In memory

John Taylor

1979 – 2019

This site exists because of John Taylor. Not as a metaphor. Literally. The anime, the Japanese music, the culture that every post on this blog is built around — John opened that door. He didn't make a recommendation. He just assumed you'd love it too, put it in front of you, and moved on like it was obvious.

He was right every time.

Before any of that, he was the battle buddy in Computer Science at Clemson University. The person who showed up for the hard classes, stayed through the hard stretches and made sure Ryan actually finished. Not a tutor. Not a mentor in any formal sense. Just someone who refused to let the difficult become permanent. That kind of friendship doesn't have a clean name. It's just the difference between making it and not.

John and Ryan went to Dragon Con together every year. Four days straight, the full thing, moving as a team through the Marriott and the Hilton and the Hyatt, convention badges around their necks, backpacks loaded. The NASA Space Shuttle Program shirt. The glasses. The thumbs up in every photo from inside a crowd. That was John.

He was the guildmaster of The Stoppable Force. Four years of Warcraft raids, late nights, the particular kind of friendship that only forms when you spend hundreds of hours solving the same problems together in the same virtual rooms. John ran it like he ran everything: with more patience than the situation probably deserved, and a quiet insistence that people do the right thing.

After college, John worked at NASA in Huntsville. Ryan visited. They did the tours of the base together, walked through places most people only see in documentaries, and John treated all of it with the same low-key enthusiasm he brought to everything: genuinely excited, never performing it. That NASA Space Shuttle shirt he wore to Dragon Con every year wasn't ironic. He earned that one.

He also put up with a lot. The impatience. The over-the-top humor. The quips that kept coming whether the room wanted them or not. John absorbed all of it without complaint and somehow stayed. That's a specific kind of loyalty that most people don't talk about because it's hard to describe without sounding like you're confessing something. Consider this the confession.

After college he was the person who showed up. Not with advice. Just with presence. The kind of friend who gets you through hard stretches not by fixing anything but by refusing to disappear. That matters more than most people say out loud.

He passed in 2019. He was 40.

This blog is dedicated to him. The anime posts, the Japanese music, the argument that creative instincts are the same across every medium — all of it traces back to a person who thought that stuff was worth paying attention to before it was easy to say so. John paid attention. He passed it along. That's the whole thing.

Almost twenty years of friendship. That's the number that lands hardest. Twenty years of learning from someone who was quietly smarter than most people in any room he walked into, who never made you feel like he knew it. A genius who wore it lightly. That combination is rarer than either quality alone.

Every post on this site is written in the spirit of what he opened up. That's the only way to honor it right.

In dedication to a once in a lifetime friend who is missed tremendously ◆