Thanks, Brent. I'm glad you're enjoying DW -- it'll probably come as good news that Chris and I are finally finishing up the last chapter of DW5 this week, so you won't be left hanging -- unlike so many of my older fans, who've been waiting for the two of us to weather various personal crises and other problems for nigh unto three and a half years now.
Oh, in case you're interested, here's what I left on my troper page before Fast Eddie stalinized me:
I suspect it's no coincidence that none of the original tropers, who built the site from the ground up with the sweat of their brow, have cared to remain.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
Oh, in case you're interested, here's what I left on my troper page before Fast Eddie stalinized me:
Quote:If you're looking for information on Warner Brothers cartoons, see Looney Tunes.Just as a point of reference, there were almost 11,000 troper pages at the time I wrote that.
Looney Toons is professional and fan writer Robert M. Schroeck. He became a troper in the summer of 2004, an unimaginably primitive time when the wiki was hosted on the long-gone sytes.net and there were less than sixty tropers in existence including the site admins. As of May 2012 he was, to the best of his ability to determine, the single oldest remaining active member of the wiki outside of the staff.
He is personally responsible for writing nearly six hundred pages on the wiki, including almost a dozen Tropes Of Legend. In response to finding an empty page labeled "Anime" during his first visit, he spent his first few weeks on the wiki creating the entire Anime section from scratch -- including the now-infamous Naughty Tentacles page responsible for The Second Google Incident eight years later in Spring 2012.
He accidentally created the entire Useful Notes hierarchy by writing a (now long gone) page called "Useful Notes On Japan". This inspired other people to write their own useful notes about other cultures/topics until there were so many it was necessary to make an entire branch of the Wiki to store them.
He long considered TV Tropes one of his two "homes" on the Net, the other being his own forums.
For more than twenty years he has been quietly (and sometimes not-so-quietly) active in online anti-censorship and intellectual freedom movements. He was a tangential party to the infamous Secret Service/Steve Jackson Games debacle in 1990, and as a result became one of the very first members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In the 1990s he worked with local and national groups to help defeat US government attacks on privacy and freedom of expression including the Clipper Chip and the so-called "Communications Decency Act" of 1996. He continues to be active in these causes.
In the spring of 2012, the fallout from The Second Google Incident -- along with the subsequent imposition of heightened restrictions on "acceptable content" for the wiki -- convinced him that he could no longer contribute to the wiki and remain true to his principles.
In May 2012, he ceased to participate in the TV Tropes Wiki.
Mr. Schroeck politely requests that none of his works, either professional or fan, be cited, quoted, reviewed or linked to in the wiki, and that any excisions he has made to this end be allowed to stand, out of respect for his rights as their author.
I suspect it's no coincidence that none of the original tropers, who built the site from the ground up with the sweat of their brow, have cared to remain.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.