Talking To Other People Online: Help

Online communication is weird and confusing and makes many of us question the reliability of our own assessments of ourselves in a very chaotic way, but then, so does communication in general. I don't know about you, but at least 30% of the time I speak to another person online (based on definitely real statistics that I absolutely did not just make up in my head), I'm thinking "oh no, what if this is bad?"

My mind does a quick automatic run through of this flowchart:

And then I am forced to distract myself by eating a saucepan of pasta and starting my 267th playthrough of Pokémon Crystal (all these years later I'm still chuffed you can play as a girl and hatch an egg).

Talking to other people online can be a bit like playing Minesweeper, only instead of mines, what you are trying to avoid is the knowledge that you have transgressed a hazy social rule that has been invisibly placed in front of you like tripwire. However, when you do manage to make a friend and prove yourself to be perhaps not the secret rhinoceros of social ignorance and badness that you suspected you were, it's pretty great.

So just do what the flowchart says. The flowchart knows all. Some people are busy, or not very talkative in certain message formats, or they're buried in their own saucepan of soothing pasta. Who knows. But you should just be nice to people, I guess, and level up your Totodile.