Hi, Hub.

I feel like I'm slowly becoming the designated bearer of grim tidings... Forgive me for that. ^^; I'm sure there are a lot of people who would prefer to keep this place purely escapist. We are a fetish community, after all. But, we are a community all the same, which means we help each other and share in both the good times, and the bad. That's why we have a crisis resource post stickied at the top of the forum (which I encourage you to use, if you're particularly feeling the weight of what happened), and that's why I wanted to reach out this morning after last night's terrible news.

I also want to remind everyone that there will be a lot of questions arising over the next day or two. I understand how maddening it is to not have answers right away, but keep in mind that jumping to conclusions is the worst thing we can do right now.

I'm headed to bed after writing this (I work nights), but I encourage anyone to talk about anything they feel they need to right now. I'll be checking back later.

Be good to yourself and others, everyone~.

I didn't know about this until just now.

Reading almost made me sick.

I just have nothing to say.

Apologies to anyone hearing about this for the first time through this thread.

I've been paying attention to what's been going on the news. It was pretty rough waking up this morning to this news.

Also, if you value your sanity, don't go on twitter in regards to this tragedy.

If you value your sanity, just stay off Twitter, period. It's just sick how people act online. Nothing is sacred at all.

There's some people who works I'm a fan of that I will not go on their twitter pages because I know its usually a putrid, alienating, endless stream of shit that just makes my opinion of them go all the way down the drain for one reason or another.

To paraphrase Hayao Miyazaki, "Twitter was a mistake".

We need that quote on a motivational poster.

It's unfortunate that the way news like this gets distributed these days may be one of the things that leads to more incidents like it.

At this point...I give up. All hope is lost for this place...nightmares keep happening and happening. There's nothing we can do...no matter how hard we try.

Short version: Guy shoots people attending a concert from a hotel room - 59 dead, about 500 injured.

At least we will have a gun control debate again, for a week or so.

That will go nowhere...like always...

As tragic as this is there were a lot of people who show the good that humans are capable of. Some of the injured went back in despite the danger to try and rescue others.

Several organizations and volunteers were responding within hours raising money, gather medical supplies, seeking counselors.

More people are helping then making it worse, they are doing their best to try and help those affected and that's a good sign.

Gonna take a hell of a lot more than that to restore my faith. For every one of those people we get three more shooters...

If that were true, we'd all be dead already. For my part, I believe that there's probably about 60% of the population who don't give a shit, 35% who do and wish to help/change things, and 5% (probably a lot less, this is a rough estimate) that are actual dangers.

Doesn't make it much better. I know I'm being a massive downer but it just keeps happening too often for me to be positive anymore.