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"

[Barry Williams]

Remember everyone, in exactly one month from now you owe it to yourself to drink a glass of mangosteen juice and toast it to one of the OG lolcows.

 

[Pissmaster]

HAHAHAH PURPLE DISHWASHER PIRATE NINJA ZOMBIE HAHAHA!!!!1!!

Lowtax was always an enigma with how this was his exact brand of humor, yet he hated it when other people said stuff like that

 

[Stan]

Welp, I have booked altar flowers for the anniversary of Lowtax's death. I'm sure he would have hated that.
I'm going to give the flower guild ladies some cut-out cardstock clipart mounted on bamboo skewers as well to include in the arrangement. Here are the images I have in mind to use:

 

[Molly White's Breast Milk]

Welp, I have booked altar flowers for the anniversary of Lowtax's death. I'm sure he would have hated that.
I'm going to give the flower guild ladies some cut-out cardstock clipart mounted on bamboo skewers as well to include in the arrangement. Here are the images I have in mind to use:

Instead of wasting money on flowers you should donate $10 to a woman's shelter in his name.

 

[The Grognard]

It's actually fairly amazing this thread is still alive after he's been dead this long, because people just haven't even finished saying how much they hated this fucking bastard.

It's also that his influence on the internet is immeasurably large. He is like one of those early Hollywood creatives who genuinely blazed trails for the future of cinema, only to flame out as personality defects compounded with too much money ruined the potential for a stable life.

 

[Stan]

Instead of wasting money on flowers you should donate $10 to a woman's shelter in his name.

It's not a waste of money. He's far from a perfect person, or even a good person, but I admired him and I read SA a lot when I was younger and he was still active. He had a life worth living and I'm sorry that he threw it away in a fit of depression and spite. There but for the grace of God go we, etc.

And fwiw I already donated to his daughter's gofundme when he died, but I'll set up a recurrent 10$ to a women's shelter in his honor if it makes you happy.

 

[blablabla]

if this faggot just passed his time banging shemales ey whatever, but the fucker decided to kill himself over having to be an adult for the first time in his life. i hope he rots in hell

 

[RJ MacReady]

It's not a waste of money. He's far from a perfect person, or even a good person, but I admired him and I read SA a lot when I was younger and he was still active. He had a life worth living and I'm sorry that he threw it away in a fit of depression and spite. There but for the grace of God go we, etc.

And fwiw I already donated to his daughter's gofundme when he died, but I'll set up a recurrent 10$ to a women's shelter in his honor if it makes you happy.

Let me upsell you: You could buy an ouija board and a Goldbelly pie (for the séance) and tell us how Lowtax is doing in the great beyond.

 

[retard strength II]

I still feel so horrible for his daughters. Even if he was a shit dad having your own father shoot himself is incredibly traumatizing. It's something they will be dealing with for the rest of their lives.

Plus that he basically did it to spite mom/step-mom for daring to pursue child support. That is such a weird, spiteful element that and I hope all the kids know and understand it isn't their fault. The method of suicide, their age, and his reasoning. Extremely difficult to deal with as the child.

 

[Camel joe]

Lol he's dead ahaha looooool

It's not a waste of money. He's far from a perfect person, or even a good person, but I admired him and I read SA a lot when I was younger and he was still active. He had a life worth living and I'm sorry that he threw it away in a fit of depression and spite. There but for the grace of God go we, etc.

And fwiw I already donated to his daughter's gofundme when he died, but I'll set up a recurrent 10$ to a women's shelter in his honor if it makes you happy.

Retard.

 

[Sniperwoof]

I still feel so horrible for his daughters. Even if he was a shit dad having your own father shoot himself is incredibly traumatizing. It's something they will be dealing with for the rest of their lives.

Didn't it leak at one point that he had his daughter in his cell as "little whore" or some shit like that? He was almost Alec Baldwin levels of shitty father and they are better off with him dead.

 

[Spunt]

Didn't it leak at one point that he had his daughter in his cell as "little whore" or some shit like that? He was almost Alec Baldwin levels of shitty father and they are better off with him dead.

His daughter had him as "birth giver" on her phone, showing her father the respect he deserved. Not seen anything the other way around.

