Byuu / byuu_nyan / setsunakun0 - "Non-binary" furry programmer who wrote a Super Nintendo emulator

[CIA Nigger]

I think Byuu has some skeletons in his closet that we don't know of yet.
From him giving money to Sisk the convicted sex offender and groomer of children, his blog post about shota, his opinion on Eevee and the really strange undertone to his Internet persona he's obviously suspect for some activities.
I mean, practically he admitted to fapping to shota through his blog post's insane projection on how poor, poor people (himself) have been vilified and persecuted by everyone around them for liking it.

My suspicions don't end there. Who are you, @another life in hell?
You just joined yesterday, yet you've already made four posts in this thread. You haven't even set your avatar. In all of your posts you try to downplay Byuu's exceptional behaviour.
Like how you say he isn't even a furry, didn't take antiandrogens, gave up being trans/bi/whatever and is boring compared to the other emulation lolcows.
That's literally all the content you've posted here. If you're trying to sockpuppet, you're doing a really bad job at it.

The thing is there are a bunch of people in /emugen/ threads who laugh at bigger lolcows than Byuu. Byuu only came across my radar when I was doing digging on troon furries in general and even if his behavior is erratic or his opinions on some things are controversial (the FPGA debate comes to mind), there are far crazier people in the scene.

I doubt he's Byuu, he's probably someone from one of those threads. People in those threads with more knowledge of emulation scene drama have asked for threads on other scene cows or a general thread and I can agree with them on this. An emulation general thread is a much better thread idea especially as that scene is loaded with drama and controversy. There's plenty of things an OP could cover from MAME's battle with hoarders to just how hated SquarePusher/Daniel De Matteis and RetroArch are in the scene, and maybe how the classic FOSS vs proprietary debate has taken over the scene as well.

 

[???]

Did a search on FPGA, only got 3 hits. More details?

edit

Nevermind, found it.

BTW there are two forum backups for bboard.

Oldest is here:

byuu's message board - Index page

Newest is here:

byuu's message board - Index page

It looks like they aren't indexed by search engines, try backing them up or writing a spider to index them.

 

[Near Throwaway]

Sigh, since I screwed up yesterday engaging, so against all sound judgment, I'll post here once. I've been wanting to thank the OP for a while anyway. You can verify me by my signup e-mail if you want.

Look, I'm the first to admit that I'm a joke of a person. I spent half my life reverse engineering video game systems. That's *weird*, but no one else was going to do it as thorougly, and I've helped improve all SNES emulators, not just mine. At least it's a little tiny bit useful to society, and lets people have a bit of fun reliving their childhoods. It could be much worse. But it doesn't give me a pass to act like a sperg online. You're most welcome to observe and laugh at me. I only interacted yesterday because not 30 minutes after making my new Twitter handle, my notifications started having your accounts popping up in them, and my referral logs were showing your thread link. (By the way, consider adding noreferrer to your outbound links to be less conspicuous. Or don't, I'm not your dad.)

So instead of playing it smart and just running a block chain, I tried to have a bit of fun with it instead. Yeah that was absolutely stupid. My bad. Hats off to farmcat. I thought I wasted your time more, but it was a draw. You tried to get my attention and you did, so you won. No need for another game, I concede defeat. I underestimated your ability when you didn't just link to the user ID directly. I apologize for that. I wasn't trying to hide the link (it's https://twitter.com/near_nyan now, by the way.) My main Twitter handle's been the same since 2015.

All I want to do with Near is separate myself from my emulators, so that people don't have to put up with my hot takes just to get emulator news, and so people aren't stuck with my baggage when I retire. I let my projects start as a part of me, but they're way bigger than me now. There's literally a hundred contributors to higan and bsnes, and they don't deserve to get dragged down because of association with me. Just one person alone recently ... have you guys seen HD mode 7? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6u7Nk6_L50) That's legendary stuff. Let me fall on my own sword here. Whether it'll work or not remains to be seen, but so far I'm off to a pretty bad start.

