#ventrilo

Everybody's saying that 2026 is the new 2016.

Today I noticed that it really is easier to just press call and share ideas back and forth rather than sending thousands of messages.

It’s crazy how the chat era, which was my first taste of international communication, was so big due to phone calls being completely out of question, as they were much more expensive with long-distance billing, roaming and such.

I remember spending many, many, many hours of my youth on my pentium 1 with dial-up, loading up ICQ or AOL, and chatting with complete strangers about comic books, games, goth stuff, comedy, punk bands and whatever I was into at the moment. 

You would just click on a category and it showed you a ton of people with similar tastes. What an amazing way to see just how small the world was, and what an incredible way to share information about anything.

That later carried on into text messaging, we all began texting each other because, again, it was cheaper than calling, and you don’t have to flatten your ass for hours on a computer. Then came the muthaload, broadband. With broadband and skype you could just have a video chat with anybody at any time, as long as you wanted, at no extra cost. Following that came teamspeak and ventrilo, which allowed you to chat with other online players. 

All of those brought an era of internet voice calling that was wonderful, you could talk for hours with friends and family while playing or just browsing the internet, some nerds even used it for work!

Then I have no idea what the hell happened that everybody became terrified of voice calls.

MSN AIM came out and everybody began just typing, chatting, sending SMS, anything to avoid a 2 minute conversation. It also allowed introverts and people of all kinds and tastes to come out of the shadows and express themselves in ways they never did before, for better or worse.

But today, a lot of us, who can chew the fat for hours, sometimes prefer to just send a message and a gif. Will we communicate exclusively in gifs in the future? Maybe gifs with audio? Real-time live gifs? What a world, can’t wait.