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"

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Things like ankylosing spondylitis hit in your late 30's and can destroy the upper vertebrae of your neck. AS is a degenerative rheumatic disease of the joints in the spine that is often triggered by liver, pancreas and immune system problems. Such as those experienced by a pill-popping alcoholic.

I think the disintegration of Lowtax's spine is real, and largely self-inflicted. I also think that he was a junkie way before it happened, but post-surgery analgesia may have upgraded him from something like codeine (on top of Ambien and/or Xanax) to Vicodin, Oxy or Tramadol. Stuff that he can get even more fucked up on than before. That explains why his decision-making and blatant e-begging got even worse after his surgery, something that I didn't even think was possible.
 
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God fucking damnit I had better not lose the Wiz LPs the LPArchive refuses to archive because they aren't complete over this.

Those got me into historical games, got me through shitty jobs when I had nothing do to and there were no customers, gave me something to read when I was down. If those get lost forever because some alcoholic reetarded person fucked up his mail-order marriage I'm gonna literally lose a piece of myself. Fuck you Lowtax; I'll drink your ass under the table any day and then kick your head once or twice for good measure.
 
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Spunt said:
Things like ankylosing spondylitis hit in your late 30's and can destroy the upper vertebrae of your neck. AS is a degenerative rheumatic disease of the joints in the spine that is often triggered by liver, pancreas and immune system problems. Such as those experienced by a pill-popping alcoholic.

I think the disintegration of Lowtax's spine is real, and largely self-inflicted. I also think that he was a junkie way before it happened, but post-surgery analgesia may have upgraded him from something like codeine (on top of Ambien and/or Xanax) to Vicodin, Oxy or Tramadol. Stuff that he can get even more fucked up on than before. That explains why his decision-making and blatant e-begging got even worse after his surgery, something that I didn't even think was possible.
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Ankylosing spondylitis usually begins in adolescence or early adulthood, not early 40s. Having surgery to treat it is extremely rare.

But If he had what is basically arthritis of the spine why not just say that? If you’re going to beg money and blame all woes on a back condition why not specify what this mysterious terrible ailment is? The weird part has been how vague all this back shit is. Most people buried in medical bills will tell you exactly what got them buried in them, usually with way more detail than you ever want.

His terrible back seems to correlate precisely with the surprise new baby and the crumbling of the marriage to leaf wife. Easier to lay in bed and eat pills than deal with Depressing domestic reality. Then his back magically healed to travel to Utah and stay in hotels for three weeks to bang Mormon strange.
 
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It seems like every person who was responsible for SomethingAwful’s culture ends up becoming an utter laughing stock. I’m surprised LowTax is still able to pay for the site at the same time he’s getting wallet raped.
 
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L50LasPak said:
God fucking damnit I had better not lose the Wiz LPs the LPArchive refuses to archive because they aren't complete over this.

Those got me into historical games, got me through shitty jobs when I had nothing do to and there were no customers, gave me something to read when I was down. If those get lost forever because some alcoholic reetarded person fucked up his mail-order marriage I'm gonna literally lose a piece of myself. Fuck you Lowtax; I'll drink your ass under the table any day and then kick your head once or twice for good measure.
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Why would you drink his ass?
 
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Let's also not forget that one of the big reasons Lowtax refuses to upgrade the forums software to something like what the Farms runs on -- and knowing what an incompetent, idiosyncratic dumbass he is, it likely even ranks above things like "tranny autist gravy train exodus" and "current forum code being a frankenstein's monster of cobbled together shit" -- is that he doesn't want people to have the ability to rate posts, because he thinks it's "low effort" and "stifles comedy" to be able to rate a post "agree", "disagree", "feels", "horrifying", etc. etc. rather than writing a post explaining why someone feels that way.

Which is ironic, because "low effort" and "stifles comedy" is pretty much emblazoned on the Kyanka family Coat of Arms at this point.
 
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PTNR 2.0 said:
Wild to think that, but for a few (very) bad but easily preventable decisions, SA could have been a HUGE deal, highly profitable and still super relevant. Lowtax passed on everything from Zero Punctuation to Million Dollar Extreme to Welcome to Night Vale (and probably about half a dozen other things I'm forgetting) and disaffected goons have created everything from Weird Twitter to Chapo Trap House to 4chan to Let's Play culture that itself saw the birth of shit like Twitch and AGDQ. All of this could have been owned, branded or leveraged in some way or another under Something Awful and Lowtax could have been a very wealthy man with more mangosteen and 1000 dollar chairs than you can shake a stick at.

Unfortunately, literally every time opportunity knocked, Lowtax was too fat, gay, drunk, malevolent, high on Ambien, unwilling (but not unable) to pay and/or completely incapable of taking anything seriously EVER (just like he is compulsively spraying unfunny OmG sO wAcKy "humor" all over his divorce as we speak) to answer. Him running off to Utah to fuck a 20 year old goonette with Borderline while his 30 year old illegal immigrant wife with Borderline sits at home with their daughter and no car, job, or family all the while his 40 year old ex-wife with Borderline cashes those sweet Patreon shekel child support checks is fucking AMAZINGLY on brand for the complete inability to make even remotely smart decisions he's become known for over the last 20 years.
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I think I read about The Escapist undercutting SA to get Yahtzee on board. Good thing they did that too, because The Escapist never had a single other thing worth watching.

