Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died
forums.somethingawful.com
forums.somethingawful.com
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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 and chat about Something Awful and Gaming Garbage. To my surprise, he responded back with "sure, I'd be up for it".
I responded back with "How does early December sound to you? something on the order of December 11?"
His response was "shit I dont even know if I'll still be alive then". This response was a little weird, but this isn't exactly "off brand" humor for Lowtax, so I ignored it.
I then say something to the effect of "how about something along the lines of November 13?", which he said was better. He then said "and you have my permission to stab me". Again, not off brand for Lowtax.
I bought a plane ticket to Kansas City, was ready to fly out this friday. But I had this deep feeling in my stomach that what he was saying wasn't just a joke. It's pretty well documented that he's been depressed, and I dunno, upon re-reading his messages a hundred times I got a dark feeling that these might be kind of bad omens. What exactly do I do with this? I discussed it with my wife and a friend, who weren't sure what the best solution was, and I ultimately decided not to say anything. I figured I'm just some dork who stalked him on LinkedIn, and I was afraid that if I said anything he would think I'm weird and cancel our lunch date.
And now this shit happened. He finally did it, and now the thought keeps playing in my brain of "what if I had said something a few weeks ago?" I know I don't owe him anything, but I can't help but have this repeated feeling of "I valued an opportunity to meet my man-crush more than I valued someone showing suicidal tendencies," and it makes me feel downright rotten. That's not the kind of person I want to be, and it makes me feel legitimately sick that that's how my brain decided to work.
At some logical level I know none of this is my fault really; realistically even if I had said something, I doubt much would have changed, and I doubt I had enough there to get him committed or anything, but there's a difference between logically knowing something and feeling something.
As it stands, I think there's a reasonably good chance that I will feel partly responsible for this for the rest of my life. This sucks.
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RIP Rich. I know you had a rough last couple years, you were the definition of a "complicated person", and despite everything you will be missed.
I barely knew the guy, and there's a large part of me that knows I did basically everything I could possibly do to help. I wasn't a family member, I wasn't his spouse, I wasn't a childhood friend, I was a dude who had an SA account as a teenager and subscribed to his YouTube channel and found his LinkedIn.
....That said, and I will acknowledge that this isn't the most rational thought that I have ever had, but I do wonder if him saying that to me was a cry for help, like he was reaching out to anyone to show some sort of interest in his well-being.
It's silly, and of course that logic will never end; I'm sure could convince myself that I'm responsible for 9/11 if I tried hard enough.
As I said in a sister thread, I do have an appointment with a shrink in a few days. I am reasonably sure they will either be able to help me or at least will be able to refer me to someone who can.
Taking him to lunch and treating him as a human being would probably been a super nice thing to do for him.
I know you feel that the part where you think "man I should have said something different" makes you feel bad, but people do much, much more regrettable gaffes they realize only after the fact. Like, for instance, a spouse who considers maybe to lock away the firearms, but not doing it (an unfortunate example from real life, not mine luckily).
Luckily most people are not experts in suicide. Even though if you had concrete intuition that something was off, having no experience of this before, you probably could not tell if the intuition was pointing at something actionable, or imagined.
Persons who are under treatment, with their family, still end up performing a suicide.
I know it feels bad for you, having interacted with him briefly before his passing away, but you should not feel guilt (even though its a natural human reaction you do).
Without going into detail, rest assured that this has nothing to do with you, and there is nothing you could have done to change this.
It would be incredibly sad if you feel partly responsible for this, even if it is understandable. In this case, however, your interactions with him may have helped him somewhat. His actions on this day, however, were nothing you could have influenced either way.
Please do yourself a big favor and don't take any of this on yourself.
Despite his many, many faults, I did genuinely like Lowtax. The few short conversations I had with him before were very funny and pleasant, and I'll miss his strange humor on YouTube. He was a complicated dude, and his fall over the last few years shows how someone can go from "king of the internet" to laughingstock in a relatively short time, and serves as a cautionary tale. The rest of the SA community very justifiably turned on him, and I don't blame them for that at all, but I dunno, I guess I liked him enough to cut him a bit more slack than he deserved.