 

[Dixieland Buckaroo]

If he hadn't lucked into success in 1999 he'd just be another failson from a rich family having his mom get him tendies in the basement while he fritters away his trust fund on gatcha games into his 40s and beyond.

It's almost the Nick Rekieta story. I continue to see parallels.

 

[Sniperwoof]

I'm just sad he killed himself before a homeless saga or better yet a mcjob saga. I absolutely would have made a special trip just to be shitty to him at whatever retail or fast food job he he ended up in.

 

[Stan]

I'm just sad he killed himself before a homeless saga or better yet a mcjob saga. I absolutely would have made a special trip just to be shitty to him at whatever retail or fast food job he he ended up in.

Think that might have been the proximal reason he joined the 41%.

 

[Sicko Hunter]

I'm just sad he killed himself before a homeless saga or better yet a mcjob saga. I absolutely would have made a special trip just to be shitty to him at whatever retail or fast food job he he ended up in.

That was never going to happen. Lowtax would never have worked a shitty job. A day as a janitor or working at Wal-Mart would break his soul.

 

[John Ligma]

It's not a waste of money. He's far from a perfect person, or even a good person, but I admired him and I read SA a lot when I was younger and he was still active. He had a life worth living and I'm sorry that he threw it away in a fit of depression and spite. There but for the grace of God go we, etc.

And fwiw I already donated to his daughter's gofundme when he died, but I'll set up a recurrent 10$ to a women's shelter in his honor if it makes you happy.

What you're saying is going to be really controversial here due to the level of (well earned) disdain for him that the community here has, but for what it's worth I agree with you almost wholeheartedly. For what Richard was lacking in most departments, he made up for with a lot of comedic talent, latent intelligence and unique charisma. People can disagree in that they personally did not find him funny, but he clearly had an audience of people who liked it and found it to be a cynical breath of fresh air back in the early 2000s, one that was heavily influential in defining the comedy of the hip 'web 1.0' scene. Having followed his work for something like 15+ years leading up to his death, I know that my sense of humor was heavily influenced by his writings, the videos he made and the animations/other silly little projects he put together with Shmorky. Separating art from artist, he was a funny man with a unique way of looking at the world, lots of good ideas and the combination of charisma and writing talent that helped him present a story or improvised scenario in a funny way.

Richard was lazy, he was spiteful, he was angry, he was a liar and a womanizer but through all that I still couldn't help but feel pity for him as I watched his life spiral downwards over the decades. If you look back at the start and the first couple years of his internet presence he wasn't always the way he was towards the end; those negative traits of his were slowly brought more and more to the forefront as he forced himself to pridefully ignore his mental problems and self-medicate with excess drugs and alcohol. He was an expert at playing his character and pretending like he was totally mentally sound but it seemed obvious that he had some demons in him that he refused to get help for until it was too late. He let his toxic mentality and unchecked lies destroy all his social relationships, his family, his finances and his body. There were many points where he could have turned his life around but for one reason or another didn't have the strength to do so, he was a failure of a man who fell into societal pitfalls that he didn't possess the level of self control required to escape from, the kind of man who needs help from therapists, psychiatrists or anger management but is too prideful to receive it. While some of his escapades were funny to laugh it, overall it's just a sad situation and I genuinely think with a firm guiding hand and a better support system he might still be with us today in a completely different mindset.

I have to say too, I know it was obvious to everyone for years and years that Shmorky was a pedophile freak of nature and it seemed clear to me that Richard knew it too but didn't seem ready to accept it until he was presented with completely irrefutable proof. For what it's worth, Shmorky was his best friend and the other half of his comedic duo, they had a lot of chemistry together and you don't always get to choose who you have chemistry with. Lowtax didn't seem like the kind of person who was good at making long-term friends and given the sheer volume of stuff they did together it's obvious that they had a strong social bond. While it was ultimately necessary, I felt nothing but pity for him when he had to oust Shmorky from his life and I find it extremely callous that Shmorky didn't appear to ever reach back out to him or come back to talk/help him with the issues he developed later.

