My name is James White, I have been running some version, iteration, or incarnation of Turtlshel since the spring of 2002. Very originally the domain name for my translating company (Turtlshel Translating Company), which was named after the legendary original of some of the Hanji/Kanji characters coming from the fire-caused crack on the turtle shells that were used by early Chinese divinators and that were eventually codified into the ancestors of the characters we know now.
As an autistic person (undiagnosed for much of the life of this domain) with a special interest centered on knowledge and knowing, I have a very wide area of interests and hobbies. Turtlshel.com and turtlshel.org drifted over the years as the focus of my interests changed. While I was trying to build up my translating company and in the short time after, the site was filled with resources for advanced learners of Japanese, which were scarce online in those days.
I made a move as a undergrad from Classical Japanese to geomorphology. During that period, the focus of the site was on field techniques, pedology, land-use-planning, aerial photography, surveying, stratigraphy, and hydro modeling.
Fly tying, music, my paintings, poetry, a home for my various NaNoWriMo novels, concert reviews – this site has held a lot of things. But really only one thing at a time. Every six months or three years I would completely overhaul the site to be a home for whatever the new thing I was excited about.
This current iteration (October 2025) is trying to unify all of those past things into one place where I can post about all and whichever of the things that are taking my interest at the moment.
It may seem frivolous to be posting about my silly things while the long shadow of fascism plunges much of the Western World, and especially the United States, into the dark night of hatred, violence, and oppression, but I believe strongly that one of the ways we help the darkness is by stopping all of the beautiful, creative, community-building, unifying, joyful things we are doing and voluntarily extinguish our own lights. I may fight in other ways, but on this site I will be fighting one photo of my dog, and one silly poem, and one LEGO build, and one unbelievable sunset at a time.