And then she went splat! on the asphalt.

Motto : Cut my tongue out, I've been caught out
Like a giant juggernaut.
Happy hours, golden showers
On a cruise to freak you out.

When "When I Grow Up" came out Shirley Manson spent a year or so as the most exalted Destkop Image on my revered Main Box. It was the spring of 1999, "everyone"ⁱ was excited by the entirely ridiculous concept of "y2k"ⁱⁱ and she had just met her maker the previous Autumn.

Here's what it looked like :

She never grew up, and she never was stable. She does make the occasional (and usually anonymous) appearance here, like for instanceⁱⁱⁱ in :

The other category of women able to confuse are kiddos. Unripe girls, 12 to 16-18 (depending how worn out), that haven't yet finalised their socialisation, and as such are still smooth on the surface, still possessed of a neotenic naturalness^iv that allows them to spontaneously create the pseudopodes discussed above. Supported by the universally positive reaction due to their age, lolis are perfectly capable to convince four different adults that they're special in the same one evening, something I have witnessed with my own eyes and verified experimentally, no metaphores here.

or a spoken bit in [NSFW] Fata-n oglinda

"Ba pula! Ce pula mea^v ?! De unde le scoti ?!"

I wasn't sexually inexperienced when we met, by any means. On the contrary. She, however, was - jivina era virgina^vi.

I don't know whether she loved me or not. She certainly obeyed me, and in retrospect actually worshipped me. She challenged me, constantly, because I suspect the only respite she ever had^vii from her own demons was at that point when her entire individuality just melted and washed away under the crush of unadorned masculinity.^viii There, pressed against the wall, grasping for breath in my fist, tiny feet dangling a foot above the ground, there she had a moment's peace.

I'm pretty sure that on some level she also despised me, or perhaps just hated herself with a burning passion. In any case, she did spend a lot of time and energy trying her hand at that ancient game of epater le bourgeois which the motto very aptly references. Why exactly me as Mr. Jourdain is entirely unclear, and for that matter rather nonsensical on the face. Perhaps the fact that I had the books and had read the books, that I had power that was, securely, obviosuly my own creation ran her counter over. Perhaps if she could blow me away it'd finally mean she's on to something.

She was definitely looking for something, with all the furious, outrageous singlemindedness of the autistic child. She never found it, so she just looked harder.

And harder, and harder, until one day, when she went splat! on the asphalt.

I went, much later, to see the spot. I was fully expecting a crater, an indentation still visible in the basalt of the pavement. I expected the very ground to be visibly, painfully hurt. Because yes, she was a hundred-and-change pound juggernaught, no question about it.

There was nothing there. I don't think she'd have expected any different.

1. The idiot everyone. [↩]
2. There are two horns to understand the concept of y2k as used here. One is Alf's "never happened", a recurrent theme in republican discourse, perhaps best summarized by the man himself :

   The buggers' traditional defense is to pretend that the event was a non-event - or, if this is impractical, to continue living in an imaginary world where they 'scooped' the story first, and all of the 'unsanctioned' discussion never happened.

   The other's Naggum's earlier statement :

   To take but one simple example: suppose you thought of the new millennium when you wrote your application back in 1972 -- not only wouldn't you be invited to the party, those who knew you had done it right from the start and who probably laughed at you at the time would positively hate you now, and they sure as hell wouldn't tell people about you. and the more stupid they are, the more important it would be to pretend that nobody was smart enough to see the next millennium coming.

   Yes there existed people in 1999 that didn't have the problem, and who looked down upon the problemidiots with all the condescending amusement sane people deploy upon the same idiots reincarnated into dullards drooling excitedly over the white iSomething.

   They existed, and they weren't all over fifty or graybeards. Et in Arcadia ego. Plenty of teens in that Arcadia with me, for that matter. Age has relatively little to do with sanity, this notion that sanity "comes later", at some ulterior point when "you're more experienced" is rank nonsense. Whether someone will ever be sane is generally set in stone by the age of about 16, if not earlier. Certainly for women at least a couple years earlier. [↩]

3. There are better examples but somehow I can't find them. Trilema has outgrown memory, it's a sad day today. [↩]
4. It's Latin, shut up. [↩]
5. It may seem strange, but Romanian cussing allows a female to reference "her own cock". It would be unthinkably misogynistic to do otherwise. [↩]
6. Speaking of which, here's a funny reddit snippet I feel compelled to preserve because Trilema will certainly outlive Conde Nast and all its "products" :

   justcool393 Illumanati Gold Member 3 points 15 days ago

   Oh look, it's Mircea "Online, it's the women that rape" Popescu. He even has the audacity to try to charge to read his bullshit (you can just set your cookie through a form on their site to 99999, which is way more that you should be reading of his stuff).

   Part and parcel of the present dispute is to clearly make the point that Gavin Andresen does not have the authority to enact or create a hardfork of the Bitcoin network, nor any sort of significant clout, cachet, power to influence the matter etc.

   Yes, we know you are very smart. Please enlighten us on how to use a thesaurus. Other than that, Gavin does have a lot of authority (being like the 4th top contributor to the code and all) and his opinion does hold weight.

   This will be useful for the Bitcoin network first and foremost, because Gavin is, by and large, a mentally retarded doofus...

   You don't have an argument here. He's playing with the cards he has here (their bad considering how half of the ecosystem he is in is full of scammers).

   ...displaying a shocking amount of Dunning-Kruger syndrome in his assorted dabblings in economics and other hard fields.

   I mean, that is a pretty common thing with bitcoiners, so he isn't exactly unique in that regard.

