At the close of the submission deadline last Thursday, we'd received tens of thousands of videos—many of them amazing, others less amazing but at least following the rules, and still more of them clips from King of Queens with Linkin Park songs dubbed over them. While we appreciate the passion of that final group, we should remind you that the King of Queens Metal Maelstrom contest isn't until next month.

For the rest of you, this is a reminder to get voting. As of last Thursday the Saxxys entered the all-important Battle Voting stage, with your choices bringing the strongest videos in each category to the top of the heap. Battle Voting ends Thursday, May 26th, so if you've got opinions, vote now while they still matter!

Once Battle Voting's culled the weak, Kevin James-based rap metal entries from the herd, a panel of immortal Valve combat film critics will descend from their monastery at the top of the Space Needle to choose a set of final nominees from each category. They will then bang an important-looking gong, thus re-opening the voting to the community. Each user will get ONE vote per category to help determine who will be taking home Saxxys.

Lastly, some clarifications: 1:01 IS a valid length for submissions, since it turns out YouTube is adding a second here or there during upload. Also, flagged videos ARE being screened and removed. We're listening and our fingers are hovering over the DELETE button, so keep flagging.

That's it! Thanks to the TF community as a whole for taking the time to vote, and specifically to the many talented folks out there who were willing to take the Replay Editor out for a spin and make some entertaining shorts in the process.

<a href="http://www.teamfortress.com/saxxyawards/vote.php"><img src="http://www.teamfortress.com/images/posts/francis.png" width="420" height="195" border="0"></a>

<i>Allo, mes amis! Ho ho ho!</i>

Valve took a film class last week so they would be qualified to judge the many great entries in the Saxxy Awards contest! So many unfamiliar terms! <i>Mise en scene! Auteur! Avante-garde! Montage!</i> Even <i>cinéma</i> itself!

What do all of these words have in common? Un: They sound complicated enough that Valve decided they had no business judging <i>cinéma</i>. Deux: These words were all invented by <i>me</i>, Francis the Talking France! And so Valve has spared no expense in flying me tout de suite to the French-sounding town of Bellevue to judge the entries myself! <i>C'est magnifique!</i>

But <i>onh-honh-honh</i>. Why the sad French sounds? Because I see now this is too big a job for one talking France. So I am writing this <i>poste de blog</i> to announce that <strong>judging of the <a href="http://www.teamfortress.com/saxxyawards/">Saxxy Awards</a> is now open to <i>tout le monde!</strong> Le jugement est fantastique!</i>

<a href="http://www.teamfortress.com/saxxyawards/vote.php">Click here</a> to start your voting adventure! À bientôt!

Allo, mes amis! Ho ho ho!

Valve took a film class last week so they would be qualified to judge the many great entries in the Saxxy Awards contest! So many unfamiliar terms! Mise en scene! Auteur! Avante-garde! Montage! Even cinéma itself!

What do all of these words have in common? Un: They sound complicated enough that Valve decided they had no business judging cinéma. Deux: These words were all invented by me, Francis the Talking France! And so Valve has spared no expense in flying me tout de suite to the French-sounding town of Bellevue to judge the entries myself! C'est magnifique!

But onh-honh-honh. Why the sad French sounds? Because I see now this is too big a job for one talking France. So I am writing this poste de blog to announce that judging of the Saxxy Awards is now open to tout le monde! Le jugement est fantastique!

Click here to start your voting adventure! À bientôt!

Updates to Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Source Engine Changes (CS:S, DoD:S, TF2, HL2:DM)

• Fixed another case where the $ignorez material flag could be used as a cheat
  

Team Fortress 2

• Extended the Saxxy contest deadline to 11:59:59 PM GMT, Friday, May 20th, 2011
  
• Fixed the third-person camera options dialog not displaying correctly in the Replay performance editor
  
• Fixed a rare case where users running Service Pack 3 on Windows 7 64-bit with graphics driver version 12.42 saw a graphical glitch on the main menu Options button
  
• Updated the Three-Rune Blade, Hero's Tail, and Sign of the Wolf's School items so they can be crafted and traded
  

