Come and Play with Us

Posted on May 31, 2025 by Reverend

“Come and Play with Us” Diorama all but done

In the two weeks since being visited by Canadian angels I was able to finish up the “Come and Play with Us” Bav-O-Rama featuring the scene where Danny encournters the Grady sisters in the hallway. It was a tour de force to put it together so quickly and I’m glad it’s done because I can now get back to my regular life. I could feel part of me transforming into a timeless, psychotic resort caretaker. That said, besides obsessing over every detail, it was a blast to create it and I learned a ton along the way. I’ve got a lot to share from the process, but right now I’m exhausted so I’m just going to put this post on my blog as proof I met a self-imposed end of May deadline. YEAH!

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Chris Long “On Writing”

Posted on May 31, 2025 by Reverend

The Bloggers Anonymous series “On Writing” continues to win hearts and minds as the reclaim blogging underground “movement” increasingly gains steam. Few can better articulate the importance of inhabiting your own space online than Chris Long, Provost of the University of Oregon, and long-time blogger. His The Long Road Blog and Digital Dialogue podcast emerged from the faculty development work happening at Penn State University’s Teaching and Learning Technologies in the mid-2000s. We spend some time talking about the optimism and promise these digital publishing tools represented only twenty short years ago and how the subsequent break down in civil discourse represents an existential crisis to the values that undergird the noblest ideals of higher ed.

Chris’s commitment to diverse communities defined much of his work in his previous role as Dean of the College of Arts and Letters and the Honors College at Michigan State University. His authenticity (a word that comes up again and again in multiple discussions about blogging) as an administrator and willingness to not only be vulnerable, but also openly work through his ideas with the broader community makes for a truly unique campus leader. At the center of his attempts to build a sense of community and trust during this moment of deep political uncertainty is a bold return to the blog for “Finding New Modes of Communicating as Provost”:

For more than a decade, this blog has been a third space of essaying for me, situated between the private reflections of my daily writing practice and the polished prose of the public messages, statements, and other publications expected of me first as a scholar, then as a Dean, and now as Provost.

Perhaps in this difficult time, when the very purpose of higher education as a sacred place of inquiry and learning is under threat, this blog might continue to be a place of public reflection for me as Provost. Perhaps too, these practices of public writing might open us to new possibilities of connection that make university life so vibrant.

I have to admit it’s sometimes hard to hold onto a broader sense of optimism in these dark days when the vestiges of US democracy are being dismantled at a breakneck pace, but talking with Chris provides a ray of hope. His belief in dialogue, reflection, and intercultural connections as an antidote to the closing of the American mind is chicken soup for the bava blog soul. I come away from this conversation hopeful that all is not lost and the power of connection to reinforce the hopes of a purposeful life can very much be rooted in a faith in the seed of an authentic, reflective, and searching post on one’s blog.

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Bryan Alexander “On Writing”

Posted on May 30, 2025 by Reverend

As my youngest son would say, in the parlance of our times, “you’re glazing Bryan Alexander again, dad.” This episode was a bit of a lovefest for edtech’s hardest working man, and I have no regrets. Bryan’s impact on the field of edtech has a long, storied history and I think we do a pretty decent job of covering some of the highlights in this chat. One of the immediately refreshing and endearing elements of Bryan is he hates talking about himself, and is constantly deflecting any praise—which I’m sure made this conversation uncomfortable for him, but sometimes he’s just got to deal with the facts!

The “On Writing” series is very much about the power of blogging to create a voice online, and Bryan’s early blog Infocult (which is still going!), is something we discussed at some length in this episode given it was very much a model for me in 2005/2006 when trying to decide what this blog was gonna be all about. I often reference D’Arcy Norman’s blogging about Drupal as a model for ultimately dedicating at least part of my voice to WordPress early on. The other part was all about an exploration of media of all kinds, and two of the biggest influences in that department were WFMU’s Beware of the Blog and Bryan’s Infocult, a deep dive into the occult, gothic online world we live in. It was immediately apparent to me this was a passion project that managed a voice that was simultaneously inviting, informative, and fun, a really powerful balance of sharing one’s passions while at the same time being open and ready for any and all discussion.

