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"The Crudetons in your Word Salad"
Topless Robot (which, despite the name, is usually safe-for-work) is a Village Voice Media owned blog dedicated to nerdy interests, formerly run by Rob Bricken, a former writer for ToyFare, Anime Insider and Anime News Network. The site has become well known for its daily lists, entertaining contests which get hundreds of entries, and the notorious Fan Fiction Fridays, in which Rob gave the MST3K treatment to incredibly awful fanfic. In November 2012, Rob moved on from Topless Robot to io9, where he writes a column titled "Postal Apocalypse". Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), io9's higher-ups asked Rob to stop doing FFF after some readers complained that the concept was mean-spirited. His replacement as TR head was long-time contributing editor Luke Thompson, who revived FFF as a video series under the name "I READ YOUR FANFIC!".

The site was given a new tagline in 2014, replacing the former slogan "Nerd News, Humor, and Self-Loathing" for being too dark. The next year, the site received a total overhaul and was renamed The Robot's Voice, complete with a new URL. Unfortunately, later that year, the site stopped publishing new articles citing financial difficulties as the reason for the blog's closure.

You could still find the site's official twitter account here even though it longer updated and eventually vanished. For all intents and purposes the site was a defunct archive...

...until now. The blog was resurrected on September 28th 2018 under new management (Ryan Schremp taking over the site). Returning to it's original URL at Topless Robot, the blog started updating again after nearly three years of inactivity. The new twitter can be found here. Time will tell if the site can reestablish itself in the late 2010s.

...and then the site stopped updating again in November 2020. The creators seem to have switched focus to live streaming instead.


Tropes frequently found on Topless Robot include:

  • Be Careful What You Wish For: The Pokémon Story. The fans demanded it, Rob refused to show it for ages. When he finally caved, the fans instantly regretted it.
  • Berserk Button: Do NOT bring up Michael Bay's films. Especially Transformers.
    • After Transformers: Dark of the Moon came out and was proven to be a very bad movie but not a wretched cinematic atrocity (according to Rob), Bay and his movies just became a punching bag for Rob rather than a satanic abomination that must be wiped off the face of this earth.
    • ... and then came Aliengate, after which Rob proclaimed Bay as Nerd Satan.

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