I loves me some SyFy original movies. From Mansquito on to Ice Spiders, it's hard to go wrong with these B-Movie gems (it doesn't hurt to down half a bottle of Scotch before and while watching, granted, but still: CGI monsters).

I feel that SyFy is running out of good creature-combo movies. That's why I decided to come up with five new, sure-fire combos that are guaranteed to bring in a ratings bonanza.

Click on through to see what everyone's favorite wrestling ... er ... science-fiction channel (yeah, that's the ticket!) has in store for you in 2013.

So, now that the FDØ bathes in Ben Franklins and paid Adam Savage to mount a .50-cal on his strech Aztek limo, he must be giving away bucks like Bill Gates at a strip club, right? Well, not so much.

If you want to read a long post about Dark Øverlord Media's charitable goals for 2013, then click on through, MacDuff. ARealGirl and I thought we'd open up the Kimono and talk about where we will focus our efforts. We can't donate to everything, but we've picked four places we can.

Also? I don't have a stretch Aztek limo. But I want one.

The awesome Scott E. Weinberg joins the MONSTROSITY crew to give us his sleeper DVD pick. Is JJ Abrams going to bail on STAR TREK to direct the next STAR WARS movie? And you have to check out this monster meat from the soon-to-be-cult-classic flick JOHN DIES AT THE END. 

MONSTROSITY episodes will drop every Tuesday (I know YouTube says "1-7-13," but YouTube LIES! THEY LIE, ALL OF THE VIDEO PEOPLES!)

This episode sponsored by our Moosejaw coupon page at . Save 15% on outdoor gear for camping, hiking, climbing, skate, surf and snow. Brand names like Mountain Hardware, North Face, Marmot, Billabong and more.

PACIFIC RIM robots have huge inseams and a huge trailer. Author James Rollins busts out that vampire action, and these bitches don't sparkle. Check out scenes of DEAD SPACE 3, due out in February. This episode sponsored by our Eastbay coupon page.

Nothing swells an already swollen Napoleonic ego like Junkies getting ink of stuff from the world of Siglerism. Check these bad boys out! David Kaneshiro's Orbiting Death tat, and Jesse Sharrow's sweeeeeet Krakens tribal tat (that's that "Kraken" the team is named after).

Check out all the Siglerism tats here (and if you have a Siglerism tat that's not on that page, email media@scottsigler.net).

This is awesome. Awesome, I say. Props to the amazing Junkie Beth Copenhaver (and thanks to Keith Hughes for the sweet video hookup).

Let's get a few things out of the way, so that in case you don't read to the end of this blathersnape you won't make these rather obvious comments:

• Yes, I am cheap.
• Yes, I am old and crotchety when it comes to gouging the customer.
• No, I haven't done enough research to find ways around this situation.
• No, I am not a big fan of "change."
• Yes, this is a giant "First World Problem" rant.

All good? Let's get into it

Back in 2006, the Evil Queen and I droped some bucks on our first flat-panel TV, a 42" LG plasma with a built-in DVR. We thought we were pretty fancy. We're big movie fans and we love watching football (obviously), so we thought it was worth the expense to have something we really liked. Also, FIFA '06 looked pretty kick-ass on it, so there's that.

The TV also had a built-in cable-card reader, which will prove to be significant later in this rambling post. What's more, it had built-in a TV Guide service — we had show schedules, one-touch DVR recording scheduling, a 200gb hard drive to save shows ... it was pretty pimp. These were all features LG was touting at the time.

So from 2006-2011, we were pretty tickled with this gadget. Then, it started acting up. Say I was up until 3am working on a deadline so I slept on the couch: sometimes, the TV would just turn on for no reason. When you write horror for a living, a full-volume infomercial bringing you out of a dead sleep can make a body wonder if ghosts are real (they are not, btw, but that doesn't change the face that I might have piddled myself a little at the time).

The TV also started missing recordings, or would stop recording with five minutes left in the show (when that happens for WALKING DEAD? Yeah, it's way up there in the Righteous Rage of First World Problems ranking). Then we started to lose channel and program information. Turn the channel to something that looks cool, hit "get info," and it would most often say "no information available." Again, a minor thing, and we rolled with it.

Keep in mind, we're paying a premium price for that information. We pay Comcast, Comcast has that info, therefore that info should appear.

