Hey, I'm back again. The critter-related subject this time is How to release a kraken with an emphasis on the more warlike aspects of dealing with these huge irascible slimy customers. It turns out that my only dealings with a kraken have been strictly off of the nautical dispute beat, actually, mostly just gawking at them from an icy fjord where I might be foraging for some tasty seaweed or perhaps just a peep at one through a porthole in a submarine when we might be heading down to one of our ocean trench bottom hideaways. Impressive-looking specimens, I must say, and by all accounts more intelligent than one might suppose based on their lineage. Yeah, like I should talk.

There are all kinds of krakens out there, those that look like calamari squid seen through binoculars, those which look like aquatic bigfoots with tentacles, and look like they have dropped down here from an alien shores. What they all seem to have in common however is a wish to be free and lead their own lifestyle, and who can blame them if they cause a big fuss when they have been deprived of their liberty? Certainly not the other freedom-loving, lifestyle-pursuing entities of varied and sometimes monstrous appearance that I see around these parts.

We here have spoken with a number of experts on the topic of releasing krakens and have distilled their experience and related body of knowledge into a fairly comprehensive article, I think, that might I hope be helpful for someone seeking to take on the Zeus role of their dreams someday. Anyone who takes our advice on this, good luck and let us know how it all goes, all right?

Veeper

Some of the pieces here on the wiki are perennial in interest, and during this second season of Evilhow we will be sprucing up and revisiting one of these every week in order to bring you the fullest possible evil experience. This week's revision of the popular page How to worship an evil god lays out the basics of setting up and running a repellent cult in order to contribute a powerfully horrific aura to all your dealings. We have consulted a number of eminent authorities with eons of experience in slaking the unholy thirsts of kakodemons and she-devils and present their practical tips in one place for you, the eager dark hierophant, to consume. A few small adjustments in your common practice will, in my experience, serve to freshen up a sacrificial routine gone slightly stale, and contrary to most sectarian nightmares, it does not have to involve costly structural makeovers. The true believer can incorporate a few bits of flashy showmanship, while the cynical hypocrite can learn from the soul-rending depictions from Hell that adorn this monstrous work.

Grinning Skull (friendfeed)

Jewels are attractive and magical items are intriguing, but the best way to tell whether an evil overlord has truly made it to the most exalted ranks of our profession is to inquire as to whether they have purloined an ocean liner of their own, and, if not, what on Earth they are waiting for. Achieving one of these is a sort of evildoers pentathlon, attesting to his or her organizational skills, talent with arms, fortitude in the face of adversity, deceptive creativity, and casual ruthlessness, and if the individual has a number of cruise vessels they now call their own, you know you are dealing with someone rather special. For a while there, it was nearly a fad for up and coming fiends to establish their vile credentials by lifting a megayacht or a pleasure barge, trading up toward the multi hundred thousand ton class as they go, but the inevitable costly losses of promising talent led the governing bodies for villainy (such as they are) to discourage this activity unless there is clear and compelling need for the nautical bauble in question, lest the nouveau bad be snubbed socially for their airs.

Modesty forbids my commenting on any personal accumulation of luxury berthing. Those days are long passed now for me, although I will admit that I do enjoy observing the proceedings, executed by a master, when I can get a chance. Even the attempts which go awry are instructive and entertaining in some way. Aficionados of the ocean liner rustling sport have a tendency to go on at some length about the ones that got away just as much as the big scores we all know about, and will dwell on the technical misstep that sunk this one, and the faulty timing that dematerialized the other, and so on, which can be offputting to the untutored outsider in the subject.

Grinning Skull (friendfeed)

So, did you like miss us or whatever?
When our posse has something going down, I usually never think of whether I might have an opportunity for snappy quotes, much less a quote from Shakespeare that might dazzle and stupefy the other guys maybe at a ticklish point in their resistance, which is kind of too bad, because that kind of thing isn't nearly as strenuous as the kind of fighting or support work that normally is assigned my way. Plus even if I did set something good up and up and pipe at the critical point, it is often the case that the place is too noisy for a person to be heard clearly by someone who's likely to be a survivor of whatever it is, so maybe they mishear the thing and think it was something like "fried haddock and let's lose some dogs and slaw" instead of what it's supposed to be, and though that might certainly be a notable and unique line, it maybe doesn't have the kind of oomph behind it that makes for a proper story afterwards (one that sounds cool, anyway), and if they end up getting wasted anyway or driven mad, they probably don't even get a chance to repeat it to anyone anybody cares about. So since it's really kind of a lot more tricky than people think, it's a good thing we're back on here with an article on the topic, and I am sort of proud to be the one to announce it, you know.
Capella

Most supervillains I have known imagined that their arrival on the scene would be seen as a spectacular outcome of a long, successful series of capers, as if the discovery of their awesomeness was both unavoidable and completely logical according to the rules the universe runs by, but they are just about always tripped up when anyone bothers to look into their claims of a lurid backstory that something just doesn't seem right, whether it is the way the light is cast in that photograph of them alongside Hitler, or the tale of their superhuman deeds told by supposed eyewitnesses who have that look that they're worried someone's out to get them. There was this one guy who went around claiming credit for having blown up the ancient library at Alexandria who would make something different up every time people started asking how he managed to transport his demolition crew through time and space and never get a line in the history books (he wasn't around too long in the modern times, at least not in one piece he wasn't), becoming ridiculous to a lot of folks in the supervillain community, not dreadful (not in the way he wanted). Everybody I talk to who sees these backstory trainwrecks goes on about how they would never fall into the same traps, that their level of deceit is worlds better than that, but the fact of the matter is that one of the things that the bad guys love to talk about, almost as much as the great big nasty thing they are responsible for doing, is how pathetic and conceited the other guys are, whoever isn't at the table at the time, and how their streak of luck is soon going to run out.

Capella