If there's anything I know inside and out it's how to remake yourself over in whatever way you want or need to, and not let little things like facts or annoying details get in your way, having done just that sort of thing enough times in my life that it's like an instinct by now, like brushing my teeth or whatever. The good thing is that usually your average person is not going to have any idea what really happened or why and hardly any motivation to dig past the cover story you put out, once that version has been repeated enough times by enough people, and if a few areas contradict one another or there is an unexplained gap smack in the middle of the thing, hardly anyone will have the wits to spot them anyhow and even if they did, nobody would have any reason to listen to them. I think it's that they are trained to accept all sorts of nonsense from the guys who put together those flimsy collections of junk on TVs and pass them off as drama or comedy or reality these days, and the tripe they expect folks to sit through at the movie theaters, and the complete frauds that make up pro sports and all that, really.

And does anyone really read history books, anyway, seeing how the schoolkids certainly aren't much into reading them, and the teachers can't be bothered to, and the parents haven't had a clue of what they're about for ages now, and you can forget about the school bureaucracy and the textbook companies as having any interest in the matters? No, I don't think they do get much of a looking at, and as long as you have some other pet topic that's guaranteed to rile everyone up one way or the other and draw the headlines it doesn't much seem as if anybody cares what the other 99% of the history book says, like at all. Ditto for the reference sources and ditto for the internet authorities and double ditto for what they like to call common knowledge that mostly just drifts with you get everyone else saying. If after all that there's one or two crackpots who know the truth haven't already been forced to deny it why should anybody care anything about those losers either? Everybody knows that.

Capella

When it comes to betraying your own, few situations offer quite as large a testimony to the sheer vileness of your heart than maroon your own crew in space. How else can you administer the big treachery trifecta: hard vacuum equal to any achievable on Earth, a chill a few degrees above absolute zero, and penetrating stellar radiation?

The heinous act has one more appealing feature from the point of view of the space villain who is its author: it can be argued that any crew willing to venture out into space under the direction of an entity that might have even the slightest hint of an immoral streak is automatically entitled to the label of possessing bad judgment," making the deed that much easier for you to shrug off afterwards. It does not hurt that the victims are out of sight by distances that define vastness, and that the chance of direct reprisals correspondingly take on an infinitesimal likelihood. Were it not for the rather high expense of all off-planet mischief, I would be tempted to nominate deep space abandonment as the perfect monstrosity for all supervillains to aspire to.

Grinning Skull (friendfeed)

Man oh man, I could have a lot of fun with the subject of how to turn people to stone, especially when it comes to buff, athletic Chesterfields of the sort that always grab my attention whether they're on their side or on ours, but I have been counseled that this might be something to tone down a little, seeing as how this is going to go out on the Internets where nothing off-color ever darkens a website I guess and the supply of uncorrupted minors is supposedly in my hands as I sit here writing very, very carefully about turning dudes (and I guess chicks also) into stone. Like that's not going to do any kind of damage all on its own, but no don't you never mind that anyway. Stonification or what you call it is just plain cool any way you do it, though I hear it's a real pain in the rear to set up this stunt and I wouldn't doubt it, otherwise I figure why wouldn't every bad guy be flying around with a turn-to-stone-cannon shooting people in all the cities of the world? It's a shame because how great would that be? to just hose all the schmucks down and then come traipsing along afterwards without any worry of being pot-shot at by rows and rows of folks standing like statues dumb and blind. I could go for that.

Capella

Universal love. Euphoria. Bliss. Transcendence. Ecstasy. These things, and more, you can grant to the world if you have been diligent about excelling in our brain series on your own behalf and can whip up something in the way of a pill, injection, or implant which leverages the primitive vertebrate wiring in everyone you wish to oppress. And as a side feature, unlike the case of most of the other dirty deeds you are called upon to perform, your victims will generally be found to sing your praises, as long as the supply holds out. When the crash comes, they may be bleating a different note, but despite what one might expect, this almost never deters people to the point of depressing demand much at all. It is funny how that all works out.

Degeneracy pays handsomely. Even those villains who turn their noses up at enterprises which eschew things like bloodthirsty butchery or grinding wanton torture in favor of a kind of indirect exploitation at a distance acknowledge this as fact. I feel that in its most established form, the merchandising of mass-produced happiness turns dyed in the wool evildoers off because of its deeply Establishmentary milieu. A posh mansion does not make for comfortable digs for a cave troll, nor for an offworldly slime-bat-arthropod. Still one cannot help but feel that in the evil spectrum both ways of doing business can coexist and even cooperate when the random alignment of aims happens to come about.

Grinning Skull (friendfeed)

To me, the trick of how to entertain zombies has to do with willpower, yours versus theirs, even if they are supposedly not actual enemies of yours or anything, but something like allies or whatever even, just because that's the way they are and there's no point trying to change that. I remember one time we were expecting zombies, just a couple of them one evening a couple of years back, and we had to spend an enormous sum of money fixing up the doors and windows all around the first floor and the basement levels, just to find that one of the neighbors had been painting the house and left their ladders out for the taking, so we had to chuck all our original plans and go with something half-baked on the spur of the moment more or less. But if I let things like that bother me all the time then I can tell you I'd be looking for a different calling pronto, something more stable like catering or bagpipe touring maybe I don't know.

Anyway, zombies are all right, better than yeti and not as good as vampires, mainly just different kind of. At least they don't keep trying to interrupt your story with their own boring tale of where they went on vacation or what they have to do at the office every day, which is a lot more than I can say for some of the so-called good company that have passed through this place the last couple of weeks imposing on our hospitality a couple of hours or days longer than a person would like. About the worst thing is that they're kind of hard on the place and you don't want to be the one cleaning up after they have blown through, but that's what minions are for after all.

Capella