ShotgunGoBOOM found a Flash video called ‘Halo Delight‘ on Flashplayer.com. MC gets down to the 80’s hiphop sounds of the Sugar Hill Gang. Surreal.

Update on yesterday’s elite skin, from Xavier – he’s found a way to make ALL Spec-Ops Elites black (some were coming out with a blue layer over the skin); the downside is that it changes the blue of the regular Blue Elite. Information and the new ppf can be found on the Halo: Modding Evolved forum (and I’ve added a local copy of the ‘fixed’ ppf here).

Dolbex writes to point out that all 61 teams registered for this weekend’s Halo50k3 event in Atlanta are listed up on the MLGPro.com website. If you aren’t sure if your buddies are going, check this out!

I think all of us who’ve suffered over bad internet connections can sympathize with Calvin and Halo today… and I’d like to take this chance to mention that Warbow has chosen to take the rest of the summer off; there won’t be any more Warbow-generated Calvin and Halo strips before fall. (It’s unclear whether Blackstar will continue posting one per week, on Thursdays, or whether he’ll double his output to two per week, to keep up the current schedule, or whether he, too, will take a break, giving Calvin himself a rest for a couple of months. More when we know it.)

A tad later than usual – but never fear, we get to stuff eventually. The Direct Download links for the sixth Going Nowhere Fast video (343 Guilty Spark) are now posted on the Status page. If you aren’t one of the 900 or so BitTorrent downloaders, go grab a copy of this 49.4 mb run via http!

The Comments function for the Fan Fiction section has been turned off for the time being. Shame how the actions of a few can ruin it for the many. (Before anyone who actually USES that section goes ballistic on the individual who caused most of the trouble, be aware that IGNORING THE SITUATION would have made it stop a lot sooner (and likely wouldn’t have gotten someone spoofing ME, which is what set this off).) Stories will still be posted, you just won’t be able to comment on them until someone suggests a better way of maintenance.

Captain Spark took a couple of very nice pics of the Xavier/Tina Leyk Elite skin on AotCR today – check ’em out!

Wow – that’s unique. ][-][awaiian pig has taken the Megabattle screenshot technique in a new direction – he’s reproduced ‘set pieces’ from Red vs Blue episodes. Don’t think I ever would have thought of that one… (Attention to detail is amazing.)

So the big news of the morning is that Microsoft has made a small version of the Halo ad currently showing in Loews theatres available to the public. The astoundingly frustrating part of this is that the page is viewable ONLY on a PC – Macs can’t even see the teaser. This seems unreasonable, for content that was designed to be advertising in the first place. Even on a PC, the video is only available in a streaming format – and only, in fact, on Internet Explorer. Halo Orbit has made a downloadable version of this footage available – but it’s in asf format, and it’s a tad funky (the time data is wrong; Windows Media Player thinks it’s about 15 seconds shorter than it really is… it’ll play the whole thing, but the progress bar gets pinned at the end for the last third of the movie), and this screws up the program I’d normally use to convert this to a mac-friendly format. (It’s also not readable as is in the MacOSX version of WMP9.) Because of all this, I grabbed a local copy myself, from the MSN page; you can find it (2.1 mb, QuickTime format) on files.bungie.org. Here’s hoping a larger version, more cross-platform-compatible, will be released from on high.

WOW. Xavier, a newcomer to HBO, pointed out a new skin he created, based on some fantastic Tina Leyk artwork, posted at HaloMC.com. (There was some trouble earlier getting to that forum, so if you can’t see his post, he started from this picture, and ended up with this guy (a second pic is here). A local copy of the ppf is available here (145k). To apply this, grab a copy of Extion’s HHHT application (a local copy is here, 532k) and apply this ppf to your copy of bitmaps.map (in the MAPS folder). From here on out, any instance of a Spec-Ops Elite (they occur naturally on Two Betrayals, Keyes, and the Maw, and can be injected into any OTHER level) will now have this skin. I took a couple of pics (one | two) after the cafeteria on the Maw – they’re not great, but it was a way to see how easy it was to get this skin into the game. I gotta say… this rocks. All around.

Looks like the Bravo network is picking up One One Se7en next season.

Halo: Resolution posts the second half of its farewell teaser… the marines get a language lesson from a Cov Elite.

TotalVideoGames.com has a story today that Microsoft Game Studios has just confirmed that the Limited Edition version of Halo 2 WILL be sold in Europe. Given that Bungie confirmed this very fact 2 months ago, I’m struck by the alacrity of the Microsoft marketing juggernaut…

Today is the 5th anniversary of the MacWorld Trailer, the day that Halo was introduced to the world (and the planet reverberated with the clang of dropping jaws). And yesterday was, incidentally, the 5th anniversary of this domain name (halo.bungie.org) – the website had been up at that point for almost two months, but it had been reachable at blam.bungie.org; we changed names (and post formats) when Halo was officially announced. (Why the 1-day offset? It’s hard to tell this far down the road… but I think it’s a mistake. 🙂 ) The traditional gift for a 5-year anniversary is wood – I offer you the inside of my skull in celebration. We’ve come a long way, baby!

29 new pieces have been added to the Fan Fiction section today. It looked far worse when I stopped by to approve stories – but after I deleted 19 of the 20 copies of Elitehunter676’s submission, things weren’t quite so bad. (I can only hope it was a fit of epilepsy that caused him to submit 20 times… epilepsy is controllable with medication.) Hidden among today’s entries is the first submission for our collection of the Enkidu Fan Fiction Contest entries – Wado’s Dark Halo chapter is online. Again – anyone who wants to add their entry to this collection, simply submit it via the normal means, and then send me an email telling me that it’s part of the series. (Please tell me the NAME of the story, so I don’t have to guess which one’s yours.)

Cody Miller, who took first place on Truth and Reconciliation, also aced the Library for our Going Nowhere Fast contest. Beating his nearest competitor by 5 minutes (and the third place finisher by almost 25 minutes), he raced through this level of relentless destruction almost without stopping. The video is 153 mb large, and available (for now) via BitTorrent. (And because we haven’t mentioned it in a few days, here’s a BitTorrent download link – there are still folks who haven’t grabbed a client yet.)

Tina Leyk got stuck without power this afternoon – so she sat down with her Prisma pencils (and a pen) and sketched out a gorgeous Spec-Ops Elite. Check him out on her Fan Art page!

Betcha thought I forgot Calvin and Halo, didn’tcha? Calvin sort of wishes his mom forgot HIM…

On Sunday, Stuntmutt submitted a pretty funny One One Se7en for c0ld vengeance; today, he’s made good on the promise of that strip. Whatever else you might say about him… he follows through.