Over the last year, I had the amazing opportunity to meet and grow close to Near, someone that I had secretly admired for a very long time. Someone that had helped me when I needed help the most. Sadly, Near took his own life a few days ago due to the Kiwi Farms, a proudly racist and queerphobic trolling board that had already had a storied history of driving individuals to suicide for entertainment purposes.

I first learned about Near when his bsnes emulator released in 2004. It had a focus on accuracy, and fixed a lot of the issues that plagued emulation at the time. Perhaps the thing that stood out to me was that the most was the inaccurate sound of the Snes9X and zsnes emulators (Near would help improve the sound in Snes9X) were not at all an issue in bsnes. Having the ability to play through these games on my personal computer completely flawlessly without compromise was much appreciated by my OCD-brain, which at the time was a much-needed distraction from all of the unfortunate abuse happening in my life. Near made an important part of my life significantly more bearable, and that instilled a sense of admiration in me. I ploughed through dozens of favorites such as Super Mario RPG and Super Castlevania IV. I'll never forget those simpler times.

I had always wanted to approach Near but I never felt worthy of his time. I've to date done nothing of note with my life, and he has a mountain of accomplishments with code so complex that I'm fairly certain that I'd go insane even trying to understand any of it. To date: my technical knowledge has to do mainly with HTML, CSS, setting up and running web servers, and maybe a little bit of incredibly dated Visual Basic 6 knowledge. It doesn't compare to emulating hardware in C. Not even close. So I ultimately didn't contact Near for a very long time and didn't think much of him during my 20s. This was a mistake.

Oddly enough, I had always thought to myself how perfect it would be if he took up the task of writing a Nintendo 64 emulator one day, as the system is notoriously difficult to emulate properly for a variety of reasons. One of my all-time favorite games Paper Mario is a prime example of a title that just doesn't quite play the same without original hardware, even to this day. So, you can imagine how surprised I was to see it hitting the news that Near had in fact been working on a Nintendo 64 emulator, and had managed to get a working release out in a mere three weeks. I started sending him positivity and encouraged his new project. And he...actually started replying to me. I was confused but also very happy. Why was someone on his level giving me the time of day? As it turns out, he's a very nice person who's willing to talk to anyone who means well.

I meant to say "offend" here, but he knew what I meant immediately. He always did.

We started to DM. We had an uncanny connection personality-wise. It was almost instantaneous. It was like I was talking to a harder working, more successful version of myself. We understood each other so naturally and thought the same way to a bizarrely high degree. I then learned that he too is a furry and that we even shared some interests. We started talking every day, and I even brought him to my private Telegram chat where my friends had the opportunity to meet and hang out with him over the last year. He was often the life of the chat. Near was someone who had organically wound up surrounded by strongly left-leaning people and had never experienced anything like a largely "anti-woke" furry space before, so it was like a breath of fresh air to him. He confided in me that he didn't so much enjoy being called "non-binary" anymore after having experimented with the label, but didn't also didn't want to offend anyone by backpedaling on his usage of the label. This made everyone talking about his passing with "they" pronouns a bit painful.

As it turns out, Near had another reason for reaching out to me specifically. I too have dealt with recurring abuse from the Kiwi Farms.

My own callout thread is an uncanny cavalcade of libel, impersonation, and gaslighting seemingly designed to make me look like a pathological liar that targets minors. It was originally a response to me banning a severely troubled individual (CZ) from one of the chat rooms I ran at the time. After exposing me as a babyfur, a similarly troubled friend of his (DF) solicited a minor to flirt with me while lying about how old he is. This was specifically done because I am an ABDL, and successfully exploited the negative stereotypes of ABDLs to get thousands of people on board with declaring me to be a child groomer with no recourse available to me, ever. I still deal with this libel being spread by random people who have never spoken to me 7+ years later, treating it as this known-and-established thing.

Near had received similar treatment due to a rival emudev; someone who was very much not okay with furries, and wanted to do something about it. Revenge projects like these are actually the ulterior purpose of the Kiwi Farms: they will cover genuinely profane individuals like Snakething, Kero the Wolf, and Zrcalo for no other purpose than to grant themselves enough legitimacy to attack someone who's only crime is to know the wrong person, be trans, a babyfur, etc. and have some number of people take them seriously.

The owner of the Kiwi Farms as a teenager. He hasn't changed much.

It was a long-term goal of mine to try and get Near to not care about what people said about him online. Unfortunately...despite these efforts, he still had a psychological condition Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. Essentially: it was extremely difficult for him to deal with any sort of rejection or hatred from others without extreme distress symptoms. This likely played a lot into him becoming simultaneously one of the most talented and humble people you'll ever come across. He needed to be accepted by others in order to not be plagued with extreme misery and panic attacks. He worked very hard towards being loved and accepted by everyone. Sadly, there's always someone out there willing to despise you seemingly out of spite. Or in his case: jealousy. Near was always surprised by my ability to handle online harassment from weirdos so easily, and it was a mindset I had been trying to teach him to help him with his struggles. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time left for that. Libel had been eating away at him for a long time before we started talking. It was too late.

When dealing with online harassers, it helps a lot to understand that their procedurally contrived callouts and complaints really aren't about you: they are simply using you as a coping mechanism for their own issues. They are people doing their best to deal with their own struggles, and they have yet to learn to be empathetic towards others in any meaningful capacity. It isn't worth hating them, because you cannot keep hate in your system without it hurting you. Remember: holding a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. It's a lot more pragmatic to understand the human condition, and accept that the only real enemy is hate and negativity itself.

In any case: I am grateful for what little time that Near and I got to spend together as friends. I'm glad that I was able to give him a safe change of scenery, and allow him to have interesting discussions without others judging him. Ultimately, it's important to seize opportunities like this because life is short, and you may not have an opportunity to reach out to that special someone tomorrow.

The last words that Near ever typed to me.

At the time, I was dead-set on creating a YouTube brand called "DramaHound" to try and give people an alternative to that trolling board for their "furry drama news". I lost interest in this as I took a few years to collect myself. Drama culture, in the end, is little more than spreading around the most pessimistic hearsay you can find. It hurts others for entertainment purposes, and makes the Internet a worse place. Drama culture is what took Near away, and there's no way that I can continue to enjoy it after realizing that. It also helped to see that many faces I met in that space turned out to be, well, not the best sort to hang out with.

I wish I could've done more to make Near feel safe, but I understand that what happened isn't my fault. We don't have all the answers yet when it comes to medical science, and not all humans are equipped to give people the kindness that others need to survive sometimes. If you're a silly little goober like me, I recommend not letting your abusers get to you. Seeing that they are just another struggling human going down the wrong path provides some useful context that can take the sting out of their hatred and lies.

If harassment has made you feel alone or disconnected like this, please stop by my group chat. New friends await you there. We don't buy into baseless rumors. We'd rather spend our time having fun and living life instead.