To celebrate the launch of THE STARTER podcast, we're tossing out a limited-time sale price on THE ROOKIE eBook -- just $2.99. What? Did he just say it's three frickin' bucks? Yes. Yes he did. A trio of Washingtons gets you the epic scifi/crime/sports mashup on your Kindle, your Nook, or any other device. Where can you get it?

• Buy from us for $2.99, via our partner BackMyBook (works for Kindle, Nook, Sony eReader, any ePub device such as iPad or iPhone and the iBook app)
• Get it on the Kindle store for $2.99
• Get it on the Nook store for $2.99

This is a celebration, and an experiment for Dark Øverlord Media. Within three hours of our price drop, THE ROOKIE was the #1 young-adult sports book on Amazon.com, and was the #2 sports book overall. While we were at it, we knocked THE STARTER eBook down to just $4.99. Get some while the gettin' is good!

This one was sent to me by none other than ARealGirl herself. Fucking science ... how does it work?

Tuesday Terror is a Junkie created anthology based in the Siglerverse. These stories are not canon, which means they are not part of the official time line. Episodes will initially be released fortnightly. The show is hosted by Arioch Morningstar. If you want to submit a story, click on the "submission guidelines" box in the right-hand sidebar.

The theme music for Tuesday Terror is "Pandemic," by the band Separation of Sanity.

Look below for the latest episodes.

As we continue in our riveting series of my checkered past, we dive into the college years. This is one of the few pics I have of my "band days" in college. Full-on goatee, and yeah, at one point I had long hair. I was playing bass in a band called "Kid Rhitalin." We named it thus because three of the four guys were on or had been prescribed for Ritalin. Hence, the picture above of me being a bit hyper is quite fitting.

The makers of Ritalin sent us a cease-and-desist letter, believe it or not -- after just one show. This is pre-internet days, so we're pretty sure some douchebag from the local drugstore saw a flier, and called the company. I begged the band members to keep the name, so we could get publicity, but I was out-voted -- seems they didn't want to take on Big Pharma. Go figure.

January was a big month for media coverage of your favorite Future Dark Overlord™. We had the cover of Writing Magazine, and also a good write-up in Locus. Locus is the magazine of the science fiction industry. Very cool stuff in there if you're a writerly type. I was part of a big feature on "SF in the Digital Age." The feature also focused Mur Lafferty, who had her name on the cover. That's right, our good friend Mighty Mur Lafferty on the muthafuckin' cover of Locus. Makes my nips all tingly and hard, I tell ya.

This is the second time I've been in Locus. I totally missed the first time, which was a review of ANCESTOR by Paul Witcover in the July, 2010 issue.

Junkie Jeff Mao sent me a fun challenge-for-charity event directly related to the Galaxy ... er .... the Super Bowl. Yeah, that's the ticket. So, you think you got what it takes to challenge the inellect of Drew Brees (a quarterback for the New Orleans Saints, my uninitiated friends)? Then bring it, bitch! Junkie Jeff sure is. Check out the press release below, then click on the RiceBowl logo at right to go to the site:

Drew Brees Takes on Maine Students in Rice Bowl Challenge

The New Orleans Saints quarterback and student teammates to battle Maine laptop students in fighting global hunger
 
AUGUSTA – Super Bowl 2010’s Most Valuable Player Drew Brees and the United Nations World Food Program are challenging students and sports fans to team up for a different kind of bowl game this February, with the goal of beating global hunger.
 
Brees’ primary competitor? The student team led by students in the Maine Department of Education’s laptop program, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative.
 
The Rice Bowl Challenge is a week-long competition organized by the award-winning on-line vocabulary game, Freerice.com, in partnership with the Maine Department of Education’s Maine Learning Technology Initiative. New Orleans Saints’ quarterback Drew Brees is the all-star of the competition, going head-to-head against thousands of students in Maine and across the country to answer trivia questions which earn grains of rice for the hungry.
 
Through their schools or on their own, students in Maine and across the country can enter the competition – as part of the Maine team or as part of Brees’ team. The Maine Department of Education has also teamed up locally with the Good Shepherd Food Bank to raise money for local food banks.
 
“Kids, using technology and networks, can change the world,” said Jeff Mao, the state’s director of learning technology.  “In education we talk a lot about making learning relevant and engaging. Here we have students using technology to learn, to raise food locally and globally, and to become more aware about international issues.”
 