I'm ordering replacement parts for the sucker and still trying to fix it. Taking it to a TV repair shop would cost more than the price of buying a brand-new TV. That's my TV at right, skinned alive!

So we had a TV that would randomly turn on and off, couldn't record for shit, couldn't show us program information, and would sometimes just ignore the power button (you'd turn it on, the TV would give you the finger and say "I'm on a break, buddy, come back in five minutes"). All annoying things, but even in total it wasn't worth spending four figures to replace it.

Finally, the TV started freezing the picture while the sound kept playing. That also deactivated the remote control. You had to unplug it and plug it back in to get it to work. To get through a football game, we have to turn it off and on four or five times. When that happens in the last five minutes of BREAKING BAD, and you miss the good parts (because your TV won't record it, 'cause it's broke), that's a little frustrating. So, when you take all of these minor issues and then realize we got six solid years out of it, we replaced it.

GEDDOFF MY LAWN!
And here comes the part where I get crotchity. We wanted something similar to our LG. Come to find out that while Rumple Stiltstech slept, the world changed around him, and no one seems to mind paying out the ass for services that you used to have the option of getting for free — like recording a freaking TV show.

The cable card converts the Comcast signal into a form your TV can use to show you the channels (or, it's got some fancy code so Comcast can make sure they gettin' paid for their product). Cable cards are cheap to rent, at like $2.50 a month, and we actually got a discount for ours. Know what TVs don't have anymore? Cable card slots. They don't make TVs that have them, or if they do, those TVs aren't at BestBuy.

Why? Because Comcast wants to rent you a cable box for $8.50 a month. They don't want you to own a cable card that fits into the TV, because that $8.50 a month leveraged over 22 million customers really adds up. But most people are paying more than $8.50, something which I shake my cane at in the next segment.

Important to note: Comcast has a desk right in the BestBuy TV department. Is it any surprsoe there aren't options that help you spend less money with Comcast? This is a conspiracy that puts JFK's death to shame, I tell you.

Yes, I can buy a flat-panel TV over the internet, sight-unseen. Or maybe you can. That's too much money to drop for us without getting hands-on and getting the name of the guy selling it to me.

I HAVE TO PAY TO RECORD?
Remember when I told you that with my LG, I could just hit "record" and it would record the show to my built-in hard drive? Guess what TVs don't come with anymore. Just one guess. Okay, I'll tell you — they don't come with built-in DVRs.

Why? Because Comcast wants to rent you a DRV for $15 a month (but if you have that, you don't have to pay the $8.50, as the DVR is also a cable box). Let's see ... $15 a month, times 22 million customers, that's potential $330,000,000 in monthly rental revenue, revenue above and beyond the cable service that they sell.

I'm probably grumpy because I got to do this for free, but I'm amazed that the consumer marketplace let this happen over the past ten years. You have to pay for the right to record, something that's alien for an 80s kid who grew up with VCRs.

Here's the thing: I asked for a stand-alone DVR, and BestBuy didn't have one. Not one. What did they have? TiVo.

WTF WITH THE TIVO THING?
Are you kidding me? I get to pay $150 for a TiVo DVR, and then pay at least $15 a month to record on it? I am shaking my cane at all of you. I tweeted about this and got responses that most people love their TiVo. That's great. More power to you, if you're paying for a service and you're happy with that service, awesome. But I don't want foreign chanels, I don't want Netflix streamed, I don't need all the bells and whistles — I just want to hit record and store my basic cable for later, basci cable that I'm already paying for.

Keep in mind here, the problem isn't that it's illegal to record. This isn't a copyright or intellectual property situation. Comcast is happy to let you record, if you pay for the right to do so. Comcast also allows another company (TiVo) to record the shows for you, so it's supposedly open to the free market. Again, there's no legality issue, it's just a matter of Comcast buddying up with TiVo to remove the ability for you to record without using one or both of them.

Why does this piss me off? I should have the choice to pay for renting Comcast's recording gear (which is probably excellent), or go buy my own. That choice seems to be gone. Comcast will not sell you a DVR (please refer to the $330 million in potential monthly revenue, above). If it costs me more to buy my own, that's my business and I should be able to make that choice for myself. It looks like I can buy a Moxi for $500, but reviews say this thing is a piece of crap.

