Inactive Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka - Deadbeat (emphasis on "Dead") founder of Something Awful, forced out of his own community, on his second divorce, stuck his dick in crazy, "Birth Giver"

[Fluffy Yaks]

lol yikes.

Rest in piss

 

[c120]

 

[ColorfulCassowary]

SomethingAwful was always a shit website that contributed nothing of worth to the internet as a whole. It starred a wife beating deadbeat dad, a legit diaper fur pedophile, and hundreds of bpd trannies.

Goodbye, Lowtax. You died giving us nothing.

 

[Rewire Tea]

I didn't follow SA or Lowtax much beyond skimming some of this thread (and before that, I mixed up Lowtax and Bryon "Lowtax" Looper occasionally) but the kids are the only ones I feel any real empathy for. They didn't choose to be born to their parents.

 

[Actinidia]

On reflection and after discussing Rich's demise with a bunch of other ancient faggots, I've figured out why I disliked the man so much, and it wasn't his sweaty toes. Rich turning the internet into a poisonous hellhole started well before he let the trannies take over his forum. What happened first (by about 2002) was that every fucking forum that wasn't 90+% catlady turned into Something Awful Lite, just like nearly every fucking forum that isn't Kiwi Farms now is basically Reddit.

Actual communication ground to a halt. Liking the hobby or interest that was the original subject of the board was boring and lame. The general/off-topic forum became the shit-posting forum, took over the board, and was one giant popularity contest predicated on who could do the very best impression of Lowtax- aptly summed up by another geriatric autist as "dried shells of humanity devoted solely to writing sarcastic and derogatory posts about the same topics for years and years".

The backlash, once Rich receded into a pill coma, was rampant oversharing disguised as "sincerity" and "authenticity". It was also fucking unbearable, but it did give us tons of new lolcows.

I've always liked the caution against powerleveling here for a lot of reasons (shits up threads, nobody wants to read your diary, makes you easy to dox), but on reflection, I think it makes for a good balance in post tone as well. Either extreme poisons communities.

 

[Ghostse]

On reflection and after discussing Rich's demise with a bunch of other ancient faggots, I've figured out why I disliked the man so much, and it wasn't his sweaty toes. Rich turning the internet into a poisonous hellhole started well before he let the trannies take over his forum. What happened first (by about 2002) was that every fucking forum that wasn't 90+% catlady turned into Something Awful Lite, just like nearly every fucking forum that isn't Kiwi Farms now is basically Reddit.

Actual communication ground to a halt. Liking the hobby or interest that was the original subject of the board was boring and lame. The general/off-topic forum became the shit-posting forum, took over the board, and was one giant popularity contest predicated on who could do the very best impression of Lowtax- aptly summed up by another geriatric autist as "dried shells of humanity devoted solely to writing sarcastic and derogatory posts about the same topics for years and years".

The backlash, once Rich receded into a pill coma, was rampant oversharing disguised as "sincerity" and "authenticity". It was also fucking unbearable, but it did give us tons of new lolcows.

I've always liked the caution against powerleveling here for a lot of reasons (shits up threads, nobody wants to read your diary, makes you easy to dox), but on reflection, I think it makes for a good balance in post tone as well. Either extreme poisons communities.

I just hated him because the world handed him gold bars and he always just looked and said "Wow, that's nice grandma" and then shit his pants

 

[Big Nasty]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't cheat codes the original purpose of GameSpy?

To me, Rich wasn't the funny guy on SA. Zach Parsons, Frolixo and the guy with the duck avatar was way funnier in my opinion. Rich had too much of a mean streak to be entertaining in the long form. He was at his best with Cliff Yablonski Hates You where it was just turbo insult machine gun fire.

 

[Pissmaster]

I’m an SA oldfag that left the forums long before the Troubles came about. I loved the community and the genuinely new and exciting things that were going on in the fledgling days of the Internet 1.0

I just never liked that fucking Rich Kyanka guy. Even when I was an impressionable, idiot teenager at the turn of the millennium that easily latched onto any dominant internet personality around at the time (mostly through Fark.com). I even liked Maddox, for Christ’s sake.

But Lowtax was just never funny. My first experiences of him were him begging for people to click banners for ad revenue, threatening to have to close the site and vacillating between pompous bravado and “cheese monkey” random-access humor.

Something Awful was built on the backs of talented people orbiting around a lazy, unfunny turd that didn’t deserve his success even before he was discovered to be a drug-addled wife-beater. That he killed himself is just a testament to a pathetic, petty life that accidentally found itself some worth through happenstance and plain old fucking luck.

