Goons wrote the playbook for the internet culture war.
Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
41–50 of 370 posts
Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
#42SA in the early 00's was really special. It was like someone dumped a whole chemical supply closet into a pot and brought it to a boil. Equal parts trash and alchemy. Gold was inexplicably made there, and as long as you had your kitty litter scoop it was easy to find.
Goons screwing around with Poser was probably peak gold or close to it. The large-scale projects like Goon City and Goon Tower stick with me as inspirational with respect to what spontaneous groups of idiots can accomplish pushing in the same direction.
Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
#43He leaves behind a complicated legacy. It's important to note that credible allegations of domestic abuse lead him to sell SA in the past year, and this can't be set aside. At the same time, SA's influence on the modern internet can't be understated. The 'image macro' of early SA (maybe created by Lowtax himself, from what Fragmaster says in his video in the link) is the direct ancestor of today's common meme image--…
I remember hearing that image macros originated on TribalWar (a forum for Starsiege: Tribes), but they were definitely popularized by SA
These proto-memes were probably independently "invented" on a lot of different forums. There was a much bigger emphasis on making content yourself back before content aggregators, which meant there was a lot of innovation going on in a lot of places. They'd sort of trickle through the internet through some sort of weird back-channel osmosis and merge and intermingle to create new formats.
I think almost anyone who spent a decent amount of time in forums aimed toward adolescents around 2000 will have had some small impact on the emerging meme format.
Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
#44This isn't a joke; I had actually scheduled a lunch with Lowtax for this Saturday. Despite a (let's call it) checkered past, I was extremely excited to meet him, since he's been a huge influence to my sense of humor and Something Awful was really important to me as a teenager. ------- I had found him on LinkedIn a few weeks ago, and simply sent a message explaining that I'm a fan, would love a chance to buy him lunch…
Don’t let that take hold. You had nothing to do with it and deep down, you know it. If anything, you helped as best you could as some dork who stalked him on LinkedIn.
Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
#45Why does it say “dies” when he killed himself? And please, no trick answers.
One of my favourite posts of his, why lingerie is fucking stupid: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=38...
Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
#46Someone on twitter was talking about the Franz Ferdinand insane ripples of the man's decision to ban anime pornography on his site: 1. He bans it 2. One "moot" was then currently showing around his futaba channel clone "4chan" and not getting many bites 3. The pornography-obsessed people decide to abscond to 4chan en masse, determining the culture of /b/ and all that 4. This leads to the proliferation of fascism and…
There was a lot of well-founded animosity towards SomethingAwful in the early days of 4chan. How could you respect anybody who paid money to talk to people online? It was so contrary to the spirit of the internet.
SA's brand of snarky balding catfather humour lives on in so many facets of culture, and they all suck hard. Most of Twitter and Reddit were colonised by it. Almost all garbage American comedy seems tinged by it too. Looking past the hysterical headlines about 4chan, SA may have ultimately been the bigger setback to online culture.
Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
#47Someone on twitter was talking about the Franz Ferdinand insane ripples of the man's decision to ban anime pornography on his site: 1. He bans it 2. One "moot" was then currently showing around his futaba channel clone "4chan" and not getting many bites 3. The pornography-obsessed people decide to abscond to 4chan en masse, determining the culture of /b/ and all that 4. This leads to the proliferation of fascism and…
There was a lot of well-founded animosity towards SomethingAwful in the early days of 4chan. How could you respect anybody who paid money to talk to people online? It was so contrary to the spirit of the internet. SA's brand of snarky balding catfather humour lives on in so many facets of culture, and they all suck hard. Most of Twitter and Reddit were colonised by it. Almost all garbage American comedy seems tinged…
You mean neckbeard culture? What other types of online comedy were there, The Onion and Modern Humorist?
Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
#48good riddance but he even died like a fucking scumbag
Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
#49I don't know "Fragmaster", "Lowtax", "tinathan". "Everyone knows who Lowtax is!". Yeah no. Just stop.
Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
#50I’m surprised no one has mentioned the domestic abuse allegations. The Something Awful forums almost completely melted down because of that, and it’s certainly left me with a very negative final impression of the man who’s sense of humor I once idolized.
See: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&th...
> An hour later I was contacted by my attorney who informed me that Rich had shot himself earlier in the morning.
> So. There it is.
His other ex and I got to tell our children that their father died without saying goodbye to them, or that he loved them, or to my knowledge, left a note for them.
This rubs me the wrong way. Also the countless posts dissing someone who committed suicide.