And now Lowtax is dead because he had nothing left in his soul but alcohol, xanax and spite and his three children are left fatherless. We can laugh all we want about how his downfall was his own fault but at its core he was a failure of a man who slipped between the cracks of the mental health industry and degraded to the point where he came to the conclusion that putting a 5.7 meme round through his skull was a better option than living, something I find absolutely horrific to think about given the existence of his three daughters that he, at one point loved so much. Drugs, alcohol and a lack of mental healthcare destroyed him. It's sad to me that he couldn't get the kind of support he needed so that he could turn his life around and the world is worse off for it.

For all his faults, failures and the spiteful, drug-addled animal he degraded into being, I miss Lowtax a lot and I think his death was preventable.

 

[Harbinger of Kali Yuga]

The thing is Lowtax's humor didn't age, his type of slapstick and weird humor was funny at the time along with Newgrounds-era flash video trends that wouldn't be considered funny anymore either (Eskimo Bob, some YTMND stuff, Happy Tree Friends, ) and he was a one-trick pony.

Did you ever interact with him, ever? He was truly unpleasant and impossible to reason with. Nobody could ever get through to his egotistical skull. He couldn't be self-critical, self-aware, couldn't even receive mild constructive criticism. Dude was truly an ass, he did not respect other people or treat them well, and he kind of was a funny at the right place, right time. You think Lowtax couldn't get the support he needed? He was beyond redemption. Nobody could ever get through to him. If you told him anything he didn't like, you'd be kicked off his forums, out of his inner circle, etc.

Other than play Cliff Yabklonski and make fun of ugly people (look, it's the internet and humor is mean, but if you dish it out, you gotta be able to take it and Lowtax could never take it, not even in good fun) Lowtax was only funny because he surrounded himself with marginally funnier and more intelligent people, many of whom he fell out of touch with since he was so personally insufferable, and if you weren't an asskisser and was getting more attention from other goons he'd find a reason to remove you. They actually meme'd removing valued posters because most goons emulated Lowtax to make a name for themselves and the obsession with purging disloyal people or even the forum's best (only goons at the time understand the weird desire for goons to see good goons banned) because nobody was allowed to be funnier than the boss, even if obviously nobody could outwardly state that. Lowtax had the same mental disorder Trump does.

Normally I don't hate cows just for being asinine and stupid, but (and most people forget this these days since SA is old news) but Lowtax frequently lead DoS attacks on websites on shared hosting because someone on the server plagiarized the front page, he actually ripped people off frequently -- if you complained about something you paid for on the forum not working, he'd outright ban you because he was so egotistical, he hated anyone complaining about anything he did. Apparently he thought he could play the same games with Uncle Sam as he could with his forum users since he lived up to his name and the IRS went after him for not paying nearly enough.

It's hard to emphasize just what an insufferable goober Lowtax was. He was the quintessential "people only like the admin because he's the admin" forum shit. Internet went mainstream, SA became irrelevant, Lowtax couldn't control the narrative about him, he suffered his literal worst nightmare--widespread humiliation--and killed himself. It's a happy ending to a shitshow. Lowtax left a shitstreak across the lives of most people that knew him and that's why his death had such little fanfare with so few people coming forward with positive words about him. The deafening silence said it all. Nobody was gonna publicly dog on an ex-friend of theirs or something especially since his family his grieving but Lowtax burned more bridges than a spiteful Soviet army.

 

[John Ligma]

Yeah, you're right @Harbinger of Kali Yuga , I never talked to him very much outside of a few games here and there. I was worried he was a suicide risk towards the end so I spent some time in his chat for his shitty little streams he put together for like 20 people and I chatted with him a few times in his Discord. Beyond that I only ever knew his public facing persona that he put on in his articles, posts and YouTube videos, plus everything on here- though this thread didn't really take off until 2019 but I was still posting on the SA thread and the Shmorky thread since like 2014 or so.

Maybe I take for granted how bad of a person he really was to the people he was close to, given the results of most of his relationships it's pretty hard to ignore that he pushed everyone away by being a piece of shit. For some reason his suicide hit me kind of hard though and I feel some sympathy for the situation he was in, even if it was entirely his fault.

 

[blablabla]

no wonder the internet is so shitty if lowxtass helped shaped it and there are still retards saying i enjoyed SA 20 years ago let me tell you why this deadbeat piece of shit wasnt so bad...