Brewer Nick circa 2010

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.

Tech:

  • Coffeezilla – Mainly famous for exposing crypto scams. He’s a good financial youtuber.
  • DankPods – Hilarious reviews of old MP3 players from the 90s. Insightful reviews of audiophile headphones costing several thousand dollars. He’s super entertaining and down to earth, but his info and reviews seem to be right on. Just don’t listen to Scarlet Fire on any dirtybuds.
  • Freakin’ Reviews – I would be a sucker for as seen on tv products but James White buys them all first and reviews them. Now I only buy the good ones!
  • Graham Stephan – Good financial advice from somebody that saved up enough money to buy rental homes by only eating subway sandwiches for years. He dabbles in crypto too.
  • Hoovies Garage – The dumbest automotive channel in all of youtube. Hoovie built his hooptie fleet and loves driving around exotic cars acquired at bargain bin prices.
  • JerryRigEverything – Jerry got famous doing teardowns with a trusty razer blade and Mohs’ hardness picks to see what makes the latest and greatest phones tick. It’s transitioned into more of a lifestyle channel where he makes cool electric trucks and gardens but he just seems like a good person.
  • LGR – Nostalgia for any 90s kid. LGR does cool projects building old computers and mostly playing Duke Nukem.
  • Two Minute Papers – Computer rendering and AI is getting spooky good. This scientist breaks it down into bite sized tech demos.
  • Stuff Made Here – If you ever wanted to see somebody make a baseball bat that uses ammunition to launch a baseball into space this is your channel.

Pure Entertainment:

  • Good Mythical Morning – I watch this out of habit more than anything but Mythical Chef Josh has become one of my favorite food YouTubers.
  • Internet Comment Etiquette with Erik – I’m ashamed this is even on here but he’s low-brow funny.
  • j aubrey – I generally don’t like YouTube drama but the research done here makes this very informative.
  • Philip DeFranco – An old school YouTuber, I love his brief news show 4 times a week.
  • Steve Wallis – If you want to watch a Canadian go camping once a week this is your guy. His stealth camping videos are especially good.
  • VoicePlay– Extremely talented vocal group that does popular song covers.
  • ashens – Another old school YouTuber who got famous for eating very old food and reviewing cheap toys and crap from wish.com.
  • ContraPoints – Natalie makes very informative videos on mainly gender issues. They are long but really well done.
  • cyriak – Trippy music videos that are just my jam.
  • Felix Colgrave – Similar to cyriak above but the music is better.
  • Ghost Town Living – Brent bought an abandoned mining town in California and has been living and working there for over a year. He has over a million subs. He’s an inspiring person, I should probably do a bigger feature on him.
  • Geoff Castellucci – Amazing bass singer.
  • I did a thing – Crazy Australian who makes ridiculous inventions and plays with weird animals in his yard.
  • JCS – Criminal Psychology – Really well done depictions of criminals, mostly through police interviews.
  • LockPickingLawyer – There’s no lock this guy can’t pick. His videos are short and sweet.
  • Mark Rober – Famous for the glitter bombs, this former NASA engineer makes some really engaging content usually featuring some sort of charity or outreach.
  • Nerd City – The production values in this channel are off the charts. He covers whatever he feels like but every video is amazing. He’s currently running the Dead Avatar Project, an NFT experiment with a lot of promise.
  • wavywebsurf – He mainly follows up with people who got famous for being in memes. Pretty interesting stuff.

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.

Art:

  • ComicTropes – If you like deep dives into comic writers and artists this is a great channel.

Games:

  • Skill Up – Laymen Gaming was my favorite source of gaming news once ScrewAttack gave up the ghost. They split up, and I picked Shiller. He does a great weekly roundup of gaming news.
  • The Spiffing Brit – If there’s exploits to be found, Spiffco will find them. His channel features bizarre game breaking content sometimes gamifying things like the YouTube algorithm itself. He’s found some pretty crazy hacks.