Japanese, games, fatherhood, fitness, and the things I build. Side quests from the main quest of life, logged one entry at a time.
Your life isn't just one main quest. It's a world full of side quests.
I started a new side quest: short videos under the Sidequesthings name, about anime, games, idols, Japanese and whatever else catches my interest. Here is why I started, how the 30 Videos Quest works, what the five series are, and where to follow along.
Continue quest →One client job taught me more about running client work than any template could. Here is how I turned what went wrong and what worked into a small system of skills, templates and notes, and why every page of it had to be done for real once before I wrote it down.
Continue quest →A family-led holding company needed one place investors could trust and a separate site for each of its businesses. Here is how I thought it through: the parent site, the construction site, the investor pipeline, and how every update ships.
Continue quest →Confession first: I hate needles. Not a mild dislike. The kind where I get a little tense just thinking about a vaccine schedule. Being pricked, being injected, any of it, I’d rather not. So of all the side quests I’ve picked up, this one was never on my list. Then a friend of mine, someone…
Continue quest →I’m at chapter 154 as I write this, and I still stop mid-chapter to plan builds in my head. That’s usually the sign a story has me. The setup is familiar isekai territory. Elymas is born into a family of master swordsmen, and at fifteen he gets his class at the Ritual of Divine Blessing.
Continue quest →I gave this blog a whole new look without touching a single post. Here is how I restyled the theme in place, proved it on a staging copy before it went live, and kept a way back the whole time, with before and after screenshots of every page that changed.
Continue quest →A client reviewed her company's live website on her phone and asked for ten changes, including 95 new photos on six project pages. Here is how I made the photos safe, rehearsed the round on a copy of live, and shipped it the same day without breaking anything.
Continue quest →Between 2004 and 2010, I wrote a lot of poems and posted them on PoemHunter under James Callos Jordan. Then life moved on, and so did I. Somewhere along the way, I lost the login. That page is still out there at poemhunter.com/james-callos-jordan/, and it’s going to stay there. Without the credentials, I can’t edit…
Continue quest →Every save file ends eventually. This week I’m retiring wotakunai.com. Before pulling the plug, I took one last walk around the place. This is how it looked on its final day: a quiet grey layout, a penguin in the sidebar, and a tagline I never got around to changing: “I love the new Dragon Quest…
Continue quest →The weekend before my JLPT N3 exam, we took the kids to Binondo. There’s something about walking through the oldest Chinatown in the world with your kids that resets your head in a way that last-minute cramming never could. We wandered, ate more than we probably should have, and let the day be about them…
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