(You can’t say we don’t try to broaden your musical horizons here at NCS, but today’s guest post by Phro may push them farther than we ever have before.)

Well, there’s been a lot of talk recently about Celtic/bagpipe metal around these here parts. Which is pretty fucking awesome, if I may be so bold as to force my opinion on you like a political advertisement. Nothing wrong with a little sack in your metal, right? (Yeah, that’s the best I have right now…don’t expect anything too funny from this.)

Anyway, all this “traditional instruments doing dirty things with my metal behind closed doors and having babies that clearly are far more awesome than simply genetics should allow” got me thinking about a traditional instrument that I love: the shamisen. (Click here to get some Wikiknowledge dropped on your ass.)

Now, I know every FrownyFaceTrveCvltMetalHeadOfDoom out there thinks his or her favorite thing is the most metal thing of all, so that’s not what I’m going to say. However, if you don’t find yourself rocking (at least just a little) to some good tsugaru-jamisen, I’d say. . . well, I’d say this music probably isn’t for you and that’s tots cool. Seriously. Tots. Cool.

Before we really get started, I’d just like to explain very briefly what the fuck a shamisen is. A lot of people describe it as a Japanese guitar, which is just stupid. I think “Japanese lute” is the most commonly accepted description, but I prefer to think of it like a banjo. (They sound pretty similar to me.) Anyway, they have three strings, a long, thin neck, and a small box body.

Depending on the kind of shamisen, the form and size will be different.The Okinawan shamisen is smaller and the body is usually round and made of snake skin. The “standard” shamisen is about a 3 or 4 feet long with a body of about 10 inches which looks like a box. (It is a box, but the top and bottom are covered with animal skin.) The tsugaru-jamisen is basically a bigger version of the standard one.

Important note: there are no frets and the damn things go out of tune like a drunken sailor, so players are often re-tuning between songs. The largest string also has a natural reverb to it, so it’s the only acoustic instrument I know of that has built-in distortion. (I could just be stupid. Let us know how stupid in the comments below!)

Alright, so, today, for your totally-not-really-all-that-metal-but-kinda-metal entertainment, I’m going to be presenting some shamisen rocking. Pull on your hakama, throw some sen in your wallet, and let’s get this matsuri going.

Love is grand and all that, but you still need to keep your priorities straight.

Women need to keep their priorities straight, too. More about that after the jump.

Here we are, with another highly commercialized holiday, the principle object of which is to get you to show your love by spending money. And of course, nothing says “love” like spending money, and nothing measures the depth of your love more accurately than the amount of money you spend.

Being tolerant, being willing to sacrifice to the needs of someone else, shutting your yap and listening for a change, biting down on your temper when you’d selfishly like to have a good explosion, admiring and appreciating the person you’re closest to, remembering how much life would probably suck if you were alone again (and showing it) — that’s all shit. Buying gifts is where it’s at.

Apart from giving retailers yet another excuse to sell you their wares, Valentine’s Day has lots of other pluses and minuses. In the minus column, instead of providing an excuse for being more than usually romantic, it can become a brutal downer if you’re alone, especially if you’re still hurting from the pain of a recent break-up (or even an old one that just won’t leave your memories alone).

So your buddy Islander has some advice for you lonely hearts out there. In fact, I’m taking this occasion to answer some of the many e-mails I receive from people seeking advice in matters of the heart.

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.”