Your regularly-scheduled domesticat entry shall not appear here this evening, canceled due to sadly extraordinary life events. After a good bit of cross-checking with friends, we still don't know much about what happened, but what we do know is this: someone whom my friends and I have worked with on dragon*con tech staff, someone whom I probably would've called a friend on staff, has been charged with involuntary manslaughter. All we know can be summed up in the five paragraphs on that page, which means we know nothing of consequence. Not even the woman's name, though a couple of friends have ventured guesses.

What does one do in a situation like this? Acknowledge? Stay silent? As of now, I am the only tech staffer acknowledging online that this event has happened, and I find that I almost feel—disloyal?—in acknowledging what is (honestly!) public knowledge.

In the time that I've been a part of tech staff, I've absorbed the attitudes of 'the group' toward 'outsiders' until those attitudes became my own: 'us' versus 'them.' I might not like every member of tech staff, but even a disliked fellow staff member ranks far above the faceless mass of dragon*con conventioneers as far as I'm concerned. The expectation is that no matter what happens, we will back each other up and deal with the consequences later.

But that's a convention. This is different—an order of magnitude different. The bond of a raggle-taggle group of friends can't glare or duct-tape away the fact that as of this morning, a woman is dead—an action which we cannot patch away with our ever-present duct tape. I'd like to know details. Why? and what? and how? and why again?

Questions without answers, for now at least.