beetlecrazy12 found an interesting latex mask on eBay – unfortunately, I didn’t get this posted last night in time for folks to actually BID on it. Still cool to see. I’ve put up a static (no links) local copy for when this auction rolls off eBay.

Once again, a night not posting Halo news has generated a few dozen notes about a new clip over at nilerogers.com – it’s called Impend. This time, it seems like there’s a a small error in the page code; the copy-and-paste from Heretic, Hero wasn’t fully converted. Browsers that use the Object definition (like IE on Windows) will get the flash animation… those that use the Embed parameter (pretty much everything else) will see a white box. I’m sure this will be fixed soon – but in the meantime, you can at least grab the music snippet itself… it rocks. First heads-up was Julien LeBlanc, about 12 hours ago.

Halloween Love Now here is a woman who cares about her man. LadyRziha created a Master Chief costume for her husband – it’s not as polished as a Nightmare Armor suit, but there’s a whole lotta love there. Check it out! (More news tomorrow – too much trick-or-treating tonight.)

Stuntmutt pointed out a nice little contest over at Game Revolution – Enter, you’ve got a chance to win some cool Halo schwag.

A quick reminder – HBO Coerce is going offline at midnight EDT tonight. (That’s about 7 hours from now, for folks who can’t do the math.) Go play some last minute Halo CE!

Biography of Master Chief, Part 1, at Newgrounds. Wronchi takes liberties. Thanks, Blade.

Stuntmutt, too, has gotten into the spirit, with a special holiday One One Se7en.

Yesterday, Sep7imus mentioned that the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly contained an article about Halo 2. He couldn’t scan it, though. Today, Finchmeister found an online link for the same article – no scans necessary.

ONI_operative_343 found a new Halo 2 action figure mini-pack (it doesn’t seem to be advertised on Joyride’s site). You can see it (and buy it) at DieCastExpress.com.

Kevin Ryan made a Halo 2 Halloween comic last winter – Red Leader suggested now is a good time to remind people. You can find it at Black Arts Studios.

Alex Barnes noticed a commercial on Spike TV for a show called ‘Halo 2 Ultimate Gamer’. (We posted the casting notice for this a couple of weeks ago.) If you want to watch – check out showtimes. (Coming up this Thursday and Saturday.)

mecka wrote to say that he works for a company that is putting up large Halo 2 posters in public transport shelters across Melbourne, Australia – and he snapped a pic (164K) of one of these babies before pasting it up. It’s about 1.8 m (6 feet) tall. Pretty!

There’s a Dutch site that’s hosting

Sean Kelly pointed out a new clip on the MTV website promoting this week’s Making of Halo 2 video (showtimes are here). Once again, it’s XP/IE only. Some websites suck.

The Melbourne (Australia) Herald Sun had a short article on Pete Parsons, the ‘man behind Halo 2’ (that’s a direct quote) and a previous Melbourne resident. There’s a followup next week. Pooston sent us a digital photo of the article (229K).

A few days ago we mentioned a page on the I Love Bees website that discussed a closed invite to a ‘training session’ in 4 large cities – as of last night, that invite has been opened to several hundred people per city. Go visit the page, and if you’re in the area, follow the instructions and get yourself included! Thanks to Major Hellion Youngblood and weephun for sending word.

Mostly working on pumpkin stuff today (the number of entries nearly doubled overnight), but there’s other Halo news. In an attempt to staunch the flood of emails about the new Official Halo Soundtrack clip over at nilerogers.com, I’ll post that now. It’s called ‘Heretic, Hero’, and the snippet is 1.1 mb (1:10 long). As always, preferred listening method should be the Listening Station at the website. There are now 11 clips to listen to. The first heads-up came last night, from Hunt3r.

To all the people who send mail to us: READ THIS. A week ago, Count Zero posted a note stating that he was going to stop reading and answering mail until after Halo 2’s release, to avoid spoilers. The rest of the crew has pretty much decided the same thing. Since that point, HBO has been maintained, in its entirety, by ONE PERSON – me. I’ve been doing my best to answer all mail that needs answering, add all news that needs adding, update all sections that need updating… but I’m human. I miss things. Sometimes I decide that things aren’t important enough to add, and I forget to send mail explaining that. PLEASE – do NOT send news to multiple addresses here if you don’t get a response – they all go to me right now. Hopefully that will change again in a week or two, but for now… please, be patient, and understand that I’m pretty close to the limit of what I can realistically do when it comes to maintaining this website. Mail telling me you’re angry about something not being updated will NOT be handled gracefully – for that I apologize now. You can avoid the nasty mail by NOT COMPLAINING. Thanks.

Quick note, before heading to dinner – Homefront has finally been released. If you own Battlefield: Vietnam… go grab it. Thanks to lots of people, but Zavaro was first.

Major Nelson, the Xbox marketing guy, has a blog entry up from yesterday about a gathering of ‘the most influential fansites from across Europe’ – he’s talking Xbox fansites, now. They got lots of cool treats… but the last might have been the best:

To cap off the day, we held the very first European Halo 2 Tournament with winners walking away with cool prize packs…including a new Samsung mobile phone!

Oh, the goodies you get when you run a fansite… HEY, WAIT A MINUTE! (Thanks, Cybrfrk.)