Tag Archives: Online chat

Technology

When It Is (and Isn’t) OK to ‘Double Text’ Someone You’re Dating

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Photo: Antonio Guillem (Shutterstock)

Dating comes with its fair share of rules (“wait 24 hours until after the date to call”), and so does texting (“never end a text with a period unless you want to be a jerk”). Put them together and it’s no wonder we’re so anxious about sending and receiving texts from our latest crush. Texting etiquette is already a tricky area to navigate within the throes of a new relationship, so how do you handle the double text?

The double text is when you send two or more text messages to someone before they respond to the first, and it’s often considered “cringe” as it can come across as a little needy or desperate if you just started seeing someone. When it comes to texting, patience is everything, says Laura Bilotta, founder of Single in the City and an expert date coach and matchmaker. “If you’re still in the early stages of a relationship with someone new, try showing some restraint. After all, one message may be all that’s needed for your crush to respond back!”

If you’re guilty of sending a double text, don’t worry. Bilotta breaks down when it’s appropriate to send a double text, and when you need to double down and refrain from sending one.

Should you send that double text?

If you’ve just met someone, you’re probably better off not pressing send. “Double-texting someone can come off as desperate or clingy, leaving your conversations feeling less than romantic,” Bilotta says. “Taking the time to give a person space before following up is essential in any meaningful text conversation.”

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Instead, Bilotta recommends understanding your motivations behind sending that double text. “Think about what you’re wanting out of this exchange: Is it something meaningful or just an attempt to soothe away those anxious feelings we all experience when communication doesn’t go as planned?” If you’re feeling sad or anxious about not receiving a text back, Bilotta says that’s perfectly normal. Process your emotions rather than texting that person back. “It can be tough waiting for that text back, but if it does happen eventually, the patience will pay off.”

And remember: It’s totally normal not to hear from someone for a day or three or even a week, especially if you’ve just met them.

Is it ever OK to send a double text?

Of course it is. There are no hard fast rules since every situation is nuanced. According to Bilotta, it’s OK to send a follow-up text if you’re wondering about the other person’s feelings or trying to ward off potential hurt, disappointment and rejection, but “try to give them a chance to respond to your first message before you do so. By sending an extra message, you may get that response your heart desires—never let yourself feel like it was something more than just missing notification timing.”

It’s also OK if you send a double text for logistics purposes, like if you’re trying to reach them for something important, like rescheduling or confirming plans. “Sometimes one message doesn’t do the trick, and that second nudge might be exactly what they need to respond quickly so things can move forward,” she says.

Just make sure you’re not relying on the double text to manipulate the other person’s time or get them to share something with you that they’re not ready to express yet.

“It’s important to remember that the person on the receiving end of your messages has a life too,” Bilotta says. “If they aren’t responding, there’s a good chance they’re busy with something else and aren’t able to get to the phone right away—you’re just putting extra pressure on them and showing them that you expect them to respond immediately whenever something comes up.”

What to do instead of sending the double text

If you’re feeling down because someone didn’t respond to your text, don’t feel discouraged. Bilotta says you should process those emotions and take time for yourself while also taking an intentional break from your phone. “It’ll give both of you space while also giving the chance that they might reach out when least expected.”

At the end of the day, Bilotta says the most important thing is to remember your worth. “Everyone deserves to have people in their life who they can count on and appreciate them. If your feelings aren’t reciprocated and you don’t hear back, it’s all right—you could be missing out on a whole world of possibilities. So take this as an opportunity to explore and meet new people.”

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Technology

Warzone 2.0 Proximity Chat Is Unhinged

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If you hear a heavy Long Island accent mocking you in Warzone 2.0, it’s me.
Image: Activision / Kotaku

We’ve only had Warzone 2.0 for a few hours, and it’s already clear that proximity chat is an absolutely bonkers new feature. Today, the brand-new battle royale from Call of Duty launched an hour or so earlier than planned, and there are a ton of new features to parse through—an entirely revamped inventory system, a tag-team gulag, and proximity chat aka toxicity in your vicinity.

Read More: Call Of Duty: Warzone 2.0: Everything You Need To Know About The Gulag, Proximity Chat, and More

A video from FaZe Clan member ZooMaa shows off just how powerful proximity chat can be as a means of weeding out enemy squad members—and talking so much shit they get nervous and choke. “Come here buddy, I hear you dude,” an enemy says during ZooMaa’s stream. ZooMaa then smack-talks him back, repeatedly asking “where are you?” before the two engage in a hilarious shouting/shooting match.

Of course, famous Call of Duty streamer TimTheTatman has also already weighed in on the proximity chat discourse, sharing a video of himself telling an enemy to “peep the head” before he headshots them and calling the new feature “content.”

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It’s unclear how close you have to be for proximity chat to kick in, and if you have your in-game chat off or your mic muted, it won’t really matter. But when it does start working, it’s obvious that it’s the kind of feature that will only spawn more chaos, more yelling, and in a lot of cases, more toxicity. Will this game make playing against dudes more insufferable? Maybe. Will I double down on being equally annoying? You bet.

Read More: Modern Warfare II Reveals a Game-Changing, Non-Linear Battle Pass

During my first Warzone 2.0 quads match, my teammates and I picked up a bounty contract and were given the location of an enemy player to take out, which would award us a fat stack of cash. As we drew closer to the location on our tac-map, it became clear that the enemy, aware of the bounty on his head, went to the tippy-top of the highest building in the area. As we climbed it searching for him, his voice suddenly rang out in my headset, his name in the bottom left-hand corner of my scream.