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.
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--impact font text over a silly image, easily accessible to anyone who wants to post it.
Many of today's well-known internet comedians and writers grew up with the site. And it's hard to estimate how big the impact (positive or negative) of things like ADTRW leading to 4chan have been, not to mention things like the rise of Let's Play videos, or the creation and eventual shutdown of BitTorrent Barnyard (and its ensuing spinoffs).
The site itself still remains one of the last vestiges of the old internet--one of the few sites that both survived and managed not sell out and go headlong into monetization--and as a result, is one of the last sites on the modern internet that (maybe ironically) is not entirely awful.
(hi Nexty, it's ParadoX)
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.
Pak. Chooie. Unf.
Ironically, he failed to capitalise on his influential position unlike so many of his peers who sold off their online properties and disappeared from the public eye. If he'd taken a different approach, he'd probably now be sitting on media properties (or a fortune) worth tens of millions, and minting millions more in cryptocurrency/NFTs. And also possibly have a very different family life.
An example of someone with huge opportunities but not the inclination/mindset or skillset to grasp them.
(Also, I never understood the absurdist humour of Doom/Mood House back in the day. Weird stuff.)
For some reason, imagining this individual with lots of money calls to mind the life of John McAfee.
It wasn't for lack of trying (mangosteen).
"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 considered not sharing this out of respect for Rich's parents and sister, but after thinking on the incredibly vitriolic wall of text Rich's Mother sent to me this morning, saying upon many other things, that his blood is on my hands, I need to share it to regain some sense of control over what's taken place in the past 48 hours.
Yesterday I recieved a divorce ruling that would help me and my daughter stay in our home in Canada and allow me to provide a good life for her as well as pay back numerous debts that had accrued during the past two years when I was receiving $350 a month in child support.
In the divorce ruling the judge found that Rich had willfully spent down the martial fund, confirmed his treatment of me was Domestic Violence and put together a plan to pay for the attorney fees etc. He would still retain custody settled on previously in mediation. He was due to get our daughter for Christmas.
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.
If you've made it this far thank you for giving me space to let this go so I know longer have to hold onto it. "
Wow. This is when I'd suggest indulging in a small white lie, for your children's sake.
Don't say "your father died without saying goodbye" and don't say "your father died and said goodby". Just say "your father died". No need for manipulation.
My younger children still need to hear from time to time that she loves them, even if the obvious reality (to me, and my older children) is that her behaviour demonstrates quite clearly that she doesn't.
But, to ease their young minds, and help them sleep when the doubts come, I tell them that she does love them, and always will so, but she's working on some challenges that make it hard for her to tell them in person.
To quote Thackeray's Vanity Fair - "Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children."
(She has supervised access, but won't use it because "she did nothing wrong", and using it appears to her, as an implicit acknowledgement that she did something wrong)
I dislike lying to them, and I'll admit I feel angry when I do so - they love her because she's Mom, but she doesn't deserve their love - but it safeguards their mental wellbeing until they're old enough to face the unvarnished truth.
I also think of the day my father died, twelve days before I was born. He died smiling (I'm told) despite the intense pain, because of a white lie.
He was dying of cancer, and they desperately trying to induce me so he could meet me before he died, but no dice. And they'd been unable to discern my gender via ultrasound. He was desperate to have a son. (this was the 80s, so you know, patriarchy was the norm, etc. etc.)
In his last hour, he asked the nurse if his child had been born, and she lied magnificently - yes, you have a beautiful baby boy, he's eight pounds five, congratulations. (Which was not a bad guess, I was eight pounds 10).
While they're wildly disparate circumstances, they share a commonality - the unvarnished truth isn't always the best option in some circumstances.
Kind of like the silk road before the darkweb.
Hopefully more will be known over time because there are some crazy stories.
Not that I would know anything about any of it
The comment you are replying to is referring to the sites dedicated solely to piracy. You have a pretty fantastical idea of what happens there.
