Near, creator of BSNES emulator, dies following sustained hate and harassment campaign

Johnny Ryall wrote:Jesus, bsnes was a revelation in terms of software emulation accuracy and game preservation.

Such a shame.

Is this the same person I've seen online go by byuu?

Yep he callled himself byuu original in refrence to a character from his fave game but then later went by Near.

He created BSNES and Higan emulators and he worked on translating a bunch of RPG games. He also purchased and dumped a full collection of USA and japanese snea games
to help with preservation, as well as disasembling some specialist Snes game chips to learn how they worked. His work has greatly added to the world of emulators and game preservation.

kerr9000 wrote:

Johnny Ryall wrote:Jesus, bsnes was a revelation in terms of software emulation accuracy and game preservation.

Such a shame.

Is this the same person I've seen online go by byuu?

Yep he callled himself byuu original in refrence to a character from his fave game but then later went by Near.

He created BSNES and Higan emulators and he worked on translating a bunch of RPG games. He also purchased and dumped a full collection of USA and japanese snea games
to help with preservation, as well as disasembling some specialist Snes game chips to learn how they worked. His work has greatly added to the world of emulators and game preservation.

I can't imagine how bloody hard creating an emulator must be.

Awful to think someone with that talent and love for gaming history can be bullied to the point of suicide.

Yep and the emulators he made must have took so much more work, your average emulator tries to play the games by hook or by crook with the goal of just making it seem like it's running properly. His emulators were made to run ROMs exactly in the way the way the system would, no cheating, no skipping stuff nothing. Not only that he then apparently offered help and support to the creators of rival emulators.

I had no idea about the existence of Near or their amazing body of work until this thread, but it's a terrible shame to have lost them, and even worse that this was entirely avoidable. The owner of this site (at the very least, probably many others too) belongs in prison.

The owner of that forum (please do not link to and preferably avoid mentioning it to bring attention to them rather than Near and his work) is like my literal nemesis. He was fired from 8ch*n for admitting to watching child porn for strawberry float's sake and will only take responsibility for the action of users on his site if he's legally compelled to by a change in law. The same site may well have helped trigger the US capitol riots as well. Anyway, back to Near

I want to share his biography. There are so many aspects of this I can relate to, I've often been called a perfectionist, I often work on projects for a very long period of time and seemingly never finish or release them. I'm so glad that he did manage to release his passion project only February this year, but it's incredibly sad to think that perhaps once his magnum opus was finished, he could no longer be driven to tolerate the online harassment that started several years ago.

Near wrote:Nice to meet you! Please call me Near.

I'm a software engineer with 23 years of experience living in Tokyo, Japan.

My specialty is reverse engineering hardware and software. I am most well-known for writing video game system emulators and producing Japanese-to-English video game fan translations. I have also created various tools and file formats used widely within these scenes.

Personality wise, I'm an INTJ-T. I mostly prefer to keep to my own spaces, and generally won't reach out first to others. I work alone, though I am at my best when I have friends nearby to support me. I tend to be overly sensitive and self-critical, and I am not the most adept at social graces, but I'm working on these challenges as best I can. I value honesty above politeness, and rationality above emotion. I have a strong desire to understand everything, and an overwhelming drive to achieve perfection, which often leads me to implementing everything I can myself.

I find I'm not content unless I am working on problems that are just beyond my limits, always seeking to increase my knowledge and capabilities. You'll pretty much always find me working on something, as I don't enjoy leisure time.

Anyone who knows me will say I am sensitive and self critical to a fault, part of the reason I don't need most kinds of jibes is I'm already deeply aware of my own faults, so that's been an ongoing struggle with my experience with depression too. I think this is really common we autism, we don't fit in, question deeply all manner of social interactions all the time, for fear of misunderstanding or being misunderstood, and so generally just tend to stay away from other people. But if you live like that, you will seldom get anything done in society, find a job, find a partner, etc, this things feel impossible at times on the spectrum. I am happy Near did manage to through the Internet, connect others and his passions and find purpose through his work. It is precisely the total disregard for the value of human life and wellbeing from his persecutors, why someone like Near was lost. And this happens much more often than anyone would care to admit. It is so very easy to wind up neurodiverse people who basically lack the capacity to deal with things like this, although I cant imagine anyone could cope with this scale of targeted harassment. These killers know this, and they do it for fun, and the fact they tend to be alt right shitlords, well what a surprise. The Internet can be the best and the worst thing. I'm not sure what else to say at this point.

