Last week, U.S. law enforcement authorities convinced a federal judge in Virginia to shut down the Megaupload file-sharing site pending a criminal trial of its owner, “Kim Dotcom”, and other employees on charges of criminal copyright infringement. Working in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Justice, New Zealand police arrested Dotcom at his Auckland mansion, seized millions of dollars worth of expensive cars, and froze bank accounts holding $11 million in cash. The U.S. will now try to extradite Dotcom to the U.S. to stand trial.

A couple days ago, I wrote an article for NCS trying to set out the facts about why the government went after Megaupload so aggressively and what laws the government has charged Doctom with violating — they didn’t need SOPA or PIPA to do it. I also offered some opinions, the main one being that the Megaupload shutdown really doesn’t have anything to do with freedom of speech or censorship and instead has a lot more to do with temporarily impairing our ability to get something for nothing. I also made this prediction:

“If this case is successful, we will likely see a severe short-term restriction on our ability to download albums for free — because other file-hosting companies will be taking more aggressive steps to prevent the uploading and downloading of copyrighted content. In fact, they’re probably taking steps to do that right now.”

Well, sho’ nuff. Today, the FileSonic on-line file storage site has terminated the ability of users to share files among themselves. The site now sports a banner on its home page stating: “All sharing functionality on FileSonic is now disabled.  Our service can only be used to upload and retrieve files that you have uploaded personally.”

Kim Dotcom and his pink cadillac.

Lots of people I know, including some of the people who write for NCS, are up in arms over the U.S. government’s shutdown of the Megaupload file-sharing site earlier this week. It’s being condemned by lots of metalheads as a clampdown on the freedom of the internet, a violation of free speech, a virulent form of censorship, and a sign of worse things to come. I’m sure part of the reason why the reaction has been so intense is because of simultaneous efforts by fuckheads in Congress to pass those SOPA and PIPA bills we wrote about a few days ago.

Does it suck that Megaupload has been shut down? If you’re a downloader, hell yes it sucks. If you’re an artist who uses the site as a convenient way to freely spread your art to reviewers and fans, hell yes it sucks. If you’re someone who is doing legitimate file sharing, and your uploaded files on Megaupload are now in limbo, fucken-A, it blows.

But is the shutdown really some kind of tyrannical trampling on freedom of speech? Nah, I don’t think so. But before we get to opinions, let’s start with some facts. I could be wrong, but it seems like it’s better to develop opinions after you have some facts instead of just taking someone else’s word for it. At the end of this post, I’ll give you the sources of the facts as I understand them, along with a copy of the government’s indictment of Megaupload so you can see exactly the basis of this prosecution.

I was going to wait ’til after midnight here in Cascadia to post this, but what the fuck. It’s already after midnight everywhere in the world except the Americas. So, on behalf of all your embarrassing friends at NCS, I want to wish everyone out there a Happy New Year. May 2012 be better for you than the year just ended. Take care of yourself, look after your friends, and don’t let the bastards get you down.

And yeah, I know what that photo looks like. We do like our massive ejaculations here in Seattle. If you’d prefer a less ejaculatory photo, I like the one after the jump, too. It has pretty colors. There are also three  songs after the jump, including a brand new version of the New Year’s traditional featuring lead guitars by Jeff Loomis. Rock on.

An e-mail to me from Ben C. yesterday afternoon that I didn’t see until this morning: “If you haven’t tripped balls yet today, this should do the trick.”

Indeed, it did.  Just too amazing not to share.

Hot buttered damn! Until this morning, I had no idea this was on the way.  I may smile the whole rest of this day. I figured you could use a big fuckin’ smile on your face, too.

So many good moments from this franchise, and so many good lines. E.g.: “People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.”

That is all.

Last weekend I departed from our usual focus on metal with a piece on a forthcoming movie (“John Carter”) based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic series of sci-fi books set on Barsoom (the Martian word for Mars). That seemed to generate a fair amount of interest, and although I don’t plan to post about movies or books on any kind of regular basis, I got an e-mail about something else sci-fi-related that has set me off again. So here we go.

The e-mail (from a reader named Ben) pointed me to a web site about something called K3LOID. K3LOID is a sci-fi short film by a Spanish outfit called Big Lazy Robot VFX (“BLR”), based on Eliezer S. Yudkowsky’s Artificial Intelligence Box Experiment (more about that later). Coincidentally, BLR did the visual effects for an amazing short film called “The Gift” that we featured in a THAT’S METAL! post almost a year ago (and if you haven’t seen that, definitely go here and watch it).

All that’s available about K3LOID at the moment is a trailer, which you can see after the jump (and I’m actually not positive that there will ever be anything but this trailer, though I hope a film itself will come to fruition, because both the visuals in the trailer and the concept behind the film are cool).

Based on the trailer, and before I found out about BLR’s involvement, I thought this was a Russian sci-fi film (you’ll see why). That got me thinking about both Russian sci-fi movies and Russian sci-fi novels. I’m certainly no expert in either of those genres, but I remembered really liking a book called Solaris by Stanislaw Lem and the 1972 Russian movie made from that novel (directed by Andrey Tarkovskiy), which captured the sense of solitude, profound mystery, and utter strangeness of the mood and the events captured in the book. If you look, you’ll find Solaris on plenty of internet lists as one of the best sci-fi films ever made.

