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"

[Spunt]

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Author's note: This is a new OP written by @Spunt with help from @Pissmaster , @Sabrina and @Ghostse . This OP is part Kiwifarms OP, part obituary, mostly shitpost.

Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka

1976-2021

The Internet Made Him Stupid

Related threads:
Something Awful
Shmorky
Lowtax Divorce

Lowtax Documentary on Youtube​

Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka is now as dead and gay as the forum he once owned. One of the titans of the early internet (or at least the man who stood on the shoulders of actual titans and tried to claim credit for their accomplishments, while drunkenly stuffing $70 pies into his face) ended up deciding that suck-starting a 5-7 was a preferable alternative to supporting his children. Explaining how that downfall happened, and cataloguing the tragicomic 45-year saga of chaos, addiction and financial malfeasance that preceded it, will be the topic of this OP.

For those unaware of what made Lowtax a lolcow (and a terrible, terrible human being), there's a brief summary in the spoiler below:

Spoiler

- He defrauded his own forums users by raising $20,000 to upgrade the forums software, but embezzled it instead.
- He let a known paedophile babysit his children.
- He beat two wives and one girlfriend, at least.
- He confiscated and hid his second wife's passport and deliberately didn't complete her immigration paperwork so that he could threaten her with deportation if she stepped out of line.
- When he went to Utah for a month to fuck some BPD girl half his age, he left his wife alone with the kid and no transport.
- When his eldest (14-year-old) daughter called him out on the above he told her to go fuck herself.
- Despite this, his first wife arranged for the second to get into into a women's shelter. She setup a GFM which Lowtax's mods banned off the site and tried to take down.
- Lowtax's first action on discovering this was to tell Facebook that he was going to call ICE on his own wife out of vengeance.
- When she sued for divorce he deliberately spent as much money on gatcha games and prostitutes as he could to spite her AND HIS OWN DAUGHTER.
- He spent months denying that said BPD thot was a side-piece and instead insisted she was a "brand manager". The main contribution to SA was to offer unpaid writing for the site in return for "exposure".
- After he beat her and she revealed it on the forums, he forced her to record a tearful video saying she lied and he didn't hit her.
- He spent years popping pills and chugging booze, whilst vehemently denying it, even when he appeared on stream smashed out of his head.
- When he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in the DV case, he tried to spin this as "vindication" and being found "not guilty".
- The second it became clear he had to bear some consequences for the above, he blew his brains out leaving three children without a father.

GlossaryTax​

For those unfamiliar, these are terms that come up in the OP and the thread that you may need to know to understand some of it:

Spoiler

Goon – a nickname for a Something Awful forum poster.

Troon – Many don't know that this word originated on SA and was coined by its own genderweirds as a portmanteau of “Transgender Goon” before becoming internet speak for any insane tranny.

GBS - General Bullshit. Something Awful's general discussion board and the busiest part of the site. One of the first parts of the site to be taken over by said Troons.

FYAD – Fuck You and Die. A subforum of Something Awful (often known as just SA), originally a containment forum for flame wars, eventually became a clique and adopted a different culture to the rest of the site with a fondness for irony-poisoned non-sequiturs and posting in all lower case to show how much you don't care. Many FYAD posters, notably dril, went on to form “Weird Twitter”.

Ambien and Box Wine – Lowtax's supposed intoxicants of choice (as well as various opioids). The story was that a Goon went to the SA offices, located in a bleak stripmall in Lee's Summit, MO (the suburb of Kansas City where Lowtax lived and “worked”) and found (and photographed) our hero passed out on the couch, surrounded by empty boxes of wine and empty Ambien Rx bottles.

Jeffrey of YOSPOS – The SA moderator that Lowtax was eventually forced to sell his site to at a fraction of its once $13m value. No dox to date, rumoured to be a crypto millionaire. YOSPOS is another SA subforum (Your Operating System is a Piece of Shit) for tech-related matters.

VINDICATION – A word Lowtax was obsessed with from the start of the Domestic Violence allegations against him. Apparently, accepting a plea deal meant he was “innocent”. No, I don't get it either.

Bogan/Bogan Lay – A nickname often used by Kiwis for Logan Day, the BPD thot who single-handedly brought Lowtax's entire life to its knees. A warning about what happens when you stick your dick in crazy.

GAL – Guardian ad Litem, a lawyer appointed by a family court to represent the interests of a child in divorce cases.

Early LifeTax

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Richard Charles Kyanka was shat into this world on the 11th May 1976 by Carol Kyanka. Dadtax (also called Richard) doesn't appear to have been in his life very much at all, and Richard grew up as a coddled mommy's boy, something that would contribute to his bizarre behaviour over the next four and a half decades. Richard was not an only child; his sister Jessica teaches at a Jewish school (though the family are not Jewish themselves) and appears to be a moderately functional human. As we will discover, Richard inherited many of his most negative qualities from his mother – she was selfish, vindictive, heartless and uncaring, and therefore ideally suited to her job as a lawyer – a lucrative career that allowed her to bail her failson out of both legal and financial trouble over and over until one day the two combined in a way that not even she could fix for him. Richard's response to mommy not being able to clean up his latest mess, and having to take responsibility for the consequences of his actions for possibly the first time ever, was to blow his brains out. Carol herself passed away only 4 months after her son after a long battle with leukaemia, presumably figuring that if he couldn't be bothered to be a father then she didn't want to bother being a grandmother either.

Whilst studying at Vanderbilt University (where he would later drop out), Richard, in his own words, “almost ended up getting a summer job” (i.e. failed the interview) working for eccentric politician Byron Looper, who legally changed his middle name to “LowTax” as a campaign gimmick. Despite this being the first of a long list of career failures, Richard started using the handle “Lowtax” while gaming and it stuck.

Lowtax, finding that studying was hard, decided to stop, and dropped out of university to work for Planet Quake, where he gained attention for his edgy sense of humour. Showing the level of professionalism that he would sustain throughout his career, Lowtax fell out with one of his co-workers and responded by publicly attacking her in a front-page article (which seems to have been lost long ago). For this (and failure to do any actual work), he was fired.

Early SomethingAwfulTax

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(This is the Lowtax thread, not the SA thread, so we will only be covering SA history and drama as it relates to Lowtax himself.)

In 1999, Lowtax founded Something Awful, originally as a place to put his “comedy” writing. The site's forums began to fill with neckbeard edgelords who shared his sense of humour, and the SA forums were born. Lowtax was soon battling a small army of bots, spammers and trolls, and to dissuade them from the site he introduced a $10 fee to register, which you had to pay again to unban your account if you broke the forum rules. Make a good mental note of this decision, because it was the only good decision Lowtax ever made in his entire life. I'm not even joking about that, and even that decision was made by accident – he wasn't trying to get rich from it.

Nonetheless Something Awful became an internet powerhouse and probably the single most influential site in internet culture until 4chan (founded by ex-goon Christopher “Moot” Poole) came around. No precise numbers are available (because Lowtax), but the site was making six-figure sums throughout the 2000s and may well have sometimes breached seven figures once all its revenue streams (advertising, merch, account upgrades) were taken into consideration.

Picture the scene – you own the most culturally powerful site on the internet and it is almost obscenely profitable. You are in your early 20s, a multi-millionaire and you have tens of thousands of loyal customers who will throw money at anything you try to sell them, and many of these are attractive women who you have to fight off with a shitty stick. You have time, money and opportunity to do anything you want. What do you do?

Well, if you're Lowtax, the answer is “fuck it all up in every way possible then shoot yourself”. This thread is an attempt to chronicle and explain why and how that happened. And to understand Lowtax the trainwreck, you have to understand Lowtax the man.

