Happy late Will Smith Weekend to you all. Or as some would like to call it, Independence Day. I know some of you don’t hail from these great states of ours, but I’m a wisher of well all the same. I hope you got to blow some stuff up for freedom.

There hasn’t been an update in awhile because there’s not a whole lot to say. We’ve been eating, sleeping and fondling production for the last couple of weeks. And not just on TLW, but more on that later. Episode 12 marches inexorably towards its fated release day, which should be at some point over the weekend. It’s currently in post production while we film Episode 13. Or rather, part one (of two) of the finale.

As far as a general FYI goes, you might notice that all comments now go to moderation before being posted on the site. We’re trying to raise the level of discourse around here, so play nice, have something worthwhile to say, and your post will go through with no problems. There will be some other changes coming to the site shortly after the season, and we’ll give you a heads up when the time comes.

I know I’ve said it before, but the general rule around here is that the more busy we are, the quieter we tend to be. Coming up on the twelfth episode of Season 2 is no exception. With Daniel still out of town and gallivanting around movie sets like some cinema cowboy, we’re left scrambling to finish the season. But it’s a good kind of scramble. Like eggs.

It’s hard to believe there are just a couple more episodes left, but that’s the way we roll, I guess. Thanks to you dudes that have stuck it out so far for this absurd machinima. Anywho, here are some screenshots from the next episode.

That last one is a major tease, am I right?

We now present to you Season 2, Episode 10, Wake Me Up Before You Go. This is a pretty big one, and you’ll see why when you watch it. Next to Episode 7 and the Finale, it’s maybe the biggest of the season. Be careful when reading comments, as there will be spoilers run amok. We even disabled the “recent comments” feature on the sidebar in order to prevent accidental spoil-age.

In this episode, we see what happens when Asher goes rogue, and the consequences unleashed upon the cast. Be sure to check out the wicked TLW Premiere Page to watch a higher res version. Clear your cache if the page is still showing the old episode.

Or just hit the jump to see the normal version!

6/7 EDIT: A few have mentioned that the audio mix had some issues. It’s updated now. Watch the episode again!
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If you follow us on twitter, then you’d know that Episode 10 is shaping up to be a beast of a different sort. Imagine a hulking brute that spits acid and isn’t intimidated by Nick’s beard and then you know what you’re dealing with. It is unruly and grotesque. In a good way.

Anywho, part of the reason for this is that it has quite a humongous action sequence in it, and before I get carried away with superlatives, I will just say that it might own you. We’re big fans of action films (if you can’t tell), so this is always a treat for us. By the way, the picture is from Die Hard, so if you haven’t seen it, I might ban you. Welcome to the party, pal.

Here are some screenshots from Episode 10. I had to work very hard to find ones that don’t give anything away. There’s just way too much to spoil.

Hope you enjoy the tease.

I’d like to thank everyone for the encouraging words regarding our announcement about the end of TLW after this season (and an awesome movie). We’ve been suspecting that this might go down for a couple of months, but it only became set in stone recently. It’s good to have it out in the open, and even better when nobody goes ballistic and throws things at us. You know, like e-rocks.

Since the questions are rolling in, I wanted to clarify a few things:

• Daniel is not leaving yet. He actually won’t be gone for about 5 months or so. In that time our goal is to finish the season, party like man-imals, and then make a sweet movie. We don’t know how long the movie will be, minutes-wise.
• The show is not over yet. We’re still going to do the second half of the season. For those of you wondering, it will be just a bit shorter than last season. 
• Without Daniel, we won’t be continuing Web Zeroes regularly. Since he’s kind of in it and also the director, there’s no way it could happen. We’d still like to do an episode or two before he goes, and there might be an occasional episode if he comes in town for a weekend, but that’s it.
• Nick and I will keep making stuff after TLW is over, but we’re not replacing one crazy big workload for another crazy big workload. Whatever we work on next (be it G.R.I.E.F. or one of our other ideas), it won’t be as regular or as big as The Leet World.

Anything not answered there is something we don’t know the answers to or can’t really address at this point. There’s a lot that we still don’t know, but I thought I’d do my best to answer the things we could. 

