Yay! Tonight in the Dongbu Feng chat, the Avatar Interfansite olympics was announced. If you weren’t there, sucks for you. Read the rest of the post for details.

Basically, a bunch of major Avatar websites are going to put together teams for a “friendly” interfansite competition. Each team will consist of 15 to 25 members. The sites participating so far are:

Distant Horizons, Airbender.Net, Dongbu Feng, Gyatso’s Temple, Flying Bison, Blue Spirit Gal, Kataang Forever, and myself.

Here’s a lowdown of the rules:

• Sites participating will need 15 members (with a max of 25) submitted to webmaster@avatarolympics.net by January 10th. We’re still accepting sites as well, and any site that can get the required number of competitors is eligible.
• The Olympics will take place from January 14th (opening ceremony) to February 15th (closing ceremony). Also, to be clear, this is NOT based on Avatar’s season 3 return, because there is not date yet, don’t mistake the 15th for the day that the show comes back (though that would be cool!)
• Fandom teams will be accepted for those who do not make the Fansite teams. Fandom and Fansite teams will compete in pretty much the same events, but their standings will be separate. Essentially the Fandom teams compete against other Fandom teams, and the Fansite teams compete against the other Fansite teams.
• People can only join one team. Also, they cannot be on a Fandom team and a Fansite team, only one.
• There will be many activities in which people can earn points for their team, including fanart, writing, video and scavenger hunts. Full details of the events will be available soon at the official site. There will be some live events, but those will be announced in advance and only a certain number of participants from each team will have to be there.

If you have any questions, contact Jake of Dongbu Feng.

If you want to be on the team for this website, just e-mail me

A while back I got screencap crazy and started taking DVD caps for every episode. That ran strong, and I did most of season 2, but then I stopped doing it. Oh wells. Anyways, the point is that I found a program that will take a DVD and convert every frame, or every 5 frames, or whatever, to a JPG file.
So, on the plus side, very soon I’m going to add DVD caps from EVERY SINGLE EPISODE. In addition to that, as soon as a new DVD comes out, I’ll be able to add caps from it within hours of when I get it. Woot!
The negative is that taking generic caps every second produces some duplicates, and some cool shots are missed (such as in action scenes). Still, better than no caps it all.

Edit: DVD Screencaps are now up for “The Awakening” here. View them, and tell me what you think of the quality, as well as the layout of the gallery Also, note the nicer URL

This isn’t really much of a post, but now that Day of Black Sun has aired, I’m curious as to what people think about the episode. I’d appreciate it if you could leave your thoughts/comments/reviews in the comments

However, this post isn’t entirely pointless, just mostly: Episode information is once again a priority, and I’m working on getting information on all the season 3 episodes so far up, along with bios and hopefully some audio soon. I’ve gotten a lot of emails in the past week about new audio tracks from season 3, and I’ll get those up as soon as they’re available

Also, another random note, after about 4 different attempts to move them, the speculation comments are back up, where they originally were all along - on the actual editorial pages. So enjoy, and post new comments I’ll have a new editorial out soon about what I think is going to happen over the course of the rest of Book 3. Wow….how long has it been since I wrote an editorial…? I’m almost nervous…

In a definitely unexpected change, Nick recently informed ASN that Book 3 is going to have 21 episodes, not 20 like seasons 1 and 2. This is because Day of Black Sun, although the length of two episodes, is one giant chapter 10.

In a confusing twist, though, although the episodes are separate (numbers 310 and 311 respectively), both are part of “Chapter 10″ in Book Three: Fire. Up until now, each chapter has been an episode, but with “Day of Black Sun” this is no longer the case.

Also revealed was that the Avatar season three (and show) finale will be comprised of episodes 318, 319, 320 and 321. No other information on episode titles or broadcast dates was available.

Again, credits to ASN for this news.

Well, I’ve made a bunch of updates regarding book 3. The character bios aren’t done yet, but they’re getting there (huge thanks to Jeremy for dishing out around 10 bios in a single day). “The Awakening” is completely done, bios and all. “The Headband” now has its own page, but the bios for it aren’t completely done (I’m mising “Combustion Man”). Also, the episodes page itself has been updated with a cool new layout for season 3 episodes, and you can now click on the pictures for each nation to be brought to that nation’s season’s page. (eg, click on the water picture and you go to a page just for the season 1 episodes).

Also, random notes, there’s a new poll, I remembered that I have an updates bar on the right to update, and the air dates and times for the next 4 episodes or so have been added to the right navigation.

Enjoy
Edit: It took all of 2 minutes for this post to be up before I got 2 e-mails telling me that the “Original Air Date” thing for all of my season 3 episodes is wrong. I know that, I’m just too lazy to fix it at the moment, I’ll do that tomorrow. Thanks for pointing it out though

Some of you may remember that I started doing a full-scale character bios section back sometime in June. I estimated they’d be done by July…..righty….

Well, although it wasn’t done in the most efficient manner, it still got done. For the most part. The character bios section now has entries for every single character in Avatar….up through the end of season 2. I’ve made a list of all the new Season 3 characters, and am working on their bios now. Hopefully those will be up by the weekend at the latest, but no promises.

Also, right now, the characters page is just an A through Z list of all the characters. The staff is working on organizing it better, so look out for that too.

Again DOTBS The Invasion did not air! Instead Nicktoons aired The Puppetmaster as it was (if you’re reading this on Wednesday) Halloween . I’m not going to keep guessing when it will air as I do not want and angry mob forming every time I get it wrong . Although, I am almost certain this time that part 1 is airing on Saturday and part 2 on Sunday. Happy Halloween!

The Book 3: Fire Volume 1 dvd is now available for purchase. It contains chapters 1-5: The Awakening, The Headband, The Painted Lady, Sokka’s Master, and The Beach.

I’ve been talking for a while with the webmasters over at Animation Insider about affiliating with them, and combining my forum with theirs. I’m happy to say that we’ve finally finished, and the new avatar forum is located here. In it you’ll find avatar “Talkbacks” (in the episode discussion subforum), where each episode can be discussed individually, along with a whole lot more threads about the show in general. There’s a whole lot more active members over there than WT Forums ever had, so I hope everyone will sign up and enjoy discussing Avatar with the people over at AI.

The speculation comments on WT Forums are floating in their own dimensional abyss right now until I figure out what to do with them. If you have any questions about this move, leave them in the comments

And while I’m posting about new partnerships, everyone give a welcome to Jeremy, Matthew, and Bree, who have agreed to help me run Waterbender. Matthew has made a few news posts already, and Jeremy and Bree have been helping me write new character bios. The about us page will be updated with them asap

Sadly Day of the Black Sun: Part 1 The Invasion did not air in the UK . Instead nicktoons aired The Awakening again. Though on the bright side it seems it will be airing on Wednesday at 4:00pm and there will be 1 new episode a week .