“Get the fuck away from me!” he yelled, panic rising in his voice. “I’m coming for you, baby,” I sang back. My team all began singing “we’re coming for you” like the ghosts of schoolchildren from the 19th century until we flushed him out. His last words were “god dammit.”

It is abundantly clear within the first few hours of launch that Warzone 2.0’s proximity chat is going to be a polarizing feature. For marginalized people playing Call of Duty, it could be yet another way for them to be the subject of harassment. Fortunately, you can turn off proximity chat, voice chat, and last words chat all in the Warzone 2.0 settings menu. If you’re like me, however, and have been hardened by 20 years of abuse from straight cishet men in FPS titles, you’re welcome to join me in keeping proximity chat on.

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Technology

Steam User Spends 5 Years Purchasing All Of Its Hot Dog Emojis

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Image: Valve / Kotaku / NotionPic (Shutterstock)

20-year-old Brian Haugh has spent the past six years purchasing thousands of “:steam2016:” emoticons, which Valve created to promote the 2016 Steam Summer Sale and looks like a hot dog wearing little shoes. On Steam, you can purchase emoticons from other users in the Community Marketplace or create them by playing games that generate Steam collectibles. You can use them when chatting in Steam, to spruce up your profile description, or to create Super Mario art. Steam emoticons are typically $0.10 curios with limited practical use and aesthetic value, but they mean much more to Haugh.

“I will never stop looking for or at wieners,” he told me. “Wieners will be on my mind until the day I die.”

Some of Haugh’s dogs.
Screenshot: Brian Haugh

Haugh is on a mission to buy every :steam2016: hot dog emoticon available on the Community Marketplace, and has been doing so since the day he turned 16 in 2016. He routinely refers to them as “wieners” or “the wieners,” and as of June 30, he has 2,525 of them in his collection, which cost him over $250. He tracks these numbers in a fastidious spreadsheet, which contains all wiener transaction history and visualizes data in a graph named “Wieners Purchased Over Time.”

2018 was a good wiener year.
Screenshot: Brian Haugh

The wieners were a joke, at first. “I used to be a part of a small gaming group that met together to play Mount and Blade: Napoleonic Wars,” Haugh said. “During the summer of 2016, the Steam wiener emoji was released, and for whatever reason, I was stupid hyped over it. I kept spamming it, and our leader got fed up because other people were starting to join me. So he banned the use of it, stifling my rights to use the wiener emoji.”

In response, Haugh and his friends started drafting plans for a “wiener resistance,” which consisted of multiple people spamming :steam2016: until they got kicked from the server. He started buying the emoticon in bulk shortly after in celebration of the successful trolling, he says. Do you remember what it’s like to be 16?

The 2016 wiener resistance gained momentum on Steam.
Screenshot: Brian Haugh

But if you look beyond the teen boy shenanigans, Haugh’s attention to detail cannot be overstated. He’s dedicated to his craft, which happens to be collecting wieners. He’s so dedicated that he still performs routine checks on Steam’s wiener load even after feeling like he already made his “final purchase,” which bought up every available :steam2016: emoticon at that point in time (aside from one priced at $400).

“It has become a religion for me,” he said. “It’s always in the back of my mind.” And it has changed his understanding of real hot dogs forever—Haugh says that it “might sound strange, but occasionally I’ll see one, and this whole experience will flash into my mind and I’ll laugh.”

In addition to motivating schematic shifts, his mass wiener purchases might also be influencing the Steam market. They’re likely to be the sole determinants of :steam2016: emoticon prices, and because of the spreadsheet and Steam’s own data visualizers, Haugh has proof that his bulk purchases often lead to price spikes.

“No less than three days earlier, I had made a purchase of 66 wieners,” Haugh says about the July 1 price hike.
Screenshot: Brian Haugh

It checks out. “If I bought every single emoji worth $0.03 – $0.10 on a specific day, for example, the next day, the only [emoticons] being sold would be $0.11,” he said. “The average value would have increased, and other people would begin selling their own wieners at $0.11, which could be seen as the average trading prices for that day in the Steam market.”

“Steam’s marketplace is similar to that of a stock market,” he said. “Things are only able to be bought if someone else is selling,” which is why he let the $400 wiener live.

Our world seems to get darker and more filled with monkeypox every day, but at least one man’s loyalty to wieners stays good and strong.

“I don’t ever plan on stopping,” Haugh said. “There will always be some poor fool to list a wiener for a few cents on the market, and when he does, I’ll be there to buy it.”

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Technology

LiveJournal, Grooveshark, and 12 More of the Best Internet Relics We Left Behind

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Photo: Sharaf Maksumov (Shutterstock)

Figuring out the age of the Internet is like figuring out the age of the universe: We could date it back to the 1960s and ARPANET, or the introduction of the TCP/IP protocol in 1983, or the launch of America Online in 1985, or the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989, or maybe the creation of the Netscape browser in 1994.

However you date the inception of the Internet, two things are inarguably true: The technology has changed modern life in fundamental ways, and the modern Internet is absolutely rotten with abandonware. Not only is it chock-a-block with dead links and missing data, but many of the tools that we once used enthusiastically are either completely dead or exist today as ghostly, barely-functioning time capsules. Heck, Google alone has killed dozens of tools that it launched with great fanfare and then almost immediately abandoned.

Sometimes this is due to changing technologies—there were dozens of search engines prior to Google’s total domination of the space, after all—and sometimes it’s due to good old-fashioned capitalist competition. Whatever the reason, there are a lot of old Internet relics we left behind, and folks of a certain age might be forgiven for having a lingering affection for them. Or a lingering morbid curiosity, because sometimes there’s a definite WTF element to the old tools we used to rely on. Here are some of the Internet relics we left behind as we rocket relentlessly into the future.

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