Episode 8 will be out at some point this week. I’m excited to start this half of the season. It’s seriously going to be wild.

Ever tried to take a band-aid off, and you know it’s really going to suck when you do it, but you’ve got to just get it over with? Well, there’s no really easy way to say this, so…

Season 2 will be the last season of The Leet World.

I know this comes as a shock to a few of you, but there are quite a few good reasons that the show we all know and love will draw to a close over the next few months. And amidst all of that, there is even some good news that I think you can all be extremely excited about, but more on that later.

We started working on The Leet World back in May of 2007. To be honest, we thought we would only ever make a couple of episodes of it and then we’d give up on the thing altogether. We’ve been called a lot of things over the course of our lives, and motivated typically wasn’t one of them. But then something really awesome and shocking happened — people wanted more of it.

So around Episode 3 or 4 of the first season, we mapped out where we wanted the show to go. Over the course of a few weeks, we brainstormed, hashed some things out, and then came up with a really exciting story that would cover three full seasons worth of episodes. From that point on, we have been committed to that idea for the entire show.

So why is Season 2 the last, then? Read on for the text wall explanation, as well as a really awesome announcement.
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That’s where the lulz live.

Here are the audio outtakes from Episodes 5 and 6 of Season 2. I was going to include 7, but to be honest, there was plenty of goofy material for me to use, so Episodes 7 and 8 will be lumped together in a couple of weeks.

As always, lots of us goofing around in our absurd character voices, some movie quotes, and even some singing numbers to boot. In particular, I’m a fan of Ben discovering the “investigating each other’s privates” line as he’s reading it, and instantly cracking up. Many of you don’t know this, but the dude actually delivers his lines cold, with no prior knowledge of the script, which makes his voice work doubly impressive if you ask me.

Anyways, here are the outtakes. Right click and select “save as” to download.

  (Direct Link)

In other news, Episode 8 is coming out next week. Wewt.

Production on Season 2, Episode 8 is rolling along pretty smoothly. It’s always funny when we do a big monster episode like Tempest and then things settle down a bit, making the episode much easier to film. The episode itself is going to be a shorter one, but that doesn’t mean it’s not chock full of goodness.

Sometime in the next few days you should expect some outtakes from Episodes 5-7. They will contain a couple of rofls, I hope. While we have gotten better about recording our stuff without many goof-ups, it’s three episodes worth of content, so it should balance out.

Also, here are some screenshots from Episode 8 for you to chew on.

Enjoy!

Today is a very special day for Daniel, director, and voice of Ellis and Adam Sizzler in The Leet World. He turns 28 years of age. Yikes. I hope he doesn’t break a hip or something. Wish him a good one, he deserves it.

Production has started again on the show as of this weekend, and we are slicing that thing up like raptors in Jurassic Park. That is to say, the attack will come from the side, from the raptor you didn’t even know was there. The second half of this season is kind of awesome, so we’re looking forward to getting on with it. I’ll have some screenshots for you dudes later on in the week, I hope.

I randomly watched a lot of Season 1 yesterday, for the first time in several months. While watching some battle sequences, it came upon me to ask you dudes which gunfight/battle you’ve liked best so far in The Leet World. So, answer away. What’s your favorite?

Making a series like TLW takes a crap-ton of time. So whenever we get a reprieve from the insanity of this absurd Counter-Strike: Source machinima, we tend to live it up. I’ve been playing a stupid amount of video games, particularly Halo Wars, Resident Evil 5, and some Killzone 2 for good measure. We even started up a game of D&D with some friends, which I’ve never done before. Nick is a Dwarven Paladin named John Smotetrain, Daniel is an Avenger named Cortez Cardinal, and I’m a Wizard named Tom Shanks. We are questers of the most badass sort.

However, all that free time is gone as of this coming weekend, as we kick up production on Episode 8. We’ll hopefully have a camera there filming the process as we move through some of the episode, and hope to release our “making of” video at some point in the next month or so.

Speaking of, do you guys have any particular piece of the TLW production process that you’re most interested in hearing about? Besides whether or not Nick’s Beard (it must be capitalized out of honor) hinders our ability to puppeteer. Let us know!