Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka has passed away.

1 hour ago, Mr. Freeze said:

I feel nothing. 

I feel... Is that that dril tweet about speeding a 'mood'? That's what I feel.

It's a name I know mostly from Retsupurae and what I watched of Gaming Garbage. Learning a bit more from what's been shared here, it's interesting to think about how much influence he has had on so much of the internet that I've experienced, for better and worse as OP put it. Never went to SA, but there's a certain through-line that can be traced from there to 4chan to the kind of community I hung out in for longer than I should have that attracted its own share of shitty individuals. You wanna believe people like that will grow out of their behavior and get better as the years go on, but sometimes they don't, and maybe even spiral in the other direction. Then one day you hear they're dead or otherwise at the lowest of lows and respond with an "oh." And even you're not sure what emotion that "oh" was meant to convey.

Hearing about the kind of place he was trying to make SA into as late as friggin 2019 says a lot. Makes him come across as a relic of a bygone, edgier era that doesn't exist today for a reason.

Thanks for the funny gaming videos I guess, and condolences to the family.

I never really cared for SA, especially when they charge you money just to register a forum account.

Why, I remember a long time ago that when I was at a certain forum, I made an outburst over the price and that I was NOT going to pay for it. What's even more ridiculous was that a member replied to me, "that's why it's $10."

I believe Phoebus pulled the same crap late in the NewDoom Forum's life, before the site's demise. IIRC, that only applied to new members; long time members weren't affected.

Lowtax's SA spurred a lot of sites we have come to accept today. Not in the most positive sense, but it is a given.

Condolences to the wife and her further kin and the kids involved. Growing up without a parent, even when said parent is rather infamous for debauchery, is something you shouldn't do to kids.

And as for Lowtax himself: His personal situation was/is awful and i figure he saw no end in sight. Thus a terrible decision was made.

13 hours ago, caco_killer said:

Hi, haven't posted here in a long time. But I did find out about SA from here so I thought I should post something about it.

 

The fucking irony of this. You know, having a wife eventually deciding to divorce you over your shit ought to make you reconsider how you approach life. Just a thought 

On balance, if the specific conditions that led to some of my friends' lives coinciding with mine explicitly require SA to have existed, I would rather I had never met them if it meant SA had never been created.

That's completely nuts to me, I'd never trade my friendships to erase some stupid forum on the internet.

23 minutes ago, ChopBlock223 said:

That's completely nuts to me, I'd never trade my friendships to erase some stupid forum on the internet.

Same, moreso considering how many of them stem from there and continued long after I left SA.

Just because the guy who used to run the site was a total loon doesn't mean everyone who hung out on it also is the same. If anything, very few people subscribed to Lowtax's mentality in overall.

5 hours ago, ChopBlock223 said:

That's completely nuts to me, I'd never trade my friendships to erase some stupid forum on the internet.

But if that forum's existence set off a chain reaction leading to an attempted overthrow of the government? Might have to take one for the team. 

4 hours ago, PsychEyeball said:

Just because the guy who used to run the site was a total loon doesn't mean everyone who hung out on it also is the same. If anything, very few people subscribed to Lowtax's mentality in overall.

LMAO the furry fandom (a hugely LGBT fandom mind you) used to not even be able to show their heads anywhere outside of designated forums because of SA's influence, where people would dox them or send them death threats. And that's not anywhere close to 4chan and its influence on web culture as a whole directly descends from SA. Everyone on that forum might not agree 100% with Lowtax, but if you share 75% of his views you're still subscribing to his mentality. 

37 minutes ago, Mr. Freeze said:

But if that forum's existence set off a chain reaction leading to an attempted overthrow of the government? Might have to take one for the team.

I'm sorry, but I can't take this idea or chain of logic seriously.

2 hours ago, Mr. Freeze said:

 

But if that forum's existence set off a chain reaction leading to an attempted overthrow of the government? Might have to take one for the team.

Lmao, please don´t tell me you are talking about the ""coup"" of January 6

R.I.P. Cliff Yablonski

22 hours ago, ChopBlock223 said:

That's completely nuts to me, I'd never trade my friendships to erase some stupid forum on the internet.

I would in a heartbeat. Something Awful has had an active part in making the world worse. If we were meant to be friends, I like to think we would have met anyway, as most of my goon friends I met through mutual, non-goon friends.

