Benjamin Franklin had it wrong. Certain in this life are death, taxes, and fan fiction.

• Shadow Ops II: Chapter Nine, by Agent Shade
• Halo: The Scythe of Death Part Seven, by LordofDestruction
• Marooned Chapter Ten, by Steve Ollett
• Battle for the Norah: Part Thirteen, by Sterfrye36
• Galaxy 07 – Part 7 – Regimes, by Jillybean the Impatient
• Specters (Part 2), by MadJackal
• The Fall of Fate: Special Edition (Destiny-Freedom), by ‘Nosolee

Small update at the HSP, courtesy of yours truly.

And, of course, the day wouldn’t be complete without a new One One Se7en. So! Day’s over, apparently!

Apparently, “comics,” inspired by Halo, are all the rage right now. Here’s a new Halo: Resolution to start your day off with a smile. A tiny, pixelated smile. I think.

Ah. Well, okay. Here’s one of those update-thingies that Wu usually does. These would be Fan Fiction er, things, so go ahead and read ’em! Okay. So there you go.

• A Conclusive History of the United Nations Space Command: Chapter Four: The Human-Covenant War, by witelancer
• Jake A Model IV: Episode Three: The Trinity, by Slipping Knot
• Tides of Destruction (Part 7, Rolling Thunder), by teemus
• Battle for Tectron: Chapter 5, by Helljumper
• Halo 2 Fight For Earth: Out of the Frying Pan. . . , by HunterKiller
• Jake A Model IV: Episode Four: , by Slipping Knot
• Forced Betrayal (Chapter 2: Escape and Sabatoge), by CoLd BlooDed
• Returning the Favor, by Mainevent

Heck, that was easy! I might even update again. Someday.

Got a chance to log in to the net for the first time in a couple of days… and I discovered that some of the update tools I left for the other maintainers are… well, busted. Here’s Sunday’s One One Se7en, created by kubix; hopefully, it won’t be the last one you see this week. Gotta head out again…

Final post from me, before leaving for the airport: today’s Guest One One Se7en comes from puma (now known as someone else on our forum). To get the context, you need to go back a couple of months…

Continuing the clearout trend (well, ending it for now), here are 7 desktops submitted to the Wallpaper section in the last few days. This is the last image update for a week or so. If you submit content in the next few days, it’ll get dealt with… but not until early January. Enjoy!

We cleared the Miscellaneous Art queue yesterday… but there was a new submission that is worth getting out there. Germain Couët submitted the second of his ‘Hiding Spartans’ images; it’s a shot with 5 hidden Spartans in it, and it’s up to you to find them. There aren’t any prizes, it’s just fun!

A small Fan Fiction update – but it’s my last for a while, so I figured that clearing the queue made sense. (There will continue to be updates in my absence… but maybe not as frequently.) Six pieces for you today:

• Spartan-X Chapters 2 &3, by SilentStrider
• Halo Zero 2 / p9 / Lost Cause?, by nicholas
• ES06 – Eternal Sunder (part 06): 900,000 Years Ago , by Wado
• Tides of Destruction (Part 6, Camp), by teemus
• Forced Betrayal (Chapter 1: Early Retreat), by CoLd BlooDed
• Specters (Part 1), by MadJackal

Enjoy!

Accelerate Your Mac has reviewed Mac Halo – the single-player part of it, anyway. Again, one of the biggest complaints is system requirements… but this reviewer was also unhappy about the speed with which he mastered the game. (I’d guess he ran through on Normal, and hasn’t figured out yet that Legendary is an entirely different ball of wax…) There’ll be an update for this when the 1.03 patch for multiplayer is released, but in the meantime, check out a linked page of screenshots; they do a fantastic job of showing the advantage of Full Screen Anti-Aliasing (something that actually isn’t available on the PC version; this is Mac-only). My recommendation is to load all three shots in a given series, to get your browser to cache them… and THEN cycle through them, looking at differences.

Cowled_Wolfe created a small, soundless stop-action movie with Halo action figures… he submitted it in WMV format (243K), but you can also grab a QuickTime version (256K) if you’d rather. He says a longer one (3 minutes, maybe), with sound and a better framerate, is in the works. Comments can go in this forum thread.

Hehe – yesterday, we posted a news article about a new poll being run by CobaltNova (the 7th Column chapter), looking for predictions about 2004. I wondered, at the time, if this was an interesting way to re-enter the Halo community after the sudden shutdown of operations last month – and an entry by CobaltNova himself suggests it might be. “CobaltNova.com will become a repository for Halo based art with the announcement of monthly prizes for the best work.” Hmm… and if you VISIT CobaltNova.com, you’ll find a new design, plenty of brand-new news, and (non-functioning, but visible) a section of the navbar devoted to ‘Halo Artisans’. Way to slip it in under the radar, Emil. 🙂

Dispatcher has written up an interesting analysis of the Halo storyline, with an eye to explaining some of the repetition in level design as intentional, rather than practical necessity. An intriguing viewpoint…

It’s only been up a day.. but there are already two new entries (the last two) on the Halo Movie Spoofs page. These are the last two that will be added for a little bit… but never fear, if you submit a new one in the next week or so, we’ll get to it eventually! Update: I lied – there’s a third one today, from Ducain. THAT’S the last for a while. Sorry.

Halo Babies put up their second strip of the week last night… I dunno, I found it hilarious! (There’s also a pretty slick new Wallpaper known as ‘Defcon Zero’ in the Member Content section… worth signing up for, if you haven’t already!)

We’re way behind on mentioning Halo websites. One such site doesn’t even exist yet; Kyrceck posted a note to our forum a week ago, describing a website he’s trying to create, called The 7th Revolution. It sounds very ambitious… but ambition is good. The post lists the sections they’d like to have, eventually, and the positions they need to fill in order to realize this goal. Give it a read, and contact Kryceck if you’re interested in helping!

Emildux has begun a forum thread (which links to a Seventh Column Chapter forum) to get feedback from the community on what we think 2004 will bring, with respect to Halo. Visit the thread(s), make a prediction, and a year from now, you can see how close you came!

Earlier this week, we reported that MacGamer had announced the winners of their ‘Put the Master Chief in a Hollywood Movie’ Photoshop contest. Some people were surprised by the winners… and after we received some submissions from folks who didn’t win, we were, too. We’ve set up a section to display these spoofs; if more come in, they’ll be added to this section. Enjoy!

In an effort to stave off overload when vacation ends, I’m attempting to clear out some of the queues right now. First up is the Miscellaneous Art queue; there were 16 items built up. They range from simple sketches to modified screenshots to very funny jokes. Check ’em out!