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"

[Sabrina]

I have a hard time believing that is Ashli and not either a troll or the troon just trying to get more attention. Helps perpetuate the idea Lowtax was into troons too, so the motivations for trolls or troons doing this is huge. It also makes Ashli look bad and no doubt the Lowtax fan club is hungry to tar and feather her.

That is a troon. It is that tranny who was simping for Lowtax on facebook.

The troon is the one accusing Ashli of being the troll that sent her the mean message, which is just some edgelord paraphrasing my posts. There's no way that is Ashli, she's generally nice, not too bright and at least somewhat incoherent. Also not a reliable narrator. TBH she would never message some simp of Lowtax like that even though she can now spill the beans without it having legal and financial consequences.

 

[nigga that crab pollack]

The dude set up a total gravy train of morons. He was completely Madison Avenue style. Someone upthread mentioned national lampoon. He captured that sense and packaged it in internet form at the time when print media began to show cracks, a time when you could really do something like that.

He could be funny. Recently he wasn't, but he tried. I met him a very long time ago, and he seemed weird, but not a bad guy, no overtones or undercurrents, just an offbeat guy.

After spending years on SASS and it's clones, we all knew this was how it would end. When you stopped caring, the forums ran down. We've had a fun time shitting on you, and the last few years, you've given all of us our own vindication

the problem was that the forums stopped having a national lampoon attitude at some point and it was completely gone by the 2016 culture war - and at no point did any of the moderation team or administration ever attempt to create any sort of direction or take any sort of pro-active approach to fixing anything that could have been a problem. they took too little reactive action far too late, they lazily went along with anti-funny and anti-speech shitters as if they were the winds of change that were "improving" the forums (to catastrophic effect). lowtax was pretty much absent from the forum's administration for much of it's history and i can't really blame him for the early stuff, but you can blame him for realizing it was a problem after the child molester saga and then failing to do anything about it then. there were so many failures of leadership that it's honestly incredible that the website even exists in the form that it does now without having balkanized or completely shut down due to another stint of leadership failure and sycophant-induced culture slapfight.

the funny thing is that there aren't really any flash points i can point to as being the problem, besides FYAD, and that was a very slow burning fuse. For some reason the administration was more than willing to let FYAD and all of its wannabe comedians run roughshod over the rest of the forums and allowed them to sow discord and their smug and aloof and yet holier-than-thou attitude to diffuse into the culture of the website. skylark shitposting was funny, but not funny enough to ban people for criticizing. every single one of those faggots should have been permabanned and FYAD deleted when laissez faire was deleted, and the fact that all of those retards were literally the origins of buzzfeed and twitter culture - i don't have to say any more. they tried to leverage their e-fame into media-fame and found out they weren't actually all that funny - and you literally weren't even allowed to call them unfunny faggots or one of their moderators would hunt through your post history for a post they had the permission to probate and then chain probate you for weeks at a time. somehow the administration found that to be acceptable?

it was just a culmination of years and years of nobody putting their foot down for anything but personal grievances and having the culture of the website slowly mutate over time to push out all of the original content, funny men, and memelords in lieu of nothing but circlejerking sycophants and people with severe codependency issues. visiting the forum after being banned for 5+ years is fucking depressing, all of the fun is gone. it's all drama and stupid bullshit, gbs doesn't even have funny shitposts anymore. it's just sad e/n posters, people plugged into the proto-social media paradigm on $10 of life support. and seeing the lowtax eulogy thread where everyone just says that he was a giant manbaby who failed to grow with the forums is pretty shocking. literal pages of coping and projection that they've improved as people thinly veiled as criticism of lowtax. yeah, lowtax was a giant baby who failed to grow. that nobody can deny. but to say that the forums have "grown" is a fucking farcical statement when looking at it now is like looking into a time machine back to when Facepunch Studios was run by a histrionic pedophile. raelly makes u think

i didnt expect to write this many words but ever since i was a teenager first shitposting on something awful i always considered lowtax to be a figure to learn from, both good and mostly bad. and boy, holy fuck, have his decisions repeatedly and consistiently sent a pretty powerful message about what happens when you pathologically refuse to take decisive action and let a community run roughshod

 

[Mikoyan]

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, you are not. I've always been amazed how many people did sign up because you could get the good bits by reading the front page, back in the day, and you couldn't get people to pay for -good- websites then. Well, you still mostly can't.

Also, all these old pictures of the guy are weird for me. I guess I'm about LT's age and good fucking god have I held up way better than him. I might get grumpy about my hair being thin and frizzy but fucking hell I don't look like he did. Low bar, I know.

