Some of this just didn't have anywhere else to fit on this website. These are some of my random memories and laughs that couldn't quite fit into another section.
Ryan was incredibly gracious and thoughtful with gifts. Rarely did I see him spend on himself (there was one famous time where he bought an obscenely priced Diesel jacket after a freelance project, but that was an outlier). Ryan took pride in his gifts and consideration for others. It was something I admired and shared in common with him. Some of my favorite items he got or gifted me: my hori hori garden knife, a book all about natural farming (The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka), a special knife from our shared Hawaiian connections, a gift certificate to a legitmately well-curated record store (Rough Trade). Often when we were catching up on the phone in later years, he would be scheming and sharing some of what he wanted to give to his family members. He really was selfless in some ways, to a fault at times.
Ryan loved systems - it was something that him and I bonded over. We shared a deep mistrust of humans, albeit with different reasonings and life experiences. What we did trust however, was a system. Incentives and structures that eliminate our need to trust individuals. Maybe it sounds morbid, but we much preferred process to people. A system freed us in ways, to operate freely within a guarded fence. This applied to so many of our creative endeavors - music, cinema, editing, even how we named playlists and folders. I still have a media-ingestion-diagram that Ryan shared with me to create asset libraries at scale for agencies that process and edit multiple projects at once. I feel like this website is a fitting system to remember him by - it is not a mere static obituary and memorial. It lives, it grows, it has a driving force behind it giving it depth and additional dimension. Cheers to you, Ry.
Ryan reminds me so much of one of my favorite birds, the raven. Solitary by nature, and miunderstood for the entirety of its overlap with humans, they are one of the smartest members of the animal kingdom. They utilize tools, have a deep mastery of sound and flight, bring gifts to people they admire and respect, are always cloaked in black. Much of my love and admiration for the entire corvid family comes from Ryan.
One of the many post-work hangouts on Ryan's apartment