Of course my first immediate thought when I saw that both my laptops were gone is ‘WHY didn’t I keep the off-site backup up to date?’ of course it was. My excuse is that who who lives in a secure building with two security doors and a yale locked front door expects to be burgled? We’ve recently moved to a MUCH more secure building, and that thought couldn’t be further from my mind. Of course I still made off-site backups, but with hundreds of emails to deal with and a shit ton of work, not to mention internet that’s more down than up, it’s easy to let it slide or be lax. Even so that’s no excuse. So I apologise profusely to all our customers for that carelessness and the responsiblity of that is mine alone. But reading 1000s of posts calling me an idiot for that is the last thing I needed and it got to me, as even though it’s completely true it’s very easy to say in hindsight and given the massively traumatic experience and the fact I was the victim of a crime myself, I was kind of knocked sideways by the almost unanimous vitriol and accusations of me being a crook on that reddit. I should have held my cool and bit my lip, but being in control of your emotions is not particularly easy in that condition. Still it was shameful behaviour and that cannot be excused.

HOWEVER, the one thing I will not apologise for is the general sentiment of some of those posts. It felt oddly akin to Amy Winehouse’s death and some of the reactions I read on twitter: ‘She did this to herself, I feel no sympathy’ REALLY? Even if someone makes a mistake you can’t find it in your hearts to have a shred of sympathy? I find that distressing, and as someone capable of feeling sympathy for most people who feel bad regardless of the circumstances, I despair, and that amongst the hundreds of vicious emails, tweets and reddit comments (as well as drink), as well as the violation of my home and theft of property and what looked like the destruction of my career and passion, was what started that tyrade on twitter. I hope you’ll forgive me given the circumsances. My name and face has been dragged through the mud on page one of reddit and as someone who is generally neurotic in nature and worries about ‘if this person likes me or if that person said that because they’re pissed off at me’ all day every day, this is pretty much a living nightmare for me. Having my mother on the phone practically in tears over my public humiliation didn’t help too much either. This was meant to be me ‘making it’ and now… urgh… it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Anyway this is the end of me being a public face of Project Zomboid. I’m stopping this blog, I’m keeping twitter closed, steering clear of the forums. The other guys can do interviews and deal with the emails. No one put ‘must have thick skin’ (or ‘must make nightly off-site backups, for that matter) in my game programmer job description. People assume I ‘should have thicker skin’ but there you go, I don’t. I got into this because I love making games and none of those skills relate in the slightest to being able to withstand torrents of abuse, and despite the support and the attention it’s made me scared to open my e-mails. I sit there with the ‘new email’ notification haunting me, and I’ve been guaranteed to read something that makes me want to cry every day for the past few months. This is only going to be 100x harder now, so I’m bugging out of all that. It’ll kill me otherwise.