PsychologyTax, FinanceTax, AddictTax

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To understand Lowtax's bizarre and otherwise almost inexplicable self-destruction, you have to understand Lowtax and what a total trashfire of a human being he was from the very beginning. Many know about Richard's fuck-ups towards the end of his life, but the important point to remember is that Lowtax was always like that. For many seasoned Tax Inspectors, the big surprise was not that a twice-divorced, bankrupt and universally-hated Lowtax blew his brains out in a dismal rented basement, but that it took so long to finally happen. Like I said, Lowtax made one good decision in 2000 and spent the next two decades trying his best to piss it all up the wall, which, thanks to his remarkable dedication, he eventually did. Lowtax's psychology was very simple once you understood it, so here's a quick guide so that the otherwise completely absurd events this thread chronicles make some kind of sense.

Lowtax was an addict. Not just in the “chemically dependent on drugs and booze” sense (though of course he was), but in a psychological sense. Lowtax was an incredibly shallow and hedonistic man. He cared only about his immediate base pleasures at the expense of literally anything else. If it didn't get him some kind of payoff within about 24 hours, he didn't bother. Ever. Lowtax had no ability or interest in planning for the future, and this impulsive, short-term thinking was behind all the terrible decisions that he made.

Many have described Lowtax as lazy, and he was, but that laziness was a byproduct of his total hedonism. Lowtax was prepared to make huge efforts on occasion, but only if the result was an immediate payoff – money, sex, booze or drugs. A lazy man doesn't abandon his family over the holidays to fly from Missouri to Utah for a month to cheat on his wife with a sidepiece half his age under the auspices of a “business trip”. Nor does a lazy man regularly make 6-hour round trips from Kansas City to St. Louis just to buy pies. That sort of thing takes a lot of effort. What looked like laziness was more a really warped set of priorities and a real mental block on planning more than about 24 hours ahead.

Lowtax seemed literally unable to understand concepts such as delayed gratification, investment or planning for the future. If money was in his account he spent it immediately, even if that money was needed to pay taxes or had been raised specifically by his customers to upgrade SA's forums software. For Lowtax, any money he made was to go towards his own personal pleasure, immediately. Anything else was a waste as far as he was concerned, and that “waste” included paying people acceptable amounts to work for him. He refused to pay a proper commercial rate for anything, ever, and that resulted in dozens of content creators (including Yahtzee, who he offered an insulting $40 a video) breaking off negotiations with him, and hiring a stream of amateurs and scammers to work on SA's codebase, destroying it beyond repair. He refused $13,000,000 offer for SA in its heyday, on the grounds that he was “still having fun”, which sums him up perfectly in a way he absolutely did not intend.

Lowtax never invested a single penny of the millions he made from SA. Even his McMansion and beloved Nissan Skyline GTR were rented. So when lean times came, he had nothing to fall back on and, unwilling to moderate his lifestyle in any way, he waited until he had blown his last $400,000 on literal tranny hookers, drugs, booze and takeout before gargling cordite mouthwash.

This goldfish-like attention span went way beyond his finances. For Lowtax, the solution to any problem was the one that made it go away the fastest so he could get high and play videogames, not the solution that would fix it. This applied to problems to do with Something Awful, problems to do with his relationships, problems to do with his health, problems to do with his finances, everything. Lowtax only seemed to be interested in delaying the day of reckoning so that he could get back to his Bacchanalian lifestyle as soon as possible. But, as we shall see, starting in late 2019, all those days of reckoning would start arriving, relentlessly, one after the other, and two years later he would be dead.

Peak SomethingAwfulTax

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It seems improbable today, but Something Awful was an internet behemoth in the early 2000s. From “All your base” to Slenderman, from 4Chan to Minecraft, from the idea of the Let's Play to idea of an internet community having a shared sense of identity, a vast amount of the way the internet works, for good and bad, originated on Something Awful. Massive internet names such as Notch, Moot, dril, TotalBiscuit, Hbomberguy, Neil Cicirega, Mega64, YOGSCast and Cliff Blezinski got their creative starts on SA (all of whom were subsequently banned or driven out) and the forums attracted big names to post, such as Josh Sawyer, Mike Nelson, DEREK SMART and Kate Beaton.

And Lowtax failed to capitalise on literally any of it.

Lowtax seemed to think that if someone on SA had an idea, he deserved a cut. But actually partnering with these people involved effort that didn't result in Lowtax getting high or getting his dick sucked, so he didn't bother. He just sat back and assumed that money would materialise. That's what had happened before, right?

Well it didn't, and all of this made Lowtax very bitter. In particular, Lowtax felt entitled to a cut of Notch's billion-dollar Minecraft sale, because Notch had invited Goons to help him do some early alpha testing of the game. Given that Notch was such a selfish asshole that he didn't even give his employees at Mojang a single penny when he sold the company out from under them for a literal billion dollars, this may have been a tad optimistic on Richard's part. But Lowtax seethed for years following a Twitter meltdown, promising to write a front-page article on Notch that would expose him as being … well exactly what everyone knew he already was. Lowtax being Lowtax, he never got around to doing it, so “when is the Notch article coming out?” became something of a meme on both SA and KF.

SomethingWorseThanAwfulTax

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What happens when you give someone as shallow, arrogant, vindictive, hedonistic and thin-skinned as Lowtax power and money? For the most part, pure comedy.

And yes, Lowtax, despite being a bastion of edgy, transgressive, insult-based, no-holds-barred internet humour, was a prickly, thin-skinned little bitch who would seethe for years at even the slightest joke made at his own expense. In fact he was the very definition of someone who could dish it out and not take it. Two incidents in particular demonstrated Richard's massive hypocrisy and his fragile ego. An ego so fragile it was shattered by an obscure tropical fruit.

MangosteenTax​

One day in 2006, Richard posted a new thread in General Bullshit (SA's busiest subforum) in which he extolled the virtues of Mangosteen juice. Lowtax edited the OP before it could be archived, but according to the posts that have been preserved, Lowtax raved about this “superfood”, posted an Amazon affiliate link, and attacked rival brands to the one he was promoting. When posters took exception to this, Lowtax MELTED THE FUCK DOWN:

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He then tracked down all the posters who downvoted the thread and banned them. This would be an early example of the vindictive streak that would contribute so greatly to his downfall later on. Don't let his wacky, zany writing style fool you – Lowtax bore intense grudges and was fuelled by burning spite and desire for revenge against those he thought had wronged him – a list that grew to include pretty much everyone he ever interacted with. When he posted on Kiwifarms with his usual lolrandom monkeycheese wackiness, he inserted tracking pixels into his posts to try to track down the IP addresses of any goons posting on Kiwifarms to take revenge on them back on his own site.

The Mangosteen Incident became a lifelong source of resentment and rage for Lowtax. Any mention of it would send him into an angry meltdown, from the day it happened to his last day on Earth. Amanda “Mandy” Mullen, onetime fiancee of David “Shmorky” Kelly (oh we're getting to him, don't worry), once suggested to Lowtax that he use “M4ng05t33n” as a password and Lowtax went ballistic at her. (Lowtax later came to KF to post his own, sanitised version of this story but even his own account made him sound like a prickly asshole). Reportedly, this was the inciting incident and primary motivation behind his lifelong hatred of Mandy (who was subjected to horrific emotional and sexual abuse by Shmorky), and when Lowtax and Shmorky finally fell out Lowtax posted an entire thread dedicated to making fun of Mandy's teeth. The thread was gassed (spergatoried) by a mod for breaking pretty much every rule the site had, so Lowtax angrily resurrected it and refused to let the mods touch it. Because Mandy had gently teased Lowtax, godfather of edgy humour, about fruit a decade before. That's the kind of man Lowtax was.

