I did indeed intended possession to include controlling the possessee (like a ghost), and mind control to be able to affect multiple targets.
QotD #133 Reply: Possession could be fun, and mind control seems quite potent, but ultimately, both are pretty morally questionable, and if you ask me, creepy. If I had to choose one, I’d choose possession, but I’d prefer to not have either.
Question of the Day #134: Least favourite food?
As I alluded to with my “what is this neither you speak of”, I am definitely not in the “both of these powers are creepy and wrong” camp. Professor Xavier has always been one of my favorite characters in comicdom, specifically because he takes what is typically thought of as a “total villain power” (thanks for the quote, Freddy) and illustrates how it can be used for the cause of good. I do acknowledge that the transgressive potential of such abilities is tremendous, but just as a gun allows any idiot to commit mass murder, and we just sort of trusted that once we opened that Pandora’s box that our social systems would somehow manage to handle it, the same logic applies to any superpower that we ever might develop somehow. There are no evil tools, though some tools may lend themselves more easily to evil ends; ultimately, it is the intention of the user which should be policed, not the abilities they could theoretically have access to.
As to least favorite food, there are many foods that I wouldn’t eat if you paid me to (live escargot might have topped the list, if not for the tremendous recent push to try and convert insects into marketable food items - “cricket chips” and the like), so I think it’s a more interesting answer if I try to pick a food that I do LIKE a little bit, but would rather have virtually anything else if given a choice. I could think of something like oatmeal or plain rice or a White Castle hamburger, but the actual example I’ll go with is the least appetizing food item that I actually have in my larder right now: Maruchan Yakisoba, Teryaki Beef flavor. The packet of boullion flavor powder that comes with it is actually quite delicious, but the bottom line is that you’re using it to prepare friggin’ ramen noodle soup, and I doubt you’d find one person anywhere who would claim that store-bought ramen packets are their definition of high-quality food. The standard ramen sells for a quarter a package, and in my opinion isn’t worth that much; the Yakisoba is a slightly higher-quality noodle and comes in a convenient tray so you don’t need a dish to prepare it (plus there’s a packet of freeze-dried veggies, although I don’t use those personally), so they sell that for a dollar and occasionally mark it down to 80c on sale, which is when I bother to buy any. It’s a very easy and somewhat satisfying meal, but it’s absolutely the last item I actually WANT on my menu.
Yeah, they can certainly be used for great good. I just don’t want to be the person doing that, just as I don’t want to be the person who has to torture someone, even if it’s for the greater good.
Getting shot by that idiot with a gun is painful and I’d probably die. And that’s terrible. Getting mind controlled into shooting my friends and family and then myself is, to me, much worse.
I completely agree with this point.
QotD #134 Reply: Fish. It’s slimy and I find the smell repugnant.
Question of the Day #135: Upload your mind into Cyberspace, or augment yourself with cybernetics?
Having worked on a number of “dual use” technologies in my career, I am completely convinced that there are VERY evil tools, and I make special effort to understand the purpose of my work before I consider a new assignment. I challenge anyone to come up with a viable non-evil use for, say, any weapon of mass destruction.
As tempting as some cybernetics would be, if I can shed my meat-sack entirely and exist as pure information in the digital universe, I wouldn’t hesitate a nanosecond (which is good, because a pure computer consciousness can get some real work done with every one of those it can muster).
Hold the world hostage with the threat of annihilation if society doesn’t get its shit together and achieve a “more perfect” social order (end world hunger, achieve total peace, etc. etc.)? That might be megalomaniacal, but I’d argue that it’s no more evil than a cop pointing a gun at you and telling you to get on the ground with your hands behind your head. Sometimes the threat of force is all that gets things moving in the right direction; it’d be nice if we as a species were motivated by logic and aspiration as effectively as by fear, but we ain’t.
EDIT: Not quite sure which half of this post you’re hearting here, Fjur…
That’s a good recipe for more nations/organizations to build their own WMDs in order to resist your threat. Deterrence just encourages your opponent to get creative. I disagree that fear is the best motivator, and there are plenty of counterexamples out there; for example, if what you suggest is true then states with the death penalty should have lower crime rates, but that is not the case.
For an excellent example of a productive way forward, in the '70s, the Nixon administration unilaterally ended the US’s biological weapons research programs and spearheaded international treaties prohibiting the development of such weapons. (Nixon!) And now nobody is pointing bio-weapons at each other. Which is good, because they are evil.
You both make some pretty good points.
QotD #135 Reply: Being in Cyberspace could be interesting, but I’d only do it if there was 100% certainty that I could get back to my body. I find it only slightly less creepy than possessing another. I’d also not like cybernetics, but if I had to choose one, I guess I’d rather have some cybernetics than be stuck in digital reality.
