Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka, the founder of the now dying Something Awful has reportedly died at age 45.
Details about his sudden death are unknown, though an article I read claimed an account allegedly owned by his ex said he shot himself because he would not be able to afford debt payments.
It should be noted he backstabbed everyone who called out the regressive left in defense of those freaks, and it should also be noted he is a domestic abuser and got canibalised by the same subhuman animals he defended at the cost of his site's reputation.
Let's hope the now ruined Something Awful transitions into an archive.
Hard to imagine now, but SomethingAwful was the funniest site on the web from 1999-2005 and laid the groundwork for future humor sites. Lowtax was also the epitome of the devil-may-care carefree Gen X attitude that was all over the web in that era. It’s also credited with producing the first memes, a completely playable RPG (Awful Fantasy), popularized bad video game reviews, and was the source of many funny photoshops that originated on their forums. It was worth the $10 paywall to join their forums in the mid 00s, which was unheard of at the time.
However....
Before SJW term was even coined, they were on all over their forums. And they were really bad. Like 2021 bad only in 2009, that’s how extreme they were. It only got worse as time went on. Many of their posters were the vanguard of movements such as OWS, Antifa, the Young Turks, Reddit and other leftist trash.
It’s legacy is mixed, to put it mildly.
Ah, YTMND. Those were the days.
TIL that YTMND was an acronym.
Somehow I missed it. I've certainly heard the name but never went to the website. I probably saw their work second or third hand, kind of like how people know about stuff coming from 4chan but don't actually go there.
If you ever played any big MMOs chances are you ran into them as “Goon Squad” or their crème de la crème “Elitist Jerks”