The Handley article was written in 2010. Ten years ago. People change. It was a *monumentally* stupid article to write. I regret it and haven't stood by it at all for 8+ years now. Even then, I went out of my way a dozen times to express how absolutely sickening I find that content to be. Because it is. Excerpt: "There is no disputing that these were positively vile comics with sickening content" -- I meant that. FFS, I am not *that far gone* that I would touch this topic with a thousand-foot pole if it were secretly my thing. Give me *some* credit here ...

Yet here I was, a programmer with no knowledge, commenting on something I knew absolutely nothing about. Trying to play devil's advocate and be a bleeding heart empath to everyone that wasn't hurting anyone for real. The guy legitimately seemed sympathetic. Potentially fifteen years in prison because 3 out of 1,000 comic books he ordered had obscene drawings? Wasn't he just a massive manga nerd? What if he didn't even know?

Here's what happened; this article came up on Slashdot: http://cbldf.org/about-us/case-files/cbldf-case-files/handley/

It's the same article I wrote, down to the words "Thought Crimes" and all. I'm not very original. I read and linked the peer-reviewed research on it, which all leaned toward that it would reduce abuse by serving as a fictional outlet, and wouldn't cause anyone who wasn't already predisposed that way to become so. Banning drawings doesn't erase sick fucks from the world, unfortunately. In absence of that, I thought reducing harm would be better than making it worse in the name of moral outrage. People have since made me aware of grooming, which as the god's honest truth wasn't a term I knew at the time, and I changed my mind. We're human. We make mistakes. Sometimes incredibly massive ones. This was my biggest mistake in life so far.

If you want to judge me for using cartoon avatars that I've literally used since I was 14 myself on the internet, I guess go ahead. I'm a guy that likes cute things. I fail the manliness test, my bad. I can't disprove unfalsifiable claims, but I suppose I have only myself to blame that people think this.

You're not going to find some secret R18 content on me, because it doesn't exist. I'm asexual; I don't know why. It sucks. That's why I could move to Japan in spite of being married; it's a platonic relationship. I overshare like crazy I know; my life's an open book. At least it's entertaining for others, I guess.

As for Sisk, my timeline had this story on it: http://www.saveoursisk.org/p/sisks-story.html

I read it, and believed it was plausibly true. The justice system isn't always infallible. I chose to give it the benefit of the doubt and sent in a literal dollar or two. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm really gullible. So be it. I want to believe in the good of people instead of being cynical all the time. $2 wasn't going to change anything, it was just, in the chance Sisk was actually innocent, a way of saying, "someone believes you, hang in there."

The politics stuff on Twitter was because I was stuck in a bubble, and my entire timeline was "Defcon 1 crisis mode" 24/7 since the election. It messed me up for a bit.

So what's up with the furry / non-binary stuff? Like everything else above: I'm very impressionable, and I act like people around me to fit in. That's why you can see several versions of me depending on where you look. It gets me far in real life, and I have no problems staying employed. But I'm also a fraud: I don't really have a personality of my own. I just write code. 500,000+ lines and counting now. I can't imagine why anyone would ever give a shit what I thought about politics, or whatever else outside of coding. I realize in hindsight that I should have just kept my damn mouth shut and stuck to the thing I was good at.

My friends knew this going in. I didn't even want a fursona but a close friend was really into the idea and commissioned a slot for me as a gift. No discredit to the artist, she's very talented, but that art is about the furthest thing from what I had in mind I could imagine. But with no prior refsheet, she had to wing it. And in hindsight I shouldn't have posted it, but I didn't want to be rude about a gift. I've since commissioned a small number of pieces myself that are more reflective of what I was going for. That took time because good artists fill slots within a minute of opening commissions. I don't expect to win your favor with them of course, and I kind of like the character now.

When I retweeted Eevee, I didn't know who it was beyond the PHP article I liked (we follow each other now, full disclosure.) My thought was, "hey that's my cat's name!", and "that's a pretty extreme tactic to target anyone who shows support for someone instead of just focusing on them." In my infinite stupidity, I didn't think two steps ahead that if you went after *me*, you'd start bringing in other people around me too. Yet here we are now and this thread is half-derailed talking about other people. And that's on me, and I'm sincerely sorry to everyone who got dragged in here because of me. That's my biggest regret.