MangosteenGate was an important watershed moment for Lowtax and his site's community, as it was the first major falling-out between them. Lowtax's paper-thin skin couldn't cope with even the mildest mockery or dissent, and from this point onwards he and the site's users began to drift apart. Lowtax would become an increasingly absentee landlord, posting less and less on his own site until by the 2010s he would only post a handful of times a year, usually to beg for money. In his absence, the site's culture and politics would change too, Lowtax's lack of interest in moderating the site causing all kinds of unsuitable individuals to end up in positions of power, including convicted paedophiles, scam artists, genocide-denying Tankies, race grifters and uptight radfem catladies, all of whom would gradually transform the site from an edgy hive of scum and villainy to a hysterical, hyper-woke hugbox full of paranoid eunuchs and violent political extremists. Lowtax didn't pay enough attention to the site to see what was happening and by the time he did - well, we'll see what happened in a bit.

RagingBollTax

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Another key part of Lowtax lore is his 2006 boxing bout with shitty German film director Uwe Boll. Boll, ever hungry for both publicity and enemies to hurt, announced that he was challenging any and all critics of his films to boxing matches. Contrary to what many seem to believe, that list did not at the time include Lowtax, who had not yet reviewed any of his films. So Lowtax, as eager for publicity as Boll, decided to write a negative review of Boll's “Alone in the Dark” that not only trashed the film, but also called Boll a necrophile and a child molester for good measure. How wacky! Boll, ominously, decided that he would fight Lowtax first.

Despite having given Boll more than enough reason to punch him into low-earth orbit, Lowtax claimed to have been under the impression that the bout was going to be a gentle sparring match, when even cursory research would have revealed that Boll was in fact an experienced amateur boxer who was there to break faces. Boll, of course, wiped the floor with Lowtax, landing several blows to his head and knocking him down three times as Lowtax danced around the ring trying his best to be wacky and zany while Boll beat him like a ginger stepchild. Lowtax's corner threw in the towel after the first round. In a post-match interview, Lowtax claimed that he didn't have strong opinions on Boll's movies (despite his AITD review claiming that he had always hated Boll's films), that Boll had broken a promise to train him ahead of the bout and had told him that he would be pulling his punches. All of these claims were questionable, but not as questionable as Lowtax's subsequent claim that the bout was responsible for his later spinal problems, especially as Lowtax had been complaining about having back pain as early as 2000. Either way, Boll was added to Lowtax's long list of enemies.

ShmorkyTax

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One of the more insalubrious sagas of Lowtax's life was his long association with squeaky-voiced cartoonist, animator and genderspecial paedophile diaper enthusiast David “Shmorky” Kelly. Shmorky has his own thread, so I won't go into too much detail, but Lowtax took a down-on-his-luck Shmorky in and employed him as basically an indentured servant - given Shmorky was homeless and had trashed his career, he had to accept the poverty wages he was offered. Lowtax, happy to get a quality animator on board who he didn't have to pay the going rate, let Shmorky produce content for SA (for which Lowtax claimed copyright) and let Shmorky babysit his kids. This got Lowtax mixed up in Shmorky's utterly chaotic personal life and filled his existence with hilarious drama.

When Shmorky was exposed as a paedophile in 2016, Lowtax claimed to have no idea. I mean, why would you vet anyone who was looking after your children? Who would expect that a fat midget in a stuffed bra and yarn wig putting on a ridiculous squeaky cartoon voice 24/7 might be a sex weirdo? Ludicrous! Lowtax then announced that he had been forced to explain such concepts as paedophilia, fetishes and sociopathy to his daughter, and took to Youtube to twist the knife into both Shmorky and his mentally ill fiancee. The relevant question being, of course, why didn't any of this raise any red flags for Lowtax at the time that maybe these were not people he should be letting anywhere near him, let alone his daughter? I suspect the answer comes in a small Rx bottle.

In 2020, Lowtax uploaded several of Shmorky's animations to his own personal Youtube channel in a shameless attempt to make money out of them. As ever, Lowtax believed that anything made by SomethingAwful users belonged rightfully to him – though of course even if Shmorky did sign the copyright over to SA, Lowtax by then no longer owned SA, or by extension Shmorky's animations. Plus, y'know, diaperfur paedophile who he left alone with his daughter, but who cares about that, that's valuable pie money!

Spinetax, XenforoTax, PatreonTax, OweTax

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In November 2017, Lowtax, claiming poverty from his McMansion with a Skyline GTR in the garage, began a fundraiser to “upgrade the forums software”. This later became a promise to adopt Xenforo 2.0, and the fundraiser raised about $20,000 from gullible goons. Lowtax being Lowtax, he embezzled the entire amount and just four months later he was pleading poverty again in a now-deleted post, claiming to need spinal surgery.

None of his sycophants in the mod staff questioned what seemed to be a substantial criminal fraud committed against them and their users, instead exhorting posters to throw money at a new Patreon that Lowtax set up for drugs, booze and hookers important medical expenses. This Patreon was bringing in over $14,000 a month at its height, with Lowtax continuing to do basically nothing except stay at home and use the money to get high.

Opinions in this thread vary greatly on the extent of Lowtax's spinal problems. Some doubt they ever existed, though he was complaining of back problems as early as 2000 (six years before the Boll fight) and disc degeneration is not a rare condition in men his age with his appalling lifestyle. We'll never know for sure, and we certainly can't take any of Lowtax's utterings on this topic (or any other topic for that matter) as truth.

KiwiTax


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Optimistically seeking a more sympathetic reception from Kiwis than from Goons, Lowtax signed up for KiwiFarms in 2016 as the Shmorky drama was reaching its zenith. You can read his 220 posts (with tracking pixels removed) from his profile here.

Lowtax's relationship with KiwiFarms was a nebulous one. Null himself reached out to him, in particular offering to help Rich upgrade the SA forums software to Xenforo at a very reasonable rate, but Lowtax declined. Well, he didn't decline so much as stop talking to Null one day, because Lowtax never really saw the point in maintaining good relations with people that he didn't need any more – the possibility that he might need those people in the future never crossed his mind, because the future was for future Lowtax to deal with, and he'd heard that guy was an asshole.

Notably, Lowtax came back to his own forums complaining that the transphobic doxxxxing Nazis at Kiwifarms were creating dank memes and the kind of edgy comedy content that he wanted SA to produce again:

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In his 15-year Ambien haze, Lowtax had failed to realise that his once-edgy forums were now filled with, and moderated by, a swathe of hypersensitive mentally-ill communist troons who already hated him for being a straight white man (like them) and only tolerated him because he owned their hugbox. Richard telling them to be “more like KiwiFarms” was less welcome than a fart in a spacesuit.

*“Troon”, for those who don't know, is a word that originated on Something Awful as a portmanteau of “Transgender Goon” in about 2010. The word has now been banned from the site itself, as the many mentally ill men in dresses who created it were too busy coping, seething and dilating to prevent it becoming a pejorative across the entire internet and promptly did what trannies do best and censored it.

The news that Lowtax was consorting with the TurboHitlers over at KF did not go down well with the natives, who were already on the verge of revolt. But in the end it was not Lowtax's politics, or the sites he posted on, that would send his forums into open rebellion. It would in fact be his love life, and that is what we will cover next.

LoveTax, baby LoveTax

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Every aspect of Lowtax's life was an unmitigated disaster, of course, but it ended up being his love life that finally put him in the ground. Let's see how, and meet our cast of characters:

Dramatis Personae:

Angela Mason

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Angela Mason was Lowtax's first known romantic partner, introduced to him, in true mommy's boy style, by Carol. Their relationship was brief, but is notable for two things: The first is that when literally every other partner on this list accused him of abuse and domestic violence, Lowtax dragged Angela out of obscurity to somehow act as a character witness for him on Facebook 20 years after they last interacted, which is definitely the behaviour of a sane and innocent man.

