The Creature Persists

For me, and I think a lot of other people, the theme of the year so far has been multi-faceted fascist oppression! I hope all of you are holding up alright. I had hoped to make a post announcing the actual BigPEmu Steam release by now, but that gets into one of those facets of fascist oppression.

Before I get into that, I've had to take a new contract this year and am eyeballing a second one that would be starting next month if it works out. It's been about as terrible as I expected it to be, and I have an enormous amount of anxiety every day over how my physical state is affecting my productivity and over how much physical pain I'm going to have to endure on a given day to get any work done. I have no doubt that anxiety itself also affects my productivity, so it's a bit of a shitty psychological Ouroboros being fueled by some unpredictable physical constraints. I would love to be able to just focus on emulator stuff, but even with as generous as you folks are, the Patreon income still leaves me in the red. (and I took a sizable loss on subscriber income this month) So I'm still forced to slowly deplete my savings to stay afloat. If I don't manage at least a couple of decent contracts a year, there's a fair chance I end up homeless in the medium-future. I'm maintaining my optimism in the idea that I will live long enough to become homeless!

On the bright side, the next contract would also produce a new emulator for your enjoyment! However, the agreement still isn't signed, so I'm not guaranteeing anything yet. If it does work out, though, the client has already expressed that they're good with the "you own everything you write, we just license it" arrangement, leaving me free to do whatever I want with the thing. I can't actually provide any details on either contract, unfortunately, as I'm under the usual NDA terms. But this next thing will probably be a Patreon exclusive (for a while, if not indefinitely), as it's nothing that hasn't already been emulated quite well and I'm not really fulfilling any public need by making it. However, it's something I'm planning to do in a better/cooler way and with my usual flare for enhancements, so I think it's a nice sort of thing to offer as thanks to you. Even if most of you end up not being especially interested in it, and there's a fair chance of that since it's not really Jaguar-adjacent or anything.

Not much has changed on the health front, I'm still hitting the obligatory follow-up appointments with the endocrinologist/rheumatologist/gastroenterologist/pancreatic surgeon/etc. Chasing a couple leads on potential explanations for my symptoms, but am generally resigned and expect to just keep suffering until something finally gives out. I had my first old person fall last month and screwed my ankle up pretty good, but eh, shit happens. You may have noticed I spend a lot less time talking about this stuff now, and it's mainly because there's never any forward movement on it. I don't see a point in just continuing to complain about my misery unless there's something productive or at least interesting to throw into the mix. Doctors not being especially clever or helpful has become the norm, and when a doctor does take any initiative to try to do something diagnostically useful, the insurance company denies it. This happened with both the rheumatologist and pancreatic surgeon this month. Insurance companies using the basement-bargain doctors/nurses they employ to assert that they know better than domain specialists is also nothing new, at least not here in America, so even that is barely worth talking about anymore. The system has failed, but we all knew that already, and we can only sit back to watch it all come slowly tumbling down.

With all of that going on, I haven't had much time or energy to actually focus on my own projects. Which is why it will be nice if the project in March works out and gives me an excuse to focus more on the BigPEmu infrastructure which will be facilitating all of my emulator work going forward. I did manage to wrap up the Steam build last month, though, and it's now been in submission hell for a full month. Steam developer support hasn't responded to my requests for details/feedback in 3 weeks now, and I don't think I have any real recourse. I did try to call public attention to it:

https://bsky.app/profile/richwhitehouse.bsky.social/post/3lidsf7lai22k

https://x.com/dickwhitehouse/status/1891326536881524977

As you can see, however, those posts have gotten virtually no traction. Judging by raw view counts rather than actual engagements, my social reach is only about 15% of what it was for similar content with no reposts/cross-visibility last year. I saw this coming with Elon's general enshittification of Twitter. The type of people who tend to support me have largely stepped away from social media entirely, and I don't blame them, because I don't use it either. I only use Twitter/Bluesky to speak to my audience because I have no other means to communicate with people on a broader scale. I'd be much happier to still be working in a largely decentralized state, where you could do something cool and e-mail Blue's News or some variant thereof and some dude without a shitty corporate media agenda would decide if the thing was cool enough to let people know about it. Then if it really was cool, people would learn about it and you might end up with a few million downloads. People with the money to pay to cram garbage down our throats didn't like that, though, so now every interaction we have with each other is being monetized by some predatory entity with its own wide array of barely-comprehensible and often hostile agendas. The future is now!

But yeah, I don't know what the deal really is with the Steam review. I know some of you have heard the full story of Gabe Newell and I by now, but the gist of it is that he's a demented sociopath who secretly held a grudge against me for something trivial I wrote on my web site when I was 16 years old. I had no idea he even knew who I was, until a friend at Valve told me he recognized my name immediately and had me blackballed a good 6-7 years later. At that point, I had already been exposed to a lot of petty, vindictive video game industry manager/owner behavior in my time at Activision, but that experience with Gabe was my first real insight into just how incredibly small these people can be. From Gabe Newell to Elon Musk, a lot of sociopathic executives fit this profile. One of the most shocking things about their behavior is actually how petty and vindictive they can be toward individuals who shouldn't even be on their radar. They're ruled by insecurities (often rightfully so, possessing very little real talent in contrast to the individuals they exploit) and are more concerned with manipulating the social/business perceptions others have of them than almost anything else.

I wouldn't think it's possible that my Steam submission difficulties could have anything to do with that, but I also wouldn't have thought it was possible that Valve refused to interview me because of a personal grudge Gabe held against me from my teen years. It would be pretty hilarious if it didn't make me keenly aware of how many innocent lives a guy like that is ruining on a regular basis by being who he is. But yeah, alright, it is still kind of funny. If it hadn't been my friend at Valve who talked to him and heard it straight from his mouth, I probably still wouldn't believe it! So honestly, you never know, a guy like that could very well have a vendetta filter on Steam submissions or something. It would be shocking to most people, but after the shit I've seen, it wouldn't surprise me one bit. Still, realistically, I don't think that's what's going on.

I imagine that if they ever do come back on the build review, they'll find more reasons to keep denying my submissions. I'll be happy to keep mutilating BigPEmu until it's in a state where there's nothing they can argue against, even though they appear to be applying rules that they clearly aren't applying to RetroArch and other emulators on Steam. I won't allow them to defeat me with politics. When they aren't even providing feedback or denials for weeks at a time, however, it's impossible to take any action or make any progress either way. So if anyone does have any ability to stir the pot for me in absence of my ability to get traction on Twitter/Bluesky, please do.

I guess that's my bimonthly-ish (maybe more like trimonthly-ish, sorry, I'm really struggling with the day-to-day) update on the state of things. Hang in there, and thank you to everyone who's still helping me hang in there.