I want to talk one last time about the lead developer of Retroarch: he goes by Squarepusher, TwinAphex, and DanteAlighieri64. Same person.
He has been serially harassing me online since 2010.
Although I have never directly provoked him first (perhaps until now), I will be perfectly honest: I have responded and gotten into arguments with him in return. I do my absolute best to ignore him completely, sometimes for years at a time, but eventually too much of it leaks through and I get overwhelmed and reply.
I'm burned out on this, and I want it to stop. Furthermore, I am saddened by others who enable his actions by remaining silent and continuing to work with him or to support his efforts. Like it or not, he is the leader of Retroarch, and he sets the tone for the entire project. And that tone has been abusive personal attacks against several emulator developers. This has a corrosive effect on the emulation scene.
And even when I've finally started to call this out, I've had it thrown back at me that pointing out the harassment means I'm equally to blame for "fanning the flames", which is the absolute worst kind of victim shaming. No, I have never made this personal. I have not done anything but call out what he's done and said about me. I've not tried to attack him on a personal level before.
I'm sorry, but I'm just going to say it outright: if you dismiss this because it doesn't affect you, then you're part of the problem. Just because this is the internet doesn't mean that these attacks don't have real consequences to their victims. It's draining and demoralizing. And when someone of his prominence does it, he riles up his own fanbase, and even more insidious personal attacks start appearing elsewhere.
I've been impersonated on stormfront.org as being a racist nazi. I've been called a "fat gay tranny pedophile" on 4chan. And on and on. It's been pretty much constant and daily for over a half-dozen years now.
I'm not asking people to disassociate with him: I'm asking people to point out to him that this is not okay when he starts up. He's not going to listen unless it's people he respects saying it.
He stalks every thread about me. Half of the Reddit thread for higan v104's release were him ranting about me:
https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/6t80g1/multisystem_emulator_higan_v104_released/ (mirror: https://archive.fo/1gqAq)
He does this constantly. Try and find one reply from me to him. Now go to any Retroarch release thread, and try to find one post by me provoking him in any way. I have tried for years to remain silent, and it's never worked.
This is not "two sides of the same coin"; this is not "both sides are to blame"; this is harassment.
Most telling of his own personality are his very own words:
He repeatedly calls me autistic. He's mocked my OCD. He claims anyone who agrees with me is a cult member, gullible, etc. He's called me a parasite, a vulture, mentally damaged, a crybaby, a liar, a total piece of dogshit, a narcissistic piece of shit, and on and on. I do not do this to him. I do not call him names like this, let alone in public spaces.
He accuses me of stealing all of the credit for higan. I have tried to give credit where I could, and every changelog (mirror: https://archive.fo/qA1Vq) ever produced with higan has included the names of all contributors in brackets. No developer who has contributed to higan has ever accused me of taking credit for their work.
He distorted my fears about Cemu being sued into claiming I was hoping they would be. Which would have been the worst-case scenario for the entire emulation scene. I was wrong and they went by unscatched, but I never said it would happen, let alone that I wanted it to.
He claims nothing I've done in the higan project has been of significance. That most of higan was written by others. This is not true: the two major components not by me are the SNES DSP core written by blargg (which replaced an older core by anomie), and the Mega Drive YM2612 core, written by Cydrak. I have truly received a lot of help working on higan, but I have also put in probably 10,000+ hours of work into this project over nearly thirteen years of development. This board, and the old board mirror, are testament to that. Dozens of bug hunting threads spanning weeks of effort a piece, ekeing out brand new behaviors in emulation. Hell, the very idea of Retroarch came about from early efforts in bsnes at abstracting emulation from UI development with libsnes, which led to SSNES, which became Retroarch. The very thing that led to their project existing is not of significance?
He claims I stole credit for blargg's SNES DSP core. Search the changelog for blargg, and you see I mentioned it was his core at least a dozen times in changelogs.
He claims I stole credit for ikari's implementation of the MSU1 on the sd2snes, which ... I don't even understand how that makes any sense. The sd2snes is not my project and I've never made such a claim.
He's called me a "total asshole" and a "cockroach" for selling a license to Hyperkin for higan. I myself criticized the Retron 5 for using emulation software without a license on Reddit once it was revealed. It included Snes9X, which is an emulator that contains my code as well. I called for them to license emulation software, and so they offered to do so. Frankly, it was the ideal outcome. And like every dollar I've raised, I've accounted for where the money was spent. It has all gone back into SNES game preservation. He claims I am somehow profiting off Retroarch, but higan is not Retroarch. I did not sell Hyperkin their work. The only module at the time that wasn't my own was blargg's DSP, and he has given me express permission to relicense my port of his code however I saw fit. SP then lied about the amount of the license sale, claiming it was for $5000 when it was in fact $2500. This information is readily available publicly.
He puts up all this pretense about money and profiting off others' work, while simultaneously raising over $1000 a month off a program that would do nothing without others' emulation cores. And I don't care! It's just the hypocrisy that is striking. I don't know who he is speaking on behalf of: no one who has actually contributed to higan has ever raised a single objection about the copyright reassignment clause when I merge large patches. No one has ever claimed I have profited off their work, or stolen credit for it.
And all of this is just a very small sampling from a few months of logs. Seriously, this has been non-stop for seven years now.
He constantly tells these lies, and his followers and fans believe them. And it spreads to other sites. I am so tired of having to constantly defend myself against these deceitful character assassination attempts.
This is libel, and it is cruel and personal attacks on my character and mental health. I have never done this sort of thing to him. And if by some chance I've missed some off-hand comment from four years ago where I did in a moment of anger, then I offer my truly sincere apologies. This is a hobby. Things should never be taken to a personal level like this.
When it comes to the Retroarch project itself, I will admit: I have been vocally critical of my emulator falling four years out of date from the mainline, and much more importantly, a version being included (bsnes-mercury), which undermined all of my values and principles. While it's true this has been a criticism, it has not been of the entire project as a whole. And it's never been made personal or about specific people. It always remained technical and on the merits, even when the bsnes-mercury dev did make it personal.
I will also admit that I am partly to blame for the libretro port being out of date, because my program interface is not stable and has changed from time to time.
But to this aim, Themaister is helping with a v104 port, and I am going to make changes to higan to help accommodate this. We'll merge it upstream and I'll do my best to keep the port maintained going forward. That will remove my technical objections.
So ... obviously, this thread comes at a very bad time, considering the above. But, I had a post here about this already buried in another thread, and it was brought up on NeoGAF again recently, and so I thought it'd be better to get this out of the way and in the past now.
I've violated my own rule. I'm very sorry for this.
The reason for writing this post is basically to say, I want to call out this harassment. He has done this to too many people, and everyone has stayed silent about it. Or worse, apologized to him in appeasement. This is not acceptable, and the emulation scene should not tolerate it.
But I also really don't want to bring this up anymore going forward. I've left 80% of the places I used to visit, and I'd honestly like to just remain low key and free of any stress or drama.
If he continues, I'll link to this thread instead of diving back into all of this again in multiple places as I have been of late. In said case, if others could please politely reply with factual information, that would make my life a lot less stressful not having to deal with it.
If he stops this and leaves me alone, then everyone has my word that I won't bring this up anymore either. If we manage a few months of peace, I'll delete this topic entirely.
Thanks for reading.
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"Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired." — Jonathan Swift
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