That’s actually a pretty good way to describe Bryan: a passion-driven, authentic, and open educator in a classical sense of that term; he wrestles with the forces that shape our world (online and off) no matter where it leads him intellectually. All that while at the same time being ridiculously generous. He’s kind of a big deal in my heart!

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Art Therapy, Bava-O-Rama, and Blogging about Blogging

Posted on May 27, 2025 by Reverend

I’ve been pretty busy as of late, even if the blog doesn’t fully tell the tale of the tape. In fact, it’s been hard for me to keep up. Here’s a quick tally of all my blogging debts:

I already blogged about the Canadian angels that visited bavastudio a couple of weeks back to give me a much needed kick in the ass to jumpstart the The Shining diorama. As of today I’m just a few short days away from completing this one, and I have to say it’s been pretty amazing.

The Shining diorama in-progress at bavastudio

Not so much the quality of the diorama, by all accounts it will end up being a fairly sub-standard addition to all the amazingly creative fan-produced art dedicated to The Shining—and I take full blame there. But that’s not so much the point, kinda like blogging. The diorama space has become a form of therapy (again like blogging) to push myself into a habit of creating and connecting. The whole idea behind bavastudio was to get out of the basement and try to separate work from home a bit more clearly. I was also increasingly in need of a space for storing, working on, and, hopefully some day, sharing my enthusiasm for 80s video game cabinets with the residents of Trento as some kind of oddball museum.

Bavastudio

Welcome to bavastudio!

It’s that last part around sharing enthusiasm for culture that’s very much at the heart of this blog, and my idea early on for bavastudio was to imagine and build a physical extension of bavatuesdays. I’m not sure that’s been totally realized yet, but I do think the Bav-O-Rama is starting to get me there. It’s a work-in-progress that’s open for all passersby to enjoy or poh poh, it costs (them at least) nothing, and I’m not ostensibly selling anything. A pretty good approximation of bavatuesdays. The question I always get when folks stroll is “Che cos’è?” or “What is it?” I really like it when they ask me that, the whole idea that it stands apart from any normal sense of a store is fun, a kind of unclassifiable space.

One of the major differences from the blog is that building out the space, in particular the diorama, forces me to exercise both intellectual and physical skills that’ve been somewhat dormant. I recently likened it to a return of the 3rd grade art class in my life, and that’s no slight to those mighty third graders. Pulling out a T-square and the exacto knives is truly empowering. Throughout grade school and into both middle and high school I really enjoyed art class. I wasn’t necessarily talented technically, but I loved learning new techniques and being able to exercise their application in a quite personal way. The diorama space in the front window of bavastudio is just that.

As I was joking with my partner Justin Webb yesterday, what’s supposed to be a healthy outlet and relief from others stresses can quickly become an obsession all its own—it’s a thin line as I’ve learned with this blog over the years. But remaining excited and, as a result, somewhat hopeful about building something novel in order to make a connection with something or someone, no matter how irrelevant (or maybe because of exactly that), helps me deal with all the other things that can (and do) drive a thinking person crazy. Long live the bava, in both its virtual and physical forms 🙂

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Croom and Groom on ReclaimTV

Posted on May 27, 2025 by Reverend

Part of the inspiration for the “On Writing” series on ReclaimTV is an excuse to chat about writing with awesome folks. The other part is to explore the impact writing has on our sense of both self and community, a question that can be a bit more nebulous. Where and how do we connect with others and how does writing help both forge and reinforce those bonds?

To this end I sat down with the amazing Adam Croom to talk about everything from his failed 5th grade class president election campaign to the role of the Oklahoma City bombing in the formation of the OU Daily to vibecoding and much, much more. It was an absolute blast to connect with Adam and talk about the role writing has played in his career. In true blogger fashion, Adam already wrote about the episode far better than I will here, so you should do yourself a favor at this point and abandon the bava and go read his extremely thorough and compelling account of the conversation. I’m really glad he took the time to post about it because he absolutely nails the significance of our chat (at least for me) when it comes to the “On Writing” series:

We started the conversation with Jim kicking things off by highlighting my very first blog post on adamcroom.com about losing student council elections—multiple times—and writing campaign speeches laced with 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It was a fun way to re-enter the story of how I found my voice. As I shared, writing has always been less about polish and more about performance.

