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

After 146 hours (and 38 minutes), I've seen the true ending and rolled credits on Persona 4 Golden. This was my first time completing any Atlus RPG and I'm so happy I did.

If I didn't already have an answer to "Are video games art?", P4G would be a decisive "YES!"

Yet, as much as I loved it and loved the experience of it...I can't really recommend it to anyone.

There's so much you have to be willing and able to look past; and even though that stuff's a small part of the game...it looms.

One thing that I am happy about: I spent all of my PTO to take a long end-of-year vacation. I didn't work a single day in December.

I have 3 more days before work starts back on Jan 6.

So ending P4G now where Yu has to say goodbye to the good life of Inaba while I am saying goodbye to the good life of not-working...it resonates.

I'm glad I finished it today before the rat race started back up.

It is late January. All character Personas are level 99 and my Compendium has several level 99 Personas in it.

I'm trying to maintain at least 1 million yen to feed into the NG+ which means that every time I fuse a new Persona (an expensive endeavor), I have to grind out more cash.

According to Steam Replay, Persona 4 is where I've spent most of my Steam-time this year and I am, finally, beginning to see burn-out approaching.

I would really like to finish this game so I can start Metaphor: ReFantazio before I learn all about the spoilers. But I also need to be careful to not just get sick of the whole thing.

I'm also a little worried about [SPOILER DUNGEON] where I understand that you lose SP after every fight. I'm so close to a strong finish here and am now terrified of getting stuck like I did in P5:Royal.

I need to make sure to keep save files going back a few days, just in case.

It's Saturday, June 25, 2011. After grinding everyone to level 50, I have saved Rise Kujikawa from the TV world.

I now have a month to kill.

Rolled credits on Endwalker. I thought it was fantastic and a phenomenal way to close out the story started in A Realm Reborn. I've only been playing for a few years; I wish I'd been along for the entire decade-long ride. I bet this ending would have provided an exceptional feeling.

I do think there were some narrative problems with this expansion (or, really, "problem"-singular - it starts with "Z" and ends with "ENOS") that ultimately made a truly emotional experience fail to fully stick the landing. But in my retelling of the story in a couple of years as memory fades, I suspect I won't even remember the clown prince.

As for the future, I'm not going to barrel towards Dawntrail at full speed. Instead, I want to spend some time stretching out in what Endwalker left behind. I've got a lot of jobs to level and side quests to explore. I spent some time unlocking the Endwalker Society quests today and am looking forward to building those up in particular.

I've started the C# port that I talked about 9 months ago.

My actual job has been extremely demanding this year so I haven't had much extra bandwidth to spend on coding, which means that the project is taking forever.

But, as far as it goes, I'm happy with it. I think the code is shaping up to be fairly high quality and more adaptable than the original.

I'm not sure how much of that is "I have some expertise with C# while I was learning F# as I did the first version", how much of it is "I did this already and know what my mistakes work", and how much of it is "the rewrite is still extremely early and small; it will get worse as it gets more complete".

Probably a dose of all three...but hopefully much less of the latter.

The various sections of this website have dramatically lost pace with reality. A lot of that is because I just didn't do a good job at making it easy to update (one of the things I want to fix with the second version) -- so much that I'm using other systems to track it (such as StoryGraph for books and Backloggd for games.

I'm not sure how much effort I want to spend over in those systems organizing things if I want to eventually manage them over here again -- or if I want to figure out how to sync those systems to this website in v2.

Until then, I've decided to be comfortable with everything being a mess.

Six months, this time.

I've been continuing to take the slow path through Endwalker. I'm enjoying the story (though not quite as much as Shadowbringers) -- but at this point, there's so much to do that I don't actually spend a ton of time on the MSQ.

I think that's a solid mark for the game. While all the systems are very similar (and all based on MMO actions), they're varied enough that I don't really get bored.

That said, some things are tedious. I am sick to death of leveling jobs. All of my ranged DPS jobs are fairly low-level and the idea of leveling them to Endwalker filled me with dread.

So I spent $25 to buy a job skip for Machinist. What an incredible use of $25.

To get the story, I'm working my way through the job quests using New Game Plus right now; but I can skip all of the intermediate "Keep doing the same dungeons, FATEs, leves, and Society quests over and over again in between job quests" part. I've just done them too many times now.

Also, Machinist rocks. I think I should've done this instead of Red Mage. I'm happy to add it to my repertoire going forward.

I'm seriously tempted to buy skips for some of the other jobs as well; but my other roles are leveled high enough that it would feel like a waste of money. My MCH was in the low 30s so bumping it up to 90 (and skyrocketing it past my other jobs and my place in the MSQ) for only $25 felt like good value for money.

Doing the same with my 81 DRG would be...significantly more dollar per level. And yet, it would save so much time.

This is an interesting game but it just didn't hold my interest enough.

I've heard good things about the way that Infinite Wealth improves upon this one and I am definitely going to try it out. Eventually.

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