Farewell

It's like a really complicated puzzle. I have this game that's not working, and I have this 2 GiB trace log of millions of lines of CPU instructions and registers. I have to sort through it to understand where things went wrong. Sometimes it's obvious and takes five minutes, sometimes it takes two weeks and is mind-bending (like a loop reading from a non-existent I/O register that only breaks because eventually a DMA transfer occurs in between cycle instructions that fetches the correct value onto the data bus, which stays persistent through to the next cycle that compares the value read to finally break said loop.)

I really enjoyed over-architecting the code, and I would build these massively elaborate (read: slow) designs to handle the most ridiculous edge cases (like stacking Game Genie cartridges one after another recursively. It's an incredibly inefficient way of getting more cheat code slots, but you can do it on real hardware, and so I wanted to preserve that experience.)

> I don’t get the sense that it was something to do with making the people who used your emulators happy

That of course brought me joy as well. The tone of the farewell post aside, 98% of people throughout my time in emulation have been absolutely wonderfully supportive. It's meant the world to me.

> in a way where it’s not necessarily true that anyone else would have come along to do the same thing if you hadn’t done it.

I'm under no delusions of granduer, these were "just video games", but I definitely had the sense that if I didn't do this, no one else would. The SNES was a large part of my childhood, and I had the skill and time to do this, so I went for it.

Now on one hand, a lot of the subjects on kiwifarms are in fact not the type of people anyone would want to defend; many of them really are horrible people. And, you could argue that what kiwifarms does is not a big deal, since it’s just archiving what people say.

But then, I think it highlights one of the things people hate about the internet. Which is to say, the looming record. Everything someone has ever said or defended might be archived somewhere, to be picked apart endlessly. The thing is, most of the time, more time is spent picking apart and dissecting text than was spent originally writing it. (Could it some day be these comments in this thread being archived and weaponized? Maybe.)

I think byuu’s reply underscores all of that.

But even moreso, it underscores something more sinister, imo. Byuu never left a shred of evidence about his sexuality anywhere, which is because he is asexual. However, he is accused of pedophilia for defending comic books. Now there are enough pornographic comic books in this world to find at least one that’ll make anyone’s skin crawl, but it is still just ink on paper. Even if you still think it should be banned, I don’t see how you could possibly, with good conscience, accuse someone of potentially being a pedophile over your position on this issue, especially knowing Japanese culture surrounding this phenomenon. There is no need to make bad analogies to defend this position. It is a logical leap of epic proportions to suggest not wanting to censor comics fantasizing about something is somehow advocating for the thing they fantasize about.

Byuu gave up his position, which was a smart thing to do nowadays, as this non-sense idea that being anti-censorship makes you a pedophile is actually pervasive in both left and right leaning circles nowadays. I know some people think I’m exaggerating here, but the battle has been rather vicious against online artists, who in the west have in many cases stopped posting pornography altogether to avoid stepping on glass, and there’s a ton of pressure being put on Patreon and its payment processors to the point where Patreon now claims officially that you can no longer post illustrated pornography with anime-style features[1].

I think it is, at best, scummy behavior to go and take someone’s opinion on this subject and use it to extrapolate on how they might be a predator in real life. Of course, something also common with both Kiwifarms and with the left-leaning internet is guilt by association. So god help you if you are friends with anyone who has a banned opinion.

There are other preposterous logical conclusion jumps than just this one too! I don’t think any of them are as vicious because they are easier to call out as bullshit because you won’t be unilaterally shat on for defending pedophilia when doing so. In byuu’s case, though, I think this was the most egregious one.

All in all, what Kiwifarms claims to do and I believe even what they think they do seems like it would not be all that bad; it almost seems a bit journalistic on its face. But as usual, the devil is in the details.

Throwaway account for many reasons that are already obvious if you read this far. I am not mortified of being outed or anything, as I really do stand by my opinions, but I suspect there would be very little benefit to standing by it with my own name in this day and age. :(

[1] https://twitter.com/waero_re/status/1238408555507539968

Contributing to Wikipedia is unfortunately hard to navigate, with a lot of social trickery required just to get blatant incorrect information fixed.

But they went after my friends. Someone on an imageboard compiled a list of my friends' real names, photographs they had posted, locations where they lived ... really creepy stuff.

I'm stepping down because I don't want my personal friends and the dozens of volunteers who helped develop my emulators caught in the crossfire.