Maybe there is a subconscious belief that only "good" people deserve success and praise? I just find this so naive because if you've lived long enough and gotten to know yourself and other people you realize how complicated and flawed each and every one of us are.
I enjoyed SA at first, until it became quite clear the moderation was heavily skewed to Lowtax and his friends, Photoshop Fridays were largely rigged, accounts would be locked for no apparent reason and good luck getting a response from that cancer guy that never checked email. And fine - that's his site, his rules, and opted (since phpBB was free and had "access" to university servers) to set up something just for me and my friends. Apparently I wasn't the only one because the user base slowly declined with some hardcore hangers-on sticking around to form the shell of a community it is now. Lowtax was always an asshole, but he did build something that greatly influenced internet culture (again, for better or worse is left up to the reader).
We see this a lot in posts here and elsewhere: Some historical figure or someone with a lifetime of achievements and impact gets mentioned. Then, inevitably, a poster comes out of the woodwork to remind everyone: "Buuuuuut he was sexist" or "Buuuuuut he sometimes beat his kids" or "Buuuuuut he once cheated on his wife" as if that one fact nullifies everything else the person did.
I'm glad OP acknowledged that the person in question was "complicated". We all are complicated. People should not be reduced to a single dimension or a single bad thing they did. I hope when I finally pass away, my epitaph talks about the major things I did, rather than that one worst thing I ever did, that someone found by analyzing 40 years of comment history.
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 successful boss who skims a little off the top? The beloved politician who touches female staff? Etc. Mistakes and wrongdoing have a way of hiding in plain sight.
Yes, people are complicated. It's better when folks point out the complexity, instead of sticking to the sanitized version.
If anything, to remember his flaws is to engage in the same spirit of mockery that he pioneered. It’s completely apt in this case, and to do otherwise and to whitewash would be to completely miss the point of this man’s life and accomplishments.
This may lead to progress, but I don’t believe this is WHY we do this. People are moralizing creatures. Much like we are “programmed” to recognize faces, (even when they’re not there) so too are we programmed to see issues in moral terms. Once you start paying attention to what people say, this conclusion is almost unavoidable: often discussion will never get into the details of things, but simply focus on the question of whether something is “good” or “bad.” (Other times it will focus on who is to “blame,” and who is the “victim.”)
Hopefully my tone hasn’t come off too harsh, since evaluating moral claims is one of the most fundamental things which make us human. Like all those other traits though, sometimes we focus on it too much, or else can’t see past the moral part of the argument.
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.
Especially because the people at a funeral already know the person well.
So sure, Lowtax has had significant positive influence on many people.
This is why people on SA are so outspoken and disappointed. Lowtax is an "eminent figure" of the internet. He has had a personal impact on many people throughout their formative years, inasmuch as he impacted internet culture as such.
Lowtax had a place of high status and influence that betrayed how deeply flawed he was as a person. People literally grew up with him as a central player in internet culture. When he (and SA) went and mocked some "crazy person" or fought against a perceived evil, then this was part of valiant, stupid, maybe wrong but nonetheless memorable childhoods and teenage years for many people.
When Richard posted that he was seriously ill, the outpouring of support was far and wide. When we then learned that not only was all this fake, but Richard was privately a person hardly deserving of the immense respect he had, people got unreasonably angry.
Today, I think people are mourning. On the one hand, the real person who died, on the other hand, many people are mourning the loss of a childhood hero - a hero who metaphorically (and now literally) died, because he was never a hero to begin with.
As others have said, SA was successful despite him, not because of him.
Eventually you weren't 18 anymore and that "edge lord" persona that Lowtax brought to everything wore thin, or other "edge lords" started to get more attention, and also then eventually we all found out that Lowtax wasn't an act and actually lived his life that way too. But I know for me the era of Something Awful I most paid attention to SA, most of that was for Lowtax's sense of humor and the young naive kid both I and the internet itself was at the time.
As you know my patreon has declined from like $9k to under $1k because of the fucking idiots who embrace the ideology of, "If You Read It On the Internet, It Must Be True!" Ironically, this was the original slogan for the site, before I changed it to "The Internet Makes You Stupid." Both apply equally in this case.
