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

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.

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.

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