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.
activities.
