We have a special Guest One One Se7en strip for you today; it was created by Stuntmutt himself, and it ushers in a new age of Guest Strips. By order of the Grand High Poobah (that would be Stuntmutt), there will no longer be any guest strips posted during the week. One One Se7en will come out 3 days a week, as it did when it started – all strips will be his. Once per month, all submitted strips will be added, via the Archive mechanism. There are other (relatively large) changes in the works… but no more on that until we’re ready to announce them. In the meantime, enjoy this tribute to Guest Strippers everywhere from the man who inspired them.

A bunch of new artwork from Tina Leyk today; both her Artwork page and her Fur-Lo comic page have been updated. One of these days, soon, I’ll add search functions to those pages, so finding new material is easier. For now, though, you’re looking for the last two items in the ‘Doodles’ section on her art page (they’re marked as added 14 March), and the Public Service Announcement at the top of the Fur-Lo page (read it! You people sending her hatemail suck!) and the last panel in the ‘Still More Single Panels’ section are both new. And yes… the birthday panel is accurate; today’s her birthday. 🙂

Gamespot has put up a new TenSpot – the Top Ten First-Person Shooters of all time. Halo’s on the list (the games are unranked among those 10 slots.) When you’re done reading about what Gamespot thinks, there’s a chance for you to vote, as well. Thanks to Jonah for the heads-up.

Bluestone, from 343GS.com, wrote to say that the new design that went live yesterday had some problems… so they’ve upped a DIFFERENT one. Seems solid from here.

Kris Hull has written up a pretty snazzy multiplayer Halo guide; it was originally for his local Halo group, but he’s decided to make it public. (Their strategies have apparently evolved a little since it was written… but it’s still pretty solid.) Nice layout, great modifications of Bungie’s overhead maps, generally good design all around. Check it out!

Busy weekend… almost didn’t get today’s Guest One One Se7en posted. It comes from Michael Frank… and it looks at one of the bigger problems on our forum. Ouch.

Sports fan Lophan sent in this Halo sighting, on ESPN’s website. Frank Wiley wrote a column about trash-talking… and apparently, among sports fans, Halo lines are a common form. Hehe.

As a bonus for the fans, Frankie’s posted a video of Sid Garrand, Nightmare Armor virtuoso, wandering around Microsoft’s campus in full get-up, scaring small children and generally looking like one bad mutha. Makes me wish I had a few thousand dollars just lying around…

This week’s Bungie Weekly Update showed up on the Halo Babies forum – there’s a great bit on the Nightmare Armor team’s visit to Bungie this week, along with magazine visits, cinematics polishing, stress testing, and a dogfight. (‘A bigger Covenant ship’? Banshees on Phantoms? Hmm…) Light on the progress stuff this time around, but a great read nonetheless. Go get it!

DocOctavius has posted the first iteration of his rendering tutorial – for folks looking to learn the basics of rendering using free software. Check out Yayap.com for all the details!

All the activity in the modding arena has one big downside… it enables cheating in online games. Halo Phenom (a site I hadn’t actually heard of before today) has put up a nice little article suggesting ways to avoid this, at least for tournament play. Worth a read, if you’re looking for suggestions… Thanks to Battleground: Halo for the heads-up.

gwdpto, the brains behind coerce.net and the HBO-COERCE Halo PC server, put up a post about the state of the HPC server. They’re moving to a new location, and there’s a $100 setup fee… so he’s looking for small donations from the community. For a $5 or $10 donation, you get a coerce.net email address (with pop3 access) and 10 mb of web space. If you enjoy playing on the COERCE server… drop him a few bucks! (They’re also looking for new admins, for anyone interested in kicking in a regular amount to cover the rental costs.)

One One Se7en tells you what NOT to do this afternoon. Take notice.

Halo: Resolution continues the saga of Keyes and GS; did you know what Keyes’ suit is made of?

The Evolution of Halo release, via p2p networks, a couple of days ago was a pretty big success; I don’t have Two Degrees stats, but BitTorrent dowload numbers are in the 5000 range in the past 30 hours… that’s half a terabyte of files transferred, and the hit on HBO-related servers was LESS than our normal traffic. That ROCKS. A couple of standard http-type links have popped up; if you’re behind a firewall, or on some other connection that makes p2p sharing not an option for you, you can grab the file in the standard way from one of these sites. (If more come online, we’ll continue to add links to the Mirror list.) For those interested: one of the links (Gamespot DLX) is a new service, offered by Gamespot; file downloads are free, though you do have to register. Speeds are quite fast, and there’s no queue (or at least, I never saw one). They DID re-encode the movie; it’s listed on the page as 150 mb, but it’s really 161.12 mb. (Don’t make the mistake I made, and cancel your download at 155 mb, thinking it’s corrupt…) They’re offering it in MPG format, for those who have trouble with DivX and QuickTime. (And yes, they asked first.)

Halo Babies has made their current strip visible for the general public. (Normally, we won’t be posting this information; just like with Red vs Blue, when there is an early release for sponsors, and a regular release for the general public, we’ll post once, when it’s first available (as we did yesterday), and it’ll be up to you to remember to revisit if you haven’t sponsored. However, in this case, there’s some new Fan Art posted, as well, so a second post is warranted.)

Farsight has posted another First Strike Mod Weekly Update on our forum; they’re making progress on several fronts, but the included artwork is just disturbing.

TS.Films has decided to open a new section of their website; it will be devoted to Tournaments. They’re hoping to provide a centralized location where folks can post information about upcoming tourneys in their area, or results and recaps from tournaments they participated in. They’ve started the ball rolling with recaps of a couple of their own tourneys. Swing on by and send ’em YOUR info!

A number of people have written to us about those Special Edition Halo-branded Xboxes; they’re available in Australia now, and they WILL be available in the US, very soon. I’m sure the list of countries where you can buy one is much, much longer than this… but I think we’ve gotten the point across; if you’re interested in this, contact your local Xbox dealer to find out if they’re available where you are, but you don’t need to send us more mail about this.

BOLL is still playing the Flash game… though I warn you, don’t open this with your volume set high. And don’t open it at ALL if you’re epileptic.