 

[Sabrina]

Searching for #lowtax Alice makes the same goddamn post 5x and then the goons start to notice (also made at least 3 on his fb page)



And after all this simping, she sent him porn, he bought a game for her, etc on one of her fb posts she said she was banned years ago and Lowtax "never got around" to unbanning her. Fucking lol

 

[Uber driver reviewer]

One person going is one too many. And whatever hole his remains occupy will be a waste of space to deposit the body of somebody more worthy of celebration.

Not to mention, what would be there to celebrate? I bet even his mama is relieved of the burden.

I'm just envisioning some sparsely attended gathering of the (over the hill) goons mixed with angry family members.

If Richard had 10% of even his 2010 level of popularity and recognition, this would be quite the cow-spotting event. Now his kids probably won't even go.

 

[The Great Chandler]

Well shit I go away for a while and Lowtax offs himself. Not only that but apparently he left goodbyes to friends but not his own daughters? What a shitshow Now his legacy will always be ‘see this guy? Don’t be that guy.‘

Another common narcissist trait:

Parents who care more about their friends than their own kids. Well not that he cared much to begin with.

 

[All Cops Are Based]

You hate to see it. Just the other day I showed my little brother a floppy disc and he said I kid you not.

"Wtf why did you 3D print the save icon?"

Worst generation ever.

I've heard that joke before so I don't believe you

 

[Cheeseburger Picnic]

Spoiler: gross

 

[Homefries]

does anyone have that really old video of a bunch of goons stalking lowtax at an airport when he was picking up his chinkwife for the first time? it was incredibly awkward and uncomfortable. i cant seem to find it on youtube

this?
top comment was left by the woman in the video too

Lowtax meets Hip Hop operating system at the airport.

A few goons meet Lowtax and Angela at the airport. Typical cringe worthy goon awkwardness ensues.

www.youtube.com

 

[QwahlityKahntent]

this?
top comment was left by the woman in the video too

Lowtax meets Hip Hop operating system at the airport.

A few goons meet Lowtax and Angela at the airport. Typical cringe worthy goon awkwardness ensues.

www.youtube.com

thats it!

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

Was the official divorce decree signed by the judge? I figure Lowtax made sure Ashli was not his legal wife before killing himself. Imagine the nightmare for Mom tax if they were still technically married. Death usually does terminate most divorce settlement to some degree because they are usually written or negotiated to be in force for “X year or upon death.”

I wonder what will happen now with whatever money Lowtax had left. Momtax is an attorney and she’s pissed. Whatever is left of his estate would probably go to his three kids. Momtax will favor Megan I would assume since they at least had a cordial relationship for years and has the two local grandkids.

If what Lowtax said about his tax debt is true then that might claim the bulk of anything remaining. Im curious if he was was broke or just what he thought was broke. Might be quite the fight over that money in escrow between the ex-wives, momtax and the real tax man.

The troon is the one accusing Ashli of being the troll that sent her the mean message, which is just some edgelord paraphrasing my posts. There's no way that is Ashli, she's generally nice, not too bright and at least somewhat incoherent. Also not a reliable narrator. TBH she would never message some simp of Lowtax like that even though she can now spill the beans without it having legal and financial consequences.

Yes, that’s what I was trying to coney. The nasty messages were either from the troon who posted them in the first place to manufacture drama or another troon/e-girlfriend being catty. The entire point is to try and make Ashli look nasty because dead Lowtax would appreciate it.

 

[Sabrina]

View attachment 2713324

Never got around to unbanning her account SO SHE PAYS FOR ONE just to spread more of her bullshit.
What happens when she realizes she can't delete other people's posts on SA?

 

[Kaede Did Nothing Wrong]

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.

when the sugar coating of comedy wears off I guess they're just left with the nihilism.

 

[Kwopsie Peepsie]

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:

I was on SA by mid to late 2000.

My understanding of "image macros" was not that they were made by image macro manipulation, but that the "intention" of such an image was to be a "forum macro", so that the poster didn't have to upload or attach the image to a post. They were supposed to work like forums smilies. So for example there was one called "timeline", and to post it using a forum macro, you would only have to type img-timeline and then that image would appear instead of the text img-timeline.

Lowtax implemented this on the forums and it lasted less than a week. I remember someone said something like "these are getting old" and Lowtax replied with "GEE YOU THINK REPEATING THE SAME JOKE OVER AND OVER WAS GOING TO MAKE THE JOKE FUNNIER" or something like that, then it was turned off.

