Friday, May 29, 2009

Wow...

I am stunned and amazed by the outpouring of support and sadness for the passing of TFRL. Seriously, I had no idea that so many people followed it or cared about it. I'm humbled and grateful. And your comments and tweets of support have gone a long way to ease the pain of deciding to shut TFRL down. I appreciate every person who has read my posts or voiced their support. You guys are why I wrote this blog.

But that doesn't change my decision to shut TFRL down. And that's a point I want to clarify. No one 'forced' me to shut down TFRL. It was my decision and mine alone. Our CIO never even implied that I should shut it down; his concern was only that posting things that were identifiable might create problems with our redesign process. He was clear that he didn't want that, but I also got the impression that he enjoyed some of the posts. After all, I'm sure he sits in a lot worse meetings than I do.

So please, if you want to be mad at someone, be mad at me for not obfuscating my posts better, not anyone else at my campus.

Also, I think that as much as we all loved TFRL, it needs to be put to rest. I don't want the web community to take it over. Someone else will come up with something else that is uniquely theirs, and that's the way it should be. TFRL was what it was; now it's time to move on.

Thanks again for the incredible outpouring of support. I'm really moved by it, and as I said, it's made shutting down TFRL much easier.

Maybe I'll start something else down the road, and get in trouble once again. Trust me, this wasn't the first time - and it probably won't be the last.

I love you guys!

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Next time in ATL, first round is on me.

N

jodycb said...

We all love to hate on whoever is taking our favorite toy away. I see where you're coming from & thanks for all the entertainment. I'll be keeping my eye out for your next funny outlet.

DW said...

Even though the site is shutting down, please, please stay a part of the higher ed blogging community by at least commenting in the mean time. I have no doubt you'll be back with something. A wise man once said, "If I'm not getting in trouble, I'm not doing my job."

Dr. Chuck said...

I understand your logic for retiring completely. I only followed three RSS feeds other than my own and yours was one of the three (the others were Apple and TED). So at least for me your work is quite special and worthy of reading. Here is a small request/suggestion. I would *love* to make use of your characters in some of the talks I give (with attribution of course) - If you felt like it - I think that it would be cool if you made up a ZIP with your character graphics and released it under Creative Commons Attribution. That way TFRL could live on in all of our talks as we wanted to teach the lessons that your cartoons so artfully have taught. Again thanks - and the graphic thing is just a suggestion.

M. H. said...

Awwww... I am gonna miss reading your cartoon. It gave me a chuckle almost every time -- reminiscent of Dilbert in many ways. You should definitely keep up cartooning as a hobby.

PeterW said...

I'm really sad to see this go. What tremendous work -- this cartoon made me laugh so hard. But I keep wondering: how exactly would some reality-inspired humor threaten to interfere with the redesign process? I hope you realize what great work TFRL has been. I've never laughed harder!

Unknown said...

It's too bad it's over.