First Fan Fiction… now movies. Brian Towne writes to say that the mythica.org server is having disk troubles… it might be a few days before it’s up and running again. The movie queue has just been delayed again… Please be patient.

ATTENTION – ALL FAN FIC WRITERS: Effective immediately, and for the period of two weeks, the Fan Fiction section is closed for submissions. (There are 16 stories in the queue right now – those will be posted in the near future.) Any stories that arrive between now and 00:00 UTC, February 26, 2003, will be ignored. They will not be posted after that point – I do NOT have the resources to keep track of submissions during this timeframe. Some MAJOR changes need to be instituted; there is simply too much material coming in, and most of it, frankly, is crap. I’m getting demoralized formatting it. Suggestions are welcome, and I’ll do some thinking as well. That is all.

Lorraine Reyes-McLees illustrates the recent Pentathlon article as only she can… poor Jason.

A long time ago, vector40 wrote a guide for Fan Fiction authors on filetypes, and what you should think about when submitting fiction here. It was hosted at Zenith, a site devoted to Fan Fiction authors that has since gone under – but vec has dredged up the piece for the edification of current writers. Worth a read, if you’re submitting stories to us.

HomeLAN has a Q&A with Chris Huisman, product manager for Joyride Studios (the guys that are making the Halo collectibles) posted. They’re shooting for a July release for these products, and from the interview it sounds like there’ll be plenty of detail to the figurines… but I wanna know… who’s this guy? (The linked image at the top of the article is HUGE – 2.2 mb, and almost 3000×2000 pixels. Nice view of three models!)

Two new pieces at Bungie.net – A rundown of the Bungie Pentathlon 2003 (the Bungie Pentathlon is an annual beat-the-hell-out-of-your-coworkers event at Bungie), and a new Soapbox article from Matt Soell—the first in over a year—on what, exactly, the Bungie Way is all about. Both worth reading – nice to see Matt’s writing for the public again.

Steve Messinger writes to let us know of another Halo Team Championship tournament. (We mentioned their last event a few months ago.) This one is taking place on March 22nd, in East Lansing, MI. Entry fee is $10/person, and the field is limited to 50 teams. Microsoft is helping to sponsor the event, and there are over $4,000 in cash and prizes. Take a look if you’re in the upper midwest!

Self Righteous has picked up a couple more mirrors (and a thumbs-up from moviemaker Dan Chosich), so we’ve put together a full mirror list. If you haven’t grabbed it… it’s only 13.7 mb! Thanks to Dinky, of HaloJuggaloProductions, and That Weasel, of That Weasel Television, for the bandwidth.

We get an awful lot of mail from folks who seem to be confused about what constitutes an ‘easter egg’. So much, in fact, that it was finally worth my time to write an Easter Egg FAQ, of sorts. Check it out for what we consider eggs – and what we don’t. (Suggestions welcome, but there’s no guarantee we’ll agree with you.)

The February issue of the Official Xbox Magazine (off the stands as of the 7th of this month) had a one-page quick look at Halo 2. nukedude was kind enough to scan this for us and send it in. (Normally, this wouldn’t be necessary – I subscribe to this mag, and usually scan it myself. I never got to it this time, though, so his efforts are appreciated!) You’ll find it in our Press Scans database.

On January 13, kapowaz bundled up an archive of images taken from the Bungie webcam over the span of a month – every 5 minutes, 8,000+ images in all. The zipped archive weighs in at 83 mb – and has been made available by Eclarap, of Halo-Game, for anyone who wants to use it.

Thanks to bandwidth provider That Weasel Television – three recent movies (HaloHackinFun, HaloHackinFun2, and Heffalumps and Woozles) now have mirrored versions served up by That Weasel. Get yer red-hot movies now!

Whatever problems mythica had recently seem to be cleared up. Therefore, we’re going to post the latest movie in the queue for you – it’s called ‘Self-Righteous‘, and it was made by Mobius. (We’d planned to release it more than a week ago – and then the hacking craze hit, and suddenly we didn’t have the bandwidth for it.) It’s 13.7 mb, 3:30 long, in QuickTime format. Timing is quite good… and there’s a short clip starting at about two minutes in that I just LOVE. We’ve mirrored it at the Psyjnir Complex hotline server, if you have trouble reaching mythica – and there should be other mirrors on the way. Enjoy! Update: Whoknew writes to say he’s added a mirror. Thanks!

Break Point writes to say that he’s started a profile for Team HBO at the Halo50K competition. There are still two positions open – if you’re interested in representing our site at this massive Halo competition at the end of April, stop by and sign up! (Break Point asked if there was another official ‘Team HBO’ before setting this up. There is a team made of HBO Junkies that played recently at the iGames Regionals… but they won’t be headed down to Atlanta, so the name was available.) Show what you’re made of… and bring the honor of winning (if not the $50k) back to HBO!

We have another movie for you – this one’s not a hacking film, but a gameplay one – but our main bandwidth provider, mythica.org, seems to to be having some nameserver troubles. As soon as we can get there, we’ll serve this puppy up!

Another Bryce-looking piece from gizella Varga – check our Miscellaneous Art section.

Been a few days since Fan Fiction was updated – here are 10 more:

• Sarges Platoon, FINAL CHAPTER, by Bobby Lucas
• Project Shadow Spartan: Chapter 2, by Shadow Spartan
• The Battle For Sigma Octanus Chapter 2, by moniter101
• Forest of Black Epsilon, by janglurevil7
• Freelance-Chapter 3, by Bloodcider
• Attack Plan, by Dispraiser
• A Fresh Start, part 4, by Simon James
• Chronicle of Neapolitan Ice Cream Banshee, by Sesshoumaru, Lord of the Western Lands
• And Raise Your Head With Pride! Part 1, by Arthur Wellesly
• Ring Of The Forerunners Part V, by Locke

Hopefully, I’ll have time to check the forum tomorrow. (Busy weekend…)

Thanks To Ciarán Walsh, our Forum search features just became more useful. Before today, if you were looking for a specific snippet of text, you could search for that text, or you could search for the author of that text – but you couldn’t do both. If you knew you were looking for a post about banshees, from, say, Red Loser… you could search for ‘Red Loser’, and manually check almost 800 posts… or you could search for ‘banshee’, and sort through almost 1300 posts. Now, however, you can search for both, and pare your results down to a manageable 54 posts. Nice! It’s a simple checkbox in the Search window, and it’s been added to the forum archives, as well. (If all goes well, there will be more enhancements in the not-too-distant future.)

Rampancy.net posted links to two new Bungie jobs listed at Gamasutra (but not yet on the Bungie Jobs page). These new job openings (posted a week ago) are for a 3D Environment Artist and a Developer. (The developer job is for Halo 2 – the last bullet in the ‘Responsibilities’ list is “Work with the graphics team, artists and designers to insure that Halo 2 is the best looking game on this planet or any other.” Seems like a worthwhile goal to me!) To see these at Gamasutra, you’ll need an account there. It’s free – and if you’re too lazy to sign up for one, you probably don’t want these jobs.

HUNTR-KILLR created a small (900K) movie showing the jumping ability of a floodified marine with the recent Halo hack. The library is 4 stories high… the marine has no trouble getting above the final platform in one huge leap. (For good measure, a second jump proves, once and for all, that there are no branches in the roof. If you don’t know what that means… consider yourself lucky.)