15 hours ago, MS-06FZ Zaku II Kai said:

Lmao, please don´t tell me you are talking about the ""coup"" of January 6

Please, elaborate.

1 hour ago, june gloom said:

If we were meant to be friends, I like to think we would have met anyway, as most of my goon friends I met through mutual, non-goon friends.

For what it's worth, I never used SomethingAwful and have no friendships from there, so the forum never had much significance for me personally.

I've been trying to think of what to say after hearing about this last week. Back in the early 2000s there was a period when I was definitely reading SA pretty religiously. I never contributed much to the forums there but I used to have a lot of fun reading some of the threads there. Communities often have an odd way of mimicking their leaders and his unusual and frankly hilarious sense of humour obviously set the stage for the SA forums and all it produced.

It's been pretty disappointing over the past few years to see everything that came out about him. Personally I had already written him off after seeing him palling around with alt-right personalities; that was before the allegations came out about his domestic abuse that eventually led to his selling off the forums. It's a community that had outgrown him anyway. It really seemed like he'd hit pretty much a dead end in life - I think he'd failed to move with the times and grow as a person.

So he was a flawed person but I certainly can't take any pleasure in this news. He was an artist whose work I once enjoyed and it's just sad that what in retrospect was obviously a self destructive spiral has ended this way.

I think that people such as Lowtax gaining prominence is a direct consequence of the way the internet works.  The ability for someone to create something with minimal communication with other people, this will sometimes lead to individuals who aren't really great people to create something that people like.  

That being said I have no clue what to think of the forum itself because I have never used something awful, and I think I will stay away.

This piece of news is actually the first time i heard about Something Awful, i really wasn't much on the internet before 2011 or so and Doomworld was, and still is, the only forums website I'm active in.

7 hours ago, june gloom said:

 

I would in a heartbeat. Something Awful has had an active part in making the world worse. If we were meant to be friends, I like to think we would have met anyway, as most of my goon friends I met through mutual, non-goon friends.

That's fair. Though speaking rather selfishly as someone who has trouble making connections with others, if an internet forum was ever my primary source of friendship, then I couldn't possibly wish it away. Politics are very important any time they affect you or someone you care about obviously, but not being alone is something I place of even higher value.

I just heard about this from a real-life friend who is also into "internet culture". I've backed away from internet forums more and more over the years, SA I left in probably the early 2010s. I was on the forums pretty religiously in late 2000s and I remembered the front page and the drama throughout early-mid 2000s.

I've been reducing my message board usage a lot this last year (cut off Reddit entirely which had supplanted SA for the last decade for me) and I think all I can say is I regret how much time I spent on the internet. I recommend people not spend a lot of time on the internet. Don't get in dumb arguments and don't embrace the internet drama machine. Things worked out for me, this isn't some sort of cry for help, I just think if I could go back in time and tell my 12 year old self that the internet is a stupid place to spend lots of time maybe it would have been for the better. I wish I'd never been a member on SA. How many hours of college did I spend on an internet message board? It's really just depressing.

I worry about the butterfly effect it would have if I could stop myself from being an internet-user kid/teen because my career in software must be at least in part due to my internet-driven teenage years, so who knows, but I guess if we don't do extremes I think I should at least have spent less time on the internet. I'd highly recommend spending less time on the internet to everyone.

Maybe this is a large jump from "Lowtax killed himself" to "get off the internet", but it doesn't feel that way to me. It feels like another nail in the coffin of the negative conclusions I've been drawing about anonymous internet discourse. You can win every internet argument by not being the person who is spending their life online arguing.

"The Internet Makes You Stupid." That was the tagline of Something Awful, and it's very much the truth.

Lowtax made a place for cynical weirdos deeply dissatisfied with every corner of their life, but in spite of him making a cozy den of vagabonds and jerks, it made a lot of content that made people laugh, for better or worse. I don't know whether SA was a copy of its creator, or an accelerant for his shittiness, but now, it stands more inclusive than it was before, and in retrospect, it was better that he was never around.

I used to write briefly for Something Awful under "Cranky Steve's Haunted Whorehouse" (where "bad maps go to die, horribly and painfully") for a few years and I never got any merchandise for it nor pay. There's only so many ways you can write "lol map sux, author is an idiot, I want to die," and it's a time capsule of my life best unpreserved (at the moment, it cannot be accessed). Today, I gain no pleasure in dunking on the bad work of beginner artists. Unless, of course, they lack the requisite humility.

