Killjoy. But in elementary school I’d log into other people’s saved Oregon Trail games and kill all their characters, so.

I remember when one of my college roomates hooked his AIM up to his phone for the first time. Shortly after, I wanted to get his attention so I just spammed him with something like 50 messages, all just “hey” or some variation of that.

When I was in college (2000/01 winter break), a girl about my age randomly messaged me. She lived almost a thousand miles away. We got along great, and continued to chat on a daily basis. I was the one who told her to turn on the TV to see what was happening on 9/11, for example.

You can download your chat history? I can’t even imagine how cringy it’d be to read much of that today.

I had to spend so long reading “TtoThaX” to understand what it was supposed to be!

I don’t want my old chat history. I feel like that was a different human being. I would probably be ashamed of a lot of it.

I had several embarrassing stories. 2 in particular.

As an adult I’ve had entire courtships happen through gchat! Hard to imagine life without it.

My wife and I were best buds on AIM when we were in high school. There is far too much to dig through. But I’m sure my life would be waaaay different without AIM.

I’ll add that dog owners should do the same. As in, ask permission before you introduce* your dog to mine.

We taught our daughter to always ask anyone with a dog if she can pet it. It’s not only respectful to the dog owner, but even some labs or other known “good” dogs can be defensive and skittish and could bite. It is safer for the dog, for the dog’s handler and for the person approaching to just ask every time.

Honestly, as much of a dog lover as I am, and as difficult as it is for me to let any sweet pooch just go by, I leave the service dogs alone. They’ve got a hard enough job as it is without me getting in the way.

Literally no reason other than you want to be able to reserve your seat ahead of time, sit in a comfortable seat with extra legroom, watch movies and satellite TV for free, or have the option to charge your gadgets while you’re flying.

I generally only fly United cause it is habit. It seems by the time you reach a new mileage status the service all around has gotten worse.

United has a hub in New Jersey, of course they are terrible.

So the free texting isn’t free texting at all. You can use a couple apps to send messages for free. Texting is universal, the use of these apps is not.

Nice, so United really is as crappy as it seems.

I think this is a smart move. Diplomacy is a delicate thing, especially between adversarial nations, and an additional 140 characters will allow more nuanced dialogues between world leaders which could prevent wars and save lives.

I had a friend who responded to one of my emails with:

I have always used / interpret the keyboard smash as a mark of frustration, exasperation, or annoyed-shock. Never would have thought it was someone laughing.