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Looney Toons

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If you're looking for information on Warner Brothers cartoons, see Looney Tunes.

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en-N	This user has a native understanding of English.

fr-1	Cet utilisateur dispose de connaissances de base en français.

Looney Toons is professional and fan writer Robert M. Schroeck. He is a New Jersey male in his middle fifties who is a published author of roleplaying games, magazine articles and assorted short fiction. He is a member of SFWA, and his most recent book was released in July of 2003 (although he's working on his next). He's been watching TV since Bewitched was in black and white, and has a particular fondness for science fiction shows on both ends of the quality spectrum. He's also an Anime fan, and despite his status as a "pro" writer has delved into anime (and other) fanfiction.

He is the author of the Mega Crossover fanfic Drunkard's Walk.

He has a Bacon Number of 3, having worked in the Princeton Triangle Club with Brooke Shields in college.

Thanks to BoingBong.net, he became a troper on the original TV Tropes wiki in the summer of 2004 -- an unimaginably primitive time when it was hosted on the long-gone sytes.net and there were less than sixty tropers in existence including the admins. As of May 2012 he was, to the best of his ability to determine, the single oldest remaining active member of the TV Tropes wiki outside of the staff.

He is personally responsible for writing nearly six hundred pages on that 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 TV Tropes' infamous "Second Google Incident" eight years later in Spring 2012. He coined the first "Absurdly X" trope name (Absurdly Powerful Student Council) as part of that effort, unwittingly inspiring an untold number of Snowclones. He also created the first trope with a name in the form "Instant X, Just Add Y" -- Instant AI, Just Add Water -- spawning an entirely different set of Snowclones.

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 was also for many years inexplicably credited with coining the phrase Wiki Magic on TV Tropes (and thus inspiring the corresponding trope entry), but quite honestly he was quoting Webmonkey Gus. Oh, and while he's not the only culprit, he's one of the people to blame for the egregious overuse of the word "egregious" both here and on TVT, at least initially.

For nigh unto thirty 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 TV Tropes wiki -- convinced him that he could no longer contribute to that wiki and remain true to his principles.

In May 2012, he ceased to participate in the TV Tropes wiki. As an unanticipated side effect of his departure, a number of other tropers chose to make use of the more generous licensing terms TVT then possessed to fork the wiki database and create All The Tropes. (This promptly resulted in TVT implementing far less generous licensing terms, on the grounds that tropers were only welcome to copy the entire tropebase until someone actually did so.)

Recent edits by Looney Toons