By all accounts, the good things about Something Awful were in spite of Kyanka rather than because of him. He neglected the site for many years before selling it.

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.

>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.

"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.

This is not a memorial thread. And the fact that he shot himself a day after being judged a domestic abuser adds a lot of relevant context that readers on this forum deserve to know.

In case anyone is surprised to read this, it isn’t speculation. It’s deep in the thread but it’s indisputably there from someone who would know.

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.

Do you suppose anyone ever committed suicide after wrongly being adjudged an abuser?

So you think it's possible this guy married three different women who all said he abused them, and at least one of them also tricked a judge into agreeing?

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.

> A person need not be wholesome or kind to warrant mourning their death.

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.

>Even if you despise the person, their death has caused real human suffering and pain among those around and associated to them.

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?

Most humans are imperfect. Some guy once said something about casting the first stone. A more recent guy pointed out that analogies with Stalin and Hitler are usually not illuminating.

"Imperfect" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I don't know what the reference to a character in a book is doing there. Godwin of Godwin's Law fame said you could compare people to Hitler.

> By all accounts, the good things about Something Awful were in spite of Kyanka rather than because of him. He neglected the site for many years before selling it.

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.