I’d hate to say I was catching up… because you folks would just up the rate of submissions. Hmm… Update: Eep, we yanked one of the images, because it used (without permission) some artwork created by ANOTHER fan. (The original artist asked us to pull it.) If you decide to use artwork you find on the web for your submissions here, you really need to make sure you have permission of the original creator; we take a pretty dim view of IP appropriation. (In most cases, if you find it on HBO, there’s an email address associated with the original; if there isn’t, you can drop US a note, and we can pass the note along.) Thanks!

Wow. WhoKnew, a regular on the #hbo IRC channel and a member of Alpha Base, wanted a Plantronics headset so badly that he wrote a song about it, and submitted it to haloTV. They liked it (it’s the Video of the Week), and he got his headset. (So did 5 other people, but more randomly.) Nice! (WMP9 format, streaming.)

Captain Spark gave the Engineer model buried in Silent Cartographer some Elite AI and a plasma rifle (using Halo PC modding tools), and made a short movie. It’s hard to make a longer one, because the game tends to crash when you do this… but this one’s pretty cool. The links in his forum post are nearly certainly dead now (or will be soon) – so use the links in THIS post. Movie is available in both WMP9 and QuickTime format, under a meg each case.

Tankramp, over at HaloPlanet, suggested recently that Stuntmutt might be running out of new jokes for One One Se7en strips. The joke’s on Tankramp – Stuntmutt never HAD new jokes for One One Se7en. Today’s strip, however, does use humor to make a decent point about weapon ergonomics.

We continue to get a significant number of new links being submitted to our Links page (there are 7 added to the database in the past week) – but sometimes submissions make me wonder. Today, I rejected one from a site that stated, on the nearly-blank front page, that access is restricted to members of its clan. Why would you submit a link to a public links database if nobody except your clan members are allowed to even go there? (Presumably, your clanmembers already KNOW where the page is.) I’m not trying to get on anyone’s case… but we’re going to continue to reject links to sites that have no Halo content, or whose Halo content is impossible to find, or sites whose access to Halo content is restricted to a tiny subset of the public. Sorry about that. On the bright side, I’m hoping we’ll be breaking out Clan links into xbox, pc, mac, halo2-only, and general at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Icetiger writes to point out his newest mod creation, Pipedream. Lots of new vehicles, weapons, bizarre architecture… check this one out! (It’s about a 13 mb download, or a bit smaller in .rar format.)

There’s a 2D Halo game that was mentioned by HaloPlanet during our downtime – but when I checked the link on the HP page, I got error messages. A quick note to Fluffy, though, got me a ForumPlanet thread, which had a better link. There are actually two games, ‘Hail to the Chief’ and an expansion pack, ‘Hail to the Chief: Arius’. Reviews and downloads for both are available from the author’s webpage. A quick dip into the game shows it to be pretty fun. Check it out! (PC-only.)

TheManRoom wraps up their Halo 2 Preview coverage with a new piece that includes the Halo 2 Fact Sheet, and a collection of all the recent screens and concept art released. Good reading! (Looks like we got an XBL glove tossed at our feet, as well… we’re there, when the time comes.)

Mothergoat has released Unyielding, his newest musical Halo-inspired creation. It starts quietly, majestically… but quickly explodes into heavy guitar-driven rock. 5:32 long, 5 mb big, hosted by Mothergoat himself (though if bandwidth gets tight, we’ll certainly provide an alternative – it’s quite good). Go listen. In Mothergoat’s words, “Turn it up loud, close your eyes and let your mind wander in the Halo universe. I tried to provide a sountrack. :)” Update: Oops, there’s a forum thread about this already, if you want to toss in your two cents.