teamspeak had a sound.

three descending blips when you connected. four ascending when someone joined the channel you were in. one flat tone when you got kicked. a different flat tone for the server going down.

every action had a half-second of ceremony attached to it.

discord doesn't.

you click the channel and you're in. someone joins and a name slides up the sidebar. nobody plays a sound at you. nobody is waiting for the protocol to acknowledge them.

the buh drum got compressed out of voice chat sometime around 2015.

teamspeak made you wait to talk.

push-to-talk on a moderated channel meant the mic was off until a mod flipped a bit. you held the key. nothing happened. then nothing kept happening. then a chime. then you were on.

the chime was a buh drum. the silence before the chime was a buh drum. the moment your friend said "did it work" into a dead mic and nobody answered was a buh drum.

discord made everything default-on.

you join, you talk, someone hears you, the latency is fine. nobody had to grant anything.

something was added. something was lost. i can't tell you which mattered more.

i don't miss teamspeak.

i miss the moment after you got kicked. that single flat tone. the desktop suddenly quiet. the alt-tab back to the browser to see if anyone in the forum knew why.

discord just disconnects you with a little gray banner. you have been removed from this server. no sound. no pause. no buh drum.

absolute cinema doesn't run on banners.

absolute cinema.

some buh drums you walk into. some you inherit from a friend who didn't know they were sharing.

one. a friend's wallet is open in another tab. i don't remember opening it. ENS, two tokens, a stablecoin. they haven't moved anything in eight days. i refresh the page like it's a slot machine. i am not in this trade. i'm in the room with it. i can't tell anymore if i'm watching or rooting or grieving in advance.

buh drum.

two. the dots in the DM. someone is typing. they've been typing for forty seconds. the dots stop. start again. stop. it's been a minute now. whatever it is they're trying to say keeps almost forming. i'm not even sure i want to know. i'm sure i can't close the tab.

buh drum.

three. a dev i don't really know pushes a deploy on a token i hold. the discord goes quiet. the github action turns yellow. i refresh the explorer. i don't read code. it doesn't matter. somebody i've never met is holding the screen for me. i can feel them holding it.

buh drum.

a buh drum doesn't ask who it's for. you can catch it from across a chat, a wallet, a timezone. you can pick one up off the floor of a discord that's not even yours.

it's worse this way. you can't even do the trade to make it stop.

absolute cinema.