I’m about to hit a stretch of time when my ability to post new shit on this site every day will be imperiled. No need to bore you with details, but the bottom line is that between April 8 and April 21, the odds are that I won’t have time to write for NCS every day. We do have some pieces in the works from our regular contributors, but there’s still a risk of missing a day.

I’d hate like hell to have that happen. We haven’t missed a single day since starting this thing in November ’09. So, I’m once again making an open appeal for guest posts. Last time I did this, in November 2010, it worked out great, and I’m hoping for another great response now.

As before, guest submissions can be long or short — whatever you have time to create. They can be notes about a concert, an album review, a piece designed to bring a relatively unknown band to a broader audience, thoughts about the scene or recent news blurbs, something in the vein of our “THAT’S METAL!” posts or one of our other regular features — or anything else that’s related to metal that strikes your fancy. It can even be something you’ve already written for another blog or for your own that you might like to expose to a different audience.

Sending me your submissions before April 8 would be ideal, but not an absolute requirement. If this interests you, a few other things you need to know are after the jump. Continue reading »

I’m about to ruin groverXIII‘s reputation as a hard-nosed metal blogger.

Before I do that, get out your calendar and draw a big red circle around December 21. On that day, The Number of the Blog will celebrate its one-year anniversary. On that day in 2009, groverXIII published the first post on his brainchild. It happened to be exactly one month after the day when we started NCS.

In the almost 12 months that have followed, groverXIII and his talented colleagues have turned TNOTB into an extremely entertaining, extremely informative, content-rich, heavily trafficked home for metalheads. I can’t imagine that anyone who visits NCS hasn’t discovered TNOTB, but if you haven’t, you ought to.

Now, on with the ruining of groverXIII’s reputation. Less than a week after we observed our own Year One birthday at this site, he e-mailed me with an offer to produce for us “a shiny new header for the site’s second year.”

Now, bear in mind that this dude is raising a family, holding down a job, writing prolifically for his own site, and undoubtedly doing all sorts of other things in the operation of TNOTB — and he offers to spend time he probably should have used sleeping to help give us a new look. In other words, groverXIII is one good dude.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

I got back to Seattle from my vacation last night. It’s great to be home, and all that. But to be honest, I had a great fucking vacation, and it’s possible I would have led a very happy and fulfilled life if I had never come home. Ever.

My blog obsession subsided from an insistent, incessant shrieking to a dull background roar. One of the reasons I was able to enjoy myself so much was that so many of you stepped up and wrote guest contributions for this site so that we could continue adding new posts every day even though I didn’t write anything myself. I had lots of fun reading those guest posts, and based on the significant uptick in our site visits during the last week, it’s evident that NCS readers enjoyed the change of pace, too. To all those people who contributed to NCS over the last 10 days, thank you!

Plato wrote that necessity is the mother of invention. Of course, sometimes, necessity is just a motherfucker. But in this instance, our felt need to keep this site cranking along gave birth to a change that was all good — so good that we want it to continue. I’m recharged and ready to dive back into writing again, but at the same time, we want to continue running guest posts. We’ve already received some additional contributions, and I’m expecting more to arrive over the coming week from people who wanted to submit something for publication during my vacation but were delayed for one reason or another in getting their posts to me before I left.

We’ll be running those additional guest posts off and on over the next week, but it doesn’t have to stop there. We want to encourage not only the people who wrote for us during my hiatus but anyone else out there who has an interest in what we do at NCS to send us guest submissions whenever the spirits move you to do it. Let’s keep a good thing going!

I have a lot of catching up to do — even in the space of 10 or 11 days, lots of new music and videos were released, and some interesting developments appeared in the news. So, I’m not going to waste time describing “how I spent my vacation” — except to say that I spent a lot of time looking at clouds. And after the jump, I have for you . . . Continue reading »

As previously reported, I am leaving on vacation tomorrow. I will not be blogging while I’m gone. To help prevent NCS from going dark until I get back, I put out an open invitation last week for guest blog submissions. I’ve gotten a good response from readers and even a few band members — we will have some interesting shit for you to read while I’m away.

But there’s still room for more — with a catch. If you intend to send me something that we could post while I’m away, please send it to me by tonight. Given how much shit I still need to do before we leave for the airport tomorrow afternoon, tomorrow morning will probably be too late.

HOWEVER — if you’re writing something but you can’t get it to me by tonight, send it anyway. We’ll run everything we get, when I return — as long as it otherwise conforms to the conditions we outlined in last week’s invitation for posts (which you can read at this location.)

Now please enjoy today’s regular, non-nagging post immediately below this one. That is all.