After that, anyone who posted one of the images that were briefly implemented as forum macros would usually get banned... especially if they posted the timeline one, as he hated it more than any of the other ones for some reason. Here it is:

Obviously meant as a response to someone who posts something that everyone else already knows.

 

[BobbyBriggs69420]

I wonder what the resulting gore is from one shoving a five-seven up one's pill-hole and blasting away vs. a more traditional cartridge?

 

[Dan Abrams]

How long until the police report is available to request? I want to know if he shot himself in the head and collapsed on a pile of Goldbelly pies or if he was found dead in women's clothing.

 

[nigga that crab pollack]

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.

Comedy has to have an element of truth to it. Ironic humor is a way to get the truth through some of the barriers that people put up to hearing the truth. Something Awful existed in the era I like to call the "boomer doldrums" because in the early 2000s you were basically incapable of holding any type of vaguely differential opinion from whatever corporate, religious, and political narrative that was being pushed in the mainstream. It's not much different from what it is now but back then the internet was completely a separate entity and you could say "JET FUEL CANT MELT STEEL BEAMS" with as much irony or sincerity as you wanted. Something Awful clearly leaned towards the irony.


But the tone of the internet changed a long time ago and the irony no longer served a purpose to undercut mainstream or widely held narratives. The unthinkable happened, the mainstream narrative BECAME irony. So these people ramped up the irony because it was now cool to be ironic, but at no point ever considered WHY they were being ironic. It turned into meta-irony. Once those people started taking offense that you weren't being as ironic as you should be then it was game over, the concept of sincere communication was no longer the core of the forums posting experience and it was about >implications and >implying implications that I implied implicitly tier shitposting but to get people banned for being ironically ironically racist or whatever the fuck

Something Awful didn't grow up past 2012 and it shows

 

[Least Concern]

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:

As others have stated, "image macros" was the original name for "images with silly text on them," and "meme" more broadly meant an oft-repeated idea or statement (which is closer to its original meaning). For example, "Ted Cruz raped and murdered a girl behind an Arby's in 1993" and variations on that would be a meme despite that rarely appearing as an image with text on it. Some time in the last ten years or so, though, the meaning of "meme" among Internet plebs came to mean that which we previously described as an "image macro," and there's no chance of going back from that at this point.

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.

See also the Whedonesque dialogue of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. Quipping in the face of a bad situation was just the zeitgeist in the horrific years of the early '00s. Maybe something something 9/11 something, I don't know.

Was that related to the part of the site where they made fun of forums they thought were filled with losers? They used to try and raid those forums, but at least most of them didn't charge money to have an account. I'm not even sure anyone really cared when they tried to start something, but it was a long time ago so I don't remember much.

I never posted on the forums but I distinctly remember the articles where they'd go to these stupid forums about the MPreg fetish or euphoric atheists (before we called them that) and post screenshots of some of the stupider posts. Pretty similar to what we do today with Twitter tweets… Those were my favorite SA articles back in the day.

 

[Lurk McDurk]

This is exceptionally true. The tribalism inherent in the latter is still very much present. How many SA moderators/famous persons have had their otherwise intolerable behavior excused because goons didn't believe the victims? SA makes a lot more sense when you realize that their dedication to progressive causes/fighting injustice ends where their comfort zone begins. It's a spice to make life exciting, not a foundation for their beliefs.

It's also marketable, which is a detriment.

These discussions aren't new, nor were they new when they came about on SA. Before SA had the audience it had the same shit happened at other sites. People were leaving one forum for another because the one forum got some sort of ad deal and immediately proclaimed "no more faggot posts we have to make Evilcorp happy." To which, the obvious insult in retort is "why do I need to make Evilcorp happy, so you can get your ramen and hentai ftp? So that they'll throw in a 50 dollar prize for a gaming tournament? Fuck them and fuck you."

But that creates a constant churn. Every 6 months all of the people in the thing you post on or play are bailing out of one site for another, or one IRC network for another, and it's a constant fucking hassle. Every time there's a schism a handful of people don't want to change for whatever reason. The only way to stop the churn is to somehow create a walled garden that keeps just the right amount of new people out, and solves the reliance on corporate money. Charging 10 bux works for that by blocking 90% of the tween chuds on their mom's iPad and paying for the servers. But that creates a subsequent problem, in which cliques are protected from the outside world and possibly worse yet, discover their clout could be marketable.

tl;dr:

 

[Uber driver reviewer]

I wonder what the resulting gore is from one shoving a five-seven up one's pill-hole and blasting away vs. a more traditional cartridge?

Massive overpressue.