Shoot Club: Episode III: I'm Just So Tired of These Star Wars
TomChick - Columns - Comments - 06/02/05
Stardar is what Trevor calls a person's heightened awareness for other people who are into Star Wars and Star Trek. You know, like radar or gaydar, but for Star Wars. There's even gamedar, which is the ability to detect gamers. And like Trevor says, sometimes you have to go to active emissions. Maybe you'll bring a manual to lunch. You'll sit there in the Koo Koo Roo with a World of Warcraft manual propped up in front of you. Or maybe you'll wear a Penny Arcade T-shirt when you go out to run errands. You're trawling the real world for gamers.
Trevor's Stardar is usually pretty good, but I think his gamedar isn't very well tuned. It's prone to being spoofed by weak signals. In his world, anyone can be a gamer. Well, any guy, at least. Once me and Trevor were at an office building helping someone set up their network when they had a bomb scare. It was one of those sociable pre-9/11 bomb scares, so everyone was milling around the plaza in front of the building, chatting with people they might otherwise never talk to. There was some guy sitting at the fountain with an Electronics Boutique bag.
"So. What did you get?" Trevor asked him.
"Excuse me?"
Trevor nodded at the bag.
"Oh, I just got some personal things together I didn't want to leave in the office." He peered into the bag. "Family pictures, a couple of files..."
"No, I mean what did you get there. You know." Trevor wagged his head again at the bag.
"I don't follow you."
"What do you like to play?"
"Play?"
"Yeah. Action? RTS? Do you do it online or just single player? What's your game?"
"I don't know what that means."
"What did you get there?" Trevor thrust his chin again.
The man just looked at Trevor.
"At EB," Trevor said, giving the man a knowing look.
"What's EB?"
Trevor was undaunted. He flicked his chin at the bag again. The man looked at the bag as if he were seeing it for the first time.
"Oh, Electronics Boutique," he read from the side, "This is where I buy my son's Pokemon cards."
Trevor still wasn’t giving up. "Yeah? And did you pick up a little sumthin'-sumthin' for Daddy?" It almost sounded like a sexual advance.
"You really need to work on your gamedar," I later told him.
"Yeah, I guess that was a false return. It happens, you know.”
"Also, I don't think sumthin'-sumthin' means what you think it means."
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