The brilliant, highly respected emulator developer Near (formerly known as Byuu) appears to have committed suicide.
The first concerns arose last night when the well-known private programmer tweeted a photo of himself, followed by a series of messages suggest suicidal intent.
Then, earlier this morning, noted security advisor and hacker Hector “Marcan” Martin shared a Google Doc (Content Warning: Contains Explicit Details) allegedly written by a real friend of Near, which is widely accepted as evidence of her death.
Write in theirs Twitter threadIdentifying himself as non-binary, Near shared a lifelong history of abuse by bullying that continued online over the years and more recently has been centralized around the infamous internet cyberbullying hub Kiwi farms.
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Near wrote:
But Kiwi Farms has made the nuisance orders of magnitude worse. It escalates from attacking me for being autistic, to attacking and assaulting my friends, to trying to coax someone into suicide just to get a reaction from me. I lost one of my best friends as a result. I feel responsible.
They continued:
The internet is not a game. It is real life. I am a real person. This stuff really hurts. I have invested my whole life in this. I have no real friends, I have no other reason to be. Just that. And now I have nothing.
It’s too late for me, but I pray that someday someone will do something about this website. There are too many people who are suffering and nobody seems to care because we are relatively nobody on the internet and they know it. Evil triumphs when good people do nothing.
Near acquired in 2004 with the establishment of bsnes (later renamed higan) that move quickly to the the most accurate emulator from Nintendo’s 16-bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Almost as is known, around 1,200 Super Nintendo games were scanned down to their circuit boards to ensure long-term retention and a truly cycle-accurate emulation that covered all possible borderline cases.
More recently, they’ve been in the news for the release of one greatly improved translation from Squares Super Famicom RPG from 1996 Bahamut lagoon.
The National hotline for suicide prevention in the US is available 24/7 at 1-800-273-8255. You can find a list of international suicide hotlines Here.
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