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Comment count is 26
duck&cover - 2022-01-05

This is a ride down nostalgia lane for me. I remember finding the site and reading Jeff K, Cliff Yablonski, Fireman Comics and other articles. Sad ending for Lowtax.


Meerkat - 2022-01-05

Sometimes I would go there and read bits of dumb shit in between online Quake matches if PlanetQuake didn't have anything interesting.


duck&cover - 2022-01-05

That said, I'm not excusing his treatment of his ex-wives.


Crackersmack - 2022-01-05

Lowtax was an even bigger piece of shit than I was previously aware of, but this was definitely nostalgic for me. When SA was good it was the funniest place on the internet. This documentary was well done but I'm surprised it left out any mention of Helldump, which as far as I know was where "doxxing" was invented.


Anaxagoras - 2022-01-05

Yeah, SA really was great. And wow, yeah, Lowtax was a bigger piece of shit than I had realized too. Although, weirdly enough, his life story is beginning to convince me of the truth of Buddhism's assertion: "Don't hate shitty people. Pity them, for they're in great pain, and don't know any better."

Lowtax was definitely a shitty person, but I find myself pitying him more than hating him.


Crackersmack - 2022-01-05

Some people's purpose is to serve as an example of what not to be.


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2022-01-06

I don't pity him as much as I pity whoever paid 15 million for Ebaum's World.


Pillager - 2022-01-05

His poor daughters...


Chicken the Did - 2022-01-05

Lowtax earnestly believed that having nice, shiny shit and the desire for said nice, shiny shit was the motivation for getting up in the morning. And anybody who told you otherwise was either a damned liar, an idiot or they just sucked at the game and it was a case of sour grapes. The concept of a family was just another status icon achievement to unlock and flaunt. Like sports cars they were ultimately replaceable. You don't get to have attachments when you are on that level. Even though he only even near that level for short time.

Then he rapidly became the kind of person that he'd mock in the old days. He would rather die than be that guy. Even if it meant fucking up his kids for life and maybe -especially- if meant fucking up his kids for life as a defiant middle finger to the people that he felt wronged him. Humility is for losers after all.


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2022-01-05

The internet makes you stupid.


Crackersmack - 2022-01-05

Actually I'm pretty sure I ended up as a SA poster because I found it through the original Portal Of Evil somehow. I know that's how I found Old Man Murray, etc


Stopheles - 2022-01-05

I think it was the Encyclopedia Dramatica that noted "PoE users look down on SA users in the same way that SA users look down on Fark users."


Miss Henson's 6th grade class - 2022-01-06

It did! With a picture of fighting housecats, or something! And they got that right.

It was sad that ED went from being a highly obnoxious and extremely profane -- but often useful -- repository of internet weirdness and folk history to being a hangout for actual Nazis and alt-right types. I wonder what it's like over there now.


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2022-01-06

I definitely found Portal of Evil through a link on SA, though I never really got interested in SA. Back then, I naively believed that the internet DIDN'T make you stupid.


yogarfield - 2022-01-06

@stopheles All true, and the ED and SA types can fucking rot.

There is a place you won't find that actually does what POE used to be about. We don't worry with the prime directive thing because you'll never find us, but several members here have been, for lack of a better word, exhibits.


MacGyver Style Bomb - 2022-01-06

Lowtax was always a dick. A funny dick, sometimes, but a dick all the same.


Quad9Damage - 2022-01-06

Haven't watched it yet, so no stars, but I just wanted to say Something Awful, Portal of Evil, and Seanbaby were my go-to websites in the late '90s and early '00s, back when I was a very stupid adolescent in a rural Protestant town of 4,000. PoE was the best forum community I could have asked for. Seanbaby's writing style was and continues to be god-like. As for Something Awful, I ate up ROM Pit, Awful Anime, and the movie reviews on an almost daily basis—basically anything Zach "Geist Editor" Parsons wrote.

These weren't just quality websites, either. They represented something special and innocent about the old Web. As it stands now, with the Big Four buying up and owning every aspect of the Internet, and mining data, and pushing everything under the same ToS, we will never get that back. Ever. The old Internet is gone, and so is any of hope of getting those good times back. I almost cried typing that.

Now? Welcome to the Coughin' '20s, when Lowtax has killed himself to get out of alimony payments.


jfcaron_ca - 2022-01-06

I'll echo all that. There must still be holdout groups like poetv here, on IRC or newsgroups, but it's probably impossible to find them if you're not already in them.