Is ALIH me? No, but he may be someone I know who's trying (poorly) to be inconspicuous by throwing in a few minor insults along the way, who knows. I would never use those words against my friends to try and spare myself negative attention. On the contrary, I'd rather you keep your focus on me than go after others. I'm used to it. I can and do laugh at myself. I fuck up all the time, and I'm always getting into drama. Less so these days, but it still happens. And here I am responding, so I guess I really do fit the definition of a lolcow too. So be it. The way I was acting in 2017 was absolutely peak cringe. It's funny shit; I get it. I'm not mad that you targeted me for it, just disappointed in myself for not being genuine.

I'm not going to condone anything here, but honestly ... I appreciate that this thread was made. I really do. It put all my bullshit in one place and it was a bit of a wake-up call for me. I'm not perfect, but I've been trying to get my shit together as much as I could these past two years now. I'm not going to dismiss my friends, or those who happen to be trans, or furry, or on the spectrum, or whatever it is you guys dislike to fit in here. So I'm sure it's never going to be good enough. I *do* dismiss anyone who hurts another child or animal, though. Putting those people in jail is the one thing I support from here.

I took the valid criticisms to heart and I've been making changes. I took down my old articles, I stay out of politics and online arguments, and I'm keeping my head down and staying productive instead. I'm working on making software now that people don't hate, and that aren't filled with my own bizarre hangups. I'm trying to pass on my knowledge so that someone can take the torch when I'm gone.

So sincerely, and only in my case and no one else's, thank you for the wake-up call here OP. No hard feelings. I'm not asking you to take it down, and I know you never would anyway. Keep it. Mirror it. Put it on a titanium disk and ship it into space. I'll own all of my mistakes. If you ever get a DMCA or GDPR request or some bullshit on this, it's not me. Send me an e-mail and I'll counter-claim it myself. People do impersonate me (eg on Stormfront), so keep your guard up against any false flagging or white knighting, please. I support free speech absolutely, even when it's speech I don't like, because silencing it only makes things worse. I even defended Tom in the recent Goemon translation controversy, knowing that'd lose me support among my friends. And I'll lose a lot of support by simply posting here at all. So be it.

In any case, this has nothing to do with you folks, but I've been planning to retire at the end of the year or so. I did what I set out to do with SNES emulation, and now I've mostly outlived my usefulness. Let me wrap up my last few projects, and then I'm out.

I don't want to shit up your thread, so I'll bow out now and stop engaging. I think it's better for all of us if I don't read this anymore, so I'll do that. If anyone actually reads this long, spergy reply ... thanks. I'm sure I'll live to regret this post, but what else is new, right?

To the OP, yeah that guy's been A-logging me hard on 4chan for the past ten years. I really have no idea who he is, but I will give him one thing: he's persistent. One of these days I'd love to learn what in the name of god I did to him, but I don't think I'll ever find out. Everyone has their Vordrak I suppose.

 

[???]

@Near Throwaway it could be worse, you could be unskilled, lacking genitals, and doxed. Count your blessings.

While we're all assholes here, most of us are just taking the piss out of you. Half of us are autists too.

Last and most important of all, do YOU have anyone you'd like to post about or dox? We have a small but persistent clique of lefties, they could use someone with your skills.

 

[TaimuRadiu]

Apparently in Japan he was working on WonderSwan emulation with some dood called "Furrtrek."

Imagine the smell.

edit: @Near Throwaway if he ever posts again: do you still think the big bad TRUMP is going to invalidate your gay marriage?

 

[another life in hell]

Is ALIH me? No, but he may be someone I know who's trying (poorly) to be inconspicuous by throwing in a few minor insults along the way, who knows. I would never use those words against my friends to try and spare myself negative attention.

It's not like I'm taking this personally, but i am baffled that im getting repeatedly accused of whiteknighting for pointing out stuff that's obvious. As much as I like drama, I get absolutely no joy, from accusing someone of being a pedophile, when I 99% know they aren't. I'm sure some people do. IDK. I lurked on your IRC channel before, but you were never there. We've never met.

