Prologue

I posted this yesterday because I was able to get ahold of the radio host/podcaster Jonathan Wier by finding his LinkedIn account. I have been a fan of Jonathan’s podcast for about a year, and I also knew him from some previous work on YouTube. Jonathan doesn’t have any other form of social media and as far as I can tell does not have any form of public email address, but I suppose due to the societal peer pressure in our lovely capitalistic planet, it’s difficult to opt out of the use of LinkedIn.

He accepted my connection request, I messaged him asking a few questions, and since he’s a nice person he politely answered them.

This would be a pretty short and boring story if it could really be reduced down to “fan finds person on LinkedIn,” to a point where it might honestly feel like a waste of time to even write about it.

However, I didn’t reach out to Jonathan as a fan. I like his podcast but not enough to waste his time to ask him questions over it. I reached out to Jonathan because Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka committed suicide with a shotgun two years ago.

Chapter 1

You might be wondering who Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka is, and you might be wondering what relevance this has.

Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka founded the comedy website “Something Awful” in 1999, or at least that’s how it was intended. I believe Lowtax really wanted something more or less akin to The Onion, or Mad Magazine, filled with goofy articles written by Kyanka, but going into detail about them is largely a waste of time since no one remembers Something Awful for the comedy articles. They were there, and people generally liked them, but they were just gravy for the real reason that people logged in: the forum.

The Something Awful forum has become somewhat mythologized in later years, but fundamentally it wasn’t terribly special. It was a largely-unmodified version of vBulletin, and technically it was borderline bad. Lowtax was not a technical person, and as a result, the forums were rarely updated and often buggy.

That said, the Something Awful forums had one key bit of cleverness: there was a one-time ten-dollar membership fee to make an account. A user could be banned for any number of reasons, but they were allowed to make new accounts for another ten dollars.

It is hard to overstate how important this was. We take for granted AI-assisted spam filters on social media now, but these didn’t exist in any kind of usable state in 1999. Ten dollars was not so much money that it would prohibit anyone from posting, but it worked as a natural filter to keep out a lot of shitposters. If actual money is on the line, even a relatively small amount of it, people will prioritize posting interesting content instead of casually spamming the N-word.

This also had the benefit of, in addition to ads, creating a revenue stream for the website, which was important because bandwidth and hosting were still quite expensive in the late 90s and early 2000s.

The Something Awful forums ended up as a birthplace for a lot of early memes, like the infamous “All Your Base” and “Advice Animals”, as well as a home for people who loved offensive humor.

I first discovered Something Awful in 2006, at age 15, after a temporary ban from Newgrounds, and was almost immediately enamored with the forums. As soon as I got home from school, I would log into Newgrounds and Something Awful (after the obligatory adult websites that most teenage boys in that era would frequent), and I would stay on for as long as my parents would let me. I wasn’t nearly as funny as most people, so I didn’t post a lot, but I would lurk on the forums for hours and hours. The “Fuck You and Die” (FYAD) forum in particular was of particular fascination to me. In my somewhat sanitized media consumption as a child, I had never before seen a place where the express goal was to offend as many people as possible, and as someone who has always gotten a kick out of making people uncomfortable, I couldn’t get enough.

At the time, Lowtax was sort of a legendary figure to me. He was active in the discussions, he was routinely funny, and he had this bizarrely commanding presence. This was the dude who had founded this forum after all, and it was pretty obvious that he was to be respected, if for no other reason than he could ban anyone.

I frequented Something Awful for about three years and casually lost interest in the site around the time I graduated high school. It wasn’t any particular event that caused me to lose interest, I had just (like so many other people) migrated over to websites like MySpace, Facebook, and Tumblr for all my social media and gradually forgot about Something Awful.

Chapter 2

Fast forward to 2012. I had dropped out of college and recently moved to Dallas for a girl that broke up with me shortly thereafter. About a week after being dumped, I was also fired from my job. I was sad to be dumped, but I also really hated that job so I had this bizarre state of sadness mixed with relief, but more importantly, I had a sudden abundance of free time, which was spent applying to jobs on Craigslist and watching videos on YouTube. It was around this time that I discovered the channel “Gaming Garbage”, Lowtax’s YouTube channel.

Instead of focusing on forum activities, Gaming Garbage largely focused on incredibly low-budget, low-effort, barely-functional video games downloaded from websites like GameJolt or YoYo Games. Lowtax and his partner Shmorky would play through the games and make jokes about it along the way. Shmorky had an extremely high-pitched, almost cartoonish voice, and played up a more silly persona while Lowtax generally took a bit more of a down-to-earth stance.

