Now THAT’S some dedicated mapping. Eric Loux sat down with what looks like graphing paper and a pencil and mapped out the Pillar of Autumn. Image is only 10K, so take a look.

Ryan ‘synide’ Thompson, who was recently Spotlighted by the Junkyard (go read it – it’s funny!), wrote up his own Halo 2 review based on his experience at last week’s MLG Seattle Downpour event. Swing on by Gotfrag for the lowdown, and some cool pics.

Okay – the film quality is pretty low (it was filmed with a digital camera, in movie mode), and the dialogue leaves a little to be desired… but Collin Ferry’s ‘Death of the Common Grunt’ film still brought a smile to my face. It’s available in WMP9 format (3.6 mb) or QuickTime format (3.4 mb), and it’ll only eat a minute of your life. Go watch it.

And again, continuing to clear the Wallpaper queue, there are 10 new desktops for you in the Wallpaper section this morning. Eep – time to get back to the Misc Art queue!

If you can read German, you should swing over to Halo Universe, where they’ve put up a preview of Halo 2, based on thier impressions at the Games Convention last week, along with another small (2.7 mb, WMP9 format) shakeycam vid of the action.

Stuntmutt takes a shot at passed-over assets in today’s One One Se7en. Might make you cry instead of laugh… (For some of you, that won’t be anything new, when it comes to One One Se7en.)

Ten new pieces in the Fan Fiction queue were approved today – many new series started! Go see what you can find.

Trigun mentions that there’s a new episode of Halo: On Vacation as well as a new Flash episode of That Halo Parody over at the 7th Revolution. (Well, it’s really at Newgrounds, but it’s LISTED at the 7th Revolution. Or something.)

foxygrandpa117 completed another one of those ‘wow-this-is-gonna-take-a-while’ tricks by bringing a Hunter to the bottom of the security shaft in Silent Cartographer. Read his forum post, watch the procedure (6.3 mb, WMP9 format, hosted by Mythica) and TELL me you wouldn’t go insane doing that.

mrsmiley points out that Halo Babies has a new Guest Strip from Polarbear. The things you never wondered about as a kid…

In response to many, many, MANY questions about submissions to our various sections, I’ve finally written up a set of guidelines – they SHOULD help you get your content to us. (They’ll also tell you what we’re not willing to put up.) Questions or suggestions, as always, can be sent to us via email. You’ll find a new ‘Submissions’ link in the navbar, for easy access.

Several folks have pointed out the ‘plasma grenade’ reference in today’s Foxtrot comic; it’s pretty oblique, as Halo references go, but hey… Foxtrot is funny.

Gamestyle Offline (a downloadable PDF-formatted magazine available from the Gamestyle website) has a 2-page Halo 2 preview in its latest issue, 8. Thanks to HaloPlanet for the heads-up on this.

Apologies for the outage yesterday on our Subnova-hosted server; it killed several of the updates on yesterday’s news page. It’s back up, however, and we’ve got ANOTHER 10 wallpapers from the queue for you in our Wallpaper section; this gets us near the end of July. Soon… soon.

Poop Scoop has transcribed another trio of Halo music pieces – ‘The Maw’, ‘On a Pale Horse’, and Edgen’s ‘Halo: Master and Chief’ – and put up the sheet music (in pdf format), a midi version, and a Finale file for each piece. You can find all of this over at Rampancy.net. Nice! Update: I forgot; you won’t see a ‘download’ link on the individual pages unless you’re logged in. (Registration is free.)

A couple of weeks ago, we mentioned a theater in Logan, Utah, using their screens for Halo-playing late at night. bentllama ran across another story of the same theater – with a LOT more detail. An interesting read. (Don’t mind the forum thread in which everyone tells him to search first; he’s bentllama, after all.)

Halo continues to make inroads in the fashion world, as Pallor points out that the September issue of InStyle puts an Xbox with Halo in their “What’s Hot Now” section, along with a list of celebrity fans including Justin Timberlake and Julia Roberts. As with last time, it’s good to see new audiences start paying attention to video games in general.

Yep, Subnova’s down again, taking with it some sections of this site. We’re working on it.

Just a quick heads-up; if you play Halo PC or Halo CE on WinXP, and you’re considering updating to SP2… be careful. At the very least, read this thread on the Gearbox forums. I have a pretty untweaked machine; it gets used for very, very little besides Halo. I’d kept up on all the updates prior to SP2, and never had a problem. My Radeon 9600 uses the newest 4.8 drivers. I made sure to open all the appropriate ports in my XP firewall. I updated to DirectX 9.0c. (All of this was prior to SP2, and both Halo PC and Halo CE ran smoothly.) However, after the update, when I fired up Halo CE, I got a ‘Direct3D failed to initialize’ error, with a suggestion that I check dxdiag. No errors were found, all appropriate functions were enabled. Nothing I could do would get CE to start, however. I uninstalled SP2, and all is well again. Just one guy’s story.

(GT)Juggler posted a Single player to multiplayer conversion map of the Hangar in the Maw. It’s Xbox-only, so you’ll need to have a modded Xbox to use it. You can find pictures and a download link on HaloMods. Looks pretty nice!