This account isn't even a throwaway. It's got my primary e-mail address; though its not like i do anything other than lurk 99% of the time. I feel I have derailed this thread enough, so if you want to interrogate me please consider messaging me personally.

 

[farmcat]

Look, I'm the first to admit that I'm a joke of a person.

Not gonna accept that, sorry. The only reason I got involved at all is because I respect you, as weird as that might seem from this perspective. I was curious. I tried to update the thread here. Things snowballed.

All I want to do with Near is separate myself from my emulators, so that people don't have to put up with my hot takes

You can't seem to discard the self-deprecation. Your social takes are not particularly controversial. Don't sell yourself so short. You're obviously a social chameleon. You absorb the social fabrics that you find yourself in. While you'd do well to construct a more values-driven worldview, your porous social nature isn't that much of a liability.

If you want to judge me for using cartoon avatars that I've literally used since I was 14 myself on the internet

I play things up. If you knew my history, you may laugh at the brazen hypocrisy, but you seem simply too empathic.

And here I am responding, so I guess I really do fit the definition of a lolcow too.

This site isn't about "lolcows", as seen by most of its members, they think more in terms of "exceptional individuals". Some are nice, some are not. You're the spitting image of one of the good ones. What do I know, though? Mudlord keeps coming up, so I'll comment on it for context. While the guy has his problems, I always appreciated how real he was about the fact that he has problems. Back before I disengaged with the relevant communities, I would have told you that I even liked Mudlord. You are certainly much more likeable than he.

I support free speech absolutely, even when it's speech I don't like, because silencing it only makes things worse. I even defended Tom in the recent Goemon translation controversy, knowing that'd lose me support among my friends. And I'll lose a lot of support by simply posting here at all. So be it.

Insofar as my opinion here matters, while I'd have counseled against it without seeing this, you're not shooting yourself in the foot by posting here except through your self-deprecation. That's fine. It simply reflects your character.

I don't want to shit up your thread, so I'll bow out now and stop engaging. I think it's better for all of us if I don't read this anymore, so I'll do that. If anyone actually reads this long, spergy reply ...

Don't be so hard on yourself. IDK if you'll even read this, but hey.

I wouldn't say I regret our engagement, but given context, I think that it was harder on your self-esteem than I would have liked. I have thick "Internet callus" that keeps online stuff from getting to me. It's quite clear that you don't have that. If I knew before our engagement what I know now, I'd have handled things very differently. I regret and apologize for any psychiatric distress my involvement might have caused you. You have produced a body of work that I respect and value highly. I'd have never engaged in the first place were that not true.

 

[Coolio55]

Not gonna accept that, sorry. The only reason I got involved at all is because I respect you, as weird as that might seem from this perspective. I was curious. I tried to update the thread here. Things snowballed.

You can't seem to discard the self-deprecation. Your social takes are not particularly controversial. Don't sell yourself so short. You're obviously a social chameleon. You absorb the social fabrics that you find yourself in. While you'd do well to construct a more values-driven worldview, your porous social nature isn't that much of a liability.

I play things up. If you knew my history, you may laugh at the brazen hypocrisy, but you seem simply too empathic.

This site isn't about "lolcows", as seen by most of its members, they think more in terms of "exceptional individuals". Some are nice, some are not. You're the spitting image of one of the good ones. What do I know, though? Mudlord keeps coming up, so I'll comment on it for context. While the guy has his problems, I always appreciated how real he was about the fact that he has problems. Back before I disengaged with the relevant communities, I would have told you that I even liked Mudlord. You are certainly much more likeable than he.

Insofar as my opinion here matters, while I'd have counseled against it without seeing this, you're not shooting yourself in the foot by posting here except through your self-deprecation. That's fine. It simply reflects your character.

Don't be so hard on yourself. IDK if you'll even read this, but hey.