Green Gecko wrote:The owner of that forum (please do not link to and preferably avoid mentioning it to bring attention to them rather than Near and his work) is like my literal nemesis. He was fired from 8ch*n for admitting to watching child porn for strawberry float's sake and will only take responsibility for the action of users on his site if he's legally compelled to by a change in law. The same site may well have helped trigger the US capitol riots as well. Anyway, back to Near

I want to share his biography. There are so many aspects of this I can relate to, I've often been called a perfectionist, I often work on projects for a very long period of time and seemingly never finish or release them. I'm so glad that he did manage to release his passion project only February this year, but it's incredibly sad to think that perhaps once his magnum opus was finished, he could no longer be driven to tolerate the online harassment that started several years ago.

Near wrote:Nice to meet you! Please call me Near.

I'm a software engineer with 23 years of experience living in Tokyo, Japan.

My specialty is reverse engineering hardware and software. I am most well-known for writing video game system emulators and producing Japanese-to-English video game fan translations. I have also created various tools and file formats used widely within these scenes.

Personality wise, I'm an INTJ-T. I mostly prefer to keep to my own spaces, and generally won't reach out first to others. I work alone, though I am at my best when I have friends nearby to support me. I tend to be overly sensitive and self-critical, and I am not the most adept at social graces, but I'm working on these challenges as best I can. I value honesty above politeness, and rationality above emotion. I have a strong desire to understand everything, and an overwhelming drive to achieve perfection, which often leads me to implementing everything I can myself.

I find I'm not content unless I am working on problems that are just beyond my limits, always seeking to increase my knowledge and capabilities. You'll pretty much always find me working on something, as I don't enjoy leisure time.

Yeah I was glad he finished his project but I did wonder if he kind of thought after that well I have achieved what I wanted to and I cant bear the struggle anymore.

kerr9000 wrote:This is an article about a big life ambition for him translating bahamut-lagoon, he tried multiple times but finally finished it not that long ago.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvxezw/ ... mut-lagoon

It kind of got a tear out of me, one of my mums life long ambitions was to hand rear an African Grey Parrot, she started doing this just before her death and asked me to finish hand rearing him for her. I guess I am glad at least he got to see out the thing he wanted to do.

Patrick Klepek has written a follow up to that in light of Near taking their life and his own interaction with them to write that first article.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbz4b/ ... eal-person

This almost completely passed me by but they went into it on the latest Waypoint, which seems natural given Patrick's aforementioned article with Near.

God what a strawberry floating tragedy. And what a disgrace that site is able to operate more or less unhindered, with its explicit purpose of harm.

I tried putting this on pastebin so Google doesn't eat it but it wouldn't let me as it deemed it offensive (haha, pastebin thinks just discussing this is bad!) so strawberry float it.

Nah mate it's an "entertainment website" where you can "explore abnormal psychology" whilst the members literally bang on about "tr*nnies" and "n*gs". There's a thread there discussing "do you have a good reason to hate blacks"? It's a strawberry floating hate site. It was built out of a wiki 100% dedicated to persistently trolling, doxing and detailing every inch of the online persona and off site activities of Christine Chan (the autistic YouTuber with the pikachu/sonic mashup emblem around their neck). I don't like linking to people on know your meme because that's part of the problem but this person has been trolled for decades (but at least he lived with loved ones, that is until his father passed away) https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/c ... n-chandler

All the guy was asking for was a thread full of abuse to be removed. 1 strawberry floating thread. But Joshua Moon cannot be "extorted" because it will upset his "community" and "it's just a 14 page thread". Where the strawberry float is the bar supposed to be then? 50 pages? 200 pages? 500 pages? strawberry floating pathetic. And obviously in it for any donations or money he gets, so his classy highly valuable members are oh so important over the value of somebody's literal life. Since he disclosed private emails with Near speaking of his LLC (basically a limited company), he probably funnels the site through that for tax purposes.

