Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27708312-20170202163909/@comment-31166511-20170224035722

Re: Chapter 2: Potential Boyfriends

It was a cute exchange between siblings and an excellent display of uber optimistic, both-sides-are-the-bright-side Mabel-logic.

I have my doubts that Mabel would be happy calling herself "bugs". I think she'd search for a term that was a bit more, you know, kittens and stuffed-animal-tree like.

Hmm. "Cute as a bug" *is* a valid saying.

I can imagine Mabel objecting to the way Dipper says "bug" so that it has an icky nerd connotation, when he should be saying "bug" as in a cute little lady bug.

"Mabel! It's exactly the same word!"

"Not even close, bro-bro. Try pronouncing it with more stress on the polka-dots!"

"Mabel, that makes zero sense."

. ..

"Hey, Dipper! Watch this!" Mabel suddenly melted down into a perfectly circular, but very shaggy patch on the hardwood floor. The individual shaggy fibers shifted color so that a large, flat, disembodied Mabel head appeared in the center, it's lip moving in synch with Mabel's somewhat muffled, but unmistakenly bubbly tone. "Guess what I am?"

Dipper instantly discarded half a dozen replies that he knew might hurt Mabel's feelings. The only safe reply left was the relatively lame: "You're a Mabel carpet?"

"No, silly! I'm as cute as a bug in a rug! Now laugh!"

Oh, yeah. Earlier I objected to the 400 bug reference as sounding too low. I noticed that Mabel bumped up her estimate by another hundred. I hope that you intend to keep up a running gag about Mabel's guess constantly creeping upwards. It's funny and just a little creepy. Either she's guessing wildly, or the number of bugs is increasing for some unknown, but vaguely alarming reason.

Perfect Gravity Falls type humor.

. ..

In "Time Traver's Pig", Dipper demonstrated a facility for impressively advanced mathematics. Chronal-statistical analysis is not a standard course taught in the California public schools. Something Dipper worked out on his own, or inspired by the Journal?

I don't think it's ever implied that Ford had any experience with time travel.

Bill liked to openly mock humans and their inability to perceive even a few years into the future. But Ford never seemed to pick up on any of the teasing references.

There was an intesting psychological experiment I read about once that was designed to test the human perception of time.

A simple application was written for a lap top. All it did was make a beep sound when someone pressed a key on the keyboard.

But the psychologist running the experiment had controll over the length of time delay between when a button was pressed and the beep sounded.

When the time delay was reduced to just 0.8 seconds or less, the test subject pressing the button reported that the beep came before the button press! They could press it as many times as they liked, but only became more sure that the beep came first.

The conclusion was that because of the minimum time required for an electrical signal to travel from one neuron to another, that human beings are not able to preceive the actual present. Humans live 0.8 seconds in the past.

If Bill's thought processes are not hampered by flesh and blood limits, we humans must seem to be moving and thinking as slow as molasses to him.

No wonder Bill seems random and manic to us!

I once visited a friend who was temporarily confined in a the mental health wing of a hospital. She'd had a pretty serious nervous break-down from intolerable levels of stress. She was given meds to keep her calm and rational.

We sat down in the visitor's room to chat. She was lonely, but otherwise just like her old self. It seemed a bit extreme to keep her in a locked ward.

But as time passed, the meds began to slowly wear off. She started talking faster and more urgently. She would start a thought, but before I could even respond, she'd already abandoned that thought and was talking about the next one.

I realized that her brain was working faster than she could make her mouth move. It was like watching a video with two out of every five seconds cut out. If you couldn't follow the perfectly rational chain of logic that linked her thoughts together, it wasn't that she was babling insanely like a crazy person. It was that the "normal" people around her weren't thinking fast enough to keep up.

She was stuck in fast forward and accelerating. When I tried to translate my friend's request for a newspaper to read to the nurse in charge, the nurse eyed me as if I'd caught the crazy from my friend and told me that it was time for me to leave. I was obviously over-exciting my friend who was in a delicate condition.

Seeing my friend's face when she understood that I was abandoning her nearly tore my heart out of my chest. She'd been so happy that someone finally understood her and now she was being left to the tender mercies of people who didn't even try to understand.

I stayed and calmly argued with the nurse until I was seriously risking either confinement or getting tossed out on my ass by security.

I could just barely understand most of my fast-forward friend. I had the advantage that she'd try to explain everything six different ways before I could even ask.

It was a LOT harder for her to understand anything I was saying in what must have appeared to be in super slow motion.

I was finally able to make her understand that what seemed normal to her, seemed superfast to the nurse. That if my friend wanted me to stay that she'd have to try to move and talk very, very slowly and softly.

You should have seen the nurse's face when I got nearly the same calming effect by talking and explaing things to my friend that they could only acheive with very strong drugs.

It bought me a big fat chunk of respect and the absolutely unpresedented permission to remain in the locked section of the mental ward wing past visiting hours.

My friend stopped panicing about being left behind, but was still pretty jittery. It took a lot out of her to restrain herself and sit almost relatively still.

We still could not communicate well. Even as she kept her body under tight controll, her mind continued to accelerate beyond even my best attempt to put the puzzle pieces of her thoughts together, when I was only getting less than one idea in ten. Communication is just not possible at that level.

Eventually the rate of energy she was burning at was not sustainable, and I walked her to her hospital room and tucked her into bed.

The nurse told me that was the first time in the week she'd been there that she'd been able to get to sleep without drugs.

My friend woke up much more rational the next day and was able to pursuade her doctors that pills were no longer necessary. In another week, she was able to convince them that she was well enough to go home and was not a danger to herself or others.

When I saw my friend again, I asked her about all the things she'd tried to tell me that I'd never been able to figure out. I estimated that during my visit, about 75% of what she had tried to tell me went right over my head.

Unfortunately, she had absolutely no memory of my visit. She remembered getting out of the hospital, but not going in, or the two weeks she stayed there.

It was like the two modes of thinking were completely incompatible. The memories of the one state just didn't translate into the other.

That's what I think of when Bill seems really weird.

Like Dipper says, "There has to be a reason. We just have to figure it out!"