The second was that the first time they met, a small but sweaty squad of Goons decided to show up with Lowtax at the airport, producing one of the all-time great cringe Goon videos:

If that was the first date, no wonder she bailed on him before he got round to beating her up.

Emily “Integral” Riegel

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Lowtax, rather than be introduced to women by his overbearing mother, decided to fish in his own pond for poon by trawling the forums for curvy goonettes to pork. Apparently (though this fact appears disputed) he originally went to a Goon party with a different girl, who he abandoned for Emily (SA handle “Integral”) mid-date. This would be a recurring theme for Lowtax and his notorious goldfish-like attention span.

Lowtax proposed to Emily, but the relationship collapsed acrimoniously, and Lowtax dealt with it in his own mature, adult way, by writing a front-page article calling her crazy and doxing her.

It later emerged that Emily was cheating on Lowtax with Fallout New Vegas head dev Josh Sawyer. Sawyer still posts on SA to this day, so you can add “cuck” to Rich's long list of descriptors. Emily is now a successful lawyer, and Lowtax is dead. Haha.

“Fawnette” (real name not known)

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Lowtax continued to groom his own userbase by dating a blonde known as “Fawnette” on the SA forums. Apparently organising Goonmeets at or near his house or office was the way he would meet women, and apparently Fawnette was the girlfriend of one of the Goons who went to such a gathering, and Rich seduced his girlfriend right in front of him. The relationship was brief (including the above picture of him apparently proposing to her, which knowing Rich may or may not have been serious) and after it ended her nudes were leaked on the site.

Megan “crazyellow” Austin aka Chinkwife

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Lowtax demonstrated his capacity for learning from his mistakes by bringing another Goonette on a date to a goon meet and ditching her for another woman, again. This time the lucky gal was Megan Austin, an American-born kindergarten teacher of Chinese descent, SA handle “crazyellow”. And unlike Integral, Megan was unable to crazy her way out of the relationship, marrying Lowtax in 2005 and bearing him two daughters. The couple had their first child so soon after marrying that it seems likely it was a shotgun wedding.

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It was with Megan that Lowtax's capacity for neglect and abuse of his partners became a clear pattern. Once Megan had her first child, Lowtax's interest in her dropped off – he didn't want worn pussy any more, and that was more important than, say, discharging his responsibilities as a husband and father. Seeking solace, Megan became more involved in her local church community, and over time this developed into increasingly devout Christianity. Lowtax, of course, had no time for boring church stuff where nobody snorted anything or did doughnuts in sports cars, and her faith became a major point of contention between the two.

There was also violence. According to a police report, Lowtax tried to rip Megan's phone out of her hands while the couple were sitting in bed. Megan resisted, so Lowtax, ever the classy gentleman, decided to dig his fingernails into her hands so hard that he drew blood. Megan chose not to pursue the matter at the time, but later on she would tell many stories of abuse at his hands, and notably, intervened to take Lowtax's second wife to a Domestic Violence shelter while he was in another state fucking a blonde half his age over the holidays.

Lowtax and Megan divorced in 2014. Megan won custody and a generous child support award.

Speaking of that second wife:

Ashli “Lady Ambien” Kathleen aka Maplewife

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Lowtax lost little time in finding some fresh blart after his divorce, and met Ashli Kathleen on a trip to Canada. Yet again, supposedly Lowtax was originally going to meet someone else, but stood her up in favour of Ashli. Given her SA username was “Lady Ambien” it was clear that she and Lowtax bonded over a shared love of walks on the beach, going to the cinema and abusing vast quantities of prescription medication. Ashli later said she had to pay for their dates and her own engagement ring.

At this juncture it's worth making a few points about Ashli's personality. Ashli is in some cases the only source for some of the information in this OP and she is not a reliable narrator. Anyone who signs up to Something Awful with “Lady Ambien” as their username is putting their lifestyle front and centre, and much of her behaviour and accounts of events are confused, vague, illogical and sometimes completely contradictory. This isn't an OP on her, of course, but she appears to have been a bit of a trainwreck herself and made some truly baffling decisions at times. Bear all this in mind when reading anything she is the source for.

Ashli and Lowtax married quickly, in 2015, so that he could take her home permanently, get her pregnant, and keep her prisoner in his tacky McMansion. Lowtax refused to complete her immigration paperwork and allegedly locked her passport in his safe, making her technically an undocumented immigrant. Ashli is both the source of the allegation regarding the passport and also later denied it – this is what I was talking about in the last paragraph about her reliability – but either way Rich would have had to instigate the paperwork as the US citizen sponsoring her and he never did.

Ashli bore Lowtax a third daughter, who Richard set about ignoring. He also, as ever, rapidly became bored with Ashli and started ignoring her too. But unlike Megan, Ashli had few options to leave. Lowtax told her that he would have her deported if she left him (a threat he later attempted to carry out) and, unable to normalise her immigration status or gain employment or welfare without a SSN, she effectively became Lowtax's hostage. Lowtax threatened, gaslit, humiliated and ignored her and there was nothing she could do, as Rich convinced her that leaving the house would land her in jail.

Richard therefore decided he could do whatever he wanted. What he actually did next was something that would directly result in his penury, public humiliation and suicide (when I said Lowtax never made a single good decision in the entire 21st century I wasn't fucking joking). We now need to introduce the catalyst to Lowtax's final downfall:

Logan “Unfortunately Art” “Toad on a Roll” “Mormon BPD Cokewhore” Day aka Bogan Lay

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Logan Day (SA handles “Toad on a Roll” then “Unfortunately Art”, KF handle “Mormon BPD Cokewhore”) was a 23-year-old “marketing consultant” who wanted to “pitch a script” to Lowtax. She had claimed to be an OG Goon, but considering that she would have been six years old when SA was founded it can be assumed that she was either lying or the girlfriend of one of the site's moderators. Bear in mind that for its first decade of existence SA had an entire subforum for pornography. She also claimed to be “an experienced movie producer”.

Despite her young age, Logan's Hollywood dreams saw her get a large quantity of ill-advised plastic surgery that caused her to resemble a septuagenarian Joan Rivers:

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Combine this with her being diagnosed with both Borderline Personality Disorder AND Bipolar disorder, admitted coke habit and heavy drinking, there's hardly any surprise that a 43-year-old Lowtax found her irresistible. Logan invited Lowtax to her place in Salt Lake City to “pitch him her script”, if you know what I'm saying. (Incidentally, if you had a script for something that you wanted put into production, why would you pitch it to fucking Lowtax of all people?). Plus, she was in possession of a pair of feet (of which we will get to see more later), so Lowtax hopped on a plane to Utah.

In the middle of the holidays.

Leaving his wife and young daughter without transport, money or paperwork.

For a month.

In the Missouri winter.

Logan claimed that she no longer had Borderline Personality Disorder according her therapist. I'll let you draw your own conclusions on that one as we move forward.

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Lowtax had a fine time in Utah. Many scripts were pitched, many feet were sniffed. But back home, things were taking a turn for the dramatic. Let's watch our dysfunctional cast of characters in action.

So join us in part 2, where:

• A man is not entitled to the sweat of his toes
• Lowtax joins the Bigot Brigade
• There is much VINDICATION

 

[Spunt]

Lowtax Part 2 – Tax Lower



OhNoTax

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From this point forward, things get a bit complicated, as the collapse of Lowtax's second marriage is closely intertwined with his downfall as SA owner and a huge amount of things happened in only a few days. So this section is quite detailed.