The Maine Learning Technology Initiative provides professional development and 21st century tools to middle and high schools to help students meet Maine’s Learning Results standards and supporting equity of opportunity for all students. Maine was the first state to seize the potential of technology to transform teaching and learning in classrooms statewide, providing laptops to all students in grades 7 and 8, and making them available to high schools, about half of which are also participating.
 
During the Rice Bowl Challenge - February 6 through February 12 – players will compete to see who can tally the most correct answers to the game’s trivia questions, and thus earn the most grains of rice for the hungry. For every correct answer, ten grains of rice are donated through the World Food Program and paid for by advertisers.
 
Since taking the web by storm in 2007, Freerice.com has raised enough rice to feed more than 4.3 million people for a day.  More than 1,000 students raised over 2.4 million grains of rice in Maine’s first-ever rice challenge last year. This year’s event, with the help of Brees, will be much larger. The Department has put out the call and is aiming to recruit 100,000 students to battle for the Bowl in a public school event.
 
“In football, you need to play smart to win games. The Rice Bowl Challenge is all about playing smart to tackle hunger,” said Brees, who will be building his team through his well-established social media network. “Whether you join my team or the opposing student team, this is a cause worth winning.”
 
“The challenge is on,” said Nancy Roman, director of communication and private sector parnterships for the World Food Program. “With Drew Brees at the helm of the Rice Bowl, we have a fantastic opportunity to leverage social media networks across the nation and to see what an online community of hunger-fighting trivia fans can do in the fight against hunger.”
 
For more information about how schools and individuals can join the competition, go to www.maine.gov/mlti orwww.freerice.com/ricebowl.  Results will be tallied daily from February 6-12 and the top three scorers who rack up the most rice by February 12th win Drew Brees-autographed footballs.
 
 
--
FreeRice.com is a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Program. Its designer, John Breen, developed the simple word game to help his teenage sons prepare for their college entrance exams and in March 2009 donated it to WFP. Driving the donation of rice are an average 40,000 players daily (1.2 million per month).
WFP is the world's largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger worldwide.  Each year, on average, WFP feeds more than 90 million people in more than 70 countries.
 
WFP now provides RSS feeds to help journalists keep up with the latest press releases, videos and photos as they are published on WFP.org. For more details see: http://www.wfp.org/rss

Junkie Larimie Taylor did this sweet "Super Sigler" pic and sent it my way. Check out the chest logo. Nice, no? This is my supervillain costume. One of them, anyway. What? You called me a super "hero?" Go fuck yourself, you'll never eat lunch in this town again.

Laramie did this picture with his mouth. That's how he does his work, which is pretty kick-ass unto itself.

Want to see more of Laramie's work? Click here to see his site.

Check out the Greek cover for CONTAGIOUS, printed by Platypus Publications. Simple, stark, and kick-ass. Hats off to the designer.

And for you hardcore collectors, you can try ordering from this link, but I have no idea if it will work for you.

Click on the cover to see a biggah version over on the Flickr.

-FDO™-

[img_assist|nid=4607|title=ALL-PRO? AWWWWW-YEAH ...|desc=Look at the girth on that word count. Top number is total words in the draft. Bottom number is how many I wrote on the final day to finish her off (a.k.a., "the literary money shot")|link=none|align=left|width=310|height=232]

Okay, so this one isn't embarrassing. It is, however, the final pic from high school before we get into the really embarrassing shit, which is pictures of me looking like an idiot when I was adult enough to know what I was doing.

The picture at right is the only known shot of me playing football. I love-love-love this picture more than I can tell you, a real cherished memory. That's me running option-left, steely gaze upfield to negotiate the defensive end, peripheral vision tracking the pitch-man on my left. If you look close, you can see my "rec specs," the prescription eye goggles I had to wear to see anything.

And, oh, what's this? It's a black-and-white pic, but that mesh thing on top of my practice jersey was in "do-not-touch" red. That meant, as a quarterback, they were not supposed to hit me in practice. They kind of ignored that. First, because I was a loud-mouthed, obnoxious dick in high school, and even my friends couldn't resist knocking me on my ass. Second, because my dad was the coach, he couldn't really yell at people for hitting me or it would look like favoritism. I would love to tell you Junkies just how badly I got my ass kicked in varsity football — every day in practice, for two years — but there aren't sufficient words in the English language to describe the punnishment. We had an exceptionally good team, made the state championship semi-finals my junior year, lost in the first round of the playoffs my senior year. Including those losses, in my two years of varsity football we were 20-2. My boys could bring some serious hurt.

