One piece of artwork that was submitted in January but didn’t get posted in the Misc Art update yesterday was a new work by Paul Davies – and the reason I didn’t post it is because we were in the process of setting up a new Gallery Page for Paul. His work has shown up in the Misc Art section for a couple of years now – but it deserves a more brightly-lit location, because it stands out so strongly. Go visit to see if there’s anything you’ve missed – and be sure to check out The Drop, which should be new to everyone. I’ve also added some visual navigation to the top of the HBO Galleries page, because we’re up to eight featured artists at this point, and it seems like it might be easy to miss one or two.

Amaroq and Ducain put their heads together, and after rubbing the resultant lumps, they managed to create a 100% complete mirror of Frogblast’s website; the seminal trickster had documented most of his work, but the site was up and down, and finally down permanently. Rather than let this work be lost to the bitbucket, HIH has revived it, and made a permanent copy – and for that, we say Thankya big big!

Blayne Scott, a hardcore Marathon fan who maintains a couple of pieces of the bungie.org family of sites and who’s created a number of traditional-media items inspired by Marathon in the past, has whipped up a pretty cool Marathon Fabric Patch. (It’s simlar to the one seen on Captain Keyes’ uniform in the first game, and it matches the box sticker on the original Marathon release.) They’re currently for sale on eBay; he needed to make 50 of them to get a reasonable price from the patch company, so he’s selling the extras. The auction is up for another 4 days. Go look! (And check out the Hall of Fame, showing pics of older products he created, along with community members wearing them… there’s great old shot of our very own Finn in there!)

Wow, very very cool. We get email regularly from high school students or teachers looking for sheet music for Halo pieces; we generally send them to Rampancy.net, which has (I think) the largest collection of Halo sheet music on the net. However, most of this is fan-transcribed, and ranges in quality from very, very good to… um, not so good. Konrad noticed an article over at Siliconera which says Video Games Live has teamed up with Alfred Publishing to bring a number of video game pieces to schools. The arrangements seem to be done by teachers… but I’m guessing there’s SOME sort of quality control, right? (I can’t point you directly to the VGL announcement at Alfred, because it’s in a frameset – but it’s about halfway down their front page at the moment. Currently, it lists The Halo Theme (for both Orchestra and Marching Band) and Halo (for Concert Band), all ranging from $50-$60, with more pieces coming.)

I’m STILL not done… but there’s another large batch of stuff in the Miscellaneous Art section today; I’m getting CLOSER to cleaning out the queue. There’s some amazing stuff in this round; I hate to draw attention to specific pics (because I worry that folks will look ONLY at those), but don’t miss Khan’s Forerunner, or Sabarika’s furry Chief. There’s also a pretty cool background you can turn into a custom Halo clock, from Bry-guy12. And there are a couple of dozen OTHER pics – all of them are worth your time. Go look!

imSuck and the HollywoodHalo crew submitted another vid to the MPRRS yesterday; it’s a spoof of the early 90’s Captain Planet cartoon. It’s a pretty funny piece, and (as is true of all of imSuck’s work) beautifully filmed. (To the whole HH crew – you guys need to move your mouths away from the mics when you talk – or record dialogue after the movie. Otherwise – great work!) Grab a copy in WMP9 format (45.2 mb) or QuickTime format (45.8 mb).

Valley of the Forerunners, Part 5 has been posted on the Halo CE Chronicles website. The marine contingent doesn’t understand what they’ve gotten themselves into – Sargeant Roberts learns the hard way what happens if he stops trusting Harrington. Great integration of stock Halo footage, combined with lots of new stuff. 8:40 long, available in WMP9, QuickTime, and streaming Flash.

Incogneto submitted ‘Hitman: Redone’ to the MPRRS recently, and they liked it. So we’re serving it to you. It’s a movie about a guy who works for the mob, and one of his deals goes sour. Some nice effects here! Grab it in WMP9 format (41.5 mb) or QuickTime format (41.2 mb).

The Prometheus Team (the folks working on an all-inclusive Halo editor) has posted Update #6 on their website; it’s really long, and basically says ‘we’re doing a lot of stuff, but we still can’t show you most of it.’ (Well, it says a LITTLE more than that.) If you’re wondering what had happened to these guys, go read.

r2 writes to point out a Halo 2 tourney coming up in West Palm Beach this weekend; $40 per team registration, 2v2 TS 2006 MLG rules, up to $300 cash for first prize. More details (including contact info and directions) are available at their website.

Looks like jman571 was first with the news that Frankie had posted a snippet about those new, limited edition (500 total) mylar prints mentioned in last week’s update. Swing by the Bungie Store, and for $30 (plus shipping), you can snag one of these signed-by-the-artist masterpieces!

Stuntmutt plays with the title of the upcoming Halo novel in today’s One One Se7en. Hmm… ‘plays with’ might not be a fair assessment. ‘Attacks with a hand-axe’ might be closer… Update: if you’re a REAL masochist, there are several followups in this thread. I blame trigger119 for starting it.

Over the years, number of people have put in serious hours converting Warhammer 40K characters to look like Halo characters. JoeIce stopped by several months ago with some cool pics – well, he came back this weekend with a whole batch of new ones. some of the shots are a bit fuzzy – but go through ’em all, there are some great ones in there! And check out his website, as well; pretty nice home for the actual gaming rules and tons of info.

Narcogen spent his whole weekend, it seems, writing up a comparison of Halo and Half-Life 2 (Xbox versions only). It’s a great read. It’s also really long. Pull up a mug of your favorite beverage and settle in!

Podtacular Episode 55 has been posted – it’s a Customs and Call-ins show. We heard about this from Mintz, who was a guest-host this week (and did their pod art, to boot). Go listen!

There’s an article at TMCnet.com about a Halo tournament that took place in Spokane, WA a couple of days ago. It’s interesting because it was clearly written for non-gamers; it’s nice to see this sort of stuff get coverage in more mainstream press. (It says they got this from the Spokesman-Review, but I couldn’t find it online on their site.)

Yesterday, Jillybean updated the Halo Story page with a choice collection of emails – evolutionary theory, sex drive, mad AIs, and… um, mad AIs. Apologies for not notifying you sooner; yesterday was pretty far from fun here.

Oh, before I go… Rockslider has added another piece to his second-level fun suggestions at Bad Cyborg; Mad Banshees. Ever feel like the enemy AI is letting their emotions override their logic?