If it’s not obvious by now, I’d very much like to stay 100% human me.
Question of the Day #136: In your own words, what is the meaning of “Evil?”
An exhaustive definition of things I regard as “evil” would take forever. When I use the word, particularly capitalized, I’m usually thinking in terms of a D&D alignment, and I’m actually quite proud of my take on how to handle it there. Basically, Good is defined as selflessness and Evil as selfishness, though it’s a bit more involved than that; the key point is that either of these is a bad thing in excess while being desirable in moderation. An example I frequently cite is “you can’t claim that you love your children if you would balk at the idea of brutally murdering someone who hurts them or threatens to”. Good would preach that although it was Evil to harm your kids, two wrongs don’t make a right, and any retributive violence on your part only dishonors the memory of those innocents; in such a situation, your selfishness and viciousness are an extension of your rational self-interest, and labeling that as Evil is kind of a ridiculous misnomer. (This extrapolation gets even more interesting when looking at organizations that practice Evil for its own sake, such as the church of the Drow in my version of the Underdark, where Lolth no longer rules and “Evil” is venerated as a non-anthropomorphic force. The Drow’s name for this force is a word that means something like “the necessary ruthlessness which enables the strong to grow stronger in defiance of inevitable entropy”, and so they see it as the highest of all possible virtues, and this is not a completely insane viewpoint, particularly given what a harshly resource-poor and monster-infested environment they’re surviving in. The fact that this word is translated as “Evil” in the Common tongue is just one more reason for the Drow to believe that the Overworld is a nightmare place that their ancestors were right to leave; what kind of maniacs would condemn a person for doing anything necessary to ensure their continued survival and thriving in the face of overwhelming adversity? I really enjoy exploring these sorts of comparative ethics, and fantasy contexts are great for doing so, which is why I am so deeply committed to only indulging in speculative fiction.
QotD #136 Reply: Yeah, “selfishness” seems like a spot on synonym to me. (Green Arrow once said [in the TV show Arrow], “Someone once told me that the essence of heroism is to die so others may live.” I know, it’s only tangentially relevant.)
Cool idea with the Drow. Since they no longer worship Lolth, do they keep the Matriarchy?
Question of the Day #137: How do you pronounce “Drow,” “Otyugh,” “Cthulhu,” and “Drizzt?”
Drow rhymes with “now” in my head. Drizzt is a single syllable with a short i and long z and while I’d try to end with a T sound, since it follows a voiced sound it’d probably come out more as a d. I don’t think I’ve actually ever needed to say either word aloud, though.
Cthulhu is generally said with the Chaosium house version of Cuh-thoo-loo because it’s easy and common, but with full knowledge that it’s inaccurate. Next most common is kthoo-loo (from the velar stop k directly into the alveolar fricative th - the sounds don’t actually interfere with one another and so it’s totally possible, just not common at the beginning of words in English). I will also drop in the really guttural, throaty version with a hard aspirated T instead of the more common fricative TH that’s probably closer to the “correct” way to say such an alien word using human vocal apparatus, but mostly only in contexts like games where I’m trying to speak “in character”.
Otyugh is not a word I’m familiar with. Looking at it right now, I’d probably start with “oat” then “you” followed by a simple “g” sound. It’d rhyme with “fugue”.
Drow: drau̇ (as WT said, rhymes with “now” when I pronounce it)
Otyugh: ō’-tē-əg (where that last syllable is basically “ug”)
Cthulhu: k-tü’-lü (as WT described, I use the hard “t” version instead of the “th”)
Drizzt: I don’t. 
Oh yeah, the church’s entire entrenched power structure lies with the priestesses, and the secular equivalent are the Matron Mothers of all the various Houses; it’ll take more than your god personally decimating your leadership and then effing off by herself to overturn that level of societal bias.
(But because I do agree that it’s kinda shit that matriarchal societies in fiction are virtually always awful, I did go out of my way to create ONE dwarf clan where the women are in charge and it worked out completely fine. Dwarves’ natural trend toward Lawful Good made it relatively easy for such a society to work the bugs out and not turn into some sort of awful man-hating horribleness, like 95% of the various monster races end up with when their females are the more dominant ones.)
Otyugh I generally say “awt-yuh”, possibly with the hard G on the end. But I generally don’t call them that at all. When the name of a D&D monster is a made-up word, I usually come up with a more commonsense descriptor instead. Otyughs are “trash collectors”. 
What he said. I’ve heard HPL originally intended it to be more like “kloo-loo”, but frankly I just don’t accept that as canon, regardless of who sources it.
