Welcome
My page has moved around a bit over the years, but you can always access it as http://www.eldacur.com/~brons/, the name it has had for nearly fifteen years. Any links to my pages should be made to eldacur.com rather than whatever ISP (MV, Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, RCN or Ultranet) I'm using at the time.
Recent Additions (Dec 11, 2009)
- Notice: Due to various time constraint issues,
we are temporarily suspending the Pantope FuRPiG game for a while, and will be playing in an unrelated world of Earl's devising, called "Lords of Being".
- Chapter 24: Colorado Vacation
- Chapter 25: The First Task, and Dreams of Goo
- Chapter 26: The Babe Magnet
- Chapter 27: A Sensitive Topic
- Chapter 28: Dognapping
- Chapter 29: The Fallen Will Rise Again?
- Chapter 30: Red Sun at Night
- Chapter 31: Chopping Block
- Chapter 32: Interviewing Perry
- Chapter 33: Getting into the Loop
- Chapter 34: If He Only Had A Brain
- Chapter 25: The First Task, and Dreams of Goo
- Chapter 24: Colorado Vacation
- Question:
Does anyone recognize the emblem on the belly of the fellow to the right?
There are 4 examples of it here. If you recognize them, please let me know.
The immediate family as seen on EPCOT's "Leave a Legacy". Larger versions and a other pics are on my vacation pictures page. |
Hi, I'm Jim Burrows, also known as Brons or JimB (it rhymes with limb). I'm a self-proclaimed nerd and an aging hippy living Ward Cleaver's life. I live in Maynard, Massachusetts, USA, Earth, with my wife, Selma; our sons Brendan, Morgan and Ian (who is back for the summer from college), our cats Devil, Hillary and Tomokato, (Devil's adventure up the tree is in a page of its own) and Colby, a miniature black/apricot phantom poodle and a 9/11 FEMA fosterling.
I went to school at Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio. My hobbies and interests include science fiction and other trashy books, movies and TV (I even review some of the books I read), Tai Chi Chuan, story-telling (see my musings page), computers (it's neat getting paid to do things you would do anyway), role playing (fantasy role playing games, murder mysteries, on-line gaming), genealogy, philosophy, designing clothes, art, and lots more.
Burrowing in the Family Roots
Genealogy has long been a hobby of mine, and so of course I've posted my data on the Web, not once, but twice. The current up-to-date version is to be found spread over a couple of sites. The main access point and index is on our family pages. The full GEDCOM data is stored over at the WorldConnect Project on the RootsWeb site. A set of simple 6-generation pedigree charts serves as the main index into it from our pages. There are also Research Notes for my active research on the Anderson, Blue, Brown, Burrows, Claypool, Stull and other families.A more out-of-date version can still be found on-line as well. One of my programming projects years back was creating a program that would turn my Burrows family genealogy database into English text. The result isn't going to dazzle anyone with its prose style, but think it's pretty readable and less intimidating to non-genealogists. (Most of the pages are small.) Unfortunately, a lot has happened since I created those pages. I've stopped working at DEC, moved my genealogy database to different software, and continued to do research. As a result, the pages are substantially out of date.
One of the parts of the family that I've made notable progress on is my
great-grandmother, Iona Blue Burrows's family, in large part due to having
my pages on the web. As you can see from my
obsolete pages, I'd done a fair
amount of speculation about how the Blue portion of the tree might be
structured, based on census records and what I learned from doing first-hand
research In Iowa. A couple of fellow Blue genealogists (no, we don't look
like Smurfs), saw my pages and e-mailed me. They pointed me to the
Blue Family
Association, which my wife and I have become very active in.
The Extended Family
And here's a picture of my extended family, or more correctly, the family of my aunt, Elizabeth Ellen Burrows Macleod Benchley Fisher, who a few years back. The picture was taken at the reception after her funeral, or perhaps I should say the pictures, since this is actually a composite of three very similar pictures. I couldn't resist a tad of Photoshopping to get better shots of a few people who were obscured in the main picture.
Solar System and Planet Simulations
I managed to make it on CNN a few years back, but sadly it was through a complete misunderstanding of some of my work. I have two long standing projects to do simulations of solar system formation and fractal planet generation. So, in 2000, when scientists actually found a new planet around Epsilon Eridani, they searched the web for references and found a randomly generated solar system I had created around that star.
The easiest way to see StarGen in action is the
Web
Interface, though there are command-line version available that run on
Mac OS and Windows.
The Friday Night game
For more than twenty years I've been hosting and/or running a weekly Fantasy Role Playing Game. For most of that time the game was held on Tuesday at our house. A few years back, we've moved it to Friday nights at Barry Tannenbaum's house. We put the weekly logs and other material about the most recent campaign on-line. The entry points are:- The "Jack and Pantope" Campaigns
- The "New Blood" Campaigns
- The Latest Logs (the TDFS Tindome scenario):
- Week 84: Underweigh Again
- Week 85: Sailing off the Edge of the World
- Week 86: Gifts in Darkholme
- Week 87: It's Been over a Year; Surely They've Forgotten Us by Now
- Week 88: Signal to Noise Ratio
- Week 89: The Temple of Healing
- Week 90: I Shall Never Understand the Ways of Foreigners
- Week 91: My Dinner with Khajad
- Week 92: A Psilent Harbor
- Week 93: The Trouble with Elves
- Week 94: Tea and Silver
- Week 95: Captains Consult
- Week 96: Who Are You People?
