'On the topic of why we want to mourn in public, I'm not sure if I have a concrete reason why everyone does, but I can explain it from my perspective. I lost my older sister in 2017 when she was 26 and I was 25. It was the most painful experience I've ever gone through, having someone I grew up with and loved so intensely suddenly gone forever. That sort of pain and trauma is very difficult to deal with, and in the moment I just remember thinking "why is the rest of the world continuing to move like nothing has happened?" It feels somehow wrong that the world keeps moving even when it feels like yours has stopped, it's a very strange kind of dissonance that feels impossible to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it. Back then I just wanted to share with everyone what I was going through and I'm not really sure why. Maybe it was to try and lessen the burden on myself, maybe it was to try and force the rest of the world to stop like mine had. I'm not sure, but it's definitely cathartic to mourn publicly.'

postel's law: "be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others." originally intended to foster "interoperability," the ability of multiple computer systems to understand one another, postel's law is now recognized as having wider applications.

a Marian Apparition is a reported supernatural appearance by the Blessed Virgin Mary. The figure is often named after the town where it is reported, or on the sobriquet given to Mary on the occasion of the apparition.

Many jumpers wrap suicide notes in plastic and tuck them into their pockets. 'Survival of the fittest. Adios—unfit,' one seventy-year-old man said in his valedictory; another wrote, 'Absolutely no reason except I have a toothache.'

Agateophobia: fear of insanity.

Dementophobia: an excessive or irrational fear of going insane.

cutaneous rabbit illusion: the cutaneous rabbit illusion (also known as cutaneous saltation and sometimes the cutaneous rabbit effect or cre) is a tactile illusion evoked by tapping two or more separate regions of the skin in rapid succession. the illusion is most readily evoked on regions of the body surface that have relatively poor spatial acuity, such as the forearm.

it is so tragically sureal to see a man of such unbroken logic poke and prod at the confounding boundaries of his own unreasonable reality.

'What's reality? I don't know. When my bird was looking at my computer monitor I thought, "That bird has no idea what he's looking at." And yet what does the bird do? Does he panic? No, he can't really panic, he just does the best he can. Is he able to live in a world where he's so ignorant? Well, he doesn't really have a choice. The bird is okay even though he doesn't understand the world. You're that bird looking at the monitor, and you're thinking to yourself, I can figure this out. Maybe you have some bird ideas. Maybe that's the best you can do.'