Consider, for a moment, the maelstrom that is the typical American high school, where the ruling power structure is made up of those who know instinctively How to oppress the meek. The freshman must not only yield before the senior but be humbled, despised, tortured. At its best, controlled by a single reigning intellect, it is a picture of efficiency where the faceless many exist to serve the greater glory at the top. This, in a microcosm, should be something like the order that every successful tyrannical ruler should seek to bring to those he or she strives to grind into dust, for it is the surest way to your evil heart's desire: total domination.

Grinning Skull (friendfeed)

When you need an edge, heck, when you need all the edges in the bag of knives, it pays to know How to exploit advanced technology. Even if you think you do not, you probably do anyway. The old saying "Don't bring a knife to a gunfight" so soon becomes "Don't bring a pistol to a war of aerial bombardment," then "Don't bring a bomber to a airborne pestilence attack" and so on. Keep up or die is the great lesson that history repeats over and over again, and if you are the sort of individual planning to conquer the entire planet, it behooves you to master the most advanced tech you can obtain.

I remember many happy hours going through the trash heaps of lost civilizations, first on my own and later with hired crews of excavators, hoping to score just one artifact that would inspire awe among researchers. I still have a few shards of glassy-smooth, indestructible silvery metal in my treasure cabinet from those times, though I never did find the legendary planet-buster I was hoping to come up with. Still, it was all time and effort well spent, as the enterprise turned out to be an excellent means of sorting out the loyal and committed minions from the stupid, careless, and lazy oafs who were trying to skate by by attaching themselves to me, and even helped uncover one surprise in the form of a spy for the forces of Good in the ranks. But more of that at another time.

Grinning Skull (friendfeed)

As a vegan serpent, I am extremely particular about exactly one sets puts into action the steps needed for How to run a restaurant, because it is not simply just a matter of throwing a hunk of dead flesh onto a hot skillet, squirting something from a bottle on top, and plating it up. There is a keen level of precision called for in running a successful restaurant not unlike the total concentration a mad genius musters while directing a series of hurricanes against a helpless coastal city. This sometimes comes as a shock when a supervillain down on his luck is simply trying to find a simple method of earning some cash on the side while biding his time.

Studies show that the typical person in a modern society will change their career path something like five times over their lifetime, and insane masterminds are really no different in that respect. Not every villain turning to the hospitality trade plans to poison their customers or to turn them into frozen meat pies they can sell on the side. Just some of them. There are those who really just miss the opportunity to use their creativity to construct edible works of art which harmonize in a holistic way with the entirety of the meal and the fine wine which accompanies it, an activity one rarely finds when shuttling from battlefield to dungeon to charnel house as is often their lot.

Veeper

I know How to possess eternal youth and you probably don't because you haven't read the new wiki page that went up just now. HA! Here I am scanning down the list of evilHows and I can hardly find anything anywhere near as useful to know than this, because I'm thinking that it hardly makes any sense to be able to do any of those other things unless you're also able to keep looking good in the process. (I'm not counting the page on How to be an evil consort because it's really kinda the same thing, if you know what I mean.) It gets me really annoyed to go to one of these villain conferences out in some foreign hideaway with these so-called dark lords who rule the world and I look at them and there isn't one who looks less than like 150 (and a hard 150 years at that) despite all the power and wealth they supposedly have, and I'm thinking "Is it that these guys don't even own a mirror?" (And they're all guys, excepting just a few of us of the other sort, who don't usually have this blind spot.) Because there's no way that they could consider their look to be anywhere on the attractive side. A few hours of this and I'm out the back entrance of the hall to get some fresh air, meaning that I have to give my poor eyeballs a rest.

Which of the nuggets of wisdom that you will find on the How to possess eternal youth page I won't post because I don't much want to be stared at by people looking for slipups once they know where to look that they can post on the Internet to bring me down. Nah, let them guess, I say, and maybe they will just decide that there's no evidence to dig up after all because it was all done by my a deal with my own evil deity who didn't leave any traces to be found.

Capella

Some supervillains who are more political in their disposition than their more anarchic brethren may get some worthwhile tips from the latest wiki page on How to run a police state. Or, if not, at least something to ruminate upon whilst pondering how to stamp out the last vestiges of dissent among your chattels. It turns out it is not simply a matter of taking the local streetcorner goons and dressing them up in sharp uniforms with lots of metal studs on them, though it is to be admitted, that is a good start. An entire society is a living, breathing organism, and like any organism, you just have to know how to coerce it to obey your commands.

I once was conducting an operation in a totalitarian kind of place, not one that I personally had a stake in, strictly a grab and go kind of setup, and I remember well thinking that there were things that I would change were I to be in charge. For instance, it was frustrating to me that no thought had been given to the "buy-in" mechanism where by a petty thief or (as far as one could tell) a local crime syndicate could pay tribute to amalgamate its operations into the secret police force so as to avoid harassment and waste. It smacked of strictly top-down thinking, and it seemed to me that though it is more complicated to have to work with one's populace in order to keep the society at large tamped down, surely that is a more resilient and reliable system for the long run. We got what we were going there for and hightailed it back out, so I didn't have much of a chance to see how much this mentality pervaded the rest of the power structure, but the lesson stuck with me for a long time thereafter.

Grinning Skull (friendfeed)