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.
I didn't negrate your post because I think it's very well reasoned and expressed, but I barely agree with any of it I'm afraid, other than agreeing about his writing matching the zeitgeist of 1999-2002 wacky t3h p3ngu1n of D000m humour - it was something that I enjoyed at the time but I was an edgy little asshole back then. (I'm still an edgy little asshole but my sense of humour has matured a bit in the last 20 years, unlike his).
His death wasn't preventable. He really was doomed from the beginning. If he didn't die the way he did, even if he never founded SA or got famous, his sociopathy, narcissism and addictive hedonism would have finished him off before 50, be that drugs, booze, suicide or getting shanked by some guy he cucked.
I had a thought reading your post that actually Richard is the internet's Kurt Cobain. Like Kurt, Lowtax was just not someone who could handle success. Some people take the money and attention success brings and forge happy, successful lives for themselves and their families. Others are like Lowtax and Kurt - narcissistic, self-pitying abusive sociopaths who turn fame and money into addiction and shattered families. Both men were tornadoes of misery, feckless hedonists who would leave trails of pain, hurt and emptied medicine cabinets wherever they went. Both would just be anonymous junkies without their success and died young even without it. Both lacked the maturity and self-restraint to forge stable, faithful relationships with their loved ones and blew their brains out rather than deal with the mess they created, leaving children without a father.
Like Lowtax, that doesn't mean you can't like Kurt's art, nor does it mean that his art wasn't important or influential, even if, on reflection, the men who created it had actually quite limited talent. They just made art that caught the moment, that expressed what many people their age were thinking and feeling, and founded what became whole empires of ideas that remain to this day. But, like Lowtax, to regard Kurt Cobain the man in any kind of a positive light is somewhere between naive and wilfully ignorant.
He did have that weird sociopath charisma where he's a complete ass but people still like him because just how open and upfront he is with her dickery. But he had even lost that as the Pills "for his back" and coasting on previous achievements took over.
Richard was the classic handsome, charismatic, narcissistic sociopath who had just about enough charm and good looks to sucker people in to his gravity well of abuse, manipulation and control, particularly women. Girl after girl would swoon over him, and be completely taken in by his explanation that all those previous bitches are lying whores who said he beat and abused them because they wanted his money or were jealous or some shit. That includes
@Stan , who is clearly still experiencing Stockholm Syndrome from a 20-year-old crush on this sociopathic woman-beater, just like the tens of thousands of girls who throw themselves at Chris Brown even after he reduced Rhianna's face to mincemeat. That's not a dig at women in general, plenty of guys will fall for a pretty face and a nice pair of tits long before they notice the BPD serial killer behind them - including Lowtax himself, ironically, who finally met his match when he fell for a woman as crazy as he was abusive. Humans are just prone to being shallow and we have a biological urge to reproduce that over-writes our logic and reasoning.
For all the mistakes he made, most of them weren't really all that important. He fucked up business opportunities and was mean to some random assholes on the internet? So what. Ultimately it doesn't really matter. One thing he really fucked up though - he could have done right by his kids and family, to the very end, which he didn't - because he chose not to. Moreover he explicitly fucked them over and then blew his brains out when the law wanted to force him to face the music, in a last act of narcissistic pettiness. Absolute shitstain of a person and I cannot feel sorry for him and I can also guarantee you he wouldn't have felt sorry for you.
Well except the time he defrauded his customers out of $20,000 by embezzling a GoFundMe sold as a way to fund a desperately-needed software upgrade, the time he let an obvious paedophile babysit his small children, the doxing, the revenge porn, the constant creeping on pretty much every woman in his life, including the mentally unwell fiancee of his best friend. These are just the things we know about. Then you get to what he did to his wives and kids and ... yeah. His kids were better off with him dead, and it takes a LOT for that to be the case.