While Lowtax was off in Mormonland huffing Logan's toes, Ashli, sensing a chance to escape, reached out to some friends to find a way out – and of all people, it was Megan Austin who answered. Megan drove down to Missouri and picked Ashli and her daughter up, and placed them in a domestic violence shelter.

When Lowtax got back home, teeth stained with toenail polish, he found his wife and daughter gone. Ever the reasonable man, Lowtax publicly accused Ashli of kidnapping his daughter on Facebook and called the police.

The Police did in fact manage to intercept Megan and Ashli on their way to the shelter. On having the situation explained to them, rather than arrest them, the cops actually escorted Ashli and her daughter to the DV shelter. Lowtax of course took this well.

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Megan began a GoFundMe for Ashli, given she had no food, no income, and the prospect of hefty legal bills to come. Lowtax, in response, had his moderators delete any mention of it from the site. So for now, most goons were unaware of what happened unless they followed Lowtax on Facebook, and most of those that did chose not to Believe Women.

Lowtax then called his mom and asked her to get Ashli deported. Apparently, she had been in ICE custody for a month once before, though Ashli said this was after she assaulted him and that they were going to charge her with assault before Lowtax asked them to drop the matter - which sounds like she was with the cops, not ICE (though some Kiwis say that this can happen with the cops turning illegals over to ICE even if no crime was committed, but I've no idea if you can spring someone from ICE custody the way Lowtax said he did). This being Ashli's account there's also confusion as to when it happened – it seems to have been some time before she fled to the shelter.

Either way, there's laws against marrying someone, sabotaging their immigration paperwork, then trying to get them deported when the relationship ends. They are designed to stop people like Lowtax and Momtax doing exactly what they attempted, and so Ashli and the child returned to the shelter, where they would stay until early 2021, as the immunity from deportation applied only when she was resident there. Between Covid restrictions and Momtax prowling around she barely left her room in over a year. Bear in mind that Lowtax was forcing his daughter to stay in a single room with shared bathroom facilities in order to exact vengeance on his wife for fleeing the house while he cheated on her. Seriously, I know it's been said over and over, but what a massive fucking asshole. Things would get worse, too.

Lowtax's eldest daughter (aged 14) then got into a slanging match over text message with her father, who she had as “Birth Giver” on her phone. Lowtax's response to being called out by his own daughter was to attack her religious faith and told her to take her opinion and “fucking shove it”. It emerged that this wasn't even about Logan, who she was unaware of at the time, but at other leaked texts in which Lowtax attempted to proposition another woman at the same time. Later it would emerge that he continually tried to chat up Mandy (Shmorky's fiancee) over Facebook DMs back when he was “happily” married to Ashli and publicly trashing Mandy on his site.

Meanwhile, back at SA, the natives were getting restless. A long-running dispute between two sections of the site: GBS (troons) and FYAD (edgelords) were trying to get each other's part of the site shut down. The inciting incident was one where a GBS troon announced he got a massive erection when going to the women's bathroom for the first time, and FYAD made fun of it. Richard, taking the path of least resistance, decided to take GBS's side because the Troons were whining slightly more and shut down FYAD (as well as making some other heavy-handed decisions in their favour) so that he could go back to cheating on his wife and getting wasted. He even admitted as such in some leaked Facebook DMs, though that didn't stop him telling Vice that FYAD was a “Neo-Nazi haven”. In response to the resulting pushback Lowtax offered this astonishing hostage to fortune:

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Remember this post, it will become relevant.

The ructions at SA caused his Patreon to drop from a high of $14,000 a month in spring 2019 to below $10,000 by the new year. Seeking any time away from the forums and more box wine and Ambien money, Lowtax started streaming. At one point he licked peanut butter off an AA battery he found in the street in return for a $25 donation. Lowtax's increasingly erratic and unhinged streams would become a regular watch for Kiwis eager to learn how his self-destruction was coming along.

Meanwhile, Logan had been introduced to the Goons as SA's new “Brand Manager”. She announced that her first order of business was to revive SA's moribund front page – a page that only Lowtax could update, and at that point had not in fact been updated for three years, because Lowtax. Logan announced that prospective front-page writers would have to produce weekly articles, for free, but would eventually be paid an unspecified amount of money after an unspecified amount of time. This, as you would expect, went down like a cup of warm sick and caused the two non-lovers to have a meltdown in the thread. Lowtax later admitted he hadn't received a single offer.

By the 18th January 2020 it became clear that Logan had moved in with him when a paralytically drunk “Brand Manager” appeared in one of Lowtax's streams waving a wine bottle around. The couple's attempts to maintain that their relationship was strictly a business one somehow continued, to universal ridicule, with Lowtax threatening to ban any Goons who pointed out the obvious. He then made Logan a site admin. Not long afterwards a Goon made a notorious (and extremely funny) post that suggested that Lowtax ought to commit suicide. You have to admit zxheir argument is quite persuasive.

Meanwhile, Logan, by now openly living at Lowtax's house, maintained that Lowtax was not her boyfriend, whilst claiming she was having sex every five hours. Who with? Lowtax's Patreon continued to decline, dropping to below $8000 by early May. Soon after, given Lowtax's intransigence in the divorce case (which he was using to try to destroy Ashli and obtain his “vindication”, a word he would use so often it became a meme), the court appointed the wonderfully named Dana Outlaw as his child's Guardian ad Litem, a lawyer specifically appointed to look after the child's interests. And Lowtax was obligated to pay for her time. Do you think he did?

So incensed was Lowtax that some Troon Goons were pointing out the not-exactly-woke nature of his actions, that on New Year's Eve he went on stream, almost incoherently drunk, and began live-banning troons from the forum for disrespecting him, announcing that he was now the leader of the “Bigot Brigade” (hence the unique tag on the SA thread on KF). This of course represented a 180 degree turn-around from the sentiments he expressed 3 weeks before, but despite his sense of humour Lowtax in fact really struggled to spot genuine irony. Having now turned BOTH major factions on his website against him, he went to sleep and woke up to his Patreon being $1000 a month less than it was before he went to bed. Lowtax's response to this was to go onto SA and melt down about it and bully his mods into mass-reporting Ashli's GoFundMe as “fraudulent” (wat) and attempting to have it taken down (the Goon in the screenshot thinks it was, whereas it was closed and its funds given to Ashli, then a new one opened in a third party's name to keep Lowtax's sycophants from finding and mass-reporting it).

ToeTax

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On the 23rd June, Logan announced in a quickly-deleted Facebook post that she was hiding in a hotel having been “backhanded” by Lowtax, and Kiwis quickly dug up a DV report on Lowtax's street that evening. That same day she signed up to Kiwifarms to offer a spectacularly unconvincing retraction, claiming that she had in fact attacked a sleeping Lowtax while “having a panic attack” and he had slipped on his “sweaty toes” and somehow this caused him to backhand her down the stairs. Really.

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The next day the perfectly sane and not at all Borderline Logan was back on Facebook, changing her story again and saying that Lowtax attacked her and all his previous partners. On the forums, the first calls for Rich to step aside as owner were starting to appear, and the banhammer was being wielded with broad abandon. This was to no avail, as multiple threads began to appear calling Lowtax out and the mods bravely shat their pants and did nothing as front-page writers started to quit, and the userbase (who had not believed Megan or Ashli) decided that by far the craziest of Lowtax's partners was the most believable (you have to be crazy to some extent to let Richard stick his little Mangosteen in you, but Logan, as we are seeing, was on another level). Lowtax's Patreon lost $2000 over the course of the day and by the evening Logan used her SA admin access to allow articles trashing Lowtax to appear on the front page, before changing her mind again and posting on Facebook that Lowtax was in fact completely innocent, and posting a bizarre, tearful Instagram video from the hotel (wearing full-face makeup and immaculate hair) where she again said that she made the whole thing up because she was drunk.

