Weekly Update went live a couple of hours ago over at Bungie.net; there’s not a ton of new info there, but you can get a small glimpse inside Bungie Studios… and a look at Mister Chief on the can. Frankie was first, and you can read it locally in our Weekly Update Archive, if you like.

Ninja on Fire posted an update about the XBL Halo 2 Playlist on Bungie.net; it’s not set in stone yet, but it’s close. If all goes well, they’ll deploy it in the next few weeks. Lots of changes – go read! Thanks, Sith.

Jillybean trawled (not trolled) our forum for some choice tidbits to sprinkle on your Story salad – swing by and read what she found.

Last One One Se7en before the 7 on the 7th deadline this Sunday – and Stuntmutt takes advantage of it to show you that no matter how groan-inducing the pun is that you came up with for your caption… he’s got you beat. 7 ways to Sunday. (If you’re wondering who that little guy talking to the MC is, check out this pic; he’s a creation of Stunt’s lovely bride-to-be. Luckily for all involved, he didn’t get the job he was auditioning for.)

What the heck is going on? There are 13 new pieces for you in the Fan Fiction section today – but I had to delete 7 more because the authors ignored the (pretty short) Rules page! Geez, guys – if you pad a story with useless text to bypass the minimum word limit, we’re gonna toss it. We’ve ALWAYS done that, we SAY we’re gonna do that. If you submit a block of text with no formatting – we’re gonna toss it. We SAY we’re gonna do that. Why waste your own time, and mine, by ignoring these rules? For the folks who DIDN’T ignore the rules – thanks, your stuff is available now.

The World Cyber Games just got a new sponsor – Microsoft. The pot for 2006 is rather large – half a million dollars. (Last year’s pot for the Grand Final was $435,000, so this is a nice bump.) Some of that extra money is coming from MS – along with all the hardware that the games will be played on (PCs and Xbox360s). Seems like Halo won’t feel like so much of an afterthought any more… Update: Wonga. I’d forgotten that Halo isn’t even being played this year. Thanks, Dante. (And KP.) OUCH!

More artwork. LOTS more. I had contacted a few prolific DeviantARTists – folks with large numbers of Halo-related images in their DeviantART profiles, but who’d not submitted those images here. Kamino185, lhs, and GTGundam (who did have SOME images here, just not all) each agreed to allow us to host copies of their Halo work in our Miscellaneous Art section – it’s just another place to see this stuff. (If you’re interested in the work, you should definitely follow the DA links provided; you can read the artists’ comments, and add your own. You GOTTA check out Kamino185’s Arbiter.) In addition to this veritable wealth of already-released material, we’ve got a ton of regularly-submitted stuff; scan through to find some real gems. (I’m pretty partial to Edli’s depiction of Linda – but there is so much good stuff in there that I can’t cover it all.)

IGN has put together yet another Halo 3 wishlist – and if they got everything they asked for, Halo 3 would be a pretty silly game. (It would probably also be able to make you a margarita during play – which might not be a bad thing.) IGN’s gotta sell pageviews, though, and you can’t do that without creating content – so no matter how silly it is to suggest that you should be able to pilot a starship in a first-person shooter… there you go. Thanks, Jackal Fister.

Continuing with the monstrous dialogue updates, we’ve got almost 100 Brute snippets from Hellhawk added today to our Dialogue Databank; go listen to these creatures!

Belligerent put together ‘View From Heaven’, a music video set to the song of the same name by Yellowcard. The MPRRS crew loved the filmwork. Cinematography is quite good, film quality is quite good. Good angles, all around. Go watch! 30 mb, in either WMP9 or QuickTime formats.

We got mail from Nerrolken about some big updates over at The Codex Series website. Well… it’s more than just the Codex Series site at this point, which is part of the big news – but there’s more. Go read it all.

Frankie bugged a bunch of the Bungie employees for lists of science-fiction influences or interests they’ve got going; if you’re looking for some good reading/watching, the resulting article will keep you busy for a LONG time. Notably missing from anyone’s list are Chris Rowley’s Vang novels… you’d think things that so deeply influenced the creation of Halo would have made SOMEONE’S list. Frankie let our forum know when the article went live; I managed to hit the wrong server and got an ‘Access Denied’ the first time I tried, but it should be fully propagated by this point.

RemminyCricket submitted ‘The Ring Day 0’ to the MPRRS – reviewers liked the video effects, the background music, and the camerawork. It looks at the what happens to a guy who finds a video with a dire warning scribbled on it… 32 mb, in WMP9 or QuickTime format. (He’s expecting to make 8 episodes, though not all will follow this storyline.)

If today’s One One Se7en makes no sense to you, you should read this article. And when you’re done, find me the fan clamps.

I could have SWORN we’d mentioned this site before, but it seems I’m wrong. wheelers sent us a note about merzo.net – a site devoted to illustrating the dimensions of science fiction constructs from many different sources. On the 2000X page, you’ll find a pretty familiar ring-shaped object…

On April 1, we posted a (fake) press release from Jagex, the company behind Runescape; it announced Halo: Online, a Massively Multiplayer online role-playing game based on the Halo universe. This press release was created by Ross Mills, a longtime community member and current employee of Jagex, and while he thinks the concept is cool, he created the press release for April Fools because he knew it wasn’t real. Don’t tell that to The Mole, though – this writer, over at Blogcritics.org, suggests that this sort of game is EXACTLY what Bungie is working on right now. According to The Mole they’re going to announce it at E3… and release it this fall. Let me go on record as saying that I believe The Mole… is smoking something that’s almost certainly not legal in this country.

Annihil8or stopped by our forum to mention his Halo blog, the title of which (‘Halo 2 Failures’) should give you a pretty good sense for what he writes about. None of this stuff is new – but it’s presented in a calm, rational manner, and for the most part, it’s well thought-out. (Well, except for the ‘these things happened because Bungie didn’t take pro gamers’ views into account’ part…) If you decide to weigh in on this issue (either in his forum thread, or on the blog itself), please – be polite. No matter which side you’re on. It’s a much-beaten horse… but that doesn’t mean we need to spread horse-guts all over the walls.

LunarShadow dropped by to explain that his H2O stats reader has been upgraded again; it’s a small bugfix for folks who don’t have ‘English’ as the default language in Windows. A link to his site (for a download) is in the forum post.