I learned about it late, and I was utterly disgusted at what Lowtax was like behind closed doors, and it already appeared that most who could move on from him and SA already did. At that point, the ones that stick around tend to be as damaged as their leader. It's easy to say "oh, he was nice to me," and leave it at that, but that would excuse (or at worst, justify) all of the times he was a horrible monster to others.

Lowtax lived up to his namesake as a cautionary tale, and that you should also never idolize those that entertain you. But it did give us DoomWorld, in a way, so I guess it's always up to us to decide how we emulate our predecessors. Sometimes, the best way is "not at all."

Thanks for the laughs, Rich, but you were the Terrible Secret of Space all along.

Seems to be accessible right here.

None of mine are up. Looks like an old archive. All of mine were 2001 and later.

Oh, the days I wasted reading about gross shit. I gained nothing but I wouldn't trade it for the world.

If you're still active on SA when you die, your soul doesn't go to heaven or hell, you just filter into the internet and dissolve. It's the worst possible outcome for a person.

I'm remembering when I started a website, then a week later SA started doing the exact same thing. I made some mildly annoyed comment on my site, somehow summoning Lowtax and another of the writers, who came on my forums and started ridiculing me and the site. Never was super happy that most of my friends online stayed on the SA forums and continued financing the owner despite him being a big time piece of shit who, despite running one of the biggest sites out there, was so insecure that he had to go and fuck with a fella running a site that had like, 100 hits a day max. But I guess being part of the club was more important.

I kind of forgot about the grudge over the years, but Lowtax biting the dust dredged up some old memories. Old Man Murray was by far the better game humor site of the era.

Something Awful was a strange place.  I spent a fair bit of time on the forums from the mid to late 2000's, usually in Games.  There was a bunch of edgy humor on the platform, but it really did feel at the time that SA was just plain better moderated than most other communities and in its later years tried to inch away from its edgelord humor roots.

Thing is, I never really knew how to read Lowtax the person.  He never really seemed like he knew what he was doing with his life, and there would always be little cracks in the foundation you'd notice like him shilling mangosteen supplements, boxing Uwe Boll, almost never having a nice thing to say about the people who used to work for him, and the forums themselves always teetering on the precipice of dissolving into a jumbled mass of PHP.  It seemed like the community that grew from SA grew in spite of his presence, not because of it.  He came up with the general structure, picked out a few moderators, and that's about it.

On one level you always hope someone who fell so far like him eventually gets his act together and has a redemption arc.  On the other hand, permanently making himself judgement-proof to spite his ex-wife and kids is such a callus and cowardly act that there's only so much pity I can have for him.

23 hours ago, Obsidian said:

 

Please, elaborate.

I mean that you have to be especialy bonked in the head, if you think a FUCKING online forum was the main cause of January 6 "coup".

For Christ sake people, life doesn´t revolve around what some cocksucker says on the goddamn internet, and it certainly isn´t a sole reason for a coup (you know there are more complex factors like economic, cultural and social).

So no @june gloom Something Awfull definitely wasn´t a sole cause for World going to shit, there were far more complex events outside of internet that caused this mess. You definetly don´t need to feel shame for meeting your friends on some shity forum, because things were always destined to end up shitty.

9 hours ago, MS-06FZ Zaku II Kai said:

I mean that you have to be especialy bonked in the head, if you think a FUCKING online forum was the main cause of January 6 "coup".

For Christ sake people, life doesn´t revolve around what some cocksucker says on the goddamn internet, and it certainly isn´t a sole reason for a coup (you know there are more complex factors like economic, cultural and social).

 

So no @june gloom Something Awfull definitely wasn´t a sole cause for World going to shit, there were far more complex events outside of internet that caused this mess. You definetly don´t need to feel shame for meeting your friends on some shity forum, because things were always destined to end up shitty.

I would agree with you in regards to SA not being the sole cause of the actions taken on January 6th, but the attitudes fostered on that forum were certainly ones that contributed to the current state of internet culture and conduct and it is important to bear that in mind when talking about things like cultural and social factors. Online radicalization is very much a thing and I imagine that you could trace the lineage of a lot of the internet's more unsavory corners back to SomethingAwful if you tried hard enough.

Oh yes, and why do you have quotation marks around the word coup?

You know why.

33 minutes ago, june gloom said:

You know why.

I would like them to say it.