Please do NOT not say that word a third time.
December!
It takes a lot to annoy a Buddhist monk enough beat someone that bad. He should be out of traction soon.
When you run across the internet troll in the road, kill him.
“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
“Um, uh…”
WHAM!
That’s one hand slapping.
I’m afraid I’m not following the line of jokery between Mach… and kung fu-ish Buddhist monks. Perhaps something fun in the final thread before his departure? Or more likely some TV/literary allusion I’m clueless about.
IDK about the kung-fu, but he seemed really obsessed with Buddhism. That or it was just his favorite troll topic. He really blurred the line between trolling and stupidity, so I stopped reading his threads some time before he departed (apparently).
There was an inquiry about Machinaforce that I was going to ask about in ATMB, but what the hey since he’s being mentioned here…
Maybe my favourite thread - I’m pretty sure it was about him. He had a propensity to come up with somewhat scatterbrained thread titles. So the thread was basically scatterbrained thread titles. My dope/google-fu went to all four corners of the world and still no sign of that thread.
If anyone can dredge it up, I could really use a good, insalubrious, not-so-edifying dose of ass goblinage…
Ah, so that’s why there’s been a shortage of threads along the lines of “Why do I exist?”
The question of why machinaforce exists I could have answered for him: “because God is a prankster with a perverted sense of humour”, but he buggered off before I could. I don’t think he ever developed his inquiries to the point of asking the ultimate metaphysical question “Should I exist?”. Because there I have an irrefutably definite answer for him.
I can’t really recall the specific titles of the various other threads machinaforce was able to upchuck, but they were pretty much all the same. Many were along the lines of “Is reality a delusion, or is delusion a reality?”. I must confess I don’t know the answer to that one. My advice to him would be to find a better LSD supplier. Or at least turn off his computer and leave us the fuck alone.
No, no, “Do I exist?” That is the question.
You’re misunderstanding poor old Machinaforce. 
He exists all right. What he wants to know is whether all we zombies exist, or whether we are all figments of his deluded imagination.
But when he asks us and we say that we do exist, he can’t believe us, because that’s exactly what figments of his deluded imagination would say.
He’s not a troll, though, he’s a genuine psycho case.
A search for [{at-sign}Machinaforce in:first] produces a list of his 86 vital threadly contributions to our collective oerve. It amounts to a vacuous pile of nihilist navel-gazing if ever I saw one. Most with inadequate titles.
He seems to have gone through the Buddhist phase while I was on sabbatical; so that explains my confusion.
And–more relevantly to my comment–he several times claimed to have asked many questions IRL at a local Buddhist Temple.
You are giving Machinaforce way too much credit–that was dude_robert, who sadly no longer abides. (He was mostly the fun kind of crazy. But a sock, I think.)
Ah yes, thanks folks!
He also said he had a traumatic experience at a Buddhist temple, but it was really a passage from a website he misinterpreted wildly.
Did he offended Bruce Lee’s family and offended the Shaolin Temple?