Nobody seems aware that anybody can allege anything. Nobody seems to give a shit that I built and maintained this community for 22 years; one single allegation destroyed all that good will. One single allegetion destroyed my entire career, site, job, and creation. And don't even try to say "BUT LOWTAX WHUT ABOUT THESE OTHER THINGS IN YUR PAST HURRRRRR" because I've never been convicted or found guilty of doing shit. Ever. Period.
A bunch of kiwifarms people easily whipped those gullible idiots into a frenzy of self righteous outrage, and nobody from SA even gave it a second thought. I've always been honest and open with everybody my entire life, which is also why I get easily manipulated. I cannot speak in further length about certain things, so I'm trying to be as vague as possible. Look at the background of both parties involved, look at their history, look at what they've literally and legally done. Not been ACCUSED of doing, but actually DONE.
We have a court of law to determine if allegations are valid. Rushing to judgement by simply acting on an allegation, something that has, by nature, not been proven at all, is pure idiot toilet fuck shit.
This event really shows who my true allies and friends are, and who are the people that don't give a shit about the things I've actually DONE and CREATED in the past 22 years are. I'm going to capitalize the word done here one more time. DONE.
An ALLEGATION. For fuck's sake, at least wait for me to be found legally guilty of SOMETHING. Innocent until proven guilty, except on the internet where it's guilty and then still guilty and always guilty because people make up their minds once and can never change them ever no matter what. Outrage is the currency of the internet, and by god nobody will ever be wrong!
Anyway I'm making a plea for logic, if there is any logic remaining on the internet. Thank you to the six remaining patreon members left, and a huge fuck off to the SA outrage culture reactionists that were apparently just waiting for any excuse or reason, no matter how idiotic, to turn on me. Congrats, you're betting on the wrong horse.
And yes, I'm aware that by writing this I'm just going to lose more donors but whatever, I'm not and never have done anything just for cash. I just wanted to point out how the site I used to run is now populated by the hand wringing, outrage culture warriors we used to once make fun of.
What kept me coming, was that they were amazing writers (it wasn’t just him -or he wrote under several nom de plumes).
His essays, done in the style of famous writers, and deadpan humor, where a story seemed serious, up until the point that you suddenly realize you’re being punked, were masterful.
But it sounds like his personal life was a disaster. I have known a number of folks like that. In most cases, I always hoped that, one day, they would “come out of the cesspool,” and start to realize their potential (I have also known a number of folks that did that, too). In my experience, these people were absolutely miserable, and difficult to be around. I only ever saw his creative output, so had no other stake in his personal life.
I wish his exes and children the best. It sounds like they may need it.
“Your poison womb is making heaven too fucking crowded. - Zack”
You see this play out in things as pedestrian as comic book shops. The comic book shop owner doesnt display anything resembling good business sense, but they have a coterie of people who support their business out of a sense of community and do stuff to help keep the business afloat where it would otherwise fail. Eventually someone (usually someone they know fairly well) takes a chunk of his cult and opens a new comic book shop while exposing all the horrible social abuses the old owner used to heap on people on the community space they owned.
This pattern repeats over and over in these kind of social spaces.
Maybe this happens in all social spaces that are owned by a specific person (like churches, comedy clubs, concert venues) too and I just dont see that part of the world.
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.
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 so people could laugh at them.
Brigading and "cancelling"... Yes, some of the humor was funny, but the site was a cesspool that festered into the chans. Let's Play is good, but the worst of the Internet was fostered here as well.
The best part was when he was tricked into a boxing match with Uwe Boll, which didn't work out well for him.
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 expounded on the “greater parrot-in-ass theory” about how much worse the world becomes when people with extremely niche and unacceptable interests are able to find each other online and convince each other that they’re normal and healthy. Prescient.
But yes, also a bully.
(At least this was my experience on other forums.)
Basically. Imagine having to pay $10 to register a 4chan or reddit account and being banned for silly and ridiculous rule infractions but then being allowed back on if you registered another account("10bux").