Not only was Adam a good sport playing along with my deep dive into his blog archive, but he immediately crystalized the importance of exploring the performance of self and the concomitant development of voice that’s very much at the heart of blogging. In fact, these are key points Maren and I were hoping to tease out when starting this series. We wanted people to see the value of blogging on their own domain, and feel empowered by the idea of writing as a performative act of discovering a sense of voice. Writing may be the single most powerful tool for connecting that we have on the web thus far, and to that end Adam provides a brilliant answer to the question of why write on your own domain.

While I’m biased given how much Adam and all the involved parties at University of Oklahoma helped make a fledgling Reclaim Hosting a viable business early on (Adam made me!), at the same time the willingness for a small, innovative group to try and bring a suite of online tools that encourage students, faculty, and admins to both own and manage their online voice is a hopeful vision of empowerment I still very much believe in. Blogging is ground zero for telling the stories that have the potential to connect us with that “unmet friend.” A message in the bottle, if you will. Thanks to blogging Adam became a friend and that is the story.

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Kathleen Fitzpatrick “On Writing”

Posted on May 20, 2025 by Reverend

Earlier this month I had the distinct pleasure of talking with Kathleen Fitzpatrick about her career of writing both on, off, and about the web. I’ve wanted to talk publicly with Kathleen about her journey after her absolutely brilliant keynote at Reclaim Open in 2023, thankfully this emergent “On Writing” series gave me an excuse.

One recurring thread that comes up when talking with or about Kathleen is generosity, and I think this conversation highlights just how generous she is as both a thinker and a leader (not to mention an interviewee). I’ve witnessed her career arc firsthand and it’s maintained a razor sharp focus on creating and promoting the web as a tool for academics to imagine alternative ways of working collaboratively. Hers is a ridiculously impressive CV that moves from Media Commons to MLA Commons to Humanities Commons and now Knowledge Commons, examples of increasingly larger concentric circles of academic social networks that provide an intellectual green spaces outside corporate platforms—spaces higher education so desperately needs.

But that’s just part of the story covered here, it was amazing to hear about her early blog epiphany that informed an approach to her scholarly writing that remains apparent in her most recent books on generosity in both thought and leadership. I’ve increasingly become a big fan of Kathleen’s community building work, and having the space to learn and document the pivotal role she continues to play in defining an open, responsible, and generous network for digital scholarship in the US and beyond was truly a pleasure.

John Maxwell noted that “future historians of the present should take note of this [interview] as a narrative index to the history of the web.” I may be biased, but I tend to agree that Kathleen’s story provides something of an ur-narrative for a generation of scholars that would ultimately define and be defined by the digital revolution. Arguably, few in the field have defined it more powerfully in their writings over the last 20 years than her.

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Some Dioramas Shine

Posted on May 18, 2025 by Reverend

…and some don’t!

Mr Halloran explains The Shining to Danny

For a few months now my diorama ode to the greatest horror movie ever made was hitting a serious creative block. That little man that lives inside my mouth was not speaking to me, and as a result the bav-o-rama has sat empty for months 🙁 I wrote about it with great excitement not long after I got the Creepshow diorama finished, but since then I’ve run into something of a wall, if you will.

Scale model of the hallway

Encouraged by MBS, this time around I wanted to capture the depth of the hallway the Grady sisters* occupy. To do that I needed to deal with perspective, vanishing points, and all the maths that make them work. Tommy helped me frame out a scale model a couple of months back thanks to his school-learned drafting skills. We came up with a roughly 1:4 scale model of the hallway. But after I was done something looked off, so I turned it on its side, and violà the dimensions looked right and really captured the desired effect!

Scale model turned on its side provided the desired effect

This was real progress, and initially at this point I was going to bring in Alberto and have him build out the floors and ceiling out of plywood using articulating angles. But work got really busy and I was a bit reluctant to start bringing in the big guns until I knew exactly what was going to work. Then came the long two month freeze, just like a winter in the Overlook Hotel.† Although there was one other break through during this time, namely deciding on the exact shot from the scene to reproduce. The moment up-close with the sisters between the columns beyond the exit sign and before the hallway leading left was ideal. You have both a picture hanging to the left and a fire extinguisher alcove to the right that help frame the size of the Grady sisters beautifully.