I wouldn't say I regret our engagement, but given context, I think that it was harder on your self-esteem than I would have liked. I have thick "Internet callus" that keeps online stuff from getting to me. It's quite clear that you don't have that. If I knew before our engagement what I know now, I'd have handled things very differently. I regret and apologize for any psychiatric distress my involvement might have caused you. You have produced a body of work that I respect and value highly. I'd have never engaged in the first place were that not true.

View attachment 1135225

Will you stop falling for the obvious compliment fishing? JFC this is Myspace level.

 

[CIA Nigger]

The politics stuff on Twitter was because I was stuck in a bubble, and my entire timeline was "Defcon 1 crisis mode" 24/7 since the election. It messed me up for a bit.

So what's up with the furry / non-binary stuff? Like everything else above: I'm very impressionable, and I act like people around me to fit in. That's why you can see several versions of me depending on where you look. It gets me far in real life, and I have no problems staying employed. But I'm also a fraud: I don't really have a personality of my own. I just write code. 500,000+ lines and counting now. I can't imagine why anyone would ever give a shit what I thought about politics, or whatever else outside of coding. I realize in hindsight that I should have just kept my damn mouth shut and stuck to the thing I was good at.

My friends knew this going in. I didn't even want a fursona but a close friend was really into the idea and commissioned a slot for me as a gift. No discredit to the artist, she's very talented, but that art is about the furthest thing from what I had in mind I could imagine. But with no prior refsheet, she had to wing it. And in hindsight I shouldn't have posted it, but I didn't want to be rude about a gift. I've since commissioned a small number of pieces myself that are more reflective of what I was going for. That took time because good artists fill slots within a minute of opening commissions. I don't expect to win your favor with them of course, and I kind of like the character now.

I've noticed this with the furry community (and a lot of communities) on Twitter too. There is a lot of panic and fearmongering on both political sides and it can be a toxic place. It's gotten to the point where people are getting extremely burnt out with fear mongering and HAPPENINGS that never take place. It's like the panic over 2012 ending the world became mainstream except it revolves around politics.

As for the political thing, I can agree too. That's completely derailed the FOSS community to the point where lots of discussion doesn't involve code but involves fighting over codes of conduct or other non-tech related politics. You're not the only programmer who has tried talking politics but in an intensified political climate it's known for burning a lot of bridges and starting flamewars.

If this is you (I can't check email addresses of users on my end) I can actually appreciate that. Many people who get threads on this site (or end up in general drama threads as topics of discussion) don't end up changing and end up digging their hole deeper, or make accounts to try to fight the forum turning it into something straight out of a trashy talk show. Usually threads on people die out when they change and as the replies from this thread show, more people are interested in an emulation general thread or talking about people like Squarepusher. To put it bluntly, this site at it's core is a drama or trashfire watching website and even some people with threads here had/have fans as the Terry Davis thread showed. Plenty of people still respect you because of your work on BSNES/Higan in the same way people respect the work of the MAME project. Sure, some people do hold grudges that last for years but I do believe that people can change.

 

[Near Throwaway]

I thought it only fair to at least read the responses. To tell you the truth, I was expecting the complete opposite reaction. I've been humbled and pleasantly surprised, thank you. I feel like I understand your perspectives better now, than through only being an outside observer. Apologies for the misconceptions I held about this place.

ALIH, I was only speculating on the hypothetical, I didn't mean to imply an accusation, sorry.

???, hey, silver linings! ^-^; And no, I think I'll leave that to the experts here. I missed the mark on farmcat completely, for example.

TaimuRadiu, I was in a bubble and acting like a fool with the politics, fair point. The world certainly hasn't ended. I'll stay out of it going forward.

farmcat, it only affected me so much because I fell back into old habits I've been trying to stop yesterday (over-reacting, eg drama.) I feel like I've undone years of progress. Even someone in AA will occasionally slip up and have a drink, but that doesn't mean they've failed completely. I just have to try even harder now and stop beating myself up about it. It helped a lot that you guys noticed I've been trying. I wasn't sure if you saw it. From when this thread first appeared, my thought was, "let me just show them through my actions instead of my words", and my actions yesterday screamed, "still the same." Again, I apologize for slipping up yesterday, I know how bad it looks ._.