The worst part is the people who bullied Near to death have got stuff on the darknet so even if there site was closed down etc then they will still be there lurking out of the way, add to this the main guy was a head mod on another hate filled site and was removed for promoting paedophilia.

The main thing to remember about them is that they look for what they call lolcows its people you can get the most crying and begging etc out of , they want a reaction and the more they get the more they go for people.... they basically started out bullying an autistic girl and because she got very visibly upset they kept ramping it up feeding on her misery and then looked for more people to feed on.

Note: in this post I'm mainly addressing Joshua Moon's statement that was/is up in place of an error page during DoS'ing, essentially stating that site had nothing to do with this, and as that keeps changing and I don't want to link to our quote the site I'm not going to.

My understanding of Near's reaction to his thread there isn't that he "wasn't bothered by it" it was that he was willing and ready to change about himself whatever his aggressors wanted him to in order for the abuse to stop. The saddest thing about breaking somebody down like this while trying to appear strong is it will never stop, and that person is burning alive and collapsing from within. The person getting ripped apart like that offers themselves as a sacrifice as they lose any sense of inner strength or self respect and literally begs for the abuser to tell them what to do to make it stop. Yet it never will.

What these people want while they will say repeatedly "just shrug it off" or "just change this" or "just change that" (e.g. Stop "acting" autistic, stop expressing non binary gender characteristics, stop being furry, whatever it is they will find something to manipulate) is the control the person. And when that person offers themselves and everything they have (in this case their servitude as a programmer, and their entire life savings) because they have felt or been completely defeated, the individual facilitating the gathering grounds for all of this chooses to do nothing because of free speech principles and valuing their cesspit of shitlords over anything else, even human life. That person, is strawberry floated up.

It's organised hate and stubbornness to the Nth degree and I'm having a hard time accepting it but I suppose we have to as much as we have to accept various reprehensible humans exist together with their actions.

The more I talk about it the more they grow as well and it attracts their ire here. We so obviously have a societal problem here that isn't going to go away. People are awful. I honestly don't even consider "people" humans anymore. A person is what becomes of a human born out of their environment and their decisions. These people are not human. They've become something else from human when they treat another human like this.

I must admit that during my listen to the Waypoint section about that site I had a real problem trying to visualise the users. How awful must your life be, how filled with self-hate and sadness, to dedicate yourself to bullying someone with the express intention of harm? I'm thankful beyond words that that type of person is a complete mystery to me, a horror story I have no frame of reference for.

I wouldn't say I hate people these days, I hate the mob mentality that social media has developed and encouraged. This isn't to deflect blame from those who choose to perpetrate hate, rather that said hate would be but a fart in the wind were it not for the rise of unpoliced, unregulated sites like the one we're talking about. Who gives two strawberry floats what 69xxJoshxx from Ohio thinks about race, but give him a place to group up and these insignificant societal parasites become a real force. That no organisation is willing to step up, take a stand and stop them is what sickens me.

Tafdolphin wrote:I must admit that during my listen to the Waypoint section about that site I had a real problem trying to visualise the users. How awful must your life be, how filled with self-hate and sadness, to dedicate yourself to bullying someone with the express intention of harm? I'm thankful beyond words that that type of person is a complete mystery to me, a horror story I have no frame of reference for.

So I was very good friends with a kid in school. Borderline best mates from years 7-11 untill we naturally drifted apart. He was very intelligent and funny and had a very good personal life (well off parents etc). Went to Cambridge and was doing a PhD, got a nice girlfriend etc.

It came out a few years back that he was doing essentially this - making peoples' lives a misery and going on the dark web to laugh about it/share photos. Really strawberry floated me up finding out about it as he was just so "normal".

So the long and the short of it is, despite knowing this guy, that type of person is still a complete mystery to me.