- Week 97: Unrest in the Harbor
- Week 98: A Change of Plans
- Week 99: We Got One!
- Week 100: Preparations for Departure
- Week 101: Now You See It, Now You Don't
- Week 102: Observations of Skull Island
- Week 103: The Tindome's Not for Burning (or Let the GM Have His Pick of the Cookies; We're in Combat.)
- Week 104
- Week 104
- Week 105: Home for Dinner
- Week 106: Receiving at the Reception
- Week 107: Dinner and Post-Prandial Activities
- Week 108: Elements and Alchemy
- Lords of Being (from Earl's Lords of Being Campaign) logs:
- Chapter 1: We All Meet in Bugtussle
- Chapter 2: Phone-In Campaign
- Chapter 3: "Nature Needs Frogs"
- Chapter 4: The Horror of the Nut-Walters
- Chapter 5: Cracking the Nut-Walters
- Chapter 6: Unmasking a Mole
- Chapter 7: Is that a Lord of Chaos in your Pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
or: I had a Chaos Lord, but I eated it - Chapter 8: In Bermuda, No One Can Hear You Scream
- Chapter 9: The Last of the Nut-Walters
- Chapter 10: On the Road Again
- Chapter 11: Spirited Away
- Chapter 12: How Much is that Airplane in the Window?
- Chapter 12a: Notes
- Chapter 13: The FBI Knows. Keep up the Good Work
- Chapter 14: Captain Barron's Briefing
- Chapter 15: The Road to Madagascar
- Chapter 16: The Ghost in the Machine –or– Spooks on a Plane
- Chapter 17a: Lauderdale to Madagascar, -or- There and Back Again
- Chapter 18: Neville's New Look
- Chapter 19: Decoys
- Chapter 20: The Blessing of the Sheik
- Chapter 20a: Lauderdale to Madagascar, via Luxor, -or- or There and Back Again and Again
- Chapter 21: Pages out of Order
- Chapter 22: Five Flying Fish
- Chapter 23: Ho for Diego Garcia or Anomaly Down
- Chapter 9: The Last of the Nut-Walters
The game is played by a home brewed set of rules that we've developed over the last 16 years or so. The rules are called FuRPiG and are, perhaps, rather what you would get if GURPS were developed from Chaosium's Runequest or Basic Role Playing rather than The Fantasy Trip. A preliminary draft of the latest version is available as a PDF file on the Eldacur Annex.
Thoughts and Musings, Tales and Myths
Over the last couple of years I've developed a small collection of essays and other writings here on my Web site. The Bardic Musings page is where I've collected them. This section includes things like:- Remembrances of my father
- For my sister's wedding: On love, trust and commitment
- How I met my wife Selma
- Why am I called "Brons"?
- The adventurous Mlle. Maupin
- One of my favorite stories: The Intermediary
- Reviews of three books
- My theory of why "trash" is better than "literature"
- What sort of trashy fiction I like
- But does it really protect the children?
- Why being called a "nerd" isn't so bad
Cheesecake and The Art of the Pin-up
Several years ago I got asked a couple of questions about "Good Girl" and "Pin-up" art and before I knew it, I had created a multi-page web site on the subject, which has been cited in a number of other sites and even in print a few times. The pages include instances of nudity, but as my subject matter is pin-up and not pornography, readers will probably not find it particularly shocking.Art Challenge
Inspired by a gift from my mother, I have a bit of a challenge (and of course a dollop of opinion regarding art, history and the world) on my Mystery Artist page. Hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed both my mother's gift and the hunt for other pictures to illustrate the challenge with.
Comic Books
A couple years ago, I started reviewing comic books, especially with an eye towards the positive trends that I see in the field. Actually, many of these trends reflect trends in the art world and our society at large. As you will find if you read my pages on trashy fiction and its relationship of trash to art, I think that both heroic fiction and illustration are very important, that they speak to us and about us.Seeing heroism and solid art return to the comics, and strong independent female characters as opposed to the demonized "bad girls" is very encouraging to me. If you've been turned off by comics in the last few years, or never really enjoyed them, take a look at my page and some of the comics reviewed there.
The Nerd Corner
The Nerd Corner is where I keep all my computer-related stuff, along with an explanation of why I decided that being called a nerd wasn't so bad. Several of the pages in the Corner are where I distribute the various bits and pieces of freeware I've made over the years. Some of the things in the Nerd Corner include:- An essay on the history of the term "nerd".
- JimB's Icons (not just) for Macintosh
- Inverse-T for Older PowerBooks
- The History of the Inverse-T
Friends on the Web
Having been on the net since about 1973, I've quite a few friends on the Internet. These days that's coming to mean having a Web page. Here's a partial list of Web pages of folks I've known and worked with. They're all oddballs, Mill Rats, SF fans or all of the above. (If I've missed yours, send me mail.)My pages are all built with BBedit. I test them with Firefox, Safari , Camino, and a bunch of other browsers, but should work with any Web browser.
Send me mail if anything here doesn't work with your browser.
Sign me:
Brons aka JimB. aka Jim Burrows
Jim Burrows 8 Howard Rd Maynard, MA 01754 |
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