Image of the Grady sisters in the hallway from The Shining

Shot and positioning of the Grady sisters the diorama will be modeled on

Despite some progress things had come to a stand still trying to figure out how everything from the wall paper to the floor and ceiling trim to the picture frame would both reflect and heighten the illusion of depth. It was not until the Canadians came last week that the heavens opened up and inspiration returned.‡

Wren and Kamille talking through the math and design of the ceiling

What could be better for a jolt in the creative process than two young, enthusiastic theater production majors coming in and getting it done! Wren and Kamille have lived and breathed the technical challenges of theater production over the last nine months, so I caught them as budding professionals just before they become too expensive 🙂 Wren busted out the trigonometry with all kinds of sines and cosines to get the angles right and Kamille mapped the design from which they would measure, it was beautiful teamwork!

Wren and Kamille starting work on the ceiling with foamcore and math!

Soon after lunch they were putting the ceiling together with foamcore (my new addiction) and by day’s end we knew what angles the walls and ceiling needed to create the depth-effect. By dinnertime they had finished the ceiling that gave me the template for the floor. So, in essence, these two slapped me in the head (but with Canadian grace and kindness!) and told me to get off my ass and start making some bav-o-rama art, dammit! I really appreciate them.

Wren and Kamille all but polishing off the ceiling for The Shining diorama

After they moved on in their European travels I was left with the spirit of possibility that pushed me to use their ceiling to map the floor, which made the hallway in the bav-o-rama resemble the scale model Tommy and I created to a T.

Hallway with floor and ceiling installed

After that I was back at the stationary store buying more foamcore than one could possibly need, it’s like plywood and 2″ x 4″s for diorama makers! At this point I’m still thinking this is just a rough version to get the correct angles, depth, and perspective.

This weekend realized another big leap forward with getting the picture frame, the floor molding, and a 68 cm version of the Grady sisters all cut-out.

Grady sisters printed out and ready to be glued together

To get a scaled version of the Grady sisters to print out on a regular printer, I used the free web tool Rasterbator. The image is not particularly high quality, but then again I was just trying to rough things out to get a sense of how they look in the space. The print-out consisted of eight 8.5″ x 11″ sheets that build in needed overlap to easily glue them together, which was very nice.

Half of the Grady Sister Duo glued together

After that, I glued them to a 70 cm foamcore board (almost perfectly sized for the sisters) and started to cut them out so they had a solid backing. We had already cut out the framed print in the hallway, which I discovered the specific details for thanks to the ridiculously obsessive site Eye Scream—dedicated to all things The Shining. It’s truly something else, if you’re a Shining fan don’t miss it. The author identified the artwork in the hall as William Henry Bartlett’s Montreal from the Mountain, what’s more they provide an in-depth reading of all the possible reasons why Kubrick hung it there, which is quite fun—those are the conspiracy theories I can get behind.

W.H. Bartlett’s 1840 painting Montreal from the Mountain hangs above the Grady sisters. Image credit: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec on Flickr

I found a different picture than the one above that someone took of the painting that had perspective built in, so I just printed it out on an 8.5″ x 11″ sheet and glued it behind the cut-out foamcore frame. Similarly, the baseboard molding was re-created with two separate cut-outs, one taller than the other; the trim really helps create the illusion of depth given the way it establishes the vanishing point.

Grady Sisters in hallway beneath W.H. Bartlett print with baseboard creating depth (props to Tommy for holding them up)

After seeing how things looked yesterday, I’m beginning to wonder if the cut-out, grade-school diorama aesthetic might be perfect for this one. Once I touch-up the white spaces around the Grady sisters and add other details (like the brown trimmed frame around the art print) it will clean things up significantly. Maybe hi-def verisimilitude is not what I’m going for here, maybe the foamcore cut-outs and low-res prints get the job done. I like the idea of playing with the simplicity of the diorama given the drive for perfection slowed things to a halt.

