Today’s post is kinda long and personal, even though I try my best to refrain from personal posts, I thought it was a good idea to write this.

Since it’s very long, it’s read mored. My apologizes if you are on mobile.

1. Lack of updates and more importantly, replies to your messages

I’ve posted about this before, but I feel like I can’t post about it enough until everything is back in order. For a couple of months, I’ve been really busy with work and something else I’ve been working on, and for that reason, I couldn’t make much updates, nor reply to most asks I receive unless they are urgent. I still read them all, and take action if there is anything I can do, though. I fear this will continue for another 3-4 weeks, and for that, I apologize deeply.

I feel terrible when I can’t reply: since you’ve taken the time to write to me, I should do the same, but I simply don’t have the time and/or the energy at end of the day to do so these days. Please do not think your bug reports and suggestions doesn’t matter, because they do.

2. A bit about me

As you probably know, I like this website and I like serving it’s community. Because of this, I care about what you think. A free, hobby software simply can’t exist in a hostile community, since it’s dependent on a nice community to get suggestions, bug reports, donations, and promotions. I did post about this before, but I would like to address this one thing once again. 

I’m certainly nowhere perfect, nor I’ve ever said or pretended that I am. We all are prone to make mistakes, and me, perhaps even more so. 

But, contrary to what I’ve seen people say under the “xkit guy” tag in the past 2-3 months, I’ve (1) never made fun of anyone’s pronouns, nor have talked about anyone’s gender and/or sexual orientation (except my own), ever. (2) never sent or asked people to send hate messages to any blogger, over anything, ever. (3) never said that triggers don’t exist (4) never said anything xenophobic, homophobic (um) or transphobic. (see #1) (5) I do not have a Twitter account (this was the cause of some misunderstanding in the past, because someone else is using the handle “xkit” there.) (6) I didn’t make any “racist Chinese jokes”. I did mention that one of the ideas I’ve had for April Fools was “following the path of Mitt Romney and outsourcing XKit.” (Idea came from Audio Downloader messages) It was not going to be racial joke, it was going to be a Mitt Romney one.

I did, however, wrote a post on my personal blog, after the Tumblr Plus prank the staff did this year. It was written after I’ve checked tags over it and saw a lot of people cursing to Tumblr staff for being insensitive, even though I personally think they’ve tried their best to be as non-triggering as possible. I’m talking about “burn the Tumblr staff alive” level of response.

As I’ve said before, it was not written to mock anyone, or any triggers. It was, however, very, very badly written. That happens with me sometimes: it’s a language barrier thing, I guess. It was written as a reaction to people who feel it’s okay wish harm on someone when they say or do something you don’t agree with 100%. (And as you know, that has been happening a lot on this website for a while.) It was not to make fun of triggers or people triggered by the video, but it was written as a reaction to people who weren’t actually triggered by it, but were being rude and demanding about it, to the point of censorship. (and yes, that includes questioning if Tumblr should actually be allowed to pull such a prank on their own website.)

An example of this terrible writing is, for example, in that post I’ve said “if you are offended by that, how do you even watch tv or go outside?”. I’m terribly, terribly sorry about that. What I was trying to say with that was that many things on that video (skyscrapers, trains, traffic, nursing women, etc) are stuff we usually see daily, and the video was calmer than anything I’ve seen on television and did not feature things that are an occasional sight on television (nude/sex scenes, death/murder/suicide, etc.) Once again, I was just trying to stress that they’ve done their best to make it as calm and non-triggering as possible. That post was not written, at all, to make fun of/put down people who actually can’t watch television for one reason or another or anything like that. It was a result of very, very bad writing. It is my fault, and I can’t apologize enough for that. 

Also, contrary to what people have been saying, I didn’t ignore the response to it, nor asked anyone who (rightfully) got offended by that to “chill”. That post was related to my “XKit Mobile on Nokia Bricks” prank, and was posted about 10-15 minutes after reblogging the prank post. And yes, I’ve seen a lot of tags on that post that basically said “fuck you”. I was asleep when people started talking about this. (I’m near that GMT timezone.)

This is the reason why I always say that I would rather not want my personal blog be known. Here, I rewrite every sentence several times, making sure they are clear. On my personal blog, I just write without thinking how it actually sounds. Most people who follow my personal blog either have been doing that for a long time, or are my friends, so even if I write something foolish like that example above, most of the time they know what I’ve been trying to say (and, well, failing at it).

On a side note, most of them also know where I’m from. This is why I always say that I like separating my personal blog/life from XKit, and keep my personal blog personal. Because if you don’t know me/my writing style when I’m “off duty”, it can (and did, such as the racism allegations mentioned on the link above) cause misunderstandings.

Once again, I apologize deeply for that post or any post that followed or preceded it. Again, it was never my intention to make fun of anyone or any trigger, and it was a reaction to the reaction that Tumblr received for that video.

Also, I did write a post about this before on this blog, but I’ve since deleted it because some people were right about it being a bad apology letter. I do admit that I was avoiding an apology (although I did add a full apology after an edit) because quite frankly, it is actually bad writing, not bad thoughts, that resulted in that post. But I see that should be and is a reason to apologize, hence this post.

And as I’ve said in that post, if I didn’t actually care about people, there would not be any AccessKit, Disable GIFs, Blacklist, Color Quotes or others, since I would view them as a “waste of time”, something I’ve never thought about any extension I’ve put in XKit, ever.

So please, if you are going to hate me, don’t do it over things that some people have been saying that are simply not true, such as that I am transphobic, asked people to bully someone or bullied anyone personally, made fun of someone over their sexual orientation or (and yes, I’ve actually seen a post saying this back in April) that I even make/made rape jokes/innuendo. Those acts are disgusting and despicable, and I would not even think of thinking about doing them.

One post I’ve seen even said that I broke One-Click Postage on purpose to “teach people a lesson” (it was broken after Tumblr moved a piece of data required to post stuff, called “form key”, from the HTML body to a meta tag. And before that, it was because of a server fault.) I really simply do not know where people are getting those ideas, and some of them makes me wonder if people simply enjoy vilifying.

You are, of course, allowed to have your opinions about me, positive or negative, and you certainly don’t have to like me in order to use XKit. I just wanted to apologize once again, and clear the air on some stuff.

Thank you so much for reading.