Mintz sends word that Halo: Portable is now online. It’s all about providing Halo content for the Playstation Portable – if you have a PSP, this is a site you should visit! Check it out.

Juxtapose points out that if you’re a Bell Sympatico High Speed DSL subscriber (yeah, you have to live in Canada), you can get a free Xbox or Xbox360 game when you sign up for certain Xbox Live subscriptions. Details can be found on his Arbiter’s Judgement blog.

Wow. Spent yesterday at the Machinima Festival, where Rooster Teeth went home with 3 Mackies (Excellence in Machinima Writing for P.A.N.I.C.S., Best Editing (for Strangerhood), and Best Independent Machinima (for Red vs Blue Season 3), and Chris Burke went home with Best Machinima Series for This Spartan Life. (Since we provide Chris with his movie bandwidth, I suppose you can say that HBO has award-winning bandwidth!) There were lots of other awards; these were the only Halo-related ones. Saw lots of friends, old and new, saw lots of good machinima, got inspired by panel discussions that suggested where machinima might be going in the future. All in all, a fantastic day. Put me a little behind, though, in terms of HBO… I’ll do my best to catch up. In the meantime, enjoy your weekend!

Wired has an article about the Machinima Film Festival (where I’ll be headed in a few hours, actually) and machinima in general – there’s a brief mention of Red vs Blue, which gives us our Halo hook. (Other Halo projects will be up for awards today – they just weren’t mentioned in the article.) Thanks, bluedude345.

Last night, Chairleg Productions’ Waiting In Line passed the MPRRS – we’d already posted a note about it, and Chairleg said they weren’t looking for hosting… but passing the MPRRS means we’re happy hosting versions the original host isn’t offering – so for folks who’d rather watch QuickTime (and who don’t want to settle for the PSP-formatted version), you can now grab a full-size QuickTime (23 mb) of this video from us. British queue humor, applied to the Xbox360 situation – grab a copy! (And if you’re seeing this for the first time, our news post from Thursday contains a WMP9 link hosted by Chairleg.)

Halo: Blood Covenant is a 2D sidescroller we haven’t heard from since May – but last night Tucker let us know that they’ve released a short (38 second) vid showing some of the progress they’ve made. The last time they released a movie, it killed their servers – so we’re putting up copies of this for them – please download here. WMP is 4.1 mb, QuickTime is 4 mb. Looking pretty fun!

Over at Team3D.net, F13ND sat down with Hotshy to discuss this week’s practice sessions – plenty of interesting stuff for folks who want a glimpse into the pro circuit. Go read!

Bungie’s Weekly Update was posted last night – there’s quite a bit of info about some playlist changes coming in the not-too-distant future, there are answers to basic questions about interoperability between the Xbox and the Xbo360 for games like Halo, and info about how Halo and the new higher-res modes available on the 360 will work, and some weird stuff about Marty in Korea. (Pete’s not as old as Frankie makes him out to be, either.) Go read! Update: Hehe – looks like I missed an entertaining thread about this last night. To TheDaringDuke – don’t worry, Frankie and Shishka are jerks. Especially Frankie.

Stuntmutt found some news about a series of CI-boys figures based on Xbox game characters. He hunted around until he found this – are those cute, or what?

JoeIce dropped by our forum yesterday with a pelican model he’d adapted from a Warhammer 40K piece. Today, he came back – with another dozen images, showing off the Pelican, a Master Chief, and an MC on a Ghost. That Ghost ROCKS!

Today’s One One Se7en takes a subtle shot at a certain type of Xbox Live player. The thing is… if this is you, you probably won’t get it.

Guess I went too long this time between Fan Fiction updates – there are 24 stories and poems to read today. Get cracking!

Gah. I totally spaced on putting this up earlier this week. insidi0us continues his work on speedruns (yeah, I know, we should be leaving this stuff to High Speed Halo… but insidi0us sends it here, and it’s just so amazing!) – his latest target is Two Betrayals. The current run is only on Normal difficulty… but he shaved SO much time off the Going Nowhere Fast record of 25:03 that I couldn’t pass it up. He finished the level in… yep, 11:52. (!!!!) Probably the sweetest move in the run comes at around 9:20… but man, the whole run just kicks. This is big – because it’s long – and the quality isn’t fantastic… but if you’re a fan of speedruns, you gotta see this. (He released a 17:23 Legendary run last month, so while he might not be able to get a sub-12-minute run on that difficulty, we know for sure he can beat the previous record by at least a third.) Two Betrayals, less than 12 minutes: WMP9 is 87 mb, QuickTIme is 90 mb.

Halo Babies has put up a new strip today… it, too, sends birthday wishes to Halo 2. It also points out one of the hazards of the Spartan uniform…

We got word from Dennis Powers that there’s been a resurgence in HaloCE interest in the past month – more than 47 different maps have been released since October 1 (bringing the total available for download at Halo Maps to 568). Maps are getting more sophisticated since the release of the complete Halo tag set in October. Swing by and see what you can find! While you’re there, you can check out the Halo CE Chronicles DVD – he’s giving out the entire story (two seasons, 20 eps) to folks who’ve donated $10 or more to the website.

Day by Day followed up yesterday’s Halo-related cartoon with another Halo-related cartoon (here’s the direct link, again) – this one’s even funnier if you’ve ever run across that marine in Delta Halo… thanks again, SteelGaribaldi.

Podcast updates we’ve been lax on… Podtacular released episode 24 on Monday, and episode 25 yesterday. Gamertag Radio released episode 29 Wednesday (happy birthday, Halo 2!). 2old2type released episode 12 yesterday. MLG PwnCast released episode 3 last night. Go listen! Update: The MLG PwnCast Ep III was accidentally switched for Ep II – it’s now been fixed.

Broken Console Productions have released Episode 10 of The Squadron – once again, the humans escape from the jaws of certain death. Poor Durge… this one is WMP9-only, for the time being. Go grab a copy.

XerxdeeJ has sent along another weekly update for Tied the Leader – and there’s some great reading in there. There’s a piece looking at some of the characters in movie history where the voice actor, the person who arguably made the role memorable, was not the person who physically acted the part. (Yes, this is an argument – and a solid one – in favor of keeping Halo’s voice actors for the movie roles.) There’s a collection of real-life items that are mirrored in Halo… and there’s yet another rant against cheaters on Xbox Live.

Gavin Free, better known as Gavino over at Red vs Blue, was the proud winner of Lorraine McLees’ Fight the Flood sketch in the recent Blow Me Away charity auction. The first round of shipments went out a couple of days ago (Bungie, specifically Jeff Todd, Alta’s assistant, was ASTOUNDINGLY fast in the packing/shipping of these; the unshipped items are due to lack of info we’ve asked for from the buyers, or (in a couple of cases) lack of payment so far) – and Gavin sent along photos of his prize:

• Da Box
• Da Wrapped Pic
• Da Pic
• Da Pic on Da Wall

Once again – to everyone who participated in this event… our heartfelt thanks for your help in the hurricane relief effort! And Gav… enjoy. 😉