Lowtax's biggest involvement with anything was with Mega64, he helped fund them and shoot their show in the early days, and published the first two seasons on DVD. He even flew them out to Missouri, but I can't remember why.

Lowtax had a lot of big plans at one point, to do publishing of goon projects, but that didn't pan out. I think Mega64's first two seasons and Doom House were the only DVDs released by Awful Video, with Mega64 just self-publishing from that point forward. He also did a big advertising run with The Whitest Kids U Know, opening up a subforum for them on SA, but I don't know what the deal with that was.

SA spawned a lot of talent, but the internet was rapidly growing, and there was getting to be less and less a reason to release your work through a publisher that wasn't already huge and could promote you, you know, outside of the internet. Plus, for every goon project that was successful like Zero Punctuation, you had like 50 that crashed and burned. I think The Zybourne Clock was the one thing that killed the whole notion of a goon project and turned it into a meme.

That all being said, Lowtax might just be able to go down in history as the most cucked man right at the forefront of the web exploding.
 
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Pissmaster General said:
I think I read about The Escapist undercutting SA to get Yahtzee on board. Good thing they did that too, because The Escapist never had a single other thing worth watching.

Lowtax's biggest involvement with anything was with Mega64, he helped fund them and shoot their show in the early days, and published the first two seasons on DVD. He even flew them out to Missouri, but I can't remember why.

Lowtax had a lot of big plans at one point, to do publishing of goon projects, but that didn't pan out. I think Mega64's first two seasons and Doom House were the only DVDs released by Awful Video, with Mega64 just self-publishing from that point forward. He also did a big advertising run with The Whitest Kids U Know, opening up a subforum for them on SA, but I don't know what the deal with that was.

SA spawned a lot of talent, but the internet was rapidly growing, and there was getting to be less and less a reason to release your work through a publisher that wasn't already huge and could promote you, you know, outside of the internet. Plus, for every goon project that was successful like Zero Punctuation, you had like 50 that crashed and burned. I think The Zybourne Clock was the one thing that killed the whole notion of a goon project and turned it into a meme.

That all being said, Lowtax might just be able to go down in history as the most cucked man right at the forefront of the web exploding.
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I think it was something like Yahtzee wanted to get paid for zero punctuation and Lowtax said no, so he left

Mega64 already made those videos for public access and lowtax published the first dvd.

Fragmaster had a zany gambler dvd on awful video as well.

My bad, that was BILL fillmaff's secret system published by IGN.

Something awful is not very good at making money.
 
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The story I've heard, and that I believe unless new info came to light since it sounds super on brand for Lowtax, is that Yahtzee approached Lowtax about making Zero Punctuation an SA thing. Lowtax offered to pay him the standard going rate for articles (which I was told is 40 bucks each).

Yahtzee told him that wasn't nearly enough to compensate him for his time and effort making the videos, since videos take considerably longer to script, edit, etc. etc. than it does to just write a page or two's worth of funny words for a text article.

Lowtax then offered to make him a moderator of the gaming forum in lieu of extra money. Yahtzee laughed off the idea of being paid for his work with the extra work of modding a forum for free, so Lowtax had a sO wAcKy passive-aggressive blowup at him for A) having the gall to want to be paid more for making professional, unique videos than he pays for text articles and B) not dropping to his knees and offering to suck Lowtax's dick at the thought of getting a mod star and told Yahtzee to fuck off, so Yahtzee fucked off all the way over to the Escapist and I can only imagine makes wayyyyy more than he'd have ever made at SA, even if Lowtax had offered to pay him an acceptable amount.

re: TWKUK, I think that was another minor controversy as I recall. Whatever channel was running their show, I wanna say IFC but I don't remember and don't even care enough to google it, approached SA about doing some kind of cross-marketing/cross-promotion thing in exchange for a lump sum of money. I seem to recall Lowtax mentioning the deal in a thread about the situation, and said he was going to use the money to invest into improving the forums and stuff.

There was a TWKUK sub-forum for a bit, and all the members of it got free accounts and shit and Lowtax posted a bunch of threads hyping up TWKUK and incorporated catchphrases from the show into his posts a lot (I distinctly remember he'd quote one sketch a lot, where John Wilkes Booth is trying to watch a play and Abraham Lincoln keeps yelling shit out like a stereotypical black movie goer (complete with blaccent), so Booth gets fed up and goes and kills him).

But then nothing ever came of the plans to "improve the forum" with the IFC (or whatever) money, probably because it was all spent on Ambien and box wine, and the whole thing was all swept quietly under the rug and the TWKUK subforum was deleted at the end of the cross-promotion timeframe and hardly mentioned again. Which is odd, given that getting paid to astroturf content, saying you're going to use the money for stuff that will benefit the crowd being subjected to the content, then spending it on yourself and memory-holing the whole affair is way scummier behavior than just posting an Amazon affiliate link to mangosteen pills or whatever, yet the mangosteen meme has lived on way longer.
 
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repentance said:
Oh dear god. Those "funny' exchanges between Lowtax and Logan.

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Man Lowtax had to feel some level of physical pain seeing Mormon marketer trying to be one of the cool posting gang on FB.

We will find out what her SA forum account name is soon because she’s so dang proud of banging married, dad of three, owner of a dead gay comedy forum that she’s bound to start flaunting it. Guess Lady Ambien’s account will need to be permabanned first.
 
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