It’s a night of evil, meat, and Welsh. Sadly, no evil Welsh meat. But still, enjoy it for what it is.
QUESTIONS:
Magical Talking Hat Podcast, What do you call male ballerinas? Azuretalon
Dear vocal extensions of the Magical Talking Hat, What exactly is Spam? The meatish thing! Azuretalon
Dear TMTH, Can you pronounce the longest place name in the UK, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch? Craig
Dear TMTH, If you were an evil mastermind what would your outrageously over the top secret base be? Craig
Speaking of evil secret bases….
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Re: evil me and his evil lair
I think I’d be called “Craniac”. And my orbital HQ would just be called “The Cranium”. My mind-control ray would be called “The Cranial Cavity Control Cathode”. I’d turn the entire planet into one big video game that I’d play every day while my robot servants served me root beers and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I wouldn’t want the games to be too lethal or anything, because then, you know, eventually the game would be over. Mostly the kinds of games I’d design would be sort of social experiment/simulation -type things.
I think people would actually like the game-world I’d create for them. Or at least I’d tell myself that.
And, yes, my robot servants would double as soldiers just in case someone somewhere accidentally discovered tinfoil hats.
An evil genius has to think of everything.
Oh, I forgot to mention…
Most places online I go by “Ozone” or some variation, like “Capt. Ozone” or “Dr. Ozone”, with the most popular and prevalent one being “Prof. Ozone”.
So whenever I refer to my place of residence online, I call it “Ozone’s Liar”.
Get it? Heh heh heh…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDiDK_yBCw0
This song is always stuck in my head.
Yes I still live in Slough, I was only in Africa for a few weeks.
That longest place name question was worth it just for William’s part. Also evidence of it being real: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llanfairpwllgwyngyll
What kind of reading would you like from me William? Are you interested in accents?
Disney buying Star Wars: There’s nothing Disney can do to it that Lucas hasn’t already. I’m over getting upset about such things.
Halloween: I went to work and everybody was like “You’re not wearing a costume.”
Of course none of those people were wearing costumes themselves, but they expected ME to!
After work I changed into a Fallout costume and went over to a friend’s house where we passed out candy and played with dry ice.
I love it when co-workers tell me: “You’re not wearing a costume” because then I get to say: “Yeah, but I’m a witch every day, so I don’t have to.” They’re never precisely sure what to say next.
Producer FTW!
Yay trainer!
I can’t say enough good things about having a trainer to work with.
Mmmmm, peperoni…
Somebody told me once that peperoni is a vegitable but that’s just silly.
Everybody knows peperoni is a fruit.
It grows on trees you know.
I used to do toe raises with the balls of my feet on the edge of a step so I could let my heals go down farther then they would in that direction otherwise. But my trainer pointed out that there’s an increased possibility of hurting one’s self that way.
I’m quite fond of Spam myself. This is because my Mom was an Army Brat and has a hole boatload of siblings. So they ate Spam often. In fact, Easter and Christmas dinner for my Mom’s family would be Grandma taking a spam, scoring it, putting clove spikes into it and cooking it like a regular ham.
It wasn’t exactly popular in the UK, but we sent them a lot of it, and I think there’s people who developed a nostalgic taste for it just like my Mom.
It’s also popular in Hawaii (or anywhere there’s a lot of consumption of pork in the culture) where they fry it up and put it in sushi rice wrapped in nori. “Spam Misubi” – sooooo delish.
Tony is wrong. Spam is pork shoulder and seasonings. “Spam” is a word-squish of “Spiced Ham”.
I’ve been to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, or “Llanfair PG” as they say locally.
Nice town.
It means something like “The waterfall by the cave near the lake in the white hollow north of the hill where Bob did that thing that time, no, not that thing, the other thing”.
OMG, I was laughing so hard during the spelling and candy selection my co-workers made me stop and explain.
Yeah I was in hysterics during that it, got me a fair number of odd looks given I was on the train in to work.
I’m just interested to hear what your voice sounds like. So it doesn’t have to be a reading, really… just anything with you speaking. That said, if you can make significant and consistent changes to your voice, as one might do to portray various characters, it would be interesting to hear that kind of thing.
Accents aren’t particularly important to me at the moment… not sure if they will be later… hmm…
I sent an email to the Hat’s email address with an MP3 of me doing a monologue of the lyrics to a certain song. Hopefully the Hat will forward it on to you.
The main way I change my voice is with accents, I could try just doing a different cadence and pitch… We can experiment.
The Hat must like you, because I got the email! Thank you! It’s awesome!
I LIKE TURTLES!