I knew a guy who was huge into SA and contributed a lot of their photoshop Friday threads. One time there was a thread about a new movie, most people liked it but he simply said "I just left the theater a few hours ago, I didn't really dig it" he was immediately banned for "trolling" simply for sharing his opinion. He was the biggest SA user I knew at the time.
I think the last thing SA contributed to internet culture was Slenderman.
edit: your blog is cool, nice cheese and table
Flip side, the paid account system means that banned trolls coming back under a different username doesn't happen nearly as often as it would on other platforms. It still does for sure, there are a couple of people who apparently have no problem throwing cash at the forums to be able to post their nonsense, but it's not really a big thing. The vast majority of users pay their 10 bucks once, maybe buy a few upgrades, and then never pay a cent more.
I've been on the forums since the early 2000s and have honestly never seen frivolous bans as a thing. 6 hour probations are sometimes thrown around like candy, but they're mostly meaningless unless you do something stupid in response.
In the end, the ban list is public so the system has a lot of transparency. If you know what your friend's username was you can see the exact post that earned it, as well as their history of infractions, and what mods/admins were involved. https://forums.somethingawful.com/banlist.php
> I knew a guy who was huge into SA and contributed a lot of their photoshop Friday threads. One time there was a thread about a new movie, most people liked it but he simply said "I just left the theater a few hours ago, I didn't really dig it" he was immediately banned for "trolling" simply for sharing his opinion. He was the biggest SA user I knew at the time.
I certainly can't say it didn't happen, there were definitely some less stable mods and of course the subject of this thread was the top admin for most of the forums' life, but my experience tells me that your friend was likely not entirely honest with you about why they got banned.
Keep in mind I am talking about something that happened back in 2003. I long ago lost touch with this person. He was SA's biggest cheerleader and he couldn't believe I didn't have an SA forums account since I am a huge computer nerd that spent countless hours on multiple forums in those days and SA was the "place to be" back then.
He actually did show me a screenshot of the post that got him banned and I couldn't believe he got banned over that. No profanity, calling people names, nothing that got you banned from most forums. He was just calmly explaining why he thought a movie he had just seen that day wasn't very good in his opinion. He did register another account since his whole online life was based on SA at the time. By the time I thought about maybe registering an SA account it was already on the way out as being the center of internet culture.
One thing I could never figure out back in the day was SA's burning hatred of FARK.com. I used to go there just to skim the news and check out the comments. Apparently admitting liking FARK on SA was a big no no and would get you relentlessly mocked.
Again this is all ancient 15+ year old drama at this point.
IMHO, that's one of the best features of the forums. I first joined in 2003, didn't read the rules, posted garbage, and got banned. I ended up making a new account avoid having the embarrassment of being banned. Later on they ended up loosing the rules a bit and came out with probations.
Also, that $10 went towards the costs of running the website/forums. When SA came out there was no AWS, they had to lease cabinet space in a colo facility and buy real servers. The website/forums was actually down for while when Hurricane Katrina hit, (their colo was in downtown New Orleans at the time).
One of the best things about the moderation culture at SA was that they came down hard on facile, thoughtless half-posts like the one you describe. It tended to result in vibrant threads full of people who actually had something to say.
I'll out here that my work is very strongly influenced by Something Awful and I had an account there a very long time ago. I was banned by Zack Parsons for I don't even remember what post (nothing any reasonable person would think deserved a ban), and that was the end of my participation in the SA forums, I didn't want to have to re-build an identity from scratch there and I decided to move on, for better or worse.
That is how it works
*Over the years Rich was running the site it seemed like "criticism of the mods" more frequently became a perma-bannable offense.
e: f, b.
Gold was inexplicably made there, and as long as you had your kitty litter scoop it was easy to find.
You just reminded me of the Blue Ball Machine https://ytmnd-fads.fandom.com/wiki/Blue_Ball_Machine
Also the Goon Island idea that came up all the time: if every goon contributed $10, we could buy an island and it would be a paradise.
I assume this is the RPG you're referring to?
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/274500/Brigador_UpArmored...