TiVo looks like a fantastic service. It really does. I just want the choice to use it or to not use it.

I DON'T LAY THAT PIPE
Comcast puts down the cable that brings the signals, I get that. It's a huge company with a lot of overhead. I get that, too. No, I can't magically conjure up stuff to watch on the TV. Should they get paid for what they do? Absolutely. However, I do pay that, to the tune of $85 a freakin' month. I'm already paying for the programming, they just want to gouge me for the right to time-delay the content I'm already paying for.

I DON'T WANT TO HOOK UP A COMPUTER, DAMMIT!
You all know I'm a TechTard™. I hear there are ways around this if I want to hook a PC to my TV. I don't want to screw with this forever, I just want to record the freakin' WALKING DEAD.

TIME TO CUT THE CORD?
Bah, these bastards have me. I want to watch the amazing TV shows that are out these days, and I love me my sports. They control the market. So I'll keep paying for cable (for now), but I've got to find a way around paying $180 a year to Comcast to record a signal I'm already paying for.

For now, we're old-school: we watch the show when it comes out live. In a way it's like being back in the 80s again, even before VCRs. Or, we wait until long after the show is over and get the DVDs. Seeing as we're too cheap to pay for premium channels, we haven't even seen DEXTER yet.

WHAT ARE MY OPTIONS?
Hey, you Techies: is there a DVR with a cable-card slot I can snag that solves this problem? Have any of you had similar problems, either with tech or being a stompy old man about paying money you didn't have to pay before?

Love,

Crotchety Old Man Scott

PS: Do not spoil DEXTER. Don't you do it.

Now that I'm a fancy B-list movie reviewer (I know that makes you hot for me, admit it), I get the opportunity to watch some little-known stuff. Most of the time, that means I get to watch some real stinkers. Sometimes, however, I get to watch talented people make the most of micro-budgets and create the best flick they can, without the safety net of Hollywood's money-hose. 

Case in point, the indie flick KILL ME NOW, which just launched a (very) limited theater run on Dec. 5. The movie comes with some pretty severe Internet street cred, being written by Yesterday, Webby and Streamy Award winner Michael Swaim of Cracked.com fame.

KILL ME NOW is a mix of comedy, horror, and SUPER TROOPER jackassery. There's nothing serious about this flick. There is drinking and yelling and death and loud noises. There are power drills. There is the worst fake bear in the history of movies.

KILL ME NOW is clearly an indie affair, and it starts out a little slow — I admit, because of that, I was kind of looking for reasons not to like it. Swain and director Travis Long didn't give me any, and kept it moving one laugh at a time. Yeah, the move had an FX budget of $0, but they knew that going in and relied on performances and punchlines to carry the flick.

In addition to writing the script, Swaim also plays "Dennis," one of the two much-maligned nerds that are trying to horn in on the Cool People's end-of-high-school party. A party in a cabin in the middle of the woods. A very secluded cabin in the middle of the woods (they're making a low-budget horror movie, not re-inventing the wheel).

Brett Fancy (EAST ENDERS, OUTPOST) is the rich-voiced, highly educated "Driller Killer," a serial killer that likes to take out his victims with the ages-old technique of "Trepanation." The Driller is a tongue-in-cheek character that grows increasingly frustrated with his lack of body count. Fancy is a seaoned actor, and — to be blunt — is so self-assured in the role that he seems almost a little out of place in this cast of younger actors.

There are some really solid show-stealers in this movie. Beck Bennet delivers a Grade-A, over-the-top "jock douchebag" role as Todd, the leader of the Cool People who want to keep the Nerds out. I'd love to see him in more movies. The best comedic turn comes from Noah Byrne, who puts in the best stoner performance since Sean Penn in FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH. No, I'm not kidding. It's worth seeing this movie just to watch Byrne deliver three lines.

If you're looking for awesome gore, go rent SAW VII, because this movie is gore-free. IMDB lists the movie as having a $1 million budget; I find it hard to believe they had that much to spend based on what made it to the screen (and what didn't make it, notably the aforementioned utter lack of FX).

This movie is missing a lot, but the bottom line is I enjoyed it. There's a ton of funny in this bad boy. If you like horror/comedy and you like watching what people do with limited resources (and I do), you'll definitely dig it.

The Goodreads Choice 2012 awards are all done: NOCTURNAL came in 5th.

