Lowtax from Something Awful forum has died

[IlluminatiPirate]

Well, looks like the founder of something awful has died. He was a forum brother like us.. he was a pioneer of the internet.. RIP lowtax

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3984488&pagenumber=1&perpage=40


View: https://youtu.be/2UkcZ4LtSE8

 

[y2k]

feels so weird to lose such a big part of internet history even if he wasn't the greatest guy. rip lowtax

 

[s0ren]

It's insane how much of internet culture spawned out of his shitty little forum. Zoomers have no idea what SA is or the impact that it had on the internet. RIP.

 

[vaporwavemaster1]

私はずっと前にそれらのフォーラムにいました。彼は常に問題の修正と不一致の解決に長けていました。間違いなく非常に専門的で有能なモデレーターです。彼は惜しまれるでしょう。

 

[mast]

Definitely caught me off guard. I've never used SA but as @s0ren said, it's influence on internet culture is probably unparalleled. Always sad to see the "old guard" of the internet passing on.

 

[inverse_square_matrix]

May he rest in peace. His contributions to our culture won't be forgotten.

 

[Kolph]

Damn RIP

 

[WALFTEAM]

We learned late last night it was suicide. It probably couldn't have gone any other way:

 

[IlluminatiPirate]

We learned late last night it was suicide. It probably couldn't have gone any other way:
View attachment 9514

Oh shit, thats pretty depressing.

 

[inverse_square_matrix]

We learned late last night it was suicide. It probably couldn't have gone any other way:
View attachment 9514

Oh no.

 

[WALFTEAM]

There's a lot of diaspora from Something Awful, and I unfortunately include myself in that. I signed up for the place before the paywall went up, in 2000, while goofing off in a high school Java programming class. I never was too deeply involved, but there's a LOT of people online who were.

Lowtax was always a troubled guy. Most of the people involved in trolling-as-subculture were, even early on. He suffered from depression and substance abuse, and it got worse and worse as the people around him (most of whom weren't in much better or worse shape) just shrugged it off. Going from that it comes as little surprise that the domestic abuse allegations were ignored for years until the site administration's disagreements with him came to a head over the last 3-4 years; suddenly after that it was all considered plausible.

An unimaginable number of people hate his guts, some for good reason (i.e. his exes, people he screwed over IRL) and some for petty reasons (i.e. people he banned from his own website). They're all currently united in dancing on his grave, both in the memorial thread on SA, and all over Twitter, where most of SA's top posting talent migrated starting in 2010. It all seems kinda gross and abusive, but that's almost fitting. In a messed-up way.

 

[Grimace]

Damn man, sad news. I was never a SA forum member myself but I sure lurked the hell out of that page/the forums in the 00's and a few old high school friends were posters and would show me all the their favorite threads from the FYAD forum behind the paywall/etc. Weekend Web, Photoshop Phriday... classic stuff. Odd personal anecdote, the dude I knew who was most obsessed with being on those forums 24/7 offed himself way back in 2007. Nuts. None of us are perfect. RIP Lowtax.

 

[WALFTEAM]

View: https://twitter.com/ShmorkyNFT/status/1604588041535979520


This popped up yesterday. The account seems to speak with some authority on what actually happened to Dave "Shmorky" Kelly, Lowtax's one-time friend and major website contributor. He claims he's dead, with zero details as to when and how.

As you probably already know, Shmorky fell out with SA around 2015? 2016? and hasn't been seen or heard from since 2017. The details are particularly ugly and stupid.

Either the person doing this NFT crap based on a bunch of "previously unreleased commission art" knows for sure what became of him, OR this is an attempt to draw him out on the off chance he is still alive.

 

[power gem]

View: https://twitter.com/ShmorkyNFT/status/1604588041535979520


This popped up yesterday. The account seems to speak with some authority on what actually happened to Dave "Shmorky" Kelly, Lowtax's one-time friend and major website contributor. He claims he's dead, with zero details as to when and how.

As you probably already know, Shmorky fell out with SA around 2015? 2016? and hasn't been seen or heard from since 2017. The details are particularly ugly and stupid.

Either the person doing this NFT crap based on a bunch of "previously unreleased commission art" knows for sure what became of him, OR this is an attempt to draw him out on the off chance he is still alive.

damn, I figured this was shmorky himself coming up with a stupid scheme to get money but the person behind this seems to have a legitimate internet footprint as a boomer "blockchain entrepreneur". she wrote about shmorky in more detail here and the story is so absurd that i'm inclined to think that it's true. basically he was her roommate for some time and she paid him to make illustrations for her business because she felt sorry for him. her coworkers hated the illustrations and begged her to stop using them so they've just been sitting on her hard drive for years. she also tries to psychoanalyze shmorky:

What struck me most was his lack of strong characteristics. He was amorphous. Sort of a shapeless blob, not in a physical sense, although I doubt he had much muscle tone, but in his aura. (Not a mystical thing, I mean like what he gave off. Normally people attract other people in some way. You are either attracted or repelled by another person – sometimes you are confused because they are sort of a pushmi-pullyu – but you have a response to them which is dependent on both you and them. I am a high-valence person. People generally either really like me or really dislike me, usually a sign of fear. I rarely encountered someone with no apparent externally-focused energy.)

i'm not really sure why anyone would want to pay for Corporate Memphis clipart as interpreted by a furry pedo though.

 

[WALFTEAM]

So the previously unused art story is true, but there's still no answer as to what the hell actually happened to him. If he is still living this might be one way of him simply handing off what's left of his baggage; he has to have been living totally off the grid under another identity if he's still around.

Whatever bad or good he may have done and whatever's been done to him I guess I'm cool with that. His ex still thinks he's alive, for what little that may or may not be worth.

 

[Alone]

I miss this dude. I really liked his YouTube channel.

 

[WALFTEAM]

I forgot this >reddit thread existed, but it's very good. Summarizes what was happening on SA leading up to the coup.

 

[Iommi Fan 420]

I don't really know the whole SS/SA shit, but from what I gather the SA "goons" are what ruined the internet and the fella who offed himself hated them and its all a big dumpsterfire and shit idfk.
Apparently these lads originated on that cunts forum and even though they haven't released anything in fuck knows I still think they're mad cunts. One of my all time favourite videos; "jogger Dave" is the funniest shit to me still even fuck knows how many years later.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-OWaeBpqh8