I know about SA, but was never an active participant. Likewise I know about 4chan and other communities.
From reading the first page of this thread, it seems very critical of the creator of the community. Even at a glance I can tell that is because of the personal flaws of that person, the mistakes they've made in their life, and how they hurt other people. I feel like it is such a shame for this to be your legacy to your community. I feel like we lost a pioneer, but it's now on us to learn from their mistakes and continue to build communities that we want to be in.
As far as building healthier communities and what we can learn, I think it's definitely healthy to maintain and continue to improve the focus on helping victims and prevent potential victims from becoming a target of abuse. Everyone should be able to be part of a safe community without fear of harm.
I think there's another dimension that is significantly less popular, which is about enabling people who may have abusive tendencies to get the help they need. Society generally wants to dismiss and discard these people but that just pushes the problem into the shadows, as it's social suicide basically to come forward and say "I need help, I can't control my behaviour / keep hurting people / etc." Especially if you have any degree of publicity around your life and career.
Cancel culture was like a spark that started a fire that shone a light into these dark spaces, and some people are trash that need to be called out and exposed, especially people who get their rocks off on abuse, but there's shades of grey in between "victim" and "abuser" that don't fit the conventional good guy vs bad guy stereotypes, and it's in that realm I think there's a lot of progress yet to be made in identifying, preventing, and responding to abusive behaviours as a society.
I don't really have solutions but it's a multifaceted issue that needs solutions from all angles.
I stopped visiting SA 10 years ago, but even back then he'd do something unpopular like ban someone for something petty, then when people called him out on it he'd rage-quit the forums saying they were a cesspit, and focus on the front page articles for a while.
Famously his rules regarding moderation of anime content caused the creation of 4chan(!).
I don't know what's happened in the intervening 10 years but reading some of the comments in the linked thread it seems like everything he did every time he returned was unpopular with the community, like deleting one of the most popular subforums, and justifying it with a blatant lie.
So it's not too odd for the community he created to turn on him this violently if you add in how he treated the community in addition the problems in his personal life.
And I think this is still wrong. Having been there from the beginning, SA certainly became successful because of his posts and sense of humor. He is directly responsible for some of the earliest viral content and memes.
_Staying_ successful, on the other hand, is CERTAINLY in spite of him.
This rubs me the wrong way. Also the countless posts dissing someone who committed suicide.
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 other foolish ideology in /b/ and eventually to the quarantine zone, /pol/
5. Someone starts posting as "qanon"
6. A depressing number of people start believing in that crap
7. Many depressing things
e: looks like 4chan also has a banner for the occassion:
" RIP Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka
Our dad who disowned us"
which one would surmise would also describe moot. Who wouldn't disown 4chan if it was created from their actions?
Coincidentally, the current owner of 4chan[0] happens to be the original owner of futaba channel (2ch), so the answer to that question is one Hiroyuki Nishimura. Also, I am sure that a significant portion of imageboard users feel satisfied by the chaos they have sown; they aren't disgusted by it, they really lust for it, and that is how they have always been.
[0] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurenorsini/2015/09/23/4chan-s...
/b/tard here. Can confirm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_events_associated_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(hacker_group)
And Qanon isn't even /pol/ at its most politically active, given how they rode the memetic wave into the 2016 elections.
While there might not be a direct material connection between 4chan and r/wallstreetbets, the latter's culture was certainly shaped by the same posting style as 4chan- so perhaps a good deal of meme stock activity in the past two year is also distantly descended from Lowtax's decisions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.nl/ron-watkins-the-man-widely-ru...
[3] https://mashable.com/article/q-identity-revealed-hbo-documen...
I forgot to mention that on the other end of the spectrum, a good amount of (extremely online) American leftist culture ("the Dirtbag Left") is also linked to Something Awful, the Chapo Trap House three were either from SA or from the Weird Twitter subculture descended from SA's FYAD subforum.
The democratic machine is proving rather resistant to those forms of attacks.
> but it has not managed to perform an insane coup on one of the two mainstream political parties
That's also overstating 4chan's influence in the 2016 election.