• THE TWELVE by Justin Cronin, 7,414 votes
• ODD APOCALYPSE by Dean Koontz, 6,549 votes
• ON DEMON WINGS by Karina Halle, 3,945 votes
• BLACKOUT by Mira Grant, 3,909 votes
• NOCTURNAL by yours truly, 3,614 votes

The category had a huge jump in participation from 2011. In 2011, 18,950 people voted in the horror category, while in 2012 41,104 chimed in. That's an increase of 217%, significantly larger than the overall participation in all categories combined (638,603 in 2011 compared to 1,156,852 in 2012, an increase of 181%).

I think that's all indicative of the growth of the Goodreads site. It really is the main place on the internet to discuss books and share your thoughts. Reviews on Goodreads outnumber reviews on Amazon by factors of ten-to-one, or higher, for the exact same title.

What sucks is I looked at the 2011 horror winnner – Mellissa Marr's GRAVEMINDER, which won with 3,264 votes – and thought, "hey, we can hit those numbers and compete for this thing." Well, we did, but the overall competition increased a helluva lot more.

THE COMPETITON:
Going up against a best-selling horror icon like Dean Koontz, and a marketing-budget juggernaut like Justin Cronin, I knew we had a steep hill to climb. Ballantine spent somewhere between $500,000 and $2 million to promote the first book of Cronin's vampire series, THE PASSAGE, which, obviously, creates a lot of sales and awareness which translates into hundreds of thousands of people waiting for Book II. That's pretty tough to compete against.

Koontz is a legend with legions of fans. He's been doing this – literally – since before I was born and has been a mainstay of the industry for most of that time. Add to that fact that his entry into this year's contest was Book 10 of his popular Odd Thomas series, and it was obvious he'd bring in the votes.

Mira Grant's BLACKOUT was the third an final book in her NEWSFLESH zombie series. I've read the first book in that series and it kicks ass. Pick it up if you're looking for a smart, sciencey zombie book that really embraces the internet and blogging culture (political warning: according to the book, Republicans are far worse than the undead). The first book, FEED, made all kinds of Years' Best lists. I knew BLACKOUT was going to be a strong entrant into the horror category.

The one that really surprised me was ON DEMON WINGS by Karina Halle. I admit I hadn't heard of this book at all. Halle took the bronze (9.59% of the vote to me 8.79%). She doesn't have a big Facebook or Twitter presence, and we seem to be about even on Goodreads as far as reviews go, so I'll be looking to see if I can learn how she connects with her fan base and how she generate such a monster turnout. People come up with new ways to connect and market all the time, and watching those who succeed is just part of the business.

THANKS FOR YOUR HELP:
Placing higher would have been a big boost to the TV series efforts, but we fell short. It's reasonable to think that upwards of 80% of the people who read this post voted for the book, so I thank you!

That's right the eBook for TITLE FIGHT, a novella co-written with Parsec Award-winning author Matt Wallace, is now available!

We've been working hard to get this title ready for publication, so I can think of no better birthday present for our FDØ! (Well, you should also leave a comment below, as he digs a busy, fun comments section, and that'd be a great present too!)

SYNOPSIS:

TITLE FIGHT takes place between THE ROOKIE and THE STARTER. 

Undefeated galactic heavyweight champion Korak the Cutter has defeated all challengers, destroying everyone in his path, but the wins aren't as easy as they used to be. After a decade of perfect fighting, his age is catching up with him.
For a Quyth Warrior, that means he's slowing down, and speed is the name of the game in mixed martial arts.

At this late stage in his career, he faces a nightmare savage and unpredictable Chiyal "The Heretic" North. As crime lords and promoters try to fix the fight, and as managers cling to dreams of lost glory, Korak and Chiyal must find their way into the octagon to decide once and for all who is the greatest of all time.

Oh! Did you come out to a East Coast 2012 tour stop? If you came out in Atlanta, Chapel Hill, Washington, D.C., New York City, Bethlehem, Pittsburgh, Chicago or Grand Rapids, you'll be receiving an email shortly with a link for a free copy since the Biggie Smalls side won the East Side/West Side competition!

TITLE FIGHT is available now here on our site and at Amazon.com.  It's on it's way to the other retail outlets. Even though it's Scott's birthday, you should treat yourself and snag a copy of the great story.