On being a social chameleon ... in real life, it only ever helps since you only interact with people in front of you. I can take interest in whatever the people around me are into. No one wants to be around the guy who only obsesses over his singular hyperfocused interest with everyone. I don't even bring up my online persona in real life. But on the internet, everyone sees everything, whether they want to or not. We don't stick to our own little communities. Which isn't even a bad thing! But if you take it too far, you're not being genuine and you'll alienate outside observers.

It was never okay that someone wanting to download bsnes had to get a furry avatar and left-wing takes shoved in their faces. You couldn't get away from my identity when you had to go to byuu.org/bsnes to get the software instead of, say, bsnes.domain as it should have been. I don't think changing my name to Near is going to make anyone forget about the past, so it may be pointless. But it certainly wasn't helping my self-deprecation to keep a name ("byuu") that literally means "mistake" in Japanese. And it certainly won't hurt to split my account into two separate roles.

I don't know if I'm making the right choice in changing my name after 22 years, and people are welcome to (and likely will) keep referring to me as byuu. That's fine. I'm also not going to use Near to backslide into 2017 byuu again, I said as much from day one. But I do want to continue to be myself, and support my friends, even if it's not always popular. To the mods here, you can name this account whatever you want, or leave it as-is, up to you.

I *really* don't know if it's the best idea to name my new user-focused emulator "byuu". I consider the software my magnum opus, so it's fitting, but it may just cause too much confusion since it used to be my name. It's far too late to get away from the name byuu entirely, though. I can't change 15 years of backlinks to byuu.org with a permanent 301 redirect. Hijacking the name to bypass it taking years like higan did for people to even know it existed is shrewd; I hope it will end up being the right move. We'll see. I suppose I can always rename the new emulator at any point.

The only right choice would have been to keep my personal and professional lives separate from day one. Retro gaming transcends politics and identities. We can all appreciate games as a form of art and history, or just something to have fun with. But I can't undo the mistakes of the past.

...

OP, when it comes to community bubbles, I found this article very illuminating: https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a-purity-spiral/

Yes, it's definitely a valid concern. I don't believe this is a left-right divide, it feels like an authoritarian divide. Do what we do, say what we say, in lockstep, or you're out. When you get clout from callouts, it incentivizes eating your own. And when it works, you *do* drive people on the margins out, meaning you have to keep escalating the purity tactics to have more targets within your ranks for virtue signaling.

Yes, I'm afraid of that. I think we all are when we're not anonymous. We all want to fit in, and none of us want to be next on the chopping block. Society seems to be spiraling down, which is 'good news' for this site, but bad news in general. I took a long break from Twitter in October 2018, and started hanging out more with friends offline. I started aggressively muting and unfollowing the people who are always screaming about "the end is nigh!" and "this person is bad and must be silenced!" It helped a lot. But I know those people are all still there, and I am still not sure how they're going to take it that I signed up for an account here: this place is basically public enemy number one in my circles. But again (and only speaking for myself), I can concur that you folks laid off me when I got my act together. As long as a person can laugh at themselves and admit their mistakes without trying to hide them, this place can be beneficial even to targets. It's easy to go astray when no one in your friend circle will risk calling you on your shit the way anonymous strangers will.

Also, I can tell from your name you were a fan of Terry's. I always hated that other people either looked at him as someone to gawk and sneer at, or as someone to virtue signal about how caring and empathetic they were, yet no one ever really seemed to want to actually help him. I was worried that one day I'd read that he hurt someone for real. I stayed out of it entirely because there was nothing I could do, but I wanted him to get better. It was a sad day when I learned of his passing.

...

Everyone else, if you have any more questions for me in good faith, please send them to me on Twitter (near_nyan) instead. I do think it's best for everyone that I not stay in my own thread like this.

Thanks again for the warm reception!

(edit: added a few small clarifications for what I meant; I didn't remove anything. Proof: http://archive.md/tEcDH)

 

[garakfan69]

So if you have so much regrets about your past self, will you finally stop being a dump hoarder?

