There’s a note over at Bungie.net about an upcoming outage – starting around 1:30 pm Pacific time today, their forums will be down for roughly 12 hours for maintenance. Remember – they have a LOT of new visitors these days… they see a LOT of new posts, and all of them need to be adjusted right now. Thanks to lots of people – Michael S was first.

haloTV has 12 new movies for you right now – some have been available as regular downloads, others are completely new. If you’re not familiar with haloTV, this is a great way to get to know ’em!

21 new pieces added to the Fan Fiction section this morning. I don’t make a habit of singling out individual stories – but vector40 doesn’t come around much any more, and his stuff is worth seeing when he does. Take a look at his 4-part (unfinished) final HBO fan fiction tale, and be sure and stop by the link listed at the top of the first part!

Web comic The Day it Snowed figures out that William Dietz had a pretty tough job… thanks, Druff.

SketchFactor has posted a note on the Bungie.net forums to address the recent allegations of cheating, with some guidelines about how to deal with it. Bungie is looking into the situation, and confirmed cheaters will be penalized, possibly with deletion of their Xbox Live account. Ouch! Read the thread for more details. Thanks, Brad Stephens.

Top story on GTAGaming.com (a Grand Theft Auto website) is ‘Vice City Gone Halo!‘ – six mods to help turn GTA Vice City into Halo. Weapons, vehicles, health, HUD, and a skin… check ’em out!

prometheus opened a new website yesterday – it’s unique, in that all it offers is content that glorifies the environmental grandeur of Halo and Halo 2. Inspired by David Galindo’s hudless tribute films, he made his own – ‘Orbital Shock Trooper Tribute’. You can find a WMP9 version (7.4 mb) on his site (hosted by Mythica) or on files2.bungie.org – and I’ve put up a QuickTime version (9.2 mb), as well. Grab a copy – and look around the rest of the site! Nice stuff.

One of the tradeoffs Bungie made in Halo 2 was an elimination of load times in-game… at the expense of some visual glitches during major scene changes. Stuntmutt looks at some side effects in today’s One One Se7en.

Goodness. There’s already a Blood Gulch mod for Half-Life 2. That’s amazing! (Driveable warthog, and everything.) Thanks, WonderWeasel.

Mhaddy writes that a new Spotlight article is up at the Junkyard – this time it’s focused on BOLL. Wanna know what makes this guy tick? Go read!

An interesting grab-bag of articles from around the net this morning:

• Yale Daily News – Halo 2 interfering with grades
• Stuff (NZ) – Halo is ‘about as close to a perfect game as you can get.’
• Winston-Salem (NC) Journal – Halo 2 is a must-have gift
• Austin360 – Big-Screen Halo 2 tourneys at the Alamo Drafthouse
• Washington Post – Op-Ed lamenting the rise of video games in general (and Halo 2 in particular) and their effect on study habits – thanks, Free at Last
• HowStuffWorks – Gift-Buying Guide lists Halo and Halo 2 as the ‘gift of obsession’ – thanks, Rip-Saw

Remember – if you run into articles that need a login to read, always try bugmenot.com first.

Pcsme found a truly retro Halo-themed logon screen for Windows users at WinCustomize. It’s so old, it’s new!

We’re getting closer and closer to clearing out the various art queues (though new data comes in every day). I just added twenty images to the Miscellaneous Art section – and there is some SPECTACULAR stuff in there. Go look! (One of my favorites is Paul Davies’ ‘Installation Unknown’, though quite a few other ones made me catch my breath.)

Nice – Mat Noguchi, Tools Programmer (and a whole lot more!) at Bungie, will be giving a talk at the 2005 Game Developer’s Conference, according to his blog. Thanks to Narcogen, at Rampancy.net, for noticing.

Bungie’s store is now selling Holiday cards – you can buy a set of 15 (5 each of the 2001 and 2003 cards, originally shown on their website, and 5 of the new 2004 cards) for $12.95. Wish your friend a Happy Carnage Season in style! Thanks, Rio258k

HaloTwoFreak points out that the Windows version of Konfabulator is now available; we’ve mentioned a number of Konfabulator widgets over the past couple of years, but until now, only MacOSX users could make use of them. Follow the link above to see what’s out there in terms of Halo-related widgets, and then grab your copy of Konfabulator to use them!

Red vs Blue Episode 45 is now out for Sponsors. Just under 5 minutes of hilarity… poor Donut. (Did you know you could make blood from orange juice?) If you’re not a sponsor, you’ll be able to grab this by Sunday or so. Thanks, the beaz.

CBSNews.com has put up a Video Game Holiday Buying Guide – and Halo 2 is on it. There’s also a nice little note explaining how parents, not interest groups, are ultimately responsible for the games their children play – ESRB’s rating system is there to help, but the final decision on whether or not to let kids play games like Halo 2 belongs to parents. What a refreshing view!

During the month leading up to the release of Halo 2, we had a ton of submissions for various art sections that I simply didn’t get to. I’ve cleared out 20 of the desktops (30, if you count variations) and added them to our Wallpaper section – there are still a couple of dozen images in the queue, but it’s much smaller than it was. More coming soon. In the meantime, check these out – there are some GREAT ones.

BOLL’s Halorama section has gotten an infusion of 15 new images; 8 multiplayer shots, 7 single player. There is almost no better way to get a good look at Bungie’s beautiful architecture!