The arts and crafts approach was liberating, and I’m more excited than ever heading back today to try and knock-out the window at the back of the hallway, the columns, and perhaps the ceiling trim. After that, I’ll need to figure out the carpet (paint or something else?), the fire extinguisher alcove, the wall paper, and the paint for the window and trim, but there’s no doubt I’m now over the hump. Turns out the hallway is really coming together—not because of some knock-off Persian rug—but thanks to a couple of brilliant Canadians. Rock, not rot!

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*In my surface research for this diorama it turns out the Grady sisters in the film were not supposed to be twins, but rather 8 and 10 year olds that look A LOT alike, part of the uncanny valley of this entire film 🙂

†Part of this long hiatus was a result of trying to get the Exidy Cheyenne video game cabinet working,  it took up all my free time and is still an ongoing saga. In fact, the diorama has become a a much needed distraction.

‡Special shout out to Maren Deepwell for brokering the deal 🙂

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Creepshow Beach Show

Posted on May 17, 2025 by Reverend

A few weeks ago I got a comment on a video I uploaded featuring elements of the Creepshow diorama I was working on for bavastudio. It was a solid piece of outreach for a coming event, to be sure, but I appreciated they were upfront about that but also gave the diorama some love and offered some much needed encouragement:

Hey Jim! I’m hosting an event called the Creepshow Beach Show on the beach where they shot the “Something To Tide You Over” segment from the movie. It’s vendor market and movie screening with a replica of Ted Danson’s head in the sand for photo ops. Came across your awesome diorama and wanted to invite you up to Seaside Heights, NJ for the event on May 17th–it’s free! The fun begins at 4pm! More info at CreepshowBeachShow.com. Keep up the good work! – Nick

It’s fun knowing people stumble upon the video of the diorama, but even funner that Nick has built an entire event around my favorite episode of Creepshow. Fan culture is alive and well. The event kicks off in just a couple of hours, and if I were back in the States there’s no place I’d rather be. Also, the event poster is brilliant, I’m gonna have to see if I can get that printed on glossy paper and hang it somewhere in the studio.

Image of Ted Danson's head in the sand, surrounded by effects from the other Creepshow episodes

Promotional poster for the Creepshow Beach Show

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VHS Stack #3

Posted on May 4, 2025 by Reverend

VHS 4life

I had these tapes running last week while I was working from the office, and I got to watch all of Crumb (1994) and Planet of the Vampires (1965) and most of DEVO’sThe Men Who Make the Music (1979) and Outland (1981). The rest were catch as catch can, but it was a solid week of VHS watching at bavastudio.

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Breaking Away

Posted on May 3, 2025 by Reverend

Working through the Family Pictures Podcast backlog of posts with lucky episode number 13 featuring the film that brought the joy cycling to a whole generation of Americans: Breaking Away (1979). I don’t necessarily like cycling and all its lycra accessories (even after living in Italy for almost a decade), but I did enjoy revisiting this movie 40+ years later.* As I mention in the podcast, Breaking Away is deeply connected with the popularization of cycling in the American imagination. In the early 80s my older brother got a European bicycle—a  Motobécane to be specific—complete with a turned-up brim cycling cap as a direct result of this film. My other brother and I would make endless fun of him for being a Europhile, but turns out he was tapped into the coming zeitgeist: just four or five years later, in 1985, he would be on his way to Kona, Hawaii to run his first Iron Man Triathlon.

Iconic shot from Breaking Away that brought the cycling craze to North America

The element of this film that I didn’t pick up on as an eight or nine year old was the class struggle at the heart of the story. Is this the elusive ground-zero film for all those John Hughes’ productions that would shape my personal politic?  The working-class kids at the center of the movie are known as “cutters” given how closely their families’ livelihood, and eventual lack thereof, is tied to the local limestone industry. The quarry, now a swimming hole, is one of the major backdrops where the tension between the locals and invading college kids plays out.

“This hole, this quarry hole is mine!”

The other setting for this town and gown showdown is campus, which was shot at the University of Indiana Bloomington. The “cutters” are clearly unwelcome at the university despite their families having built the limestone halls of learning that become the trademark of these institutions. In a nuanced parallel, the campus buildings everywhere aspire to a European sense of culture that our Italian-loving protagonist both imitates and exploits to pass as an