Did I mention I was third-string? I was third-string, smart, and could learn the opposing team's offense in about ten minutes. That meant I was the "prep quarterback," which meant me and my scrub D&D buddies got to play the other team's offense in practice so the first-string bad-asses could get a good look and prepare for the game. Now you can probably imagine that my goofball D&D buddies weren't starters, which meant they weren't that good, which meant they couldn't block our our All-State and All-Conference defensive players for shit. Hence, the aforementioned beatings I took.

There were kids on the team that weighed 230 pounds or so, which meant at the time I was giving up over 100 pounds when they smacked into me. Physics was a dirty whore, and I did not like her.

Next week's picture is — thankfully — one of the few I have from college. If you thought my hair was retarded in my previous pictures? You're in for a real treat.

Click here to listen to ARealGirl's short
happy message about SiglerFest 2011

SiglerFest 2011 registration is now open! Quick like a bunny, head on over to the SiglerFest page to be sure you've secured your spot. We're expecting 1.3 billion attendees for this event and only have 1.2 billion tickets available for the buffet, so don't be one of the ... uh ... well, it would be a lot of people going hungry, that's for sure.

To paraphrase Groucho Marx, I wouldn't buy any magazine that would put me on the cover. I keeed, I keeed! This is pretty frickin' awesome. Martyn Casserly wrote a cover story about me in Writing Magazine, an author-centric publication from the UK. Yes, that's right, I'm big in Europe.

I asked them to air-brush me a luxurious coiffure, but since they had seen my high school pictures, they chose to stick with the chrome dome.

Well, we have to say goodbye to ARealGirl's J-E-T-S JETS-JETS-JETS!, at least for this season, as they fell to the Steelers.

However, the Evil Queen™ still has her team in the mix -- the Packers will play the Steelers for all the glory and immortality that a Super Bowl has to offer.

And still? Fucking bullshit. My Lions are not in the Super Bowl.

News flash: people like free stuff.

Yes, I know I just rocked you way down to your private bits with that shocking information. I read an article this morning on Yahoo's Appolicious that the world seems stunned that "freemium" games are making money. What is "freemium?" No, it's not an element on the periodic table, it's when someone gives you a videogame -- for free -- and that game offers the option of paying to increase basic functionatliy. You don't want to pay for more playability? You don't have to.

What this does is create the same environment we proudly offer have here at Dark Øverlord Media: try it before you buy it. Our free podcasts (and their free games) let people try something for free to see if its right for them. If they do enjoy the goods, sometimes they then choose to spend their money because the entertainment value has already been proven. They know their money is well-spent on a proven commodity.

If they don't like the free book/game, then they don't buy anything. They don't feel cheated that they wasted their hard-earned money on something that didn't have value for them. Even when they don't dig the goods, they usually remain happy. Why? Becuase the vendor trusts to consumer to make up his or her own mind. Not with spin, marketing, misleading movie trailers, fake social-media campaigns, etc., but with the actual product.

"Freemium" is about putting the spending decision in the hands of the consumer. Freemium is a great way to say "my product is so bad-ass, I can give you the main engine for free and you'll be beggin' me to buy more stuff."

That's why you so many free stories here. And, yes, you will beg, first for things you can buy, and then -- when the Sigler Ascension hits -- for mercy.

What, and you thought last week was bad? It's Fro-Time™! That's my new tagline, so love it. I believe this gym was my 10th-grade class picture.  I'm guessing, because I'm pretty sure I wasn't going to ever lose my virginity look like this. Those are some bad-ass 80s frames my friends.

Submitted by: Junkie Tom Merrit

That's right, Eastern Washington, the team that plays on the To Pirate's blood-red field, staged an amazing come-from-behind victory over Delaware to win the FCS Championship. I'm still not sure what "FCS" is, it's a step down from the BCS, which used to be called "Division 1." When you're a fucking corporate money-hungry organization that rips off hard-working college kids like the BCS, you kind of want to obfuscate your name at every opportunity, so it makes sense in a fucked-up corporate money-hungry way.

For all y'all die-hards who are jonesing for this beast, I'll give you a little tickle. Yes, an Elmo-style tickle.

I am about 100,000 words into the first draft. I am skipping ahead to write the news coverage of the playoff games, the same way I did for THE STARTER. In short, there are only two people who know who wins the 2684 Galaxy Bowl -- ARealGirl and me.

I have about 50,000-60,000 words to go to finish the first draft, then it will be time to dive into the second. A and I are working hard, and so far it looks like we're on schedule for the April 1 pre-order.

We'll keep you informed.

Also?

HAHAAHAH! I KNOW WHO WINS AND YOU DON'T! HAHAAHAAHAHA!!