This 3rd, 4th? Can't remember? change of story by Logan did not stop Lowtax's Patreon from dropping to below $3000 the very next day and below $2000 the day after as the SA userbase went into full revolt. All those pies gone, like tears in the rain.

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You'll never guess what happened the next day! Logan changed her story YET AGAIN, this time claiming that Lowtax forced her to issue the retraction and record the previous evening's video and that she would be taking Lowtax to court for Domestic Violence. She also apologised to Ashli having spent the previous six months trashing her on SA, on KF and on Social Media.

Don't stick your dick in crazy, kids. If this is getting confusing then a helpful Kiwi compiled all the DV paperwork from all three women in this handy post.

Lowtax, on his continuing quest for VINDICATION, went on the Dick Show and trashed both Ashli and Bogan, leaking some audio of him and his side-piece screaming at each other for 15 minutes (transcript) ahead of time which he apparently thought would make him look good. An ill-informed Dick Masterson simped for Lowtax, agreeing that bitches be cray-cray, and asked no difficult questions. (Further evidence that Dick's “narcissistic misogynist” schtick isn't an act or an edgy character. He really just is that much of a cunt). The best Lowtax could manage in his defence on Facebook was to say that he had “never once been convicted” of abusing women, a curious form of words for an innocent man.

This was the person who closed FYAD on the say-so of screaming troons and said this was for Social Justice, let's not forget.

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Another day, another new line from Logan, this time claiming that Lowtax had been “her hero since she was 12 years old”, which is curious given that SA was supposedly an 18+ website and was full of porn until about 2010. Not long after, Lowtax did a highly intoxicated stream (Lowtax always, until his death, never admitted to streaming while drunk or high) where he incoherently attempted to defend himself, claiming that Logan was so wasted she couldn't remember the incident and he had to clear it up for her. Which clearly went well.

It went so well in fact that Logan logged onto SomethingAwful and posted a picture of Lowtax sniffing her feet whilst threatening to leak her entire Bogan/Lowtax nudes collection to the site before Lowtax did the same. She was talked down from committing a felony by the users, but this did give us one of the most horrilarious? Hilarrifying? pictures to ever grace this thread:

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By the 28th June, 5 days after Logan's first claim of violence, Lowtax's Patreon had dropped from $7500 a month to $1500, and it wasn't going to stop there.

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Hold onto your Mangosteens, things are about to get wild...

CancelledTax

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By the first of July the Patreon dipped under $1000, and Mike Nelson withdrew the Rifftrax episode featuring Lowtax from sale. Lowtax's Patreon graph now resembled an extremely dangerous ski slope.

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Lowtax then accused Logan of diverting SA's ad revenue account to herself – Logan had long described herself as SA's “Chief Operating Officer”, a job with the rather atypical description of unclogging the toilet from Lowtax's massive opioid shits and letting him smell her feet. The same day, an long-serving SA mod known as “Jeffrey of YOSPOS”, rumoured to be a crypto millionaire, started making noises about buying the forum off him.

Having milked the SA sympathy teat dry (and having got banned until the court date in October), Logan returned to Kiwifarms to drop a pile of allegations against Lowtax in a string of weirdly-worded posts:

-Lowtax did nothing all day except watch old films
-He was addicted to mobile games
-His left ball was really small compared to his right and was “like a walnut”
-He talked to his mom on the phone every day
-He didn't do any housework
-His shits were “like cement”

Logan later admitted that she had no contract with SA and wasn't paid. She then went on to appear on Null's podcast to confirm the above, as well as to claim that Lowtax sent so many abusive and angry emails to Ashli while drunk that Momtax tried to make him stop because it was harming his divorce case.

The rebellion at SA continued. A front-page writer decided to issue an apology to furries, because furries are part of LGBT or some bullshit. So serious was this problem (Lowtax famously despised furries, especially after Shmorky) that Lowtax was actually roused from his stupor and deleted it, calling it “absolute garbage” and claiming that Logan had locked him out of SA's Content Management System. It then emerged that the writer's previous claim to fame was being called fat by Donald Trump on live TV.

On the 12th July, Lowtax announced that he had agreed in principle to sell Something Awful to Jeffrey of YOSPOS. As his Patreon dropped below $800, he posted an incoherent rant to his supporters, attacking Kiwifarms for daring to document all his horrible behaviour and not censor his critics, insisting that his lack of criminal convictions was proof of innocence, and telling his critics to “fuck off”.

Logan announced her retirement from the internet on the 26th July, because her horoscope told her to. I am not making that up. Lowtax, ever the maker of wise decisions, continued to post on the site as negotiations were continuing. It didn't go well. His streaming didn't go well either, he postponed one at the last minute because totally sober Lowtax was “too sleepy” to do it. At 2.30 in the afternoon. The next day the Patreon was at $666, and a rather long thread appeared on SA called “GO AWAY LOWTAX” in which he got probated by his own mods before having a meltdown.

On the 9th August 2020, Lowtax made his last post on the SA forums. Posting a thread on FYAD, a subforum he had deleted six months earlier because some troons said so. He was told in no uncertain terms that he was not welcome, partly for publicly calling them Nazis, partly for beating his wives, mostly for just being Lowtax. Lowtax promptly called them “deluxe retarded” and threatened to close FYAD a second time in revenge. He never posted again.

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Lowtax's VINDICATION went from strength to strength. On the 21st August he was busted for speeding, then was on the receiving end of a Restraining Order from the GAL the next day. On the 19th September, Ashli's lawyer submitted her demands and listed Lowtax's offences. This included such gems as:

-Lowtax spent almost all of the $70,000 that was in their joint account 9 months earlier
-This spending included $15,000 on mobile games
-He never normalised her paperwork claiming he was too broke to afford it
-“Broke” Lowtax leased a second sports car weeks after she left.

Mandy then spilled even more tea:

-Lowtax got so high he'd forget the names of people around him
-His desk was always covered in empty pill bottles
-He gave her a quarter after shuffling around the house in nothing but basketball shorts and told her to “keep it forever”
-He had become a hoarder and the SA office was a roach-infested hellhole
-He left unsecured firearms lying around the office
-He made her drink alcohol knowing it reacted with her medication then got mad when she threw up in his (revolting) bathroom

It seems that you had to wait in line to shit on Lowtax that month because not long after, Ashli popped up on SA to add to the pile (SA account required to view):

-Lowtax's spinal issues were real, but exaggerated.
-Some of the infamous photos of him in hospital were staged.
-He didn't follow doctor's instructions or do any physiotherapy.
-He would regularly ask his terminally ill mother to visit and do his housework because he couldn't be bothered his back hurt.
-He only left the house to go to restaurants by himself or wash his beloved GTR.
-He let her keep the couch, but she later discovered he'd been fucking hookers on it
-Lowtax would turn all his partners against the previous ones by telling massive lies.
-Lowtax was teaming up with Zoe Quinn of all people to write articles. Despite supposedly being an arch-feminist and protector of wammens everywhere, Zoe knew about the domestic abuse allegations against Lowtax but went ahead anyway (thus making LowT yet another man Zoe associated with who an-heroed shortly after).

Meanwhile the man himself was on Facebook saying that he “hadn't been drunk since 1995”. You do have to start wondering whether he was simply a terrible liar or undergoing some kind of substance-induced psychosis.

