The Sword of Peace: Life Sign. Hey. Hey, watch out. Hey, listen.

I've been thinking.

I mean, that kind of goes without saying, right? We all do that. Thinking, I mean; we all think, but some of us don't do any "saying."

...Which is probably why I'm talking to nobody, via the message conveyed through my fingers. Heh heh.

Anyways.

I just want to put out a life sign. (Not necessarily a lifeline... though, if you need one, by all means, grab it. Let this... blog post... be a... lifeline? Something like that, eh.)

This was a thought I had just today. See, as far as personal matters go, I've just gone from having school and a job every day, to having neither of those things in my life. I have just deactivated my Facebook account again. And the short of it is, this is an incredibly lonely set of circumstances to be in.

That's probably it -- the reason that I've found myself doing things like having imaginary conversations with myself, talking to inanimate objects, writing more stories, and... even... stooping to...

...using Miiverse.

Ha ha. How sad.

But for real, I can be honest with myself and notice the disguised attempts I'm making to make myself feel like I am connected with others. And one of the other things I've been doing, just today, is browsing through blogs on Blogger.com. I've been trying to find some more blogs that I would like to follow. I'm surprised to find that this is easier said than done.

You would think that with there being literally millions of blogs on this website alone -- not even going into other blog sites -- there would have to be at least a few blogs I'd identify with strongly. At least one author out there that I want to befriend.

Y por lo tanto que puedo usar dos idiomas más o menos proficientemente, se puede pensar que tengo doble el area en que buscar. Entonces no tengo excusa de quedarme sólo, aquí en el centro de una de las naciones más grande y conectado en el mundo: el Internet.

(If you don't speak Spanish, or Google didn't translate that paragraph very well, don't worry about it. It's unimportant.)

The thing I've found, however, is that even when I do have the rare chance to come across someone whose writings I'd be interested to see more of, sometimes even blogs belonging to people that I actually know in real life... well, want to guess what the problem is?

They don't blog anymore. And they haven't for years.

...I mean, I would be kind of a hypocrite for complaining about this; I did go for over two years without saying anything on this blog -- I've already mentioned this in a previous post. Somewhere. So, please understand that I'm not complaining. If anything, it just makes me a little sad.

These people I came across, they showed me, no matter how briefly, that they are brilliant lights in an otherwise dark space.

...Yeah, I think that's actually a rather accurate analogy. The Internet, the web of connectivity that we've had our technology create, tends to look a bit like this if left alone:

Now add stars to that picture.

That's how I feel when I can really get myself to care about the people around me, and how I feel when I really get the opportunity to see what good lies inside of them.

I like this...

...a lot more than this.

With that being as it is, I was struck by a powerful impression tonight. It was the kind of impression that I can't ignore and just go to sleep. (But hey, I did just say that I no longer have school or a job at the moment -- it's not too big of a deal if I wake up late tomorrow.) My impression was that if I want there to be any connectivity in this big and nebulous nation of the Internet, then I have to start some kind of communication.

In other words, if I want people to stop feeling alone out here -- myself included -- then I'm going to have to be the one to start talking.

So, hi! I thought I'd mention that in spite of taking down the only posts I've written since February, I'm not gone. You know, just in case anybody cared to know.

I have been thinking about some other things to write on here. School in the recent past has made it difficult to write anything that isn't homework, but the ideas have been queuing up in my mind.

And... actually, you know what? To all... like... two(?) loyal readers of this inconsistent blog (sorry), I may as well give you a preview of some things I've been thinking about writing on. If I can figure out how to make comments actually function on my posts, then feel free to tell me which of these (if any) you'd actually want to take some time to read. I'll try to accommodate you, good strangers of mine.

So here you go. It's not a terribly long list, but these have been some recent ideas:

Majora's Mask: Odolwa

Remember how way back in 2013, I wrote a post about the Moon Children of Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, and then said I was going to do individual posts about the children, the questions they ask, and the things they symbolize? Well, I still haven't forgotten about doing those. I just need to figure out how I want to go about it.

I mean, I took pages of notes for the first post, about everything ranging from ideas about how the subdivisions of the Southern Swamp represent different aspects of anger (i.e., rage, enmity, hatred, and emptiness), to questions about how friends are defined and how anger affects friendships, to analyzing the attack patterns of Odolwa's boss fight and how they relate to anger.

Or in other words, I didn't have a specific focus or direction on how to do the post, so I tried to do everything.

Once I figure out how I'm going to write that post, I don't think it will take too long to actually write it. And for that matter, I think I'll have an easier time writing the other three posts after that. Well, the other four, maybe; Majora's one of the Moon Children too, right?

So. I'll make an effort to get on that.
"The Humanity of My Enemy"

I put that in quotation marks because I don't really like the title very much yet. But it does convey the idea.

In short, this is something that I've had a hard time getting people to understand throughout my life, but it's something that I think is so important. I was once taught, "Love your enemies." Extremely difficult as that is, it's not impossible. So I've tried. And over time I've learned techniques that help you to do that. I've practiced, failed at that a lot, but I'm starting to learn how that works.

As a result, it's led me to recognize the good in people who hate me, and whom I am tempted to hate in return.

...I feel like this isn't a good explanation on its own. I'll have to explain in the full post, once I get there.
"Miis are Tiny"

This is simple enough, and I think the post would be short.

So, you know what is currently the second-most popular post on my blog? This one right here. It's about Tomodachi Life and the fury it's made me feel, along with some good I've gained from it.

Well, this would be kind of a follow-up... a little bit... I guess. But my main purpose would be to answer a simple question that the Miis in that game ask, and one that has kind of intrigued me: "How big do you think we Miis are? Like, in your world's metrics?"

I doubt that I would go full-out "Game Theory" style for that, but I'd show some of the things I've come up with. I just feel like explaining it. And maybe I feel like getting people to actually see this blog again, that too. Yay.
Short Story/Stories

Now this, I really don't know. But I might give it a shot.

I used to use Facebook Notes for a lot of things, one of them being as a place where I could write and share short stories with my friends. Er, sorry; that should be, my "friends." Big surprise, nobody read most of them.

I don't really expect that much difference here, but... well, there's a chance that someone will run across it eventually, right? Someday? I mean, instead of there being a reading audience of a few hundred, like on Facebook, there are, as I said, millions of people out on the wide Internet.

With that being as it is, maybe I'll post up a short story or two the next time I feel the inspiration to write one. And I'll see how it goes from there. (Keep in mind, I do pay attention to the stats that Google shares with me. I'm more likely to write again about the kind of thing that I can see has been viewed hundreds of times, rather than 22 times.) (By the way, that's a not-so-subtle reference to my post called For Glory, which has exactly 22 views at the moment I'm writing this. Maybe check that one out too?)
Poetry

And this? I really, really don't know about that. I'll be honest: even I don't like a lot of the poetry I've written in the past. In my whole life, I've only written a few poems that I still think are any good at all.

But just maybe, I'll slap one up here. At very least it could give someone an alternative to re-posting to their social media accounts yet another clever-sounding-but-false Internet meme on a cute background.