Bye, Richard

Yeah, that was more or less what I thought of him, though I pretended to like him as I didn't want to get banned. Lowtax was the titular emperor from The Emperor's New Clothes, where nobody dared to try and say he was obviously naked, lest they eat a ban and get publicly mocked.

Alongside his shitty sense of humor, he had a long, long list of stuff he maligned, which goons carefully went along with. He hated memes, which goons called "image macros" for reasons that still escape me, like this one:

Yet posted photos of himself like this, which he treated like comedy gold 55555 manbabies:

and like, referencing very old internet & computer things verbatim as part of his wacky-zany schtick. It was just extremely weird and not funny at all, but, enough people walked on eggshells around him that it just wasn't worth it to waste $10 to say otherwise.

But then again, he's also a guy who turned down $13 million to retain his hugbox where he could continue to get praise for not being funny, only to get run out anyway because his skin is thinner than tissue paper.

Well, I know I'll never forget him. He's definitely the luckiest retard I've ever heard of, and his death was nothing short of fitting.

 

[admiral]

Lowtax is gonna get to hell but instead of a hoard of tormenting demons there'll be a crowd of ex-wives demanding child support, and instead of a fiery pit and a dismal dungeon there'll just be Groverhaus.

 

[sethking]

Since this thread seems to be filled with ex-goons, I wanted to ask if anyone else has noticed a strange syndrome in 2000s SA posters that I have observed, which also seemed to have addled Lowtax.

I call it "compulsive irony syndrome". It's a rather strange type of mental illness, usually witnessed on SA or in ex-SA posters on Twitter, where the sufferers exhibit a strange pattern of posting. In it, 80% of the time they're typing up formulaic 2000s FYAD/LF style irony posts and then disturbingly, 20% of the time they're posting really disconcerting and hyper-earnest exposes of their sad life and mental state. So 80% "haha dick cabbage, donald trump has big hands", 20% "I am taking 10 anti-depressants and my dick just fell off. As I watched it come loose from my body, I didnt even care. I haven't been happy since 2006 when my cousin bought me an ugly hooker to suck my dick but she got stuck in my fatty folds. What's the difference...Donald Trump and climate change has doomed us all anyway."

Usually this strange syndrome seems to hit SA posters who were somewhat well known in the ironic subforums - FYAD, LF, Helldump etc. Often these people either became lefties or are politically non-committal (like Lowtax). Most worrying of all, their disease seems to be progressive and usually gets worse. If you read the twitter feeds of these people, it starts out usually being 100% formulai irony, then gets worse and worse as more of the feed gets taken up by hyper-earnest self-pitying. In some cases they even stop being ironic altogether and become a full-time self-humiliating sadsack, or just kill themselves like Lowtax.

 

[blablabla]

I'm glad he is dead

 

[Dan Abrams]

Since this thread seems to be filled with ex-goons, I wanted to ask if anyone else has noticed a strange syndrome in 2000s SA posters that I have observed, which also seemed to have addled Lowtax.

I call it "compulsive irony syndrome". It's a rather strange type of mental illness, usually witnessed on SA or in ex-SA posters on Twitter, where the sufferers exhibit a strange pattern of posting. In it, 80% of the time they're typing up formulaic 2000s FYAD/LF style irony posts and then disturbingly, 20% of the time they're posting really disconcerting and hyper-earnest exposes of their sad life and mental state. So 80% "haha dick cabbage, donald trump has big hands", 20% "I am taking 10 anti-depressants and my dick just fell off. As I watched it come loose from my body, I didnt even care. I haven't been happy since 2006 when my cousin bought me an ugly hooker to suck my dick but she got stuck in my fatty folds. What's the difference...Donald Trump and climate change has doomed us all anyway."

Usually this strange syndrome seems to hit SA posters who were somewhat well known in the ironic subforums - FYAD, LF, Helldump etc. Often these people either became lefties or are politically non-committal (like Lowtax). Most worrying of all, their disease seems to be progressive and usually gets worse. If you read the twitter feeds of these people, it starts out usually being 100% formulai irony, then gets worse and worse as more of the feed gets taken up by hyper-earnest self-pitying. In some cases they even stop being ironic altogether and become a full-time self-humiliating sadsack, or just kill themselves like Lowtax.

The irony poisoning thing that goons do is 100% cope. They know they’re pathetic and their e-cred on SA is all they have so pretending to be a gay indifferent retard shows everyone how much they don’t care.

