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I admit to being flummoxed by the combination of trollish and serious elements--it basically does a denial of service on my brain

For very good reason: Trolls often pretend to be serious, but serious people pretending to be trolls is incredibly rare.

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This sounds like something Paul Graham would say. It's only missing the words "it turns out that".

I don't know if it's really that rare, though. From where I sit Maciej is playing the fox/anansi/trickster character to a tee, with a healthy dose of ha ha only serious (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.ht...). Whether it's a character he's pretending to be or just his natural communication style is for him to say, but dude-who-wanders-in-to-fuck-up-your-ego-with-practical-jokes is a pretty well-established archetype that predates "troll".

Now I'm blushing.

I think you're just drunk.

You seem to be implying that you think Maciej is a troll. Have you read much of his writing? He is a jester: he tends to couch the things he's serious about in a lot of humor.

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