 

[Sigma]

I thought it only fair to at least read the responses. To tell you the truth, I was expecting the complete opposite reaction. I've been humbled and pleasantly surprised, thank you. I feel like I understand your perspectives better now, than through only being an outside observer. Apologies for the misconceptions I held about this place.

ALIH, I was only speculating on the hypothetical, I didn't mean to imply an accusation, sorry.

???, hey, silver linings! ^-^; And no, I think I'll leave that to the experts here. I missed the mark on farmcat completely, for example.

TaimuRadiu, I was in a bubble and acting like a fool with the politics, fair point. The world certainly hasn't ended. I'll stay out of it going forward.

farmcat, it only affected me so much because I fell back into old habits I've been trying to stop yesterday (over-reacting, eg drama.) I feel like I've undone years of progress. Even someone in AA will occasionally slip up and have a drink, but that doesn't mean they've failed completely. I just have to try even harder now and stop beating myself up about it. It helped a lot that you guys noticed I've been trying. I wasn't sure if you saw it. From when this thread first appeared, my thought was, "let me just show them through my actions instead of my words", and my actions yesterday screamed, "still the same." Again, I apologize for slipping up yesterday, I know how bad it looks ._.

On being a social chameleon ... in real life, it only ever helps since you only interact with people in front of you. I can take interest in whatever the people around me are into. No one wants to be around the guy who only obsesses over his singular hyperfocused interest with everyone. I don't even bring up my online persona in real life. But on the internet, everyone sees everything, whether they want to or not. We don't stick to our own little communities. Which isn't even a bad thing! But if you take it too far, you're not being genuine and you'll alienate outside observers.

It was never okay that someone wanting to download bsnes had to get a furry avatar and left-wing takes shoved in their faces. You couldn't get away from my identity when you had to go to byuu.org/bsnes to get the software instead of, say, bsnes.domain as it should have been. I don't think changing my name to Near is going to make anyone forget about the past, so it may be pointless. But it certainly wasn't helping my self-deprecation to keep a name ("byuu") that literally means "mistake" in Japanese. And it certainly won't hurt to split my account into two separate roles.

I don't know if I'm making the right choice in changing my name after 22 years, and people are welcome to (and likely will) keep referring to me as byuu. That's fine. I'm also not going to use Near to backslide into 2017 byuu again, I said as much from day one. But I do want to continue to be myself, and support my friends, even if it's not always popular. To the mods here, you can name this account whatever you want, or leave it as-is, up to you.

I *really* don't know if it's the best idea to name my new user-focused emulator "byuu". I consider the software my magnum opus, so it's fitting, but it may just cause too much confusion since it used to be my name. It's far too late to get away from the name byuu entirely, though. I can't change 15 years of backlinks to byuu.org with a permanent 301 redirect. Hijacking the name to bypass it taking years like higan did for people to even know it existed is shrewd; I hope it will end up being the right move. We'll see. I suppose I can always rename the new emulator at any point.

The only right choice would have been to keep my personal and professional lives separate from day one. Retro gaming transcends politics and identities. We can all appreciate games as a form of art and history, or just something to have fun with. But I can't undo the mistakes of the past.

...

OP, when it comes to community bubbles, I found this article very illuminating: https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a-purity-spiral/

Yes, it's definitely a valid concern. I don't believe this is a left-right divide, it feels like an authoritarian divide. Do what we do, say what we say, in lockstep, or you're out. When you get clout from callouts, it incentivizes eating your own. And when it works, you *do* drive people on the margins out, meaning you have to keep escalating the purity tactics to have more targets within your ranks for virtue signaling.

Yes, I'm afraid of that. I think we all are when we're not anonymous. We all want to fit in, and none of us want to be next on the chopping block. Society seems to be spiraling down, which is 'good news' for this site, but bad news in general. I took a long break from Twitter in October 2018, and started hanging out more with friends offline. I started aggressively muting and unfollowing the people who are always screaming about "the end is nigh!" and "this person is bad and must be silenced!" It helped a lot. But I know those people are all still there, and I am still not sure how they're going to take it that I signed up for an account here. We'll see.