I found the videos instantly charming and remembered why I had liked Lowtax years before. The combination of bizarre and irreverent humor was exactly as I remembered it. Lowtax was an extremely interesting person who had a way of consistently being the funniest guy in the room, and due to the relatively low effort required to cover these crappy games, videos with Lowtax and Shmorky were uploaded between four and six times a week, generating a lot of content quickly. I eventually found another job, but like my fifteen-year-old self from years before, I again found myself looking forward to coming home to see updates from Lowtax, only this time in the form of YouTube videos, and continued this pattern until 2015.

In 2015, the routine uploads of videos stopped, in no small part due to allegations being made against Shmorky involving pedophilia and scat. Lowtax would still upload the occasional livestream by himself or with his daughter, but the drop in quality was apparent to anyone consistently watching.

I stayed subscribed to Gaming Garbage, and would even occasionally watch the livestreams, but it stopped being the ritual that it had been in the Shmorky years. The videos just weren’t as funny. Lowtax may have consistently been the funniest guy in the room, but that only works when the room isn’t empty.

Chapter 3

While I hadn’t given up on Gaming Garbage, it was deprioritized in comparison to all my other YouTube subscriptions. This changed in 2017 when all of a sudden Lowtax uploaded another video with a partner: Jonathan Wier.

Jonathan was a radio host in the Kansas City area who had become friends with Lowtax in 2017 and started to collaborate with him in making more Gaming Garbage videos.

These videos were just as good as (if not better than) the Shmorky videos. Jonathan was great at playing off of Lowtax’s humor and seemed to have the same nearly-infinite ability to engage in bizarre tangents that made me enjoy the videos in the past. Uploads became frequent again, so I yet again found myself looking forward to Lowtax at the end of my day.

In addition to the Gaming Garbage videos, a standalone podcast was started with Jonathan and Lowtax: Murder the Internet.

Murder the Internet was similar to Gaming Garbage in that it retained the bizarre humor and style that I had come to love over the years, but was unconstrained from the context of making fun of video games.

Sadly, I think I was also the only one that loved Murder the Internet, and I can understand why. With Gaming Garbage, there was always an actual game that could “ground” the conversation. The conversation could never go too off the rails because fundamentally the goal was always to poke fun at the crappy game.

Jonathan made routine appearances with Lowtax for about a year and a half until the beginning of 2019, after which he abruptly stopped showing up. At the time, it was a total mystery as to why, and once again uploads became infrequent and were generally solo affairs with Lowtax, and so once again I stopped watching as frequently.

Chapter 4

2019 became the beginning of the end for Lowtax.

Without going into too much detail (there are plenty of videos doing that already), Lowtax started going through a messy (second) divorce.

Accusations involving him being a domestic abuser of his wife started to circulate in relevant circles, and he was also very obviously becoming increasingly intoxicated in his videos.

His livestreams, in some ways, did become more interesting to watch, but for all the wrong reasons. Now, instead of watching them for their comedic value, I was watching as a form of bizarre and depressing emotional porn.

A lot of his livestreams would end up with him getting distracted, and then led to him crying. I remember multiple rants about how his antidepressants made it so he couldn’t maintain an erection anymore, about how he wasn’t allowed to see his kids, about how he had no more money anymore, etc. It was sad stuff, but bizarrely, it did lead to me once more frantically tuning into his streams as soon as I could.

I followed a lot of the drama that unfolded about Lowtax as it came out on KiwiFarms and (ironically enough) Something Awful. I didn’t want to believe it, and a part of me didn’t, but it was becoming clear that my internet hero was far from perfect.

Lowtax stopped uploading normal gaming streams, and the streams he did upload became very strange. They were incoherent, hard to follow, and unwatchable, and so I stopped watching, for good this time.

Chapter 5

While I was still subscribed to Gaming Garbage 2021, it was broadly out of a feeling of “I’ll feel guilty if I unsubscribe.” I would see that livestreams existed, but I didn’t watch them because I figured that they would be the rambly, incoherent mess that I had come to expect.

However, for reasons I don’t think I’ll ever truly understand, I still had this unwavering respect for Lowtax. He was the king of the internet, after all, and he had recently sold off Something Awful, fully disassociating himself from the website.

I had a policy of accepting every single request on LinkedIn, no matter what, and as a consequence of this I had built up a fairly sizeable following on there. Enough to where if I were to try and connect with someone, they would generally accept me out of curiosity.