> overtake an entire category of mass media
Well, podcasts are pretty big now.
As for Sanders, he didn't win, he hasn't taken over half the Democratic party, and the people in charge aren't even paying lip service to his platform.
But back to SA culture and its innumerable offshoots and bastards: even if Chapo has comparatively less actual political influence than say Q did (someone posting on a 4chan offshoot), the dirtbag left subculture the podcast spawned is still of internet historical value, in the same way Anonynous (a 4chan hacker collective) is historically significant despite Anon having been dismantled by the security state since the mid-2010s.
Oh, and on that note- perhaps that means 4chan had some influence on the Occupy movement, not as a prime mover but certainly one of the groups participating in it. And while Occupy is long gone, it had its important moment, once.
On the flipside, later on 4chan was one of the major staging grounds for Gamergate.
At some point 4chan’s actions are its members’ own with no connection to SA, but without SA, there would be no 4chan, and the people who acted within it would’ve been redistributed elsewhere.
The hand of Lowtax moves through history like a dumb idiot god, but it does move.
I thought they just grew up. Any records they were really dismantled?
I think that wasn't just for his journalism though, but from worry that he might become another headache like Wikileaks, should be start focusing on other conflicts. They groomed him to be a bulwark against less friendly OSINT journalism.
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.
- qanon thing originated on another chan and it didn't have a cult following on /pol/, where people generally lost interest in trump pretty early into his presidency and largely denounced him by the end of it, although for very different reasons than everyone else
For posterity, here's that thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=42...
> One "moot" was then currently showing around his futaba channel clone "4chan"
And this one: https://forums.somethingawful.com//showthread.php?threadid=7...
A random post to his daughters:
“kids if your reading this: i paid for your meals. fuck you. i own you b*tch”
I was in the e/n scene so knew of SA but never got involved, and it wasn't till 2013ish when he started doing YouTube playthroughs of the worst indie 'games' he could find which were quite entertaining on their own merits and showed off people's creativity that might otherwise be ignored. Examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pIFud0Bsa8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsCF-mz6Y6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9II_cq01hY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRQC9c6RkeI
Geez that's a term I haven't heard in decades! I too was in E/N during SA times. Mostly on CFUS though.
The author on the matter: https://twitter.com/MALTSCHLITZMANN/status/12984608093419192...
Lowtax is definitely not going to the fun hell with all the furries he told to yiff in hell.
In my opinion this deserves the black bar.
He was also a terrible person who serially abused his wives and girlfriends.
His site was very influential (in good and bad ways), but that doesn't mean he is someone we should canonize or mourn.
>His site was very influential (in good and bad ways), but that doesn't mean he is someone we should canonize or mourn.
"You know what they say, speak ill of the dead!" - Norm MacDonald.
A person need not be wholesome or kind to warrant mourning their death.
Even if you despise the person, their death has caused real human suffering and pain among those around and associated to them.
fwiw I think it's incredibly tacky to go into a what is in essence a memorial thread to post a list of grievances against a dead person that has no means of explanation or defense.
I don't know about Lowtax's personal life -- this isn't a comment on that; it's a comment about those that feel the compulsion to post vitriol on memorials.
If you feel the need to shine light on the despicable , make a thread and let's discuss it there -- that way we at least stand the chance of sparing the bereaved.
Which scenario do you think is more likely:
A) A man whose entire career and public persona was dedicated to being an asshole happened to be an actual asshole
B) At least three women loved this guy enough to marry him and then decided to make up stories about how he abused them, convincingly enough that a court of law agreed
Keep in mind that in both scenarios, we know that he did spend all of his most recent wife's money and had a substance abuse problem.
The circumstances surrounding this incident in the last 24 hours sound absolutely fucking abhorrent. I’m honestly shocked reading the firsthand accounts in that thread. Just wow.
Generally the victims of a serial abuser are usually experienced the suffering and the pain while the abuser was alive and their death is a relief. (firsthand experience)
I really don't understand of this speak ill if the dead thing, where is the limit, am I allowed to speak ill of Stalin or Hitler or the other mass murderer assholes. If you were an abuser and you die, we should not mention that you were making life miserable people around you or what?
