Bio
I’m Nick Tantillo, although several people share that name. I did get the domain, so take that doppelgangers!
I live on a lake in suburban New Jersey with my wife. I’m a Computer Science Engineer by trade who loves getting down and dirty with legacy code and database driven applications. I’m currently exploring a new chapter as an author, but I’ll always be a programmer at heart.
Noteworthy
On May 3rd 2010 my childhood best friend and I won Google Blog of Note for our beer blog, “A Tale of Two Brewers.” Our traffic exploded. The brewer from Schmaltz brewing got into a real honest to goodness internet argument with me. Finally, I had offended a real brewer! As Brewer Nick I posted humorous reviews and ramblings about beer a decade ago. 2010 was a wacky time… I did a juice cleanse, the world wasn’t on fire, my biggest concern was whether or not “pumpkin spice” would ever catch on.
The site is still up, but it had a bit of a rough time of it. Long story short, either the blog got hacked or somebody at my old job decided to delete all my posts. Restoring the blog took a herculean effort of web-scraping to piece it back together. Eventually I lost my mind and did that juice cleanse I was talking about, but no award has really topped “Google Blog of Note.” It created a new writer in my internal bag of crazies that would need to eventually be let out.
A favorite couple of ancient AToTB posts:
Stuff I Follow
Writing:
Peter Clines but specifically the blog. He’s the author of the Ex-Heroes series, which is almost like a humorous take on Marvel Zombies but so much better. That series reached his conclusion but he’s written some excellent sci-fi, 13 being my favorite. His blog is full of writing advice, B movie commentary, and Gauld cartoons. A++++ highly recommend.
Food:
- Atomic Shrimp – This guy goes out and forages foods from his suburban English countryside and makes interesting meals. I found him because of his “Weird Stuff in a Can” series. I bought some of the Fray Bentos canned steak and kidney pie for myself and quite enjoyed it.
- Babish Culinary Universe – Andrew got popular on youtube because of reddit. He started out cooking all the food that is mentioned in films and tv but has since expanded his channel. He’s going places. Very talented.
- David Seymour – I love this channel when I need something light. David will take versions of a recipe from popular spots like TikTik, YouTube, etc. then make and rank them.
- emmymade – Similar to David above, Emmy generally makes viral recipes from social media. She’s an avid beekeeper and has a very positive attitude.
- HowToBBQRight – I have learned so much about BBQ from this channel and still use a bunch of their recipes. Just perfection. I wish I could reach into the screen and taste what he makes.
- SORTEDfood – A group of English friends have cooking contests and review cooking gadgets. Just an all around quality channel.
- The Food Theorists – Matpat (famous from Film Theory and Game Theory) tackles all sorts of urban legends, rumors, etc. about fast food and goes into way too much detail. It’s pretty funny, especially the episode about how long a person could survive in a grocery store.
- TheReportOfTheWeek – Strange dude reviewing mainly fast food. His wholesomeness can do a lot to improve my mood.
- Weird Explorer – Collects exotic fruits and does taste tests. I learn a lot about other cultures watching this channel. He doesn’t have a lot of subs but it’s a cool channel.
- Steve1989MREInfo – My wife will never understand why I enjoy watching a person open ancient MREs and see if they are still edible. It’s hard to put into words. This guy is like the Bob Ross of MREs.