Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka may be dead, according to social media posts and reports on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit. If you only look at the media, you could think it’s a joke because some have claimed he died fighting a squirrel, and others are jokingly referring to today as his Deathday.

However, it appears that something has happened, and he has died. It is true, however, that the cause of his death has yet to be revealed. Well, it appears that people are being nasty, but many people believe that he was the least distinctive talent and that no one has lost anything, which is a major statement.

To call FYAD a "community" would be a generous hallucination. It was a digital landfill, a high-velocity stream of consciousness where the only currency was "irony" and the only goal was to be the loudest person in a room full of people screaming at a wall. It was a place where "humor" went to be stripped of its context, beaten into a repetitive pulp, and then discarded for something even more inscrutable. Something Awful, much like the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ who opened it, has ceased operations. To the outside observer, it was a foundational pillar of internet culture; to those who actually spent time there, it was a massive, $10-per-entry experiment in how much human bile a person can upload to the Internet before somebody finally steps in to stop the travesty.

Kyanka’s life was essentially a 20-year case study in what happens when you accidentally invent the modern internet but lack the basic social functioning to actually live in it. It’s fitting that the man who founded Something Awful spent his final years being the living embodiment of the site’s name—a chaotic, high-latency mess that even a dial-up modem would have struggled to sympathize with.

He managed the rare feat of being the only person in e-history to be "ratioed" by his own legacy. To some, he was the visionary who gave us the "Let’s Play" and the "Slender Man," but to the rest of the world, he was just a guy who somehow lost a fight to a Terms of Service agreement and his own reputation simultaneously. If there’s an afterlife, he’s probably currently trying to charge the intake demons $10 just to post a complaint about the cooling system, only to find out he’s already been permabanned.

socials are rytcposm or rytc.creature or rytccreature or rytc.posm are socials