I didn't know the guy. He hadn't done anything that I would miss in a long time. I have no reason or obligation to mourn him.
> fwiw I think it's incredibly tacky to go into a what is in essence a memorial thread to post a list of grievances against a dead person that has no means of explanation or defense
I didn't list grievances. I was pushing back on the idea that HN should have a black bar to honor him. He wasn't honorable and doesn't deserve our posthumous reverence. If a thread had been started about him a week ago, almost no one would have anything nice to say.
Also the truly, hilariously ironic thing about writing "tacky" comments about people who can't defend themselves... this is exactly what Kyanka and his site were about. They had absolutely no respect for what other people considered tacky. If it was genuinely funny, it was OK to post it.
> that way we at least stand the chance of sparing the bereaved
What bereaved person is going to read this? He left behind wives and girlfriends who will likely be happy he's gone. They'll certainly be in a lot less danger.
So maybe he has children who would be sad, but even that isn't a guarantee.
Regardless, I don't care if I offend these incredibly small number of bereaved people who have a near-zero chance of reading this. Kyanka lived a life that didn't earn him glowing reviews. Would we be having this conversation if OJ Simpson died, someone proposed honoring him, and I pushed back on it?
If Kyanka wanted people to say nice things about him after he died, he should have said more nice things on the internet while he was alive, and he should have terrorized fewer vulnerable loved ones.
I think the one clever thing that Lowtax did was require the membership fee to post. I think this worked as a really good filter away from people who are just going to post spam and random crap all over the place.
Honestly, the thing I most remember Lowtax specifically for is his Gaming Garbage YouTube channel, particularly the first two years of his collaboration with Schmorky. Those were extremely funny videos that lacked all pretense, and sadly once it was determined that Schmorky was horrible and Lowtax seemed to have increasing trouble finding collaborators, the channel got pretty unwatchable. Still, the old videos from 2013-2014 are classic, and they're worth checking out.
I also made a winampdb client to pull your current song from iTunes, remember when everyone had one of those in their signature?
Ahh Winamp, good ole days before AOL ruined it.
Is there specific criteria for who gets a black banner and who doesn't?
One of my favourite posts of his, why lingerie is fucking stupid: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=38...
It's important when reporting on suicide deaths not to glorify suicide. Copy cat suicides are a real risk. Words like "successful" have a harmful effect. In fact, the media often doesn't state the cause of death, to prevent copy cats.
On the other hand, you don't want to dæmonize depressed people living with suicidal thoughts. "Committed" would imply people with suicidal thoughts are considering sinning or acting like a criminal, which isn't the case. Suicidal thoughts are serious, but people with them aren't evil, and should reach out for help and support.
[1] https://www.irmi.com/articles/expert-commentary/language-mat...
Moreover, I explained it is bad terminology, for it trivializes and normalises suicide.
Also reading the message from his ex really angers me. A man was so broken he took his own life, and she's concerned about the 350 dollars a month hes not giving her. It's gross.
Like seriously a man she once loved killed himself and her reaction is like "he should've payed up"
Btw what really bothers me? Wtf do you know? You pose the question to me but Im guessing you never met him. So im the weirdo for grieving the death of a man that brought a lot of joy into my life and youre like "let me shit on his legacy". So again fuck off.
And by the way Im NEVER going to celebrate the suicide of a person. Because I have fucking empathy. Do you?
But yes, it is not in my place to judge what someone might do in the depths of utmost irrational personal pain. It would be engaging in the same callousness that goons are infamous for. Perhaps the most appropriate response to this situation is neither demonize nor lionize this man, but to simply recognize him for what he was- a flawed man who nonetheless changed the world and the very internet itself.
I now understand that you have truly been deeply affected by this loss. I wish you may find peace in this difficult time, as he has. Go with God.
I created an account and figured it could go two ways - abandon it, or try to invent the most effective mental faeces filter human kind has seen. It’s been years.