Dang it – I just found the beginning of this news post; I started writing it yesterday morning, but must have gotten distracted. Stupid bees… Captain Spark continues his cel-shading-like manipulation of Halo screenshots; he posted a pair that are actually the same shot, with different coloring. Very cool, if you ask me.

Last Friday’s Weekly Bungie Update has been added to our Archive – the collection (29 in total) is getting hefty, weighing in at 220kb worth of text. That Frankie writes a lot sometimes…

HaloSverige.nu (a Swedish Halo site) is gearing up for full coverage of next weekend’s $50,000 CPL event (in English). Currently, the section holds basic CPL info (maplist, participants, rules, and so on). Check it out!

Nice catch by Ross Mills – a few weeks after we posted a note about Eric Trautmann’s leaving behind his involvement in the Halo world, Eric posted ANOTHER note on his blog stating that he might, in fact, remain on in his old capacity.

My job transition may or may not happen, I may or may not stay in this group. Or I may leave. Or I may not. I exist upon a bedrock of stability and security. 😛

That was posted 2 weeks ago… Eric’s a bit busy with wedding plans at the moment (good luck, Eric!), but it’ll be interesting to see if he sticks around; he’s been a major player in shaping the public aspects of the Halo universe from the beginning.

We’ve moved our forum to a faster machine, which should solve the viewing problems some people have been having since the ilovebees invasion last Friday. The downside: it might take a little while for the DNS change to propagate. Please be patient!

Red vs Blue Season 2 DVDs are now on sale; they’re not shipping until August 2, but you can plunk down your cash now. You get the full collection of episodes, plus directors commentary, outtakes, deleted scenes, line readings, easter eggs, and ‘Never Before Seen Videos’, all for $20. Sounds like a deal! First heads-up came from Gentry Geissler.

Figures.com has put up a gallery of pics of the newest batch of Halo 2 prototypes from Joyride, taken during last weekend’s San Diego Comic Con. Some are quite washed out, but you can get a decent sense for what they look like in any case. Thanks to gd for pointing them out (in a totally random post, I might add).

We’ve known for a while that halosn.bungie.org, one of the mirror sites for our material and the sole server for our Fan Fiction section, was moving – what we didn’t count on was losing touch with Deimos Fawkes, its proprietor, in the days leading up to the move. At this point, the machine has stopped serving Halo content, but I have no way of reaching Deimos to find out where to point things… so we’ve redirected the sections it was serving to other machines, and turned off the Fan Fiction section altogether. Hopefully, we can rectify this problem in the not-too-distant future. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Thanks to clarksbrother, for going above and beyond to help provide to Mac users what Windows users got last week. (Thanks, also, to Rufo Sanchez, who tried to do the same, just a little later.) You can now download a 1920×1080 version of the Halo 2 Ad released recently; it’s 43 mb, and it plays BEAUTIFULLY on my G5, though I get less than a frame per second off the G3 laptop. Update: SanchezTheLlama has put up a mirror of this file. Grab it from him – he’s got a lot of gigs to burn in the next 4 days!

Kikizo.com has put up a bunch of very nice screengrabs from the Ad trailer – they’re listed as 800×600, but most of them are 1280×720, with a few that are 800×450. Very nice quality.

We’ve put up direct-download links for Taylor Jones’ Two Betrayals run, released last Friday in the continuing Going Nowhere Fast series. You can find the links (and direct download and BitTorrent links for all OTHER runs except the last couple) on the GNF Status Page.

Today’s One One Se7en looks at the gap between bling… and bling.

Later than usual, but the ninth segment of the Going Nowhere Fast contest winners is now available via BitTorrent. goatrope’s Keyes run isn’t always pretty, but it’s the fastest we received (and several people tried). Give it a look; at just under 100 mb, you should be able to give the BitTorrent network a run!

][-][awaiian pig is back with a new batch of Red vs Blue ‘set pieces’ – this time, with the white ‘Director’ character on-set. Pretty nice work!

Timboh56 has posted a stop motion movie test with his Halo action figures – just a meg big, but nicely done!

Halo Babies has put up a new fan-created strip. Pottie humor… but then again, it IS Halo BABIES… There is also some new fan wallpaper and a tabloid cover. Go take a look.

Wow. Halo50k3 ended with a bang – Team FFA took the final 4v4 title by beating Team StK in a nailbiter of a match, 50-49. Dolbex promises that games will be rebroadcast soon – keep your eyes on mlgpro.com! There are more news articles and more pictures to see, right now. And speaking of pictures – Rapture uploaded another massive batch of photos yesterday – including some nice closeups of the Nightmare Armor helmets that each member of the winning team took home. (Nice bonus prize, eh?) Check ’em out!

We’ve received more than a few emails about this ilovebees thing, so I’d just like to make something clear in case it wasn’t before: We are not part of this event. We don’t have any secret information; we’re just following along like everyone else. That means we can’t confirm or deny your theories about the page; nor can we answer questions that haven’t been figured out already by someone else. We also probably aren’t going to post that much news about the site, since it looks like it’s going to be going on for a while; we may note major confirmed relevations but we won’t be posting daily updates or every single new tidbit. Which brings us to my point: You don’t really need to email us about your theories or stuff that happens regarding the site. Again, we can’t tell you if you’re right, we can’t give you new information, and we probably aren’t going to do anything with your email anyway. You will get much better results by posting to one of the many forums covering the event; a lot more people will see it that way.

Because of the massive flood of bee-related speculation, our forum has become relatively useless for Halo discussion. (Can you tell that I’m not convinced of the long-term relevance to our community of this whole event|phenomenon|game?) There are interesting posts that are getting buried. Say, for example… this one, from Captain Spark. He took a few more HUDless screenshots of the Spec-Ops Elite skin that Xavier built, and then did some basic image manipulation to them. The end results are pretty cool; I’d put them in the Miscellaneous Art queue, except that 1) he didn’t present them that way, 2) they violate the posting rules for that section, and 3) you wouldn’t see ’em for a while if I did. So check out the forum post, and enjoy these ‘cel-shaded’ elites!

Day One at Halo50k3 has come and gone, and there are all sorts of goodies for you at the MLGPro.com website. The Halo FFA competition was taken by StrangePurple, and the 2v2 matches were dominated by Team StK (half the four-man team took first, the other half took second). MLGPro streamed 250 gigabytes of interview and gameplay to the viewing masses, with 335 people watching during the 2v2 finals. There new articles and new pictures in the gallery. In addition, rapture has added another update to his OWN collection of pictures. If you couldn’t make it to Atlanta, at least you can check out the action! And don’t forget, there’s plenty more to come today.