I apologize for bumping, but I didn't realize Ryan had died until rather recently. I moved to Oregon in summer 2009. The last I had seen Ryan was that May, and we fell out of touch after that. I also stopped playing Smash for a while so I hadn't been to Smashboards in ages. I didn't realize he had died until I was searching youtube for my account name (which I had forgotten) by searching "NES n00b" since I had matches with him on my channel. I was shocked to see a video called "Always remember NES n00b" as the first result. It was hard to believe he died just a few months after I moved.
Ryan was one of my best (and only) friends when I lived in Mississippi from 2007 - 2009. He lived 2 hours away from me but he would drive to my place or I would drive to his every few weeks and play Melee. We also went to several tournaments together. I remember one time after a tournament, we got lost in Alabama around 3 AM, when it was snowing. Earlier that night we had gotten stuck in a hole in a parking lot and a local redneck pulled the car out of the ditch with chains. Despite the craziness of the situation, Ryan was in good humor the whole time, and it was actually fun. He was always like that. I have a pretty gloomy personality, but when I was around Ryan life just seemed more...enjoyable. It's so absurdly unfair someone like Ryan would die, at what, 22? And his dad had died just a year or so earlier. So unfair, so random...