This story with Near is extremely upsetting to hear about. I hope his family are hanging in there.

aayl1 wrote:[

So I was very good friends with a kid in school. Borderline best mates from years 7-11 untill we naturally drifted apart. He was very intelligent and funny and had a very good personal life (well off parents etc). Went to Cambridge and was doing a PhD, got a nice girlfriend etc.

It came out a few years back that he was doing essentially this - making peoples' lives a misery and going on the dark web to laugh about it/share photos. Really strawberry floated me up finding out about it as he was just so "normal".

So the long and the short of it is, despite knowing this guy, that type of person is still a complete mystery to me.

It seems quite common for the worst of humanity to also have a "nice" side. We often hear how serial killers got on well with their neighbours/workmates for instance.

Even Hitler had a kind side when he was younger!



I think that's what's so terrifying about these people. We like to think they are pure evil that would be easy to spot because their evil would overwhelm them. But in reality, they are often/usually perfectly normal seeming.

There's no doubt that there are sad little trolls in their mum's basement bullying people online. But the majority will be just average people. They'll have jobs, families and friends and plenty of people will love them. Their dark side will only be shown online.

That's genuinely interesting about Hitler. I had no idea.

They seem successful on the outside but have a part of their humanity completely missing. A burning hatred within that must be satiated. They can't do it in "reality" because they realise they have limited power to change and strawberry float with the world they despise, so they create an identity on line and use that and do it together. They don't care what harm it causes because these are narcissists who consider their actions purely a form of entertainment, and if anyone sees their behaviour differently then they are sensitive souls who take things "too seriously" . You can see them doing that in the relevant threads and massaging what they consider the redeemable parts of the target to give them some false hope that they can escape the harassment if they only do xyz, but that is itself the harassment. That's the most satisfying part, obtaining control over the individual from afar by getting their attention through the slow build up of harassment. It shouldn't strawberry floating matter if someone behaves in a certain way if it haves no harmful impact, or indeed no impact whatsoever on society, or anyone - especially when weighted against the good things that person has done or achieved. It's an obsession in "negative" and "wrong" qualities which are rooted in bigotry and an unquenchable desire to extricate that from others by whatever means necessary. It's hatred, plain and simple, with no justifiable cause other than to appease the narcissist and attempt, badly, to enforce their world view by exploiting fear and human suffering.

It's a pathetic excuse and it's always the exact same response form harassers and bullies when they are called out. They simply do not see the harm in their actions despite that being obvious to any other half human person. Add that to Christian fundamentalism or other bigoted thought bases and you have a convenient get-out clause for rinsing oneself of all culpability:- it is "God's will" or "doing God's work", to hate LGBTQ folk, or somehow that extends to races as well. But nah that's totally not the devil or whatever they would call this sadism. No siree. These people talk about "whores" "burning in hell" for example. And yet they think they're strawberry floating Jesus. Jesus never gave a strawberry float about any of these human experiences supposedly degrading society until the world ends.

That success (for the successful ones), is precisely why they look down on other people and try to create a narrative of normality, an ideal they feel they need to represent, to manipulate other people into their image and to ultimately validate themselves. They can only see success if they are not threatened by the presence in the world of people not like them, who have perhaps achieved greater feats, or, indeed, the harasser is "not in the club". Perhaps its impostor's syndrome. These people are weak. They are cowards. And they will never find happiness provided they reject compassion and empathy and ultimately cannot truly love themselves, or anyone, as they have rejected fundamental parts of what it means to be human - to love and to cherish and to exercise compassion. They will live on that spiral of hatred until the day they die, so alone as they have never even been able to accept themselves.

Edit: I just found out that one of the directors for an LGBTQ suicide prevention charity that was targeted actually had the guts to visit the registered address for the LLC that owns that stalking forum in the US and it turns out Joshua Moon just operates it out of his mum's house. strawberry floating lol.

You can also read about how the stalking group has a darkweb equivalent. So you can imagine what you see on that site is by no means the whole picture, its literally the best least rancid/immoral/illegal facia they have to offer to denizens of the internet.