I have to take a break from our usual subject matter and geek-the-fuck-out for a few minutes, because JOHN CARTER, the movie, is on the way.

Edgar Rice Burroughs is best known for being the creator of Tarzan, about whom he wrote 20+ books between 1912 and 1947. But Burroughs wrote other series as well, including 10 books set on Mars that featured the adventures of a hero named John Carter. This coming February will be the 100th anniversary of the novelization of the first book in the series, A Princess of Mars. (it was originally serialized  in a magazine called All-Star). In the Martian language used by Burroughs in his books, the name of Mars is Barsoom.

When I was much younger and even more geeky than I am now, I spent many happy hours on Barsoom, reading all the books in the Mars series more than once (I read all the Tarzan books, too, plus just about everything else Burroughs wrote). They told the story of a Civil War captain who inexplicably found himself transported to Mars, full of exotic civilizations, races of bizarre beings, and rampant conflict. So, I became childishly excited when I saw this morning that Disney has made a movie based on A Princess of Mars called JOHN CARTER.

It was directed by Academy-award winner Andrew Stanton (Wall-E) and starts Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights) as Carter, Willem Dafoe as Tars Tarkas, and the delectable Lynn Collins (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) Princess Dejah Thoris. I really, really, really, really hope this movie is good. Really. Shit, I’ll be thrilled if it’s just decent.

It turns out that a teaser trailer was released in July, which I totally missed, but now there’s a new, longer one, which is finally what woke me the fuck up about this movie.  It looks pretty sweet. Check out both trailers after the jump, and I’ve also collected a shitload of stills from the movie and anothe rposter, too.

This has nothing to do with music, but it’s goddamned funny and it comes awfully close to what I’ve been composing for my annual Christmas rant, and I just had to share it. So there. The author is Colin Nissan, and his article appeared on the McSweeney’s Internet Tendency web site:

“I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

I may even throw some multi-colored leaves into the mix, all haphazard like a crisp October breeze just blew through and fucked that shit up. Then I’m going to get to work on making a beautiful fucking gourd necklace for myself. People are going to be like, “Aren’t those gourds straining your neck?” And I’m just going to thread another gourd onto my necklace without breaking their gaze and quietly reply, “It’s fall, fuckfaces. You’re either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you’re not.”

These days, you hear the words “terrorist attack”, and the first thing that comes to mind (at least to most Americans) is yet another wanton act of destruction by some cell of Islamic fundamentalists. I woke up this morning to a reminder that the thirst for the blood of innocents isn’t limited to whackjobs who think they’ve found a green light for slaughter in the Koran. As if we needed another reminder.

It began yesterday afternoon in Oslo, Norway, when a massive explosion detonated in a high-rise office building that housed the Norwegian prime minister’s office, killing seven people. A few hours later, a man disguised as a police officer killed 84 people on an idyllic Norwegian island called Utoya about 20 miles northwest of Oslo, shooting them one by one. At the time, the island was full of teenagers attending a Labour Party youth-wing retreat. (The Labour Party is currently in charge of Norway’s coalition government.) People fled into the lake surronding the island in an effort to escape, and police are still searching the water for bodies. Norway’s prime minister was scheduled to speak at the island youth retreat today.

Police have arrested one suspect, who appears to be tied to both of these atrocities — a 32-year old, blonde, blue-eyed Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik, a frequent poster on right-wing, Christian fundamentalist web sites.

Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told reporters, ”This is out of comprehension. It’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare for those who have been killed, for their mothers and fathers, family and friends.” He said that he had spent many summers on Utoya, calling it “my childhood paradise that yesterday was transformed into hell.”  (more after the jump . . .)

No, I didn’t forget that it’s Independence Day. I’ve been without high-speed internet service for the last 36 hours, and of course there’s no fucking way it will get fixed on the 4th of July, so I’ve had to fall back on a data card on a different carrier, which is slower than a three-legged sloth and just randomly disconnects as if it can’t be bothered — which makes uploading and downloading tedious, and streaming is impossible.

Well, enough spoiled whining from me. Happy Fourth to all you motherfuckers! Hope all you Americans are enjoying your holiday. In honor of the occasion, I thought it might be worth remembering a bit of history.

Almost five years ago, I found myself in Philadelphia with some time to kill and I sought out the Christ Church Burial Ground because I wanted to see the grave of Ben Franklin — who, among many other things, was a signer of The Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution — and the grave of Commodore William Bainbridge, for whom the island where I live was named. Also, I like graveyards.

After prowling around the cemetery for an hour, I wandered into Christ Church itself, which was founded in 1695. It’s a relatively un-ostentatious building, but it’s steeped in history. It was the first parish of the Church of England in Pennsylvania, it was the birthplace of the American Episcopal Church, and the rector of the church gave the opening prayer to the first meeting of the Continental Congress in 1774. (more after the jump . . . and there will be metal . . .)