Updates to Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Important notes

• If you were previously crashing on startup, please have Steam verify the integrity of your game cache
  
  • Update your game to the most current version
    
  • Right-click on the game and select "Properties"
    
  • Click on the "Local Files" tab
    
  • Click on the "Verify Integrity of Game Cache" button
    
• If you were previously crashing when connecting to a server, please run once with "-autoconfig" to reset your graphics state
  
  • Update your game to the most current version
    
  • Right-click on the game and select "Properties"
    
  • Click on the "General" tab
    
  • Click on the "Set Launch Options..." button
    
  • Add "-autoconfig" to the launch options and click OK
    
  • Restart your game
    
  • After doing this, you should remove -autoconfig from your launch options
    

Source Engine Changes (CS:S, DoD:S, TF2, HL2:DM)

• Fixed several client crashes on game startup, shutdown, and replay interaction
  
• Updated the materials used on models to ignore the $ignorez flag, to make it harder to create wallhacks on sv_pure 0 servers
  

Team Fortress 2

• Added an Advanced Options button to the main menu to allow tweaking of many gameplay options
  
• Fixed server crashes related to replays and new items
  
• Added "per_class_loadout_slots" and "attribute_controlled_attached_particles" sections to the GetSchema WebAPI call
  

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Team Fortress 2

• Fixed a server crash caused by a mismatched items schema
  

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Team Fortress 2

• Added a “Show in Backpack Order” setting to the loadout slot select screen
  
  • This flag also affects the Quickswitch dialog
    
• Updated the Furious Fukaamigasa, the Hero's Hachimaki and the Connoisseur's Cap to be craftable
  
• Updated the localization files
  
• Replay
  
  • Added a new command line parameter “-replay” that will increase maxplayers by 1 at startup and automatically execute replay.cfg for the server
    
  • Fixed another bug that caused Mac replay renders to be blurry
    
  • Fixed a bug where Replay FTP offloading was not using "replay_fileserver_offload_port"
    
  • Improved detection of Replay server config problems
    
  • Replay is automatically disabled on servers if the Replay publish test fails
    
  • Saved Replay movies that were exported as TGA's/WAV will report more descriptive errors if YouTube(TM) upload or "Export" is attempted
    

You ask? We answer. Eventually. We've updated the <a href="http://www.teamfortress.com/saxxyawards/">Saxxy info page</a> with <a href="http://www.teamfortress.com/saxxyawards/#faq">answers</a> to many of the questions pouring in from all you budding combat filmmakers.

Server admins can find <a href="http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=22333197#post22333197">all the info they need</a> about enabling the replay system on their servers .

Additionally, several have you asked for the Meet the Director comic without the text bubbles. Sure. Download the 22MB zip file <a href="http://media.steampowered.com/apps/tf2/meetthedirector/hires_notext.zip">here</a>.

In community news: <a href="http://agcommunity.org/?q=node/1106">Community vs Pros</a> goes live May 14th with a re-realized format that will select nine players from all corners of the TF2 community to face off against the six invited pros. Check out their <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApLmSKmDKSA">promotional video</a> of the event.

That's all for today. Keep those video submissions coming. Remember: The sky's the limit, but under a minute.

You ask? We answer. Eventually. We've updated the Saxxy info page with answers to many of the questions pouring in from all you budding combat filmmakers.

Server admins can find all the info they need about enabling the replay system on their servers .

Additionally, several have you asked for the Meet the Director comic without the text bubbles. Sure. Download the 22MB zip file here.

In community news: Community vs Pros goes live May 14th with a re-realized format that will select nine players from all corners of the TF2 community to face off against the six invited pros. Check out their promotional video of the event.

That's all for today. Keep those video submissions coming. Remember: The sky's the limit, but under a minute.

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

Team Fortress 2

• Removed the ability to delete the craft count attribute from items
  
• Made the "Hottie's Hoodie" craftable
  
• Replay
  
  • Fixed a server lockup during data cleanup
    
  • Fixed a viewmodel fov bug during rendering
    
  • Renamed the ConVar "replay_demolifespan" to "replay_data_lifespan"