Well, it's pretty impossible. There's an annoying gradient behind the text that's impossible to reproduce. Try looking at it with those metadata brown townyzer things.
Not saying you're lying, but it is possible, just select the whole gradient, but have the selection's width only be 1 pixel long, then stretch it, it didn't even take me a second to do in Paint.NET

Also, i've had a similar problem happen when i've lost connect to Steam as well as some other people, i'm offline, but i see friends signing on and i'm able to talk to them
