Splashdot 2026 - Day 5
Villains Day (John Scalzi)
So, I wrote a whole book about villains (Starter Villain! A chapter of which was read on the boat before anyone else heard it!), and let me tell you this about the art of creating fictional villains these days:
It’s really hard to make them worse than the ones we currently have in reality right now.
Sure, we can offer up mad scientists, but real life is giving us people in power who are anti-science, and say what you will about mad scientists, even mad science is better than no science. Yes, we offer nefarious fellows who want to take over the world, but our nefarious fellows usually have a plan, one that they’ve worked on diligently for decades. The real life people who want to take over the world these days seem to have thought it up at 3 am while they were bellowing on social media from the toilet. Our villains might want eternal life, but they’re not sucking platelets out of their actual children to do it.
I mean, how do we compete with that? I have an editor! If I try have a villain do the things our real life villains do, my editor would be, all, dude, reel it in, we have to make this believable.
But! There is one thing we can do for our villains to separate them out from the real-life villains infesting our lives at the moment: We can make them interesting.
Because this is the thing about the real-life villains: They’re a pain in the ass, but they’re also pretty boring. In real life, they come in two basic flavors: sociopath, and insecure loser with daddy issues. Sometimes they’re both! But that’s pretty much it. You don’t need to be a rocket surgeon to figure them out.
Meanwhile the mad scientists and sith lords and James Bond antagonists and suave European thieves posing as terrorists and corrupted Maiar crafting rings of power -- well. They may be bad, but they’re good at being bad. They’re usually having fun while they’re doing it, which is more than you can say about the sad sack actual villains we have, who never don’t look miserable AF. Do you think any of them ever indulge in a hearty evil laugh? And their monologues! So boring!
Supervillain Name Generator
At a loss for your Villainous (alter?) identity? We’ve got you covered.
Title: _____
Your birth month:
January: Doctor
February: Lord/Lady
March: Deacon
April: Prince/Princess
May: Captain
June: Professor
July: Sheriff
August: Colonel
September: Judge
October: Warden
November: Mr./Ms/Mrs.
December: Agent
Your Villain Name: _______
First letter of your last name:
A-C: Moriarty
D-F: Discordia
G-I: Sauron
J-K: Heathcliff
L-N: Ivan the Terrible
O-Q: Snidely
R-T: Sam Altman
U-W:Robotnik
X-Z: Doom
Your Epithet: ___________
Your phone’s current charge
0-10: “The Ravenous”
11-20: “of Nottingham”
21-30: “The Cruel”
31-40: “Esquire”
41-50: “Terror of the Lido Deck”
51-60: “of Bleakmoor”
61-70: “Who Must Not be Named. Oops”
71-80: “The Flying Dutchman”
81-90: “The Jabberwocky”
91-100: “as seen in Forbes 30 under 30”
Interview with Jiavani
Your intrepid reporter interviewed Jiavani this morning in the Fern Bar (aka Billboard Onboard) in the midst of the Nieuw Amsterdam’s crew drill, with various instructions and alarms going off every couple of minutes. Said I to the interview subject, “I could’ve picked a better time.”
Splashdot (SD): This is your first JoCo and also your first cruise! How are those meeting or defying your expectations?
Jiavani (J): I had very little expectation. I expected the people to be both older and younger, but instead it’s a lot of people my age. I also thought it would be more of people in individual groups they came with. But it’s been so much more communal in such a cool way.
Me and my travel companion have been checking out every single door decoration starting at the top of the ship. It takes a long time! We’re up to deck 7. I’m writing on every door that has a marker board, looking at every activity and taking everything that says “take me”. We’ve got our little pile of things in the cabin now.
SD: What are some of your favorite things you’ve collected?
J: There’s this little transparent pink poop – it doesn’t look like a poop, looks like a beautiful jewel, but it’s a poop. Some condoms… I met Sandeep (Parikh) on this cruise and there was a door dedicated to his show! It’s so loving.
I’m also amazed by the ship. They are so good at cleaning our rooms!
At the DnD one-shot, I got introduced on the World Stage and I came out – it’s set up like a panel and I am not going to have much time to be physical, so I came out moving and show-boating in front of the table. As I come back around, Sandeep and the host are like “you dropped something.” It was my underwear. I checked and I’m wearing my underwear but Sandeep hands me my underwear – it must have been stuck to something because of how nicely they fold up everything in my room. I was so shocked but nobody believed it wasn’t intentional!
SD: What else have you been up to onboard?
J: Me and my travel companion spent a lot of time just looking over our verandah at the water. We saw whales and dolphins! We saw 19 stingrays. And we saw a hammerhead shark!
SD: I thought those were just in cartoons.
J: Yeah, they seem like the kind of thing that exist just for little boys to wear on t-shirts. But it was like “there’s something! What is it?” “A shark… a hammerhead!” “EEEEEEEEEE”
SD: Haha, that’s exactly how it would happen in a cartoon too… “EEEEEEEEE!”
J: “EEEEEEEE!”
SD: What a great segue. So, you do a lot of voicework. Do the voices ever enter your dreams?
J: You know what I just realized? I never talk in my dreams. Except to say “help me” sometimes.
SD: That’s concerning…
J: Last night I dreamed that these people – they weren’t zombies because they were moving normal – but they were trying to invade my childhood home and I was hiding on my backyard balcony hoping they didn’t see me. They were all wearing these red track suits because right before I came here Oscar Montoya and I filmed a GameChanger episode that was Squid Game themed and so we brought the red tracksuits for cosplay day.
---At this point we were interrupted by another announcement as part of the crew drill which included “ABANDON SHIP”—
J: I love that. It makes me feel so alive (when part of an actually-non-threatening situation.)
SD: If you could bring any person – living or dead – on the cruise, who would it be?