Also, I can tell from your name you were a fan of Terry's. I always hated that people either looked at him as something to gawk and sneer at, or as someone to blindly promote to brag about how caring and empathetic they were. I was worried that one day I'd read that he hurt someone for real, and that almost no one was honestly trying to help him. I stayed out of it entirely because there was nothing I could do. It was a sad day when I learned of his passing.

...

Everyone else, if you have any more questions for me in good faith, please send them to me on Twitter (near_nyan) instead. I do think it's best for everyone that I not stay in my own thread like this.

Thanks again for the warm reception!

What if you name your new emulator the opposite of Byuu then? Maybe something like "Success" in Japanese.

 

[TaimuRadiu]

I gotta admit I'm surprised @Near Throwaway replied to me. I am a regular user of bsnes/higan and I don't really care about the furstuff, just dumb politics is dumb.

 

[A Hot Potato]

I gotta admit I'm surprised @Near Throwaway replied to me. I am a regular user of bsnes/higan and I don't really care about the furstuff, just dumb politics is dumb.

You are also a regular user of this website and nobody cares about what you care about.

 

[TaimuRadiu]

You are also a regular user of this website and nobody cares about what you care about.

You cared enough to post about it so nyaa

 

[YayLasagna]

I do so love a happy ending.

 

[Ashley Lynne Coulter]

So is their only claim to fame this SNES emulator, pretty much?

 

[Joe Biden's Left Testicle]

Put all the SNES dumps on a torrent and then we’re talking. You still hoard dumps and you still have multiple ties to various delectable furries.
Maybe he's trying to keep it cool right now, but people should keep on the lookout for more of Byuu's sperging in the meantime.

 

[Near Throwaway]

It seems I'll have to address this as well.

I don't hoard games. The latest No-Intro torrent has every single game in it that I have, and much more. I can personally guarantee that no one can name a game I own that isn't in that set, and I give everyone my word that I will never hoard any game I find.

To date, I've spent about $30,000 (about 1/3rd of which has been donated to me, another 1/3rd I've earned through software licensing sales) on buying up SNES games to redump and verify them. I have found around a dozen new games and replaced three bad dumps that had corrupted graphics. I put around 1,200 hours into this project, and every scan I've ever made (boxes, cartridges, and PCBs) are publicly available. I never scanned the manuals because it would have taken too much time for one person. I have volunteered to donate my entire Super Famicom collection to the Game Preservation Society in Japan. I put up a $2,500 bounty for dumping the WonderSwan boot ROMs. I paid out that bounty, and they are publicly available now. Behind the scenes, I have contributed several hundred dollars to various fundraisers to obtain rare prototype games and stop them from being hoarded. I contributed to a project to build a perfect cartridge dumper for the SNES, the 21fx, and it's open source hardware. I have spoken at length against hoarders who kept games such as Akka Arrh and Magical Kid Indy locked up. I absolutely detest game hoarding.

The misinformation is because I tweeted about an undumped prototype of Pachinko Fan - Shouri Sengen v1.1 in late 2017, a game that retails for $3, and I stated that I couldn't legally release the image. I regret not having more tact in how I stated that. But please see this article, where a person hosting ROM images was fined $12.2 million. It's not a risk I can take.

What I do instead is physically mail the actual cartridges off as soon as I add them to my database, and within a few months (the delay is entirely on No-Intro's end), they get added there. Here is the entry for my Pachinko Fan 1.1 cartridge. This is a necessary evil with draconian copyright laws, so that I can continue working in game preservation.

Again, I do not possess a single game that isn't publicly available. I accept responsibility for my previous words being easy to mischaracterize, and I will do better with my messaging going forward.

 

[peanus weenus]

But please see this article, where a person hosting ROM images was fined $12.2 million. It's not a risk I can take.

Is it really hard to NOT host super mario bros and legend of zelda? I understand people only ever visit romsites to download these games, but like 99% of retro game publishers are legally nonexistent. Pachinko Fan also doesn't seem like an franchise worth protecting it's copyrights (given that these rights aren't buried under millions of legalese papers owned by company that doesn't even realize they handle videogames).