Quick update from the guy who doesn’t post… too often, on the Brian Morden Memorial Halo Lanfest, held last night at the Morden house. Sounds like it was the place to be.

iGames, the folks who sponsored the National Halo Winter Season Tournament, has set up the iGames National Halo Spring Season. This one is a doubles tourney – two-player teams. Entrance is $15/player for the local tournaments, $20/player for the regionals. More info can be found on the iGames site. Thanks to ninja on fire for the heads-up. (I’m not really back yet – gonna spend all of tomorrow on a plane. Thought I’d try and fill in while the rest of the staff pay their respects to the Morden family in Pennsylvania, though…)

The entire remaining staff of HBO is currently en route to Brian Morden’s memorial, so the news has slowed down a bit. Things should be back to normal by Sunday.

Bungie.net has posted an interview with Curt Chiarelli, Sculptor, the actual creator of the Halo toys spotted recently. Thanks to Red Loser for noticing this.

On the forum this morning, Lacsap posted a link to an article about the recent resurgent interest in movie tie-ins with video games. Obviously Halo is mentioned as being shopped around. But it’s not just some little title being bandied about, it’s actually, according to the article, backed by one of the largest agencies in the biz, CAA, which was once Michael Ovitz’s home.

Of course, Matt, Official Bungie Spin Doctor, had a while back mentioned how suspicious Bungie was of the whole movie tie-in thing. And can you blame him? Still, we’d be foolish not to keep our ears to the ground on this one.

Update: Matt has chimed in with an explanation. They’ve been signed up with CAA for quite awhile, and as far as Bungie is concerned, CAA is only poking around to see who’s interested. Bungie’s busy with Halo 2 at the moment. A Halo movie is not something they’re at all concerned about.

A new artist has appeared on the forum, and despite rampant self-deprecation the drawings are very good (the post originally referred and linked to “Marine killing unspecified things”, Postman updated his page afterwards). My favorite is definitely this one.

Bungie.net has tracked down one of their own and interviewed Doug Zartman, who left Bungie around the time of the Microsoft acquisition. Lots of fun stuff in there about the upcoming toys and novel!

Yet another nugget of Halo trickery comes out of level 2, first partially described by The halo destroyer and then captured by Dark Helmet. This isn’t the first time the “drunk driver” dropship has been mentioned, but it’s the first time anyone has gotten close enough to see this bit.

An email from the raVen tipped us off to an interview with Bungie artist Shikai “Shiek” Wang. Woohoo, UIUC!

This came in a while ago, but got missed – vacation can do a number on concentration. Halo Command Central has overhauled the site design, and content is growing. Graphics work is stunning. (Check out the extracted characters and vehicles!)

BOLL sent us a collection of three images, created from Bungie.net shots and NASA images, that are designed to be used together on a 3-monitor array. If you’ve got the screen real estate, this is a pretty fine desktop collection to use on it! And because these came in to our FTP site, they’ve reminded me that we’ve recently gotten many uploads with no attribution – if we don’t know who made it, we’re not going to post it. Drop off a small text file, containing the relevant info (name, email, what file you’ve uploaded, that sort of thing) – just like BOLL did!

A new composite desktop is now available in our Wallpapers section.

Came in yesterday… but we couldn’t post it. Xerxes, of Halo Orbit, writes to say that a translation of the Halo 2 FAQ posted recently on Bungie.net has now been translated into German. For non-english speakers, this might be a better choice…

Four new art pieces – two nice composites by gizella Varga, an all-too-true strip by dogsounds, and a gorgeous rendering of AotCR. Check ’em all out in our Miscellaneous Art section.

Bungie.net comes back to life… and the updates are too numerous to mention. Go read about ’em. Short synopsis – Achronos rocks.

For those interested, the Brian Morden Fund page has been updated. Brian’s parents wrote an obituary for him on our forum – we’ve added it to the page.

Apologies for the 18 hours of downtime – HBO is back up and running again. I can’t guarantee it won’t go down again – but I CAN guarantee that the cause for this recent outage will never, ever happen again. And that’s all I’ll say about that.

THR8807 has found an interesting trick on a PC mod site: How to give an Xbox controller a standard USB connector. The process is not for the faint of heart, and requires completely disassembling the controller. But maybe now we can settle all the controller-vs-mouse arguments…

Back to Halo: a few days ago, SketchFactor, Bungie’s newest member of the Online Team, wrote a Halo 2 FAQ over on Bungie.net. It covers a substantial number of subjects, and contains lots of good info we can point to – always nice to have an official source on this sort of thing. Several people emailed us or posted this information to our forum, but as far as I can tell, Felix was first.

I, too, will miss Brian Morden – he epitomized, to me, the strength of human spirit and the power of faith. That a teenager could keep up the courage to fight so long, and so hard, against a disease that simply wouldn’t give up reminds me that we’re stronger than we look – and I’ll always owe Brian for showing me that grace and humor don’t have to disappear in the face of personal horror. I spent most of yesterday on a plane, and was sleeping when Brian passed away this morning – but in lieu of a 21-gun salute, I’d like to offer a high-quality recording of Brian’s single spoken line in the Halo script. (Thanks to Marty O’Donnell for providing this.)

The Autumn! She’s been hit! (QT format, 76k)

If you’re interested, you should also read poena.dare’s eloquent tribute to Brian, over at Bungie Sightings.