 

[The Letter h]

Since this thread seems to be filled with ex-goons, I wanted to ask if anyone else has noticed a strange syndrome in 2000s SA posters that I have observed, which also seemed to have addled Lowtax.

I call it "compulsive irony syndrome". It's a rather strange type of mental illness, usually witnessed on SA or in ex-SA posters on Twitter, where the sufferers exhibit a strange pattern of posting. In it, 80% of the time they're typing up formulaic 2000s FYAD/LF style irony posts and then disturbingly, 20% of the time they're posting really disconcerting and hyper-earnest exposes of their sad life and mental state. So 80% "haha dick cabbage, donald trump has big hands", 20% "I am taking 10 anti-depressants and my dick just fell off. As I watched it come loose from my body, I didnt even care. I haven't been happy since 2006 when my cousin bought me an ugly hooker to suck my dick but she got stuck in my fatty folds. What's the difference...Donald Trump and climate change has doomed us all anyway."

Usually this strange syndrome seems to hit SA posters who were somewhat well known in the ironic subforums - FYAD, LF, Helldump etc. Often these people either became lefties or are politically non-committal (like Lowtax). Most worrying of all, their disease seems to be progressive and usually gets worse. If you read the twitter feeds of these people, it starts out usually being 100% formulai irony, then gets worse and worse as more of the feed gets taken up by hyper-earnest self-pitying. In some cases they even stop being ironic altogether and become a full-time self-humiliating sadsack, or just kill themselves like Lowtax.

A bunch of them are just retarded, I and many others call these people "Troons". they'll just be part of the 41% at some point.

 

[Ghostse]

Yeah, that was more or less what I thought of him, though I pretended to like him as I didn't want to get banned. Lowtax was the titular emperor from The Emperor's New Clothes, where nobody dared to try and say he was obviously naked, lest they eat a ban and get publicly mocked.

Alongside his shitty sense of humor, he had a long, long list of stuff he maligned, which goons carefully went along with. He hated memes, which goons called "image macros" for reasons that still escape me, like this one:

Image Macros are the original term for Memes because they were made/got popular due to the fact they were generated with image manipulation macros - a bit of predefined code that does instructions based input. Eventually retards did them in MSPaint, but back in the day throwing text on an image was something novel you could do with clever use of libjpeg. It started out with science people using them to label images, then turned into idiots labeling cats.

And yeah, I never got the Lowtax worship either. Was only tangentially aware of SA as "a bunch of faggot trolls who pay to post", and encountered Lowtax 'in the wild' when he was already in his tinpot Pill-bottle Dictator phase, only descending from his wine-and-pill tower to be an obnoxious asshole. I don't even think he was writing articles anymore. He was just a leech.

 

[Pissmaster]

Since this thread seems to be filled with ex-goons, I wanted to ask if anyone else has noticed a strange syndrome in 2000s SA posters that I have observed, which also seemed to have addled Lowtax.

I call it "compulsive irony syndrome". It's a rather strange type of mental illness, usually witnessed on SA or in ex-SA posters on Twitter, where the sufferers exhibit a strange pattern of posting. In it, 80% of the time they're typing up formulaic 2000s FYAD/LF style irony posts and then disturbingly, 20% of the time they're posting really disconcerting and hyper-earnest exposes of their sad life and mental state. So 80% "haha dick cabbage, donald trump has big hands", 20% "I am taking 10 anti-depressants and my dick just fell off. As I watched it come loose from my body, I didnt even care. I haven't been happy since 2006 when my cousin bought me an ugly hooker to suck my dick but she got stuck in my fatty folds. What's the difference...Donald Trump and climate change has doomed us all anyway."

Usually this strange syndrome seems to hit SA posters who were somewhat well known in the ironic subforums - FYAD, LF, Helldump etc. Often these people either became lefties or are politically non-committal (like Lowtax). Most worrying of all, their disease seems to be progressive and usually gets worse. If you read the twitter feeds of these people, it starts out usually being 100% formulai irony, then gets worse and worse as more of the feed gets taken up by hyper-earnest self-pitying. In some cases they even stop being ironic altogether and become a full-time self-humiliating sadsack, or just kill themselves like Lowtax.

That's like, every terminally online tranny, and yeah, that seemed to originate on Something Awful. I guess that's what you get when overly sensitive and disturbed people find each other online, and start taking on one another's traits until you get this weird mix where they try to act unflappable, while also desperately crying out for help, while also pushing others away who try to help them, because they're insane.

