You may have heard of the "Call for Communication" Steam group? They've started a lot of ruckus back in February when they announced their "Red Letter Day" event where over 13,000 fans all loaded up Half-Life 2 at once on Steam to bring it to the top of the games list in the Steam stats, and of course, to grab Valve's attention. The effort is to remind Valve that their fans have been waiting in silence about any new Half-Life game for over 4 years!

Their newest tactic is to take thousands of photos from fans and patch a mosaic together to form one of the classic artworks for HL2.

You may upload as many images as you'd like, but they ask they be varied enough. They have an official site now: messagetovalve.com More information can be found there. If you like the idea, be sure to join the official Steam group, as I'm sure until Valve says something new about the future of Half-Life, we're probably going to see more events from these guys.

Although somewhat belated, SnarkPit makes it into 2012. Hurray for us! While there have been much happenings in the world of mapping and of everything Valve since August (our last news posting), I'll only touch on the most recent event that has caught my attention. And also because, you know...... we're not much for news postings. And maybe I should stop talking in the 2nd person because I'm the only one who writes for these things... Big surprise? -I know.

Well in recent news, the ever popular Combine Overwiki, the seemingly premier wiki for everything Half-Life related, has taken up shop with its very own URL, thus finally leaving the tight grips of the ad-driven Wikia network. Everything moved, and status maintained, the wiki deserves some recognition over the past several years for being quite the stand-up site it's been. Contained within its pages are some highly unique articles and details on facts and trivia about the Half-Life/Portal Universe and their development, that this is the place to go to become the local Half-Life scholar of your community. It's definitely one of my favorite HL sites to visit.

The site is currently running noticeably slow, but much is to be said for moving an entire wiki to an independent domain, and should improve eventually as work is not finished. The old Wikia version will remain intact for the time being, but I don't believe it will be supported any longer by the creators.

Enjoy the new year, and I plan to get back into the swing of keeping semi-regular updates for the main page.