Stuntmutt comments on Frankie’s discussion of a Mister Chief t-shirt in today’s One One Se7en. I hope he’s wearing armor after a joke that bad…

Treeskunk Productions, the guys behind Outpost: Coagulation, have started a new series, entitled ‘Outpost: Backwash’. The series trailer made it through the MPRRS yesterday; they weren’t looking for hosting, but since their downloads page offers only WMP9 format (22.9 mb), we’re providing a QuickTime link (21.4 mb). Looks to be funny, well-filmed, entertaining – check it out!

Over at Rampancy.net, vector40 has written up part 5 (the last part) of his Banshee Handling Tutorial – this one covers a number of techniques he hadn’t gotten to yet. And in case you were wishing he’d included some of the sillier tricks… he wrote a separate article on our forum, detailing the stuff you SHOULDN’T do. Really.

Halogen‘s updated again – 4 new skinned items. (You can also read it on their forum.) I like the Gas Facility… thanks, Logical2u.

DropShock Episode 14 has been posted – discussions of the new books, as well as a couple of April Fools jokes. 40 mb, almost an hour an a half. Check it out.

Dojorkan posted a bunch of pics yesterday on our forum – they show grunts and the MC getting into, and driving, the Creep (the Covenant bus that shows up on Outskirts). Apparently… driving animations for these guys were actually created, even though you’re never actually allowed to get in and drive one! Fun stuff.

Stephen Loftus submitted a pair of updates for his Scale Comparison article; down near the bottom, you’ll find new weaponry scale charts (one for the Covenant, one for the UNSC) – and each one has a corresponding hi-res PDF document you can download, if you need or want higher quality silhouettes of the items. Good stuff!

Recently, we altered the information that MPRRS reviewers had access to about their own reviews; we gave them the ability to easily see when their reviews were wildly different from the norm. There aren’t any solid rules about where you have to be in this regard – we’re not looking to censor reviewers simply because they don’t think like other reviewers. However, if someone is consistently lower than everyone else by a significant margin (our ‘problem’ delta is 25%), it behooves us to look closely at movies that fail solely because of reviews from these reviewers. One such film was ‘Special Fred’, from QuickTactical and the Epic Films crew; 7 out of 10 reviewers passed it, one gave it a score that was 2 points below passing, one failed it by about 10%… and one person was 30% below the average. Since that person has been well below the average on almost half his reviews (often without any real justification in the comments sections), this seems like an unreasonable score to base the failure of Special Fred on – so we’re hosting it. It’s funny, audio and video quality are quite good, it uses Stephen Lynch’s music (always a plus), it does a great job of illustrating the song; I think it’s worth seeing. You can grab it in WMP9 format (39.2 mb) or QuickTime format (39.1 mb). Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go listen to The Craig Machine.

Rocksiider continues his investigations into fun battles you can set up on Silent Cartographer – check out this forum post for more details.

Michael Katcher looked at the MLG model and extrapolated to sports in general; could we see internet-based subscription content supplanting one-size-fits-all TV options in the future? (My guess – not if cable companies have anything to say about it; video-on-demand might make this whole concept moot in the next couple of years.) Comments can go into his blog, or into the forum thread he started to let us know about this.

During my travels through the Red vs Blue community, I ran across HyperSoldier, who’s got quite a bit of Halo-related artwork up at DeviantART (as well as a few extra pieces in his RvB images collection). Give it a look!

Stephen Loftus shows no sign of slowing down in his quest to fully delineate the known vehicles and structures in the Halo universe; his latest subject is the Phantom Troop Carrier. Armaments, interior space, carrying capabilites – he (with the help of Dojorkan, who supplied some of the pictures) lays it all out for you; go read up!

There were a bunch of questions that came in, asking for clarification about the rules for the 7 on the 7th contest – can you photoshop your images, can you use extra (non-Halo) action figures, how do you specify your caption and theme… we’ve added answers to these questions in the Rules section of the contest page.

MikeMan27 submitted to the MPRRS a new movie he’d edited – ItWasLuck’s 5th montage. This film is up for grabs at Halo2Forums.com in WMP9 format, and weighs in at 100 mb (it’s almost 9 minutes long), but since it passed the MPRRS (handily, I should add), we’re making a QuickTime version available, as well, for those who need it. A lot of beautifully-strung-together kills, set nicely to music with some really big names in the sights. The biggest complaint from the MPRRS crew was that it was a bit long – but past that, this one ROCKS. Give it a look.

Swing by and light a birthday candle for High Impact Halo, which turned two a few days ago. Awesomeness!

The new Weekly Update has been posted – a nice little Q&A. You can read it on Bungie.net, in our Weekly Update Archive, or at Halo: Portable for your PSP. Who was first? Who do you think?

If you’ve got questions for Bungie, swing by Bungie.net and post ’em in this thread – Frankie will answer (some of) them in tonight’s Weekly Update. Gogogo!

Joseph Staten, a graduate of Northwestern University, will be back at his alma mater on April 22 to talk about Halo, and the writing of its story. It’s part of a full day of seminars from NWU alumni – the full day is $65 (with lunch), a half day is $45, and a single seminar is $20. (Unless you’re a Northwestern student, in which case it’s $5.) Registration deadline is April 14, a week from today – if you’re in the Evanston, IL area, and you’d like to hear Joe talk about how Halo was made, sign up! Thanks to Mike Miller for the heads-up.