Then they become trannies so they can continue to be insane without ever getting questioned, and eventually kill themselves because they can never become an anime girl.

 

[Dyn]

I call it "compulsive irony syndrome"

It's not a weird mental illness. It's just the internet poster version of bottling up your emotions and pretending you're happy with life until the weight of it starts to break you and you can't help but let red flags slip out, just a little one at first but then more and more as your composure crumbles and your control slips and hurtles you terrifyingly and unstoppably towards the inevitable day you finally can't take it any more and blow your own brains out and everybody acts kind of surprised but with a side of "... but now that I think about it."

In real life you have jobs and relationships and material possessions and kids and other personal accomplishments you can use to hide your crippling, all-consuming thanatos. On internet 1.0, before social media, when we were all very cautious to hide our real lives, there's nothing but affected ironic shitposting to try and desperately convince people you're fine.

That post is not a cry for help I'm doing fine.

 

[AnOminous]

Lowtax wasted so much fucking money. Money would never have solved Lowtax's issues.

He wasted way more than money. He had everything any man would need. Chinkwife was definitely a keeper, and so was the daughter he had with her, who even called him out on his shit. If he had taken that callout for what it was worth, gathered his tiny balls together, and realized holy fuck, this child of mine is more mature than I am, and taken the advice, he'd still be alive.

It's just ridiculous how much of a piece of shit this guy was.

He had shit the vast majority of humanity never got a shot at, and look what he did with it. What a worthless bastard. I wish I believed in Hell because if someone belongs there regretting their shitty decisions for all eternity, it's this no good son of a bitch.

What do you guys think Rich is doing in Hell right now?

What's his torment? Forced to relive the Uwe Boll fight for eternity? Infinite rejection from pussy? A box of wine that cannot be opened?

Just curious on your thoughts here...so much creative shit for Satan to work with.

He's getting to watch the ongoing lives of the people still living who he banned off his cucksite, as they go from success to success.

Also endless Buffalo Bill dances from the troons who still are on his site.

The general/off-topic forum became the shit-posting forum, took over the board, and was one giant popularity contest predicated on who could do the very best impression of Lowtax- aptly summed up by another geriatric autist as "dried shells of humanity devoted solely to writing sarcastic and derogatory posts about the same topics for years and years".

Brb shooting myself in the head.

I don't even think he was writing articles anymore. He was just a leech.

Am I the only person here who actually read the front page and never joined the forums? I remember clicking a link to it and it was like wtf, they want $10 to post on something 1% the size of Usenet? It was the gayest thing I'd ever seen and I just laughed at the concept.

 

[Dyn]

Am I the only person here who actually read the front page and never joined the forums? I remember clicking a link to it and it was like wtf, they want $10 to post on something 1% the size of Usenet? It was the gayest thing I'd ever seen and I just laughed at the concept.

No I also I read some of the dungeons and dragons articles by that pedophile guy and thought they were kind of okay, like a poor man's version of cracked.com articles back when cracked.com was still sort of funny but not really, and I never signed up because charging money to use a forum is fucking retarded, and goons were already some of the worst people on the internet by then.

I remember them constantly barging into other cosy little forums and games like unruly mobs of spastics and shitting them up. My first introduction to them was about two dozen of them swarming into a relatively tiny forum I posted on and immediately forming an aggressive, disruptive, insular ready-made clique that nobody else could stand, and refusing to leave until we started randomly doxing them. They left really quick when that started because their lives were embarrassing.

Goons were terrible and unfunny and obnoxious even back when they claim SA was good. Any 'internet culture' they created just filled a vacuum that any number of other communities would have filled if they didn't exist. The people looking back at Something Awful like it was ever worth anything just don't seem to understand that they were never the only place on the internet where you could have fun and shitpost with random strangers, they were just the only place with such a weird sense of herd mentality and brand loyalty.

 

[AnOminous]

Goons were terrible and unfunny and obnoxious even back when they claim SA was good. Any 'internet culture' they created just filled a vacuum that any number of other communities would have filled if they didn't exist.

It used to be that any time anything actually cool happened on the Internet, it would immediately be ruined by goons.

 

[Hiram Clarke Hustler]

It's just ridiculous how much of a piece of shit this guy was.

He had shit the vast majority of humanity never got a shot at, and look what he did with it. What a worthless bastard. I wish I believed in Hell because if someone belongs there regretting their shitty decisions for all eternity, it's this no good son of a bitch.

This is so fucking true this dude had everything an average man could possibly want but squandered it because he was a lazy fuckup who couldn't handle anything.