Boomer The Dog - 2022-01-06

May not watch, but I get the point. PoE is the only site of this type I've read, when you all had my site as an exhibit, after I wrote about being a real live dog and posted my odd dog-human drawings. I liked PoE because it had more bite than the furry world did; Furs had no hard questions or challenging conversations about why you are your animal.

I looked at SA and ED when they did pranks on furries. A buddy of mine even had a page on him at ED, they seemed to do a lot of research on their exhibits.

The web isn't as fun as it used to be, due to the Big Four as you mentioned. I'm not surprised about what happened, because it was the same thing with early radio, wild and wonderful at first, allowed to descend into chaos to where people were begging for cleanup and order, which they got from the government. Networks, seeing big money in it, then took over from the amateurs and locked it up for themselves and their listeners. Later generations knew nothing of the old times, and didn't care, they were super-served a high quality product on an easy to use radio, and couldn't see any other possibilities.

What I liked about the old web was looking at and building personal websites, I always had a home page and worked on it a lot, that was my thing, and did blogs, fun technical things I could do on my own time rather than forums.

I don't like the Big Four at all, no use for them, they could go away tomorrow and it wouldn't impact me directly that much. They are the American kings and queens now.

Boomer


Leviathant - 2022-01-06

+1 for nostalgia/throwback. PlanetQuake/Gamespy/whatever offered to buy out my Nine Inch Nails fansite if I rebranded as PlanetNIN and used their CMS and served ads on it - and I'd get paid a salary of a little over $20,000 on top of that. I think I wrote back to the guy asking if he had his resume polished because I thought that was the stupidest idea I'd ever heard.


Boomer The Dog - 2022-01-06

That's funny, and maybe it was fake, you might have branded and advertised for them for a year, then never see your salary because they'd skipped town.


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2022-01-07

Putting aside the not inconsiderable issue of Facebook possibly bringing the dystopia down on us, this is a well-organized and interesting documentary about an obscure subject, and it wouldn't have existed before 2010. There's no way I'd trade YouTube, Sunday night movies on Streamdumper, access to thousands and thousands of comic books, HBOMax, Netflix, Tubi, Pluto, Google Play Books, and even Facebook, (where, god help me, my old friends and relatives are) for one more dogpile (no offense, Boomer), on Poe-News or one more look at Rotten.com, though if I wanted to I could always find it on the Wayback machine.

I thought I was going to hate the cloud, but I fucking love it. There are no books to clutter up my apartment, no magazines, no audicasttes, no CDS, no videocassettes. I have ADHD, and managing all that stuff was a nightmare for me.. My best friend was a hoarder, and it literally killed her. She fell and hit her head trying to save her stuff, and she's been gone for four years.

Whats missing are those great portal sites like POE, long lists of bizarre web destinations. Nobody's interested in doing that any more, I guess, but also just how much atrocity tourism can you do? I don't want to be ironic ALL the time; that would just make me a dick. A lot of this shit was just juvenile, and it disappeared because people grow up, at least if they don't want to end up like Lowtax. And young people create a new culture that you're going to hate, because you're an adult, and you're supposed to.

Theres a billion people out there, and there's still weird creative stuff happening every day, and we're still finding it. Anybody can be creative on youtube


Spit Spingola - 2022-01-07

I agree, even though I still kind of cling to a few shelves and boxes of physical media. I’m happy I unplugged from this kind of toxic stuff in the ‘00s. Looking back, Portal of Evil went offline at the right time and people in the forums feeling superior to internet weirdos (as bad as some of the sites were) was one of the worst things about it.


cognitivedissonance - 2022-01-07

I friended him on Facebook like a decade ago and never bothered to unfriend, because it was fascinating to watch. The end was a cryptic daily plea for help in his usual shitty style. Then, of course, he just died, and that was the end of Lowtax. Same as he lived.


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2022-01-07

Still finding good content in the related videos sidebar.


Meerkat - 2022-01-08

Man I am getting some pretty frightening suggestions from YouTube now. One was about Shmorky and another one was about uh oh shit now I forget. But holy crap that shit was so cringe I couldn't even watch it. Skipped town and watched Captain Aty the Otter instead. So wholesome except his owner has some kind of weird fascination with his balls. So maybe not that wholesome.


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