I don’t know what compelled me to look, but I searched for Richard Kyanka on LinkedIn and found that Lowtax was looking for a regular, normal-person job. I sent him a connection request, and to my surprise, he accepted it almost immediately.

I sent him a long message explaining that I was a fan of Something Awful and Gaming Garbage, and would love to buy him lunch at some point.

To my amazement, he said he would be down for it, so over the next few days, I would constantly refresh my LinkedIn messages, eagerly waiting for Lowtax to get back to me.

At one point, I suggested I could fly over to Kansas City in December of 2021. He responded to that with the statement “Shit, I could be dead by then.”

I thought that was a bizarre thing to say, but Lowtax was always saying bizarre stuff, so I responded by suggesting November 13. He said, “That works much better. And you have my permission to stab me”.

I bought a plane ticket to Kansas City and went to bed. As I lay in bed, I start thinking about what Lowtax said to me, and it’s giving me bad vibes.

Is what he’s saying a hint? Should I call someone? Who exactly should I call?

But then I thought that I’m just being paranoid, and if I call the police or something, he’s going to think that I’m weird, and then he’s going to cancel our lunch, and I certainly don’t want that. Best to not worry about it.

Chapter 6

It’s Wednesday, November 10, 2021.

I’m at my parents’ house, because a friend of mine was getting married in Orlando in early November, and since I worked remotely, I figured that I would stay with my parents until Thanksgiving.

I sign out of work for the day and send a message to Lowtax trying to confirm the time and place we are meeting at. He isn’t responding to my messages on LinkedIn but that’s not too out of the ordinary.

Then I see a bunch of messages blowing up the Gaming Garbage Discord. They’re talking about how family members think Lowtax is suicidal.

I panic, and I send another message to him on LinkedIn, asking if this is some joke that I don’t get, he isn’t responding, and for the very last time in my life, I am eagerly hoping for some kind of update from Lowtax.

It turns out that the people on Discord were right. Lowtax had killed himself.

He had killed himself, and I did nothing to stop it.

Not only did I do nothing to stop it, I chose to do nothing. I had seen the signs and actively decided not to try and help.

Chapter 7

Lowtax is dead, I didn’t even try to help him, and there’s a level of guilt that I will carry with me forever. I had made the decision to convert my parasocial relationship to a real one, but chose to ignore the responsibilities inherent to an actual relationship.

To this day therapists are useless for this. All they seem to concern themselves with is telling me that it’s not my fault and that there’s nothing I could have done. I know they mean well, but even when it happened, and especially now, my guilt doesn’t stem from the fact that I feel like I could change anything. It comes from the fact that I chose to do nothing.

Life doesn’t give most people a lot of character tests. Everyone thinks they’re a good person; it’s easy to be a good person when nothing challenging happens. I was given that challenge, and I failed. I know it’s not my fault, I didn’t tell him to kill himself, but I also know that I should have tried. The correct thing to do would have been to try, no matter how futile.

But I also know that no utility can come from moping about it. Until I have a time machine, or until I can convince myself there’s an afterlife, all I can do is try and be better in the future.

Epilogue

I have been unemployed for the last two months. This isn’t the first time it’s happened, but it’s led to a lot of feelings of inadequacy. Feeling like I’m a shitty person. Feeling like I have no business trying to compete in the real world. Frustration that I can’t seem to wriggle my way out of this.

And when those feelings take hold, I also think of Lowtax. I think of a deeply frustrated, complicated guy person who was unprepared for and unhappy with the legacy he left behind. I think of a guy who often meant well but also suffered from personal demons he couldn’t overcome, but also a guy who was willing to meet up with a fan for no other reason than to be nice.

So that is why I reached out to Jonathan Wier, on Linkedin. I wanted to know what it was like to work with Lowtax. I wanted to know how Lowtax’s suicide affected other people. I wanted to hear about the good and the bad, and Jonathan was happy to oblige.

It’s easy to try and put people into boxes of “good” or bad. For the last two years, I’ve put myself into the “bad” box because of the overwhelming guilt that I’ve felt over Lowtax’s suicide, and it’s the first thing I think of whenever I make a mistake.

It’s funny that by missing someone for a few years, you kind of grow to forgive their flaws. Lowtax was a deeply imperfect person, but I think I’m willing to forgive him for everything.

And finally, and unexpectedly, I think I’m ready to forgive myself too.