Rambling...
I seriously don't know what to do.
When I was in high school, I had a nice little group of friends, built up along a series of various aquaintances; we actually all went to four different high schools, and it was the connections of various folks that brought us together. Our little group had a lot of laughs together, and made those years memorable.
Then one day, in the middle of Humanities, my best friend decided to become my enemy. To this day, I don't understand why. He pushed my buttons as only someone who knew me so well could, and I ended up getting kicked out of school due to the angry fit I threw.
That drove a wedge in our group, with some of our friends siding with me and some with me. Even the ones who were my friends still, though, didn't really meet up with each other anymore; we'd all meet up individually, and eventually I lost track of them all. And that was likely my fault; I could devote the time to keeping up with everyone as a group, but individually, I just didn't have the time to maintain the relationships with everyone.
Now, at RI, the same situation is developing. The situation around Rise from the Ashes brought a lot of bad feelings to boil, and now some of my best friends from RI won't even join #ri, won't post on the boards... And yet I can't leave #ri because I have other friends in there, so now I have to endure constant sniping by Luna ("Oh, Moogle, I'm so sorry you drew the short end of the stick in having to fight Krizak's character..." "Haha, I'm looking at Krizak's tournament from three years ago and wow, did those rounds suck...") without some of my best friends there to back me up. It's like I've been abandoned, like I'm being punished for daring to still like some people.
But worse is the thought of not being able to talk to those people who left anymore. I mean, sure, those folks are still reachable by other means, but how long until they decide that they'll only be available through AIM? I'd love to talk to Wayne a lot more, but turning on AIM and dedicating hours of time to a conversation with just him... it's just not efficient enough.
Is that horrible of me, to think of relationships in terms of efficiency? I don't want to, but I have a very logical mind and I'm always finding myself without enough time to do everything.
I want to bring #ri back together, for almost entirely selfish reasons. I want to have one place where everyone comes together, where I can interact with everyone I like. I want the tournaments to stay at least as strong as they currently are (or hopefully get stronger), because tournaments are the only thing I have any sort of talent with.
I'm just apparently a very selfish person. There, Kyo, I understand selfishness now.
I wonder if this is the reason Tenken disappeared off the face of the Web. Or rather, the opposite of that reason; Tenk always said that he wasn't a fan of the chat room, that all the people discouraged having a good conversation. I don't believe that, obviously, but it's worth thinking about...
EDIT: Wow, so much for iPhone's auto-spellcheck, this post should not be named "Rambing..."