Drow is an interesting one, because while it is now considered synonymous with “dark elf”, I’ve seen sources indicating that it was originally “trow” (rhymes with “toe”), a British Isles equivalent to the Nordic “troll”. You certainly could put Underfolk or Troglodytes or Cave Trolls or something into a D&D world and call them “drows” (rhymes with “doze”), while also having Dark Elves as a separate species. This might be particularly fitting for the Mystara setting, which has “shadow elves” largely unrelated to the Drizzt-style Drow, but my knowledge of Mystara is microscopic so I’ll pursue that line of inquiry no farther. Regardless, I too stick with the trend of calling them Drow (rhymes with “now”).
When I think through all the inns and oughts of English noughts and crosses, why I outta…
I lol’ed…
Yeah, that makes sense. However, I could also see an argument that (if the Priestesses’ clerical magic is gone with Lolth and not replaced too soon by Evil Magic) the male Drow might be able to take over or equalise the power, because they are trained in arcane and martial skill, whereas almost all female Drow only know divine magic.
QotD #137 Reply:
I’m pretty sure my pronunciation for all of these are wrong, though. Strangely, I’ve only read these words. I’ve never heard them pronouncounced by anyone other than those who I told them how to pronounce them.
Question of the Day #138: Why am I the only one who isn’t getting this Drizzt joke?
I don’t know that there’s much to get, so don’t read too much into it. 
I personally feel Drizzt isn’t that interesting of a character and have never really understood the love for him. 
(That doesn’t mean I think people shouldn’t appreciate Drizzt – I try not to tell others what they can and can’t enjoy! I just don’t get it. 
)
I’m mostly aware of him solely because of the character of Zz’dtri in OotS. I know just enough about him for the joke to land.
Didn’t really think of that. I assumed that the clerics weren’t powerless for more than a few “days” before they figured out how to bypass Lolth’s intercession and tap the divine source directly, the way a Paladin does (in game settings that don’t force paladins to work for a god). But this is entirely speculative; a different author with a different story to tell could definitely Justify how a drow patriarchy movement (mostly originating in the military, which is currently the one Drow power structure not entirely opposed to males gaining rank) could displace a Lolth-less church.
What he said.
QotD #138 Reply: Ah, okay, so you meant you don’t talk about Drizzt. I thought his name had some hidden pun or some such wordplay. I’ve read a couple of Drizzt books. They weren’t outstandingly good, but they weren’t remarkable bad either. He definitely has a bit too much angst sometimes. However, one thing I dislike greatly is when a parody of something is more famous/popular than the original. Parodies are all fun and good (especially of things I don’t like), but not when they eclipse the thing they are making fun of, in my opinion. (Monty Python and the Holy Grail is another offender of this to Arthurian Legends, in my opinion.)
Question of the Day #139: What parody do you like the most? What parody do you like the least?
Good question. If you count OOTS as a parody, that would pretty definitely have to be my answer; I would argue that while it certainly has strong parody elements, particularly at the start, enough Cerebus Syndrome applies that it doesn’t fully qualify as a parodic work anymore. If you take it that way, then my fave actually parody is probably Holy Grail, although I can definitely get why someone who unironically loves the original Arthurian mythos might be annoyed a send up like this.
Since I don’t consume a very large amount of parody material in the first place, I have trouble picking out one that I really hate, as opposed to my just never having been interested. Probably my main one that I did see and mostly disliked, although the parody status is again arguable, is Rick and Morty. I saw four random episodes, and there were some good sci-fi ideas and a few actually funny jokes, but it mostly wasn’t my style. The best episode of the four was a send-up of the Purge, which I managed to like despite never having seen those movies. But the worst episode was mostly just the family watching a bunch of alien TV shows, which were very stupid and frequently disgusting or obnoxious, with a lot of attempts at surrealism that mostly just landed as “the joke is how funny this joke isn’t”, with the family staring slack-jawed at what might as well just have been a drunk clown with a coloring book counting backwards in Chinese. Actually I’d probably have liked that more. Point being, when you combine that with the show’s, IMO, very ugly animation style (the mouth movements in particular gross me out), I definitely had to just say “this really isn’t for me” and walk away.
My favorite parody is probably still Galaxy Quest.
My least favorite parody is pretty much anything that’s not an Affectionate Parody, really. As typically when people who aren’t fans of a work do parodies, the end result is both so off-base and mean-spirited that I struggle to find it funny. Whereas fans are more likely to know the things about the work that actually really are legitimately doofy, and approach them with enough light-heartedness to make the humor land better.
Ooh, I change my runner-up answer from Monty Python to this. I haven’t seen it in a while but it’s great. Especially Tony Shalhoub, as I’ve since become a big fan of Monk. And I’ve always been huge into Star Trek, so the humor of this one very much lands for me. Holy Grail falls to third, I guess.
All of this, pretty much. I’m not aware offhand of any examples of the bad kind, but I would very likely agree they’re bad. You want “friendly ribbing”, not the awesome 5th edition D&D bard spell Vicious Mockery.