With fuel prices back on the upswing and commercial air travel security measures absurdly restrictive, one often finds oneself plying the asphalt ribbon more often than not when it comes to covering a fair amount of ground, and it is a vital part of one's toolkit to know how to survive a road trip with one's mental and physical faculties intact. We present a few common-sense tips to the motoring supervillain in time to take advantage of them for the latter half of the driving season in the Northern Hemisphere.

There is much to be said for the practice of propelling oneself by means of large and expensive pieces of metal and glass at lethally high rates of speed and generating invisible planet-killing gases. If a member of your organization were to propose this as an evil scheme, would you pursue the notion with enthusiasm or attack the proposer as an impractical dreamer?

Grinning Skull (friendfeed)

Whenever I visit other evil overlords, I most enjoy touring the area down below, so in my time I have seen many an untidy underground fastness which might have benefitted from our tips on how to clean a dungeon. The ones which have gone to the opposite extreme I remember well for the clearly visible signs of iron grip of the dungeon-master, all spic and span in a harsh, hard-edged manner that fairly takes one's breath away. It is a misconception that this jibes only with a military turn of mind, as it is no less well suited toward a homicidally cruel demon's operation as long as sheer chaos is not fetishized. It simply bespeaks a certain level of professionalism which separates one's conception of captivity from that of the casually vicious trussing lasses up in their parents' basements.

And at a certain level, that is what defines us as true supervillains, after all. The visible pride we take in our greatest acts of monstrosity does honor to what we are and to the spirit which animates our grand enterprises

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Restoring a classic transorbital cruiser to its original launchpad condition is a labor of love. The elegant, sleek form of an old titanium rocket body is very nearly irresistible on a visceral level. Plus, if you are shrewd in selecting the vintage technologies of the most popular space-faring races, the resale value can far outweigh the costs of restoration. Even the utilitarian sub-light heavy lifters used to ferry asteroid miners and ore between grubstakes can be diamonds in the rough, their hulls dulled and pitted over time due to the exposure to the solar wind and dust granules, thrusters misaligned and clogged from years of neglect, fairly easily re-sheathed in a spiffy new duralumin skin and souped up with new propulsion and new armament, and soon one has an attack ship which still manages to stay faithful to the original.

Once bitten by the bug, the spaceship fancier is apt to take on bigger and bigger aspirations over time, far beyond what a sane individual would do. One especially barmy villain was convinced it was his mission to refurbish a planetoid-sized colony ship as a sort of roving casino, undeterred by the centuries of labor the job would take. It also seems to afflict males rather than females for some obscure reason I would rather not go into at this time.

Grinning Skull (friendfeed)

Some, I know, will scoff at a wiki page here on How to win at dice, saying that this kind of plebian content does not belong on the pre-eminent site for supervillain instruction and education, which should concentrate on world domination, clandestine skullduggery, and the crushing of entire continents. They would have us ignore the aspiring evildoer population and set our standards high enough to appeal only to those who have already accomplished some measure of truly foul play, and not just some minor shady dealings or a fast one tinged with malice.

To which I simply sigh eyeballs are always desirable. Why put so much effort into an enterprise which can be appreciated by only a vanishingly small fraction of the wired community? Who are probably already too busy to visit? No, that way lies peril, madness, and irrelevancy, and anyone who does not like it may well see fit to start their own evil site without hindrance from ourselves, leaving the very popular dice-fixing topic to us and our readers. And if those readers benefit from our advice at a point in their careers where a small infusion of cash or contraband allowed them to continue their villainous ways long enough to become mighty, menacing, and vile beyond imagining, it may be that they will remember who was in their corner back in the old days, and who was not. It is a psychologically valid scenario.

Grinning Skull (friendfeed)

I know all about the way you all want to learn how to read minds with those splendidly tricked out big brains we covered earlier. There is no need to state your desire to me, obviously.

The main drawback to cultivating a highly sensitive telepathic sense is the enormous amount of junk people carry around in their heads, through which one must pick to glean whatever useful piece of information one is after. It's as if one were trying to reconstruct the events of a murder by searching the victim's apartment filled to the ceiling with scribbled notes on bits of damp toilet paper, pictures torn out of magazines, dried out pieces of gristle, and a noisy Furby one can't turn off. To maintain one's bearings in the swirling stream of someone else's consciousness it is usually necessary to impose some kind of artificial order, involving a certain degree of force which will leave its mark on the target and practitioner both. That is why I prefer, whenever possible, to take an "offline" approach, where one captures the target's recollections and notions into a sort of slideshow presentation, where one can spread them out and discard what is irrelevant without having to be personally immersed within the chaos. Some say that this deprives the mindreader of a lot of detail which might prove to be essential, but in my experience it is the better tradeoff. Even maniacal miscreants are entitled to a shred of psychic equilibrium now and then.

Grinning Skull (friendfeed)