Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died • Hacker News Board

Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died

#351

Post by DonHopkins » Sun, Nov 14, 2021, 2:50 AM UTC

kryogen1c wrote: post #243

antihero wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&th... "I have been sitting for hours debating whether or not to disclose this, and I feel like it's something I do need to get off of my chest. Frankly, I'm tried of being quiet. I've mostly had to stay quiet for years about things happening behind the scenes. I've held things inside so long and so hard my chest physically hurt the same way it is now. I consid…

"May the good he created stretch on, and the evil be buried with him."

That's an apt ewwwlogy.

Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died

#352

Post by Dylan16807 » Sun, Nov 14, 2021, 3:38 AM UTC

ryaniscool wrote: post #338

Tronno wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason human nature is to criticize and focus on flaws - that's how progress is made. Great achievements speak for themselves. In most cases, people readily adopt proven new practices or inventions, flock to groundbreaking ideas, and celebrate those who produce them. Meanwhile, they will happily stay silent about uncomfortable truths. Who dares pipe up about the charismatic but incompetent colleague? The su…

By your logic, funerals should be more like agile retrospectives where we examine every mistake a person made or person they hurt so people at the funeral don't repeat the same mistakes. The reason people commit violence is not because of a lack of social pressure or not understanding the difference betweeen right and wrong. They have something broken inside.

Funerals are different from biographies, and this seems more like a situation for biography.

Especially because the people at a funeral already know the person well.

Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died

#353

Post by Meekro » Sun, Nov 14, 2021, 4:31 AM UTC

rmidthun wrote: post #270

All this eulogy for an abusive bully. Among the many "innovations", there was a feature where he would link to a website that he thought was worthy of ridicule. Often mentioning directly that it had a guest book to sign in. So a horde of bullies would descend on that website, fill the book and any forums with goatse porn and email the same. Some of the victims shut down their websites, their complaints posted to SA s…

Agreed. I ran across SomethingAwful when I was quite young (maybe 12-14?) and it was rather upsetting. I kept seeing calls to action that sounded like "Hey guys, let's go be mean to _____ for entertainment! Bonus points if we make them cry!" The whole culture seemed to be like that, so I closed the site and never went back. I never understood what others saw in it.

Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died

#354

Post by kuraudo » Sun, Nov 14, 2021, 5:58 AM UTC

bigbillheck wrote: post #284

extortionist wrote: post #12

He 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 think the success of Something Awful is, by and large, despite Lowtax, and not because of him.

Hard disagree; early Something Awful was hilarious and it was mostly becuase Lowtax was more involved with front page posts.; I'm still chuckling just remembering some of those posts.

Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died

#355

Post by EdwardDiego » Sun, Nov 14, 2021, 7:27 AM UTC

antihero wrote: post #130

extortionist wrote: post #12

He 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--…

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&th... "I have been sitting for hours debating whether or not to disclose this, and I feel like it's something I do need to get off of my chest. Frankly, I'm tried of being quiet. I've mostly had to stay quiet for years about things happening behind the scenes. I've held things inside so long and so hard my chest physically hurt the same way it is now. I consid…

> His other ex and I got to tell our children that their father died without saying goodbye to them, or that he loved them

Wow. This is when I'd suggest indulging in a small white lie, for your children's sake.

Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died

#356

Post by tinco » Sun, Nov 14, 2021, 10:13 AM UTC

namelessoracle wrote: post #288

There seems to be some kind of weird cult thing that goes on in nerd spaces that always involves a person with major personal problems that manages to assemble a cult of personality around themself and that cult becomes the primary means by which they support themselves. Eventually the members rebel in a coup like fashion after one of the chief henchmen who has built their own coalition see their opportunity, and eit…

Not a comic book shop but a games shop, but same style of community I bet. The owner dedicated half of the building to an area where people could play MtG and Warhammer and Pokémon or whatever. Us geeks would hang out there for hours after school, sometimes during. For some it was basically a second home.

At some point people started to get a little too familiar and he started to remind people to be respectful of the regular customers who he said we're still responsible for the majority of the stores income.

I still wonder if it was actually true, MtG and Warhammer have insane profit margins and very loyal customers spending all of their disposable income on them. Then again just supplying every single family in the country with Settlers of Catan must be big business as well.

Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died

#357

Post by anonymoushn » Sun, Nov 14, 2021, 1:30 PM UTC

throwawaylinux wrote: post #349

curuinor wrote: post #2

Someone 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…

> 6. A depressing number of people start believing in that crap In "qanon" whatever that is? Seems like it was always massively overblown. Some fringe conspiracy theory among thousands. It wasn't like the baseless Russia Trump conspiracy theory that fully half the USA believed, was front page news for literally 3 years, and shaped the course of the government, for example. Yet that does not get proportionate air time…

I don't think the Russia Trump conspiracy theorists have any coup attempts to their name

Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died

#358

Post by watwut » Sun, Nov 14, 2021, 3:00 PM UTC

1123581321 wrote: post #331

rmidthun wrote: post #270

All this eulogy for an abusive bully. Among the many "innovations", there was a feature where he would link to a website that he thought was worthy of ridicule. Often mentioning directly that it had a guest book to sign in. So a horde of bullies would descend on that website, fill the book and any forums with goatse porn and email the same. Some of the victims shut down their websites, their complaints posted to SA s…

Brigading those ugly guestbooks was relatively harmless fun. The owners were usually enraged and nonplussed but didn’t feel anything of value was touched. This was before death threats and harassing employers and roping traditional news in to amplify the attack, and all that. The Uwe Boll fight was very funny. I think, though, my favorite lowtax moment was a recorded talk he gave at a university, in which he expounde…

It was not harmless fun as proven by websites that closed after the experience. It was bullying, plain and simple.

Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died

#359

Post by chairmanwow1 » Sun, Nov 14, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #38

This 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…

I’ve never shared this story publicly, but this comment made my hope that others can glean some insight from it, however small it may be.

One of my best friends committed suicide whilst I was in college. My friends and I figured it out from a FB post and ended up finding him before he had passed, but early enough to believe we could have saved him.

After years of therapy and discussion with my friends that were there with me. My friend made a decision extremely privately to take his own life.

There was no way that any of us could have ever done anything substantive to have altered the course of his life. I wish he had spoken to any of us and told us what he was experiencing. But he didn’t.

For years, I felt like I had done something wrong. I _must_ have forgotten to include his PoV or consider his pain.

But now, I realize, he made his decision without us. He wanted to die, and he wanted to spare us the pain of finding him in the half dead state we did.

You didn’t ever do anything wrong. And I hope you can convince yourself that you didn’t have any role to play in this tragedy.

Please DM me if you have any concerns. I will always be available to talk about this with anyone struggling on this topic. <3 No matter how far in the future you find this message.

Re: Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died

#360

Post by parrellel » Sun, Nov 14, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

throwawaylinux wrote: post #349

curuinor wrote: post #2

Someone 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…

> 6. A depressing number of people start believing in that crap In "qanon" whatever that is? Seems like it was always massively overblown. Some fringe conspiracy theory among thousands. It wasn't like the baseless Russia Trump conspiracy theory that fully half the USA believed, was front page news for literally 3 years, and shaped the course of the government, for example. Yet that does not get proportionate air time…

I'm going to go with: turning my direct family into bizarrely aggressive cultists for five hundred Alex.

Edit: I'm aware its anecdotal, but getting to sit through hours of people explaining how Kamala Harris was going to put all the white boys in re-education camps was rather affecting.