Over the course of the past two and some change weeks, our 13 judges have spent over a collective 140 hours playing 240 of some of the best custom maps this community has seen. As I have said previously, the turn out for this contest has been amazing and I want to thank each and every one of our participants.

But without carrying on too much, let's get down to business. The first and second place Grand Prize winners of the ThinkingWithPortals.com 2011 Summer Mapping Initiative are Patent Pending by ebola with a 4.66 out of 5 (6 votes) and Infinifling by MrTwoVideoCards with a 4.62 out of 5 (8 votes). Congratulations guys!

In third place, by mere fractions of points, is Edifice by Omnicoder with 4.62 out of 5 (8 votes). Fourth place comes as Delta Bunsen by Lobster with 4.58 out of 5 (6 votes), and fifth place in our top 2% is Cubes 'n' Funnels by Will T. with 4.50 out of 5 (6 votes).

The top rated Coop maps overall were Redirecting Redirection by MrTwoVideoCards in 6th place, Fast Bridge by Skotty in 7th place, and Fling Bridge by Kosire in 11th place.

I am sure everyone is dying to see the full results, and we will be posting it up soon once we figure out the best format to present all of the data. Each map was played by a minimum of 2 judges, and each judge submitted their own score, and since I know many of you would want to know every detail of your map's judgement, we are going to need to release all of the information intelligently.

I would like to thank everyone who participated, as this contest would not be immensely successful without your submissions. I would also like to thank Mevious, Farragar, WinstonSmith, and most of all Nacimota for judging an insane amount of maps and spending so much of your free personal time helping with this. And lastly I would like to thank Chet over at Valve for helping coordinate this contest, bringing exposure to our community and helping the Portal 2 mapping scene to blossom.

That's right, another contest's on your radar! Nothing to do with us this time. VALVe is holding a contest to see who can make the best music video for The National's song "Exile Vilify", written specifically for the Portal 2 sountrack. Post it to YouTube with the tag PORTAL2NATIONALEXILE to enter. The video can include more or less anything, I'm fairly certain it doesn't even have to be Portal 2 related. Can't wait to see the entries!

I'm a huge fan of The National (and yes, I was into it before they wrote a song for Portal 2[/hipster]) and might actually enter this one.

Hi there fellow test subjects--
Well, all of us here at TWP and the Aperture Science Community Outreach Development Department Specializing in Testchamber Design and Course Idea Submission (ASCODDSiTDaCIS) are proud to announce that the submission window has officially closed. That's right, if you're still working on your map it's a little late. Tragic. But informative! We want to thank you for all your participation on the forums, the site in general, and the effort that you've put into your maps. The staff and judges look forward to playing all 238-ish(!) entries, and we know we have some tough judgement ahead of us.

ThinkingWithPortals--we're done here.

For now. Here, take a look at some of the awesome work we'll be judging.

So I decided to look at Realm Lovejoy's Twitter page with no prompt whatsoever and discovered that, yes, the first volume of the P2 Original Soundtrack has been released along with several Android/iPhone ringtones.

Here is the link to the music page, and for those who aren't getting the page displayed correctly (IE9 isn't showing the download link for some reason), here is the direct link to the 156MB ZIP on Steam's servers.

Enjoy! I'm about to unzip it and bask in the glory.

EDIT: Ah, other notes:
--A giant album cover image is included in the download
--22 songs are included
--The album's subtitle is "Songs to Test By"
--The artist is listed as "Aperture Science Psychoacoustics Laboratory". Nice.

Today we're shining our community spotlight, not on a map, but a competition! We at ThinkingWithPortals.com are proud to present the Summer Mapping Initiative mapping contest!

Now, you may be asking yourself, "Nacimota, just how difficult is this competition? What was in that phonebook of a rules page I just read? Am I in danger?"

Let me answer those questions with a question: who wants to win an Ultimate Portal 2 Gift Pack and have their work spotlighted by Valve on the official Portal 2 Website? If you're interested in participating in this test then read on.

The competition will run from today (Tuesday the 24th of May) to 11:59PM EDT on the 6th of June at which point we will stop accepting submissions from test subjects. This is only two short weeks - there's no time to waste!

We're looking for clever and fun test chambers consistent with the themes in Portal 2 (which means no custom assets!). The top two winning maps will receive the grand prize of the Ultimate Portal 2 Gift Pack, as well as having their maps spotlighted on the official Portal 2 website.

If you haven't read the rules page we linked to above, I urge you to read it now. Thoroughly. Here's the link again, in case you missed it:

Thinking With Portals - Summer Mapping Initiative

Nacimota. We're done here.