About Me

Background

My name is Liam Dempsey (he/him), otherwise known as Shymander, and I live in Melbourne, Australia with my beloved partner and cat. I completed the International Baccalaureate program in high school, graduated from Monash University with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Japanese Studies and Global Asia, and now primarily work as Sr. EN Editorial Producer at Crunchyroll.

My primary interests include anime, gaming, and film, keeping me on the pulse of popular culture as a viewer, player, reader, and creator around the clock. I'm also a Eurovision fanboy and a die-hard supporter of the Collingwood Football Club.

My Professional Journey

In my 25 years of life, I've been an award-nominated environmental activist, fast-food worker, wiki creator, fan fiction writer, poet, cricketer, game developer, stage play actor and director, yearbook committee head, dorm RA, table tennis player, and so forth. In short, I have a knack for throwing myself into any opportunity that presents itself — and that's precisely what got me deep into the anime industry.

It all started in January 2017 when, on a trademark whim, I signed up for MyAnimeList.net's synopsis writing program. I then put my hand up in April to lead a new community-driven initiative for the site's Featured Article page alongside user Congress, who I'm still close friends with today. The snowball grew even larger when I successfully applied to the social media moderator team in August, where I assumed a head role after only a few months. These were all volunteer positions, but I took the latter two more seriously than anything else at the time because they allowed me to express my creativity in a self-governing environment while developing experience in writing, marketing, graphic design, data science (somehow) and team leadership beyond my years.

My success in growing MAL's broader online community presence through distinctive statistics content and other initiatives caught the eyes of industry figures at Crunchyroll and Funimation, with the latter offering me a freelance contract shortly after I decided to spread my wings. I joined the Crunchyroll News team when the two services merged in early 2022, where I've continued to evolve as a creator and person since.

On the side, I work as a project manager, editor, and typesetter for a localization group subcontracted by bilibili for anime simulcast subtitles, where I've overseen quick turnaround times on translations for popular titles such as Classroom of the Elite, WIND BREAKER, The Devil is a Part-Timer!, and My Dress-Up Darling.

What I Want to Achieve

I thrived on three emotional tenets in my volunteer days, for better or worse: "I want to do what no-one else was doing," "I want to make people say 'oh my god'," and "I want to do cool things too". The sky was the limit to my juvenile self, so after effectively reaching it… I haven't been sure about where to go.

For the most part, I've happily chugged along honing my journalistic craft, privately sourcing anime news faster than major aggregator accounts most of the time, and doing the occasional big project like the award-nominated English dub census, which is an unwieldy mostly-solo venture. But my struggle to commit to new ambitions and the isolating elements of the job — operating mostly alone in the off-hours, 8,000km+ from the closest co-worker; passing things off into a void of sorts — have accumulated into a sense of disconnect from what once motivated me so fiercely. I've reckoned with it by telling myself that I'm simply more suited to being a grunt behind the scenes, but lingering creative visions persistently scratch away at that excuse. I mean, I still live and breathe what I do, so I shouldn't be afraid of owning it and letting myself have more to show for it.

In spite of my namesake, I'm tired of shying away from myself and feeling crippled by it.

Thus, this site, presuming my resolve doesn't fizzle out again, is to reclaim at least a little personal confidence; to see what happens if I do things for myself once more and try to be the singular figure I look up to and know I can be. I'm still not sure what it'll look like exactly, and maybe this, too, won't be the solution to my dilemma, but it starts with JUST DOING IT.