I think a space station is pretty over the top as far as evil lairs go.
But Tony has a point, more detail would be needed.
Skull shaped modules in space from which you control minds.
MUCH better.
Plenta is fairly evil.
I almost forgot to comment on the “86” thing.
This comes from a famous Speakeasy in… I want to say Boston, but I don’t quite remember. (Can’t be all that famous I guess.) The building where the speakeasy was had a secret door between it and the building right behind it. So if the speakeasy was about to be raided, the customers would be hustled out the back into the next building so there would appear to be nobody there when the cops came in, and the customers could calmly walk out the other building on the next street over. The street number of the other building was “86”. So if they were going to 86 something, that means they were going to hide it by dumping it in the building the cops didn’t know was connected to the speakeasy.
Or at least, that’s what I was told.
I see a possible spin-off in your future, The Magical Talking Cat podcast!
86
Every
heropodcast needs a theme song!A part just for me? And it’s reoccuring? Aww, shucks. *blush* Any chance of you giving us some more details of the project?
Halloween: We basically gave up on doing trick-or-treating; as we’d gotten too many teenagers showing up without even bothering to dress up. So we went to watch ParaNorman, during the prime trick-or-treating time. The movie was ok at best (though the theater was nicely empty). Also we noticed as we were leaving the house that there were a lot more little kids in costume going around the neighborhood. This has us reconsidering our stance on going out to watch a movie instead of handing out candy.
One should never underestimate the power of perversity (particularly not Tony’s).
Male ballerinas are actually ballerinos.
Spam is usually canned preservatives held together by small amounts of pig bits, though some varieties use bits of poultry in place of or in addition to pig bits.
Llanfairpwllgwyngyll: Craig’s comment is spot on; totally worth it for William’s reaction.
It wasn’t reading minds that I had a problem with; it saying you wanted mind control that pushed you over to the dark side. Mind control is all about taking away another person’s free will and saying you’d only use it for good is the same thing as saying the ends justify the means. If you think mind control is a “good” power; then you can definitely pretend to be evil.
Outrageously over-the-top secret base: My outrageously over-the-top secret base
iswould be in an undisclosed location with undisclosed defenses and facilities. Itdoeswould however rock your world.No, I agree that mind control is a terrible power. It just came up in relation to reading minds, which is also a terrible power, in my opinion.
Now that I think about it, it makes sense that a person not keen on “super powers” in general, when pressed to pick one, would name the most unsavory one he can think of. Well, if he isn’t allowed to pick flight, I mean. 🙂
I don’t know that I’d agree that reading minds is a terrible power. It’s definitely a problematic power that could be easily abused, but I don’t think reading minds is inheriently bad. For example, one could use a mind reading power to be a kick-ass, real-time translator.
How can you not be keen on super powers though?
This is something I explore a bit in my novels, the notion that the people who eventually receive extraordinary abilities do so only after they’ve somehow realized that they don’t really need (or even benefit from) said abilities.
It kind of follows the same reasoning as the story of God offering Solomon whatever he desired as king. What ought a person to wish for if he is a new king and he wants to be a good one? Of course we all know Solomon wished for wisdom, and in doing so he admitted, as we all must, that what he really needed was whatever would help him know what to properly wish for.
I tend to think that every human being has just the amount of power they need, no more and no less. Whatever we want to accomplish, we can do so through cooperation and collaboration. Just about any “super” power one can imagine only amounts to allowing one to accomplish something alone and/or faster as compared to an ordinary person. And what benefit is there, really, in doing something by yourself and/or faster? Cooperation and collaboration or both fun. And anything worth doing is worth taking time to do.
So, yeah… this is why I’m generally bad at answering questions like this. I can’t help but over-think it, I guess.
William, I saw this today, and it seemed to be in a similar vein – not about super powers, but about individualism vs. cooperation. Thought you might find it interesting: http://kottke.org/12/11/stay-small-or-go-big
So if wanting mind control pushes you over to the Dark Side does that make Professor Xavier evil? Or is it different because he didn’t have a choice in whether he had mind control as part of his mutation?
Having mind control powers isn’t inherently evil, but using them is.
I am interested, and available, in doing any sort of audio recording. You’ve kinda sorta heard my voice in the intro and outro, and you can hear more by going to my YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/SirGuido
I just hit 85 pounds this morning on my new lifestyle situation. It feels good to know that I’ve gotten to this point, and it makes me upset with myself that I haven’t done it sooner, especially since I could have been here six months ago if I hadn’t slipped so hard around this time last year.
Per the internet: a male ballerina is a ballerino.