On the 10th October 2020, Lowtax sold Something Awful to Jeffrey of YOSPOS for what was later confirmed to be a paltry $450,000. Ashli and Megan posed for a picture together to congratulate Jeffrey. They were both bare-footed in the photo, making it the most difficult wank of Lowtax's entire life.

DownWeGoTax

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The last few months of Richard's life saw him being increasingly angry and pathetic. Here's a month-by-month rundown.

In December there was a brief moment of VINDICATION when he accepted a plea deal in the Logan case, pleading guilty to “disturbing the peace” and being fined $164.50. However he did not keep his earlier promise to refund double his total Patreon earnings if he was “legally found guilty of anything ever”. He followed this up by publicly posting an argument he had with his mother about politics and abortion as his Patreon dropped to $400. According to Logan's interview with Null, a second incident (in which Logan ended up in hospital) resulted in a second charge, and the trial collapsed because Logan declined to travel back to Missouri to give evidence.

Lowtax's streams continued to be the best way to monitor his decline, when he actually showed up to them. One time he did actually bother to stream, Lowtax spent an entire half an hour not realising he was muted, and therefore we will never know why he covered his face in blue paint during that time. He fixed the audio only for his video to cut out. The once most culturally powerful man on the internet was doing this in front of a grand total of 24 people, many of them Kiwis and others who just wanted to watch the trainwreck. He then got banned from Facebook for a month for “jokingly” threatening to punch someone in the face. Haha how zany!

Cue the start of 2021 and Lowtax was forced to leave his McMansion, Doric columns, lawyer foyer and all. He also claimed that someone stole his pistol – an overpriced 5-7 meme gun that he had posed with before, in a tacky Something Awful branded gun case, no less. Whilst that would be the last that we saw of that gun, Lowtax would take a really good look at it a few months later.

Lowtax would also claim that Youtube had shadowbanned his account. Whilst the uncreative might attribute his channel's poor reach to his erratic upload schedule, the frequent takedown of streams due to his insistence on featuring copyrighted and/or pornographic content, the dismal quality of the little he did upload, his failure to use tags or hashtags, not connecting his let's plays to the gaming section and the fact that almost the entire internet hated him and would rather drink bleach than watch his videos, no, a conspiracy was much more likely. He had long been banned from Twitter (for "jokingly" threatening to kill Baked Alaska and PJW of all people) and kept eating Facebook probes for his habit of “jokingly” threatening people with violence (including expressing his intent to throw a chessboard at Nancy Pelosi, haha zany wacky monkeycheese), but no, it was the tranny jannies at Google conspiring against him. Apparently Kiwifarms was responsible for this too, which would come a something of a surprise to Null who can't get any of his accounts re-monetised but who can apparently fuck with Lowtax on a whim.

(Incidentally, Lowtax lied to his own forum when he said that he “just sent Baked Alaska an email” rather than publicly “joke” about entombing him alive in concrete. The irony of Lowtax, the man who literally coined the term “banhammer” for arbitrarily banning people from his platform for no real reason, whining about being banned from someone else's platform for breaking clearly-established posting rules was not lost on Kiwis.)

February began with our man waking up one day bleeding heavily from the side of his head with no idea how it happened. Maybe it was Null. He started streaming again from an unfurnished basement, whilst Ashli's lawyer filed for sanctions against Lowtax for failing to pay the GAL fees and not co-operating with discovery. By the end of the month his Patreon had sunk to $265. According to Ashli, this basement was part of a furnished, three bedroom house he was renting. Assuming this is accurate, it's not clear why Lowtax would stream from such a dismal part of the house – perhaps he wanted to look poor for pitybux, he trashed the rest of the house, or he was too strung out to unpack. The fact that there were pictures visible on the floor of the basement that he never got around to putting on the wall suggested the third option was most likely.

April saw yet another restraining order, as Ashli's lawyer noticed Lowtax's cash rapidly disappearing and blocked him from accessing what little was left, causing him to have an on-stream meltdown. It also saw the revelation that Lowtax was suffering from vascular insufficiency in his foot, a sign of advanced diabetes or drug abuse. Why not both?

May saw him suspended from Youtube for a week, the only mystery being which one of the myriad ToS violations he had committed in his increasingly unhinged streams was the one that got him banned. He also started a new website, internetdropouts.com, which was a literal Wordpress blog with “under construction” on the homepage. The lack of spinning .gifs was shameful, as was the revelation that in the two decades in which he had been webmaster for one of the internet's busiest web forums he had learned no coding or design skills at all and still needed Wordpress to hold his hand. It was found out that many of the images on the site were hotlinked to Something Awful (Rich used to get so mad with other websites leeching SA images he'd replace them with goatse). By early September it was offline.

On the 18th he was streaming again, this time “reacting to” an obscure horror movie that he admitted he hadn't watched and had no idea if it had boobies in it (it did). Clearly the trainwreck that was his streaming career was literally everyone else's fault but his.

In June, Lowtax lamented that he was struggling to write a Resume. So I wrote one for him:

Spoiler

The supposedly broke, penniless Lowtax was also caught buying $50 of microtransactions for Earth Defence Force, just a small glimpse into just how wild and excessive his spending was. This was to have severe consequences for Lowtax later on, but they would stave off oblivion for a few minutes, so for Lowtax that was the best investment. His Steam adventures would continue the following month, as he bought and played “Drunken Dad Simulator”. Seems a bit redundant, maybe he was looking for tips.

On the 26th July he made his first openly suicidal statement on Discord and likened himself to John McAfee and the biblical prophet Job. Some points about Job, for reference:

1 – Job underwent suffering on a scale that makes Lowtax's look microscopic
2 – Job at no point drove a Skyline GTR or made millions of dollars doing literally nothing
3 – Job did not kill himself and accepted his hardships even though they were not his fault.

The same day, Ashli unlocked her twitter to reveal, amongst other things, that Lowtax once shat his pants and refused to clean them. They remained shit-stained until Logan arrived at the McMansion.

August saw Lowtax permabanned from his former forum, after Jeffrey auctioned the right to be the one who pressed the button. The link to the “offending post” was a link to the Mangosteen meltdown, the ban reason was a .gif of Lowtax getting his shit pushed in by Uwe Boll.

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September saw Lowtax streaming again, and a vigilant Kiwi noticed that a half-empty bag of popcorn in the background had not moved in eight weeks.

In October, Ashli posted on Something Awful, to further claim that Lowtax had faked a picture of himself in hospital (a photo he used to beg for money) and that a “porn star” was doing “photoshoots” in the McMansion – with Lowtax as the photographer. It would turn out to be a little more than that – said “porn star” was in fact a $3000-a-night transgender prostitute who specialised in scat, advanced Kiwi autism confirmed that the photo was indeed in his house. Supposedly one of these photoshoots included him shitting on Lowtax's glass coffee table, though, perhaps fortunately, nobody has found them, they're probably behind a paywall somewhere. Lowtax's tranny proclivities were never confirmed, but he would often refer to them as “transsexual” rather than “transgender” (something common amongst Johns) and, of course, who the fuck would let a tranny shit on their coffee table, much less take photographs of it, unless they were into that sort of thing?

Lowtax somehow sank even lower and started eating gigantic meat-tube sausages onstream for tips.

Maybe he was practicing his aim?

AnHeroTax

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Lowtax streamed for the final time on the 7th November 2021. He was incoherently drunk and not even trying to crack jokes. The man who had been a titan of the internet attracted just 12 viewers to the stream, including at least two Kiwis.

