About Me
Hello! I'm LantisEscudo, and I'm a nerd-of-many-stripes from New England and currently living in the Greater Boston area. I've been using this name online since 2004, though I have used a few others as well - most notably Honou Productions (the studio name I release most of my fan music videos under) and JHUBattousai (which I used in college and stopped using not long after graduating).
Anime and AMVs
My longest-standing nerdom has been Japanese animation, which I got introduced to through Sailor Moon's original US broadcast on UPN in 1995. Joining and later serving as an officer in my college's anime club got me in deeper, and I'm still an avid watcher more than 20 years later. I do have a massive backlog of things to watch, though - I had to start keeping a spreadsheet of the DVDs and BluRays I own and haven't watched yet to keep track (117 series and movies as of this writing), and that's not even considering what's available on streaming services now.
My time in the anime club also introduced me to AMVs, which is my most active fandom. I've been making AMVs since 2001, and also branched out to making more general fan music videos over the years since then. I've won a few awards, but mostly make videos that I enjoy, even if they're not particularly popular. I've been in charge of the AMV Contests at Anime Boston and Bakuretsu Con since 2016 and 2014, respectively, which is a very different role in the AMV community, but also a very rewarding one. It's an amazing feeling seeing people react to watching their work on the huge screens, and I love being able to give something back to the community.
Retro Video Games
I first got to play video games on my kindergarten's TI99 and a friend's original NES, but the first console my family owned was the Super Nintendo. A Link to the Past was the first game I ever beat, and is still one of my favorite games today. Getting into anime also led me to discovering games from other regions and emulation. The first console I bought for myself was a Sega Saturn (in 2000, three years after it was discontinued), specifically to play the Magic Knight Rayearth game, and that started me down the path to collecting games based on anime and manga sources. I decided to set the sixth generation (PlayStation 2/Original Xbox/GameCube/Dreamcast) as my collecting cutoff, largely because of the explosion of games and the transition to digital distribution with the seventh generation.
I finished the US side of my collection at 187 games in mid-2024, and have been working on the Japanese side since then, where I've acquired about 400 of the 1600ish games on my list. I still have a huge number that I haven't played, but someday I hope to get to at least most of them.
Hockey
I grew up in a hockey-mad town just south of the Canadian border, so I've been a fan of the sport for as long as I can remember. My NHL team has always been the Bruins, and I've always rooted against the Canadiens. I've also been a season ticket holder for UMass-Lowell since 2015, and go to almost every game, both home and away. The away games have also been great opportunities for vacations, including to Ireland twice (2015 and 2022). I'd played a bit of street hockey growing up, but didn't have the time or money as a kid to get into anything organized. But watching the UML games led me to finally get on the ice myself in 2016, playing in a recreational league as a skater for one season, then switching to playing goalie. After a couple years off during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I joined a 40+ rec league that I still play in every week.
Coding and Making
My college degree is a Masters in Computer Science, and I've played with small projects in a variety of languages over the years, including Java, C, Ruby, Python, PHP, and NodeJS. I mostly use an unusual proprietary language for my day job, but there's some NodeJS and Python involved as well. A lot of my code is for parsing and manipulating tabular data, so command-line is my usual go-to, but I'm trying to learn more GUI programming for some things I've got planned and in the works.
On the other hand, my hardware skills aren't nearly as polished. Large-scale, I can bodge together boxy but functional wood things, but detail work I find difficult. I also haven't worked with metal at all, and probably won't in the near future - it's a material that demands too much respect to tackle without taking some classes on doing it right first.
For electronics, I don't have the knowledge base to design circuits, but I can at least follow other people's designs with clear instructions. Skill-wise, I can do basic soldering, but not easily, and SMD is still well beyond me, so I'll often just breadboard things unless I need it to be fixed in place for some reason.
I started playing with 3D printing in 2019 with a balky Ender 3 that I spent more time trying to repair than sucessfully printing. I switched to a Bambu Labs P1S after three years of fighting with the Ender, and it was a world of difference. My modelling skills are still very basic and boxy, but for the things I've wanted to print (mostly organizers and display stands), it's worked out pretty well. I do want to learn more about modelling, but finding the time to do it has been difficult so far.