Halo Babies has a new strip up, writes mrsmiley, and they've also announced the winners of their avatar contest.

The Bungie Webmaster is back to ridicule some more of you. And by the looks of it, you deserve it.

Eric Trautmann of Halo Bible fame got married. Congratulations from Rampancy!

HBO has put up a BitTorrent seed (and a mirror list) of some good quality footage of multiplayer action on Zanzibar at the first-ever Halo 2 tourney, using the E3 2004 build of the game. Lots of shakeycam footage has been floating around, but this is the real deal.

Frankie is back, with a few choice words with those who were upset at last week's update, and news on how placeholder items in levels have been replaced with real items, how Marty has gone into hiding to finish scoring the game, and other non-hair-related tidbits.

Several stories around the web the last few days (XboxSolution, CNN have mentioned the resignation of Take Two's CEO, Jeffrey C. Lapin, and the subsequent revision of financial estimates for the second quarter and year-end results for 2004. Lapin had the CEO job for only one year and three months.

SketchFactor has posted up two new goodies at the new Bungie.net. (I wonder when we're going to be able to stop calling it the new Bungie.net and go back to just calling it Bungie.net.) The first is a render of a Helljumper, or ODST, and the second is a wallpaper of 343 Guilty Spark.

Those complaining that the Weekly Updates have been thin will have little to whine about where the new Bungie.net is concerned. A press release from Steve Cherrier at AEG let us know that Bungie is planning on releasing two new screenshots of Halo 2 during the week of the new site's launch. And sure enough, Louis Wu at HBO has already spotted one new shot.

Frank "Frankie" O'Connor and Brian "SketchFactor" Jarrard of Bungie have been interviewed by César "Cesar" A. Berardini at TeamXbox. Among the highlights: Frankie plays Halo on his Titanium Powerbook from the toilet. No kidding. I thought only I did that.

Thanks Louis Wu at HBO for the heads-up.

Preston Cyberdog found and Louis Wu posted an apparently poorly-hidden feature of the new Bungie.net site that offers to help you out if it looks like you don't know what you're doing.

As part of the all-new, uncut, extended and extruded History of Bungie on the new Bungie.net, the page on Halo 2 has this to say on Steve Ballmer's mention of Halo 3 last fall:

It looks like the new Bungie.net forums are powered by IdealBB 1.5, a Windows-based online collaboration system developed by Ideal Science. (Their company is linked from the bottom of the forum pages.)

Users of the new Bungie.net site might find one thing to be problematic- linking their Xbox Live GamerTag. Although Bungie.net allows you to choose whether or not to display your GamerTag if it is linked, you can't actually link it there if it isn't already. To do that, you have to sign in to Xbox.com using the same Passport you use for Bungie.net.

Those of you with truly nothing better to do may remember that my Christmas wish to Bungie was a flexible statistics system, linked to Xbox Live, that would have hooks that external fansites could link to in order to develop their own customized leader boards.