J: My nephew died last year at age 20. I’ve been thinking about him a lot this week. He loved gaming and cosplay. He could turn an incredible pirate look. We’re doing this interview in the console gaming area. He would’ve loved this and found so many of his people here. He lived so much online. I think about how it might’ve shaped how he friended – hanging out with people for extended period of time in a quality way. If I could give a gift, I wish I could’ve given him and one his friends to be here and feel how good it feels.
I found a door with an invitation to write the name of somebody that you miss or someone you’ve lost and I got to write his name – Icarian – on the door.
---At this point both your interviewer and subject were tearing up---
SD: It never ceases to surprise me how many times I cry during this week of fun.
J: The things that matter to me most are people being their authentic self and having community. I’m so happy this event exists and I get to be here. There’s nothing like witnessing and being immersed in people being their authentic selves around their people.
Caption Contest Day 5
Winner: @arisdawdle “I bet they never make Carrot Top play Ebunny and Ivory.
A Brief Oral History of the Wang Wang (@max)
[Community Submission]
The following is all true to my understanding. The most proper telling of this history is in the aft part of the Lido deck late at night with a drink in hand, so I hope you can pardon the embellishments and inaccuracies, but such is the way of such tales. In that way it becomes accuracy.
So that you know, Weng Weng in addition to being a legend of the seas was also an actual man. Weng Weng was an actor and a martial artist. Weng Weng had a wild career across a variety of movies of various qualities. Some of those qualities included (but were not limited to) “culturally insensitive” and “they don’t make movies like that anymore” (in both positive and negative forms).
Weng Weng was a son of the Philippines and this contributed to how he became a legend of the sea. It was seen fitting to immortalize such a legend by naming a tropical drink after the man.
Weng Weng the man had a deceptive strength. He was short in stature but packed a mean punch (or kick, as necessary to the film plot). Weng Weng the drink is equally deceptive. It tastes like a fruit drink but underneath packs a huge punch. (Of alcohol content; very few are wild enough to make a Punch version of the Weng Weng. Be warned that variation is dangerous.)
The Weng Weng drink has the same basic recipe as the Long Island Iced Tea. It begins as a grand tour of each of the well liquors of the bar. In encountering such a mix of flavors of different alcohols the brain and the tongue are easily confused and refuse to believe there is any flavor but “uh alcohol, maybe?” It is in this moment that a typical Long Island Iced Tea adds a bare spritz of Coca-Cola for color and “ice tea” flavor. In a similar way the Weng Wend as the tropical LIT of the Seas introduces the barest hint of fruit juice for “fruit drink” confusion to our easily confused brains and its primary color. Sometimes also a barest drop of grenadine is added to give the lovely color tones of a beach at sunset.
As legend turns to myth, and it was before even my time, but it was Holland America on the first couple of JoCo Cruises that introduced Weng Weng the drink to the JoCo Cruise in early Wang Wang Happy Hours and as a highlighted Holland America favorite drink. It is from this introduction and Holland America’s zeal on ships like this one that JoCo Cruise picked up the confusing alternate spelling Wang Wang for preference.
This was not a confusion of only theory, for subsequent JoCo Cruises in the Royal Caribbean years experienced this confusion in direct practice. It was in those confusing years that I was first introduced to the Wang Wang, and it is that confusion I may blame for myself not being particularly impressed by the drink in those first encounters.
Those that kept the faith of the Wang Wang in the RCI years experienced confusion, if not outright hostility, by bartenders in using the pronunciation and spelling to which they had become accustomed. Assuming those bartenders were even knowledgeable of Weng Weng the drink, because it also became a part of ordering a Wang Wang in those darker waters to also explain our LIT of the Sea to the inexperienced bartender.
The return to Holland America was a homecoming in many ways, but it was especially such a deep homecoming for the Wang Wang faithful. In that fervor of a new age reborn, a new Legendarium was forged. A Pope of the Wangvatican rose to lead the faithful. The Order of the Iron Liver formed as entourage and easily excitable fellowship.
In cruises after that the various spellings were debated and schisms almost formed, as is the way of fake holy orders among nerds wishing to be technically correct. (As we all know, the best kind of correct.) Wang Wang is still an approved spelling of Holland America’s bars. On a ship such as this it is never wrong and sometimes the easiest way to order one. (Even as the receipt spelling has reverted to Weng Weng.) Weng Weng is the name of the man, myth, and legend. It too is now recognized as never wrong. Wæng Wæng is a fun compromise to amuse and delight, if you’ve got the keyboard chops to spell it. It has also been said that Wang Wang is also a common island onomatopoeia for the sound of an ambulance’s siren, once plausible consequence of a night of too many of the drinks.
It is claimed that the Wangvatican Pope cruises among us still, but as each cruise passes becomes shadowed in more mysteries. Perhaps you might more easily meet an active member of the Order of the Iron Liver. One of the most reliable ways to do so remains to order a Wang Wang in a crowded ship’s bar and upon receipt shout your heartiest “Wang! Wang!” Should you get a response in kind you either have encountered a large enough roving group of Red Team looking for something to chant that hour and/or some of the Order.
It is said that the Order still happily recruits new Cruisers. It is an honor gifted for enthusiasm, not just to the legend of Weng Weng the man, Wang Wang the drink, or a mix of the two, but also an enthusiasm for the cruise, its strange and sometimes silly legends in general, and a responsible but fun use of a ship’s drink package. It is such things that keep the cruise rich.
Your humble unofficial cruise historian of tales told over drinks,
@Max
(This history was not an ordained product of the church of the Wangvatican and is my own recollection and retelling. I assume most inaccuracies and embellishments are my own, by way of alcohol, but I hope to have represented enough of the truth in making this account that all may raise a glass in toast. Wang Wang!)