On the 8th November, the judge in Lowtax's second divorce case made her judgment. This included the following VINDICATION:

-Lowtax had deliberately wasted $400,000 in 14 months in order to not pay it to Ashli
-Lowtax had physically, emotionally and verbally abused Ashli
-Lowtax had failed to pay the Guardian ad Litem
-Lowtax told Ashli ahead of time that he was going to move Logan in to the house and expected her to be OK with that
-Lowtax was ordered to pay Ashli a lump sum of $92,000 (which had been seized by restraining order so Lowtax couldn't spend that too)
-Lowtax was also ordered to pay Ashli $6,500 a month in spousal support for 2.5 years

-He was ordered to pay $350 a month in child support until his daughter turned 18
-He was ordered to pay Ashli's lawyer $25,000 on top of the GAL fees

On the 11th, Kevin “Fragmaster” Bowen, former SA admin, posted a video claiming Lowtax had committed suicide the previous day by gunshot, and this was quickly confirmed by multiple sources. Apparently he an-heroed about an hour after receiving the divorce judgment against him, making the reason for his decision pretty clear. Lowtax would literally rather die than support the child he brought into the world. Goons took the news the way you would expect.

Lowtax's last known communication was on his Discord was at 9.30AM on the day of his death – round about the time the mail arrives:

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According to Ashli, the very same day Lowtax died, Carol Kyanka, rather than help her family come to terms with the death of her eldest son, decided to send a series of texts to Ashli blaming her for Richard's suicide. These texts have not emerged, but one has, to someone Carol wrongly thought was running Ashli's GoFundMe (he had just tagged Lowtax on Facebook in relation to it) demanding he take it down. It appears Momtax showed the same level of love for her grand-daughter that her deadbeat son did.

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Ashli, for her part, posted a weird eulogy on Something Awful where, apparently suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, she appeared to still believe that a man who had $450,000 to burn on gatcha games and tranny hookers couldn't afford to fix her immigration paperwork. She also admitted to assaulting him, though many Kiwis interpreted her account as legitimate self-defence.

InheritanceTax


Lowtax is actually awake in this picture.
Ashli revealed that he was pretending to be unconscious to look more pathetic and get more donations.
What a gigantic faggot.​

The squabble over Lowtax's estate continued for some time, with Carol Kyanka doing everything in her considerable power to prevent her own grand-daughter getting any money for her life and education, and Lowtax's lawyer desperately trying to extricate himself from the mess his client created. You can follow it in this thread. Carol's death a few months after her son's on the 10th March 2022 (she had reportedly been battling leukaemia for some time) put an end to her shenanigans and Ashli finally got her money a few days later.

SummaryTax

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So, farewell then Richard Charles “Lowtax” Kyanka. How the hell do we sum all this madness up?

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One thing many people noticed about Lowtax was his inability to take anything seriously. His wacky, zany persona was a 24/7 mask from having to deal with or acknowledge any serious issues. Even his Facebook post announcing that (as he believed) his own daughter had been kidnapped was full of “ironic” tips for his wife (PROTIP: don't kidnap my daughter lol!!!!). It was clear that he was always hiding something. In my experience, junkies and alcoholics (Rich was both) don't start using to excess unless they are self-medicating for something. Richard was clearly a deeply unhappy man, but one too egotistical and hedonistic to do anything about his problems. Richard always sought a short-term solution to every problem, including the last “solution” he sought out on the 10th November 2021. His constant monkeycheese pirate ninja zombie lol persona was a way for him to hide from and ignore what were clearly deep-rooted problems.

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That doesn't excuse his actions, not at all. Part of being an adult is having to reflect on your weaknesses and mistakes, understand them, work on them, and put right any damage they caused. Richard was too much of a coward to even attempt that, so he dealt with both his personal issues and the consequences of his idiotic actions with the mixture of denial, lies and ironic detachment that has been catalogued so thoroughly in this thread. Self-improvement is pretty much impossible if you are pathologically averse to planning ahead. Whatever his hidden problems were, in the end it was the prospect of losing his wild, Epicurean lifestyle that made him decide to pull the trigger. He failed to step up and accept any responsibility as a husband and father, when it was his free choice to become those things. Lowtax was a shallow, selfish, abusive angry man with little to no redeeming features. The overwhelming feeling amongst Kiwis was that his children were better off with him dead than alive, and if you've got yourself into that position you deserve no sympathy.

​

There is a certain breed of Lolcow who make it big with their first ever project and let that success get to their heads, especially if they were college-aged or younger when they had that success. Most of us, in our early 20's, enter the workforce as arrogant little pricks thinking we will be the new broom that sweeps away these stuffy old squares who do everything wrong. Then we try it for ourselves and, maybe for the first time ever, fuck up. For most people, those are times when we are humbled, gain a work ethic, and learn the soft skills that make people genuinely successful – social skills, financial skills, negotiation skills, tact, diplomacy, self-reflection and humility.

​

People who hit it big in their late teens or early 20s don't learn that. Especially if, as with Lowtax, that success is pretty much pure luck – Lowtax was in the right place at the right time and made one good decision (for the wrong reasons). You can ride that success for a long time, and in so doing you risk gaining a massive ego. Wealthy and successful people are often surrounded by sycophants and gold-diggers who feed their narcissism by saying that they are great and amazing and can do no wrong, even more so than on a website you control where dissenting opinions can be suppressed. Why wouldn't you believe you were infallible? 100% of the things you ever tried have been wild successes, everyone you know loves you, so that must surely mean you're a genius, right?

​

The problem arises when that success fades. The money goes, attractive young people no longer beat a path to your genitals, your friends disappear, and all of a sudden people start criticising you! The nerve! And because your narcissism was fomented in your most formative years – your late teens and early 20s – it remains, even as the world around you changes. Your subsequent projects fail – but you're perfect, you don't fail! It must be someone else's fault! Then you become a lolcow, and rage and flail against the dying of the light, howling with narcissistic injury as people dare to laugh at you. Spoony, Patrick Tomlinson, DSP, Arthur Chu, Boogie, Jim Sterling, Anthony Cumia, Bam Margera, iDubbbz and dozens more – all chasing their old success, their monumental egos grinding against their ongoing failure and causing them to melt down in full public view.

Ultimately, Lowtax was a victim of a success he never even earned.

And Mangosteens.

​

Author's note 9th October 2023 - Null moving this post has allowed me to edit it again, fixed some minor errors and broken links, small updates including Momtax's death.

 

[Prowldent]

Remember when he got beat up by Uwe Boll and cried about it?

 

[aspirin]

making changes to a site you don't like doesn't make them a lolcow

 

[brooklynbailiff]

Who?

 

[Saney]

 

[c-no]

I don't know. Did he really do anything that made him a lolcow? Did he ever acted like a prima-donna on his website? Does he literally suck toes that ended up being some kind of creepy possibly sick fetish? Like Saney, all I can say is that I don't get it.

 

[Fibonacci]

 

[DrChristianTroy]

Dude made a decent Rifftrax for Troll 2. Also Something Awful has a decent archive of old movie reviews. Not exactly lolcow material.

 

[Surtur]

Yea, this guy is not really a lolcow.

 

[Null]

(This is a thread from 2013 btw.)

 

[Ruin]

Inb4 a flood of butthurt goons.

 

[Judge Holden]

 

[Feline Darkmage]

Happy not-birthday Ricky.

 

[repentance]

making changes to a site you don't like doesn't make them a lolcow

Being driven off your own website by admins multiple times does, though.

Lowtax is the Jake Rapp of website owners.

 

[Florence]

Lowtax can't survive without boxed wine, pass it on

 

[NQ 952]

Sid vicious did nothing wrong

 

[jace821]

Why was lowtax so obsessed with being verified by twitter? He bitched for months non stop after they denied him.

 

[MG 620]

Please wake up, Lowtax!

 

[Marisa Kirisame]