James Williams.me

James is a standard issue nerd, practically to a fault. He was learning BASIC while his peers were learning to throw and catch. He enjoys walking around a well-lit 3D-rendered landscape but would prefer to stay indoors. He won't dance (don't ask him) but he will /dance and /manderville all night long. If you're interested in an in-depth analysis between the command techniques of various Starfleet captains, you are going to have a great time with James at parties (this is a lie: James doesn't go to parties).

Professionally, James is a seasoned developer with nearly two decades of experience. He enjoys all sorts of different programming languages, platforms, and programming methodologies. His own personal style is a spicy mix of functional and object-oriented: he even nearly understands monads!

When he's not working, he's probably poking at his personal programming projects. Beyond that: you might find him playing a turn-based RPG (or watching a Let's Play of a more action-oriented RPG), editing pictures in Photoshop, reading a novel with a spaceship on the cover, and always always always drinking far more tea than can possibly be wise.

(The lemur's name is Gary.)

James' Resume

My Recent Activity

The book section of this website is a disaster because the book section of my life is a disaster.

I'm tracking things in a Notion database I built, the random books I've bought that have been added to my Kindle library, and Story Graph. I just don't know where this website fits in.

Ideally, Story Graph will add an API one day. Until then, I am thinking of just ripping the book section out. It turns out, I don't really have many thoughts about books mid-read and I don't really enjoy writing reviews when I'm done with them. When I do have something to say, I'm just sticking it on Mastodon. So the books section here is extremely vestigial and wasted.

At the end of the day, I was not as erudite as I'd hoped to be and I built an entire feature as a monument to that shame.

So if I delete the feature, at least I can just lurk quietly in the background without publicly claiming that it's taking me years to read Spock's World just because I never update my actual website.

Everyone's raving about Infinite Wealth; but I never finished Like A Dragon so I started a second playthrough of that one a few weeks ago: so far, entirely on the Steam Deck.

I never finished my first playthrough, though I was many tens of hours into it. I think I hit a wall where I was going to need to grind a bit to move on.

Hopefully, I'll avoid that on this run because it really is a fun time.

I started FF7:Rebirth a couple weeks ago but haven't really played it much.

It's extremely open world in all the ways I don't really enjoy.

I need to try to push past that and just mainline the story; but I'm concerned about being under-leveled. I'm also a little concerned about missing most of the game...but, then, SE should've been concerned about making most of the game fun.

I don't think I'm going to have rave reviews about this one, to be honest.

I keep thinking about starting a new playthrough of this (because I have no idea where I am in it) but I just don't want to. So much for me and Fire Emblem, I think.

This is a cool game that I am probably never going to touch again. It doesn't have that certain je ne sais quoi to bring me back in my limited leisure time, unfortunately. But I'm glad I experienced what I did.

This didn't hold my interest; which makes me sad because so many people I want to be like just absolutely love it. And yet.

The amount of time and attention I have had for an economic grand strategy sim is exactly 0 hours. And that's been over nearly a past year.

Maybe I'm really just not the sort of gamer who can handle these kinds of things.

In any event, I'll stop fooling and take the "in progress" tag off this game.

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