   This will secondarily but perhaps still notably be useful for Gavin himself. Finally liberated from all that influence he is incorrectly perceived to carry he will be free to live the rest of his life in the relative peace his brain was constructed to handle. To understand his situation, imagine a mentally retarded child living happily in the sands of New Mexico. A rich old man dies in New York, and on the strength of original research, it is considered that the mentally retarded child is the sole inheritor. News makes its way to the happy desert residence that same evening, by telegraph, but the poor monkey knows nothing of it outside of dim rumors. He is not collected enough to understand what "inheritance" rightly means or anything. He does have some sort of an idea as to "being rich" = "lots of icecream", but that's as far as it goes. All sorts of people, much better placed to understand what it all means, all try their hand at, you know, "being friendly". And "neighbourly". And only meaning the best and having the kid's interest at heart.

   Words cannot describe how much of an asshole you are.

   His life, as you might well imagine, turns into the sort of nightmare only homo homini lupus can bring on its brother, and the child lives hell (parce-que l'enfer, c'est l'autres).

   Using Latin where it doesn't belong doesn't make you any smarter. /r/iamverysmart round 2

   Once the news makes it through that really, it was all a mistake, no such inheritance exists (as in fact it does not), the simpleton is free to return to his simple prior life, and be happy again.

   Help Gavin be a happy idiot, stop trying to make him fulfill shoes too large for his little peabrain.

   You still do not have an argument here. I don't know where you thought you got one from.

   "The community" of people that need things can not fork Bitcoin to provide for their needs at the expense of the actual community of people that create things and own things.

   Well, the community needs more of these things to process more transactions.

   Bitcoin isn't here to make it easier for you to do what you want to do...

   Well shit, I guess somebody should stop bashing Bitcoin for being hard to use, because that's a feature!

   Bitcoin is here to make it trivial for others to prevent you from doing what you want to do every time that's stupid.

   Weak hands.

   This means that someone who wishes to pay for very little with Bitcoin will be forced to use something else, so to speak is forced to "give his seat" to someone richer. This is exactly the point and the intent of Bitcoin : to force the poor to yield to the rich, unversally, as a matter of course.

   So what's wrong with the legacy financial system? I can't go a day on /r/Bitcoin reading about how Bitcoin will finally give the poor power over their money or something like that.

   You may not like this, but that is entirely an emotional problem of yours, which you're welcome to resolve any way you can : stop being poor, take a lot of pills, whatever.

   If only people could just stop being poor.

   Run along now, back to playing in the mud with the other naked kids in your village. Bitcoin's just not for your kind.

   Oh, you cannot be making this shit up.

   VII. The miners decide.

   The first and most obvious is that irrespective of what miners mine, each single full node will reject illegal blocks. This is a fact. If all the miners out there suddenly quit Bitcon and go mine Keiser's Aurora scamcoin instead, from the perspective of the Bitcoin network hash rate simply dropped and that's all. There's absolutely no difference between Keiser's scamcoin and Gavin's scam coin as far as the network is concerned...

   Except transactions won't be processed and double-spends can successfully occur. But yeah, other than being unable to function, it'll be completely the same!

   ...while one's a scammer that I humiliatingly defeated in the past whereas the other a scammer that I humiliatingly defeat in the future, this makes no difference for Bitcoin.

   Congratulations, would you like to get a cookie? Seriously, no one in the world gives a damn.

   At least, to people who understand economy to any degree.

   Which is hardly anyone in the bitcoin space.

   And since we're on the topic, let's learn a little German together.

   German is a very simple language. Someone posessed of Latin and familiar with declension will be able to learn it without expending much effort. This is common knowledge, and mentioned as such by German professors before every class.

   It all starts innocently enough with der, die, das, den, des, dem etc, without omitting reminders as to how logically everything follows from there. Let us consider the German Language Book, a wonderful tome published in Dortmund. It uses a discussion of the habits and culture of the Hottentots (auf Deutsch : Hottentotten) to painlessly teach the reader God's own language.

   In this book kangaroos (Beutelratten) are caught and caged (Kotter). The cages are covered with a fabric (Lattengitter) to keep them from the elements. The cages are then logically called fabric-covered-cages (Lattengitterkotter), and when they actually contain a kangaroo will be known as Lattengitterkotterbeutelratten.

   One day the Hottentots caught a terrorist (Attentater), accused of having murdered the mother (Mutter) of a Hottentot. She was logically known as the Hottentottenmutter. As it happens her retarded son had a speech impediment (Stottertrottel), so she was also known as Hottentottenstottertrottelmutter, making her assassin the feared Hottentottenstottertrottelmutterattentater.

   After his arrest, he was, by force of necessity, preliminarily held in one of the cages (Beutelrattenlattengitterkotter). He breaks free, and a search ensues. He is caught, and the apprehending agent reports to the tribal chief :

   - We have captured the assassin (Attentater).
   - Oh year ? Which ?
   - Das Lattengitterkotterbeutelratterattentater.
   - Oh you mean the Hottentottenstottertrottelmutterattentater.
   - The very same!

   The execution of the Hottentottenstottertrottelmutterlattengitterkotterbeutelrattenattentater scheduled for the next day was delayed briefly for reasons unknown.

   In any case, as you can readily observe, German is not only simple but also very logical, all that's required is a little elbow grease.

   PS. There do exist longer German words than that.

   So now you know. [↩]

7. You ever see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ?

   - Something hasn't happened yet.
   - What's that?
   - A click in my head.
   - Did you say, "click"?
   - Yes, sir. That click in my head that makes me feel peaceful.

   [↩]

8. This, like it or not, is how the female brain works. This is why your wife/girlfriend's being a bitch to you : because you're coming up short. You're not delivering manhood. Yes, I know that your jurisdiction doesn't allow for manhood. So ? [↩]