Following a decades-long – well, maybe decade-long… okay a few years’ – tradition, July 7 is once again Bungie Day, a day to bask in the glory of upcoming world domination. SketchFactor has posted a happy little Flash card from MrSmiley commemorating the occasion. Watch it, then go play some Bungie games. Like Halo, maybe.

One One Se7en looks at one of the real downsides of a space elevator (a construct designed to move materials from a planet surface into space, mechanically – there has been speculation that one of these will exist in Halo). I’d recommend making sure your speakers are on… and that you’re using a browser OTHER than Firefox/WinXP.

Halo: Resolution looks at a tried and true institution… no matter how high-tech it gets, some things never change.

The technique pioneered by n00bles continues to inspire; J has posted a pair of screens – quite nice! Check ’em out. Update: and ANOTHER one, from n00bles again! This one is from Claustrophobia, a CE-only level. I’ve got to grab that…

As promised, we’ve put the first winning run from the Going Nowhere Fast contest online. Condorman dashed his way through the Pillar of Autumn in 6 minutes and 8 seconds in Legendary… it’s amazing to watch. It’s a 480×360 QuickTime movie that weighs in at a bit over 47 mb, and we’re serving it via BitTorrent for the time being. Please – once you’ve grabbed it, leave your BT client open for a while, and share the love! (The ten runs, taken together, will weigh in at a bit over a gigabyte; we can use all the help you can give us, bandwidth-wise.) If you don’t have a BitTorrent client, you can find one here.

Heh – pretty cool! Veegie and Madrox have begun work on a dual-wielding mod for Halo – there are a couple of short movies available in the Halomods thread (wmp9 format). This looks like it’ll be a lot of fun! It’s not clear from the thread or either movie whether this is Halo CE or Xbox. Thanks to FOrunnER for the heads-up.

Several Halo-related mods have put out Weekly Updates recently; you’ll find new content for Grand Theft Auto :: Codename Halo (a Halo CE mod), Homefront (a Battlefield: Vietnam mod), and Zanzibar (a Halo CE mod) at the respective links. Thanks to all who wrote in.

Piles of new fan artwork at Halo Babies – go take a look! Thanks to Big-Ern, of HaloPlanet, for the heads-up.

Hobbes takes a defensible stand in today’s Calvin and Halo.

SEspider wants to remind everyone that the Wallpaper contest he started a couple of weeks ago is ending this Saturday, July 10. If you’re planning on getting an entry in… now’s the time to do it! (The rules, once again, are here in our forum.)

Took us a while… but the first stage of the Going Nowhere Fast contest has been completed. We have a list of winners of each level run, and we’ll be contacting them invidivually about prizes. You can read a full status report on where we stand if you’re curious about what’s coming next. The first actual video release won’t be until Wednesday. Once again, we’d like to thank all who participated in this contest – it’s been a blast watching the runs. And I’d like to take a moment to thank Brian ‘amaroq’ Towne, Ross ‘c0ld vengeance’ Hurrell, and John ‘gnawf’ Farrell for their help in making this contest a reality.

We recently discovered a glitch film in our uploads folder; it’s called ‘Blood Gulch Bash‘, and it’s 4:36 worth of Blood Gulch tricks, some old, some less old, all crammed into an 18.1 mb package. It was made by Paul and KingHalo, over at Halo Secrets… and if you explore their site, you might find other stuff you want to download. In general, the film techniques are quite good. Watch, enjoy, get inspired!

Last Friday’s Weekly Bungie Update has been added to our Updates Archive – i find it amazing that this is the first week in which Bacon is actually mentioned. Go figure.

One One Se7en checks out the ramifications of Halo 2 being a console title.

Halo: Resolution points out one of the lucky coincidences the Pillar of Autumn happened upon…

14 new Fan Fiction stories released this weekend… go check ’em out!

stan has announced a new contest – come up with a picture of his clan mascot, win free ice cream. Details in this forum post.

Ash and Doggie (his son) managed to entice the Gold Elite at the very end of Assault on the Control Room to follow them all the way back to the start of the level – amazing! Ducain did a fantastic job of condensing the experience down to a 3:37-long, 14.3 mb video (wmp9 format) – you can find a link, and comments, in this thread. For those who can’t use WMP9, a QuickTime version has been placed on mythica, as well (13.1 mb).

The Megabattle technique pioneered by n00bles last week has been played with by other fans – it looks like fun! BOLL got started recently (that’s a 299k JPEG – I’m guessing it’s only the beginning), and yesterday VALENCE posted some shots on our forum. If past experience is any indication, I’m guessing that a flood of new visual content will be pouring out of the community soon. Update: Looks like MereCatfish is getting into the act, as well. Very nice set piece on Fissure Falls!

Hehe – Pico has found an egg in the recently-announced SP-to-MP conversion of AotCR, by nukedude… and while it was designed to be unattainable without cheating, nukedude has stated that there IS a way to get it (but he won’t tell anyone how). Can YOU find the way? Personally, I’m more interested in the concept of a melee-only weapon in GENERAL – creating a map with ONLY this weapon would enforce the melee-only gametype we try (using the honor system) at local lanfests.