June 15, 2001 "How do I set waypoints?" Charlie asks. A non-geek has come a long way when he knows about setting waypoints. "Well, you kind of can't." "What do you mean 'kind of can't'?" "You can lay out a route and assign units to follow it, but you can't do waypoints per se." "How do I lay out a route?" "Hit the 'z' key." "'z' for route? Why 'z'? Is that something from the movie?" "It's from Red Alert 2. It's not supposed to make sense. It's just how they do things at Westwood. So press 'z', then left click to drop your waypoints, right click to back out, then select your units and left click on the first waypoint you dropped to assign your selected units to follow the path." "Nevermind," Charlie sighs. "Is it too complicated?" Trevor asks. "No, I just don't need to do it anymore. All my guys died. Your harvester ran over them." "Yeah, that'll happen," Trevor says, delighted that he's beating Charlie, who's never played the game before. "So that clam shell thing is supposed to be a worm?" Charlie asks, "Why a worm? That's not very scary." "It's a giant worm. It's like ten stories long." "Why not a slug or a caterpillar? Or a snail? At least a snail has armor." "It's a giant worm. It could swallow big things in one bite. A giraffe, for instance, or a Taco Bell sign." "Whoa, it's getting struck by lighting!" Purple bolts of lightning crackle over the worm's head. The worm plows through the sand, unconcerned. "That's worm sign." "Worm sign? Like worm droppings?" "No. Worm sign. It means there's a worm coming." "Well, bear sign is bear droppings," Charlie says, "I don't know why worm sign is lightning." When Charlie joins us for Shoot Club, he tells his wife that he's going to poker night. "It's easier for her to understand poker than for me to try to explain what we're really doing," Charlie says, having lost interest in Dune now that Trevor's destroying all his buildings. "Hey, that's what I do," says Jude, "I tell her we play poker. Also, whenever I buy a new game, I tell her I lost the money at poker night. When a bunch of really good games come out, she thinks I really suck at poker." The usual conversation starts up about being closet gamers. At least, Charlie thinks he's a gamer now that he's bought his own copy of Diablo II. They start talking about how they sneak games into the house past their wives and girlfriends. I've heard these a million times, so I go over to watch Trevor, who lives with his mother where he keeps his games on bookshelves in plain view. He's carefully destroying Charlie's base one building at a time, healing any of his own units that have been damaged. "The game's over," I tell him, "You can quit out." "No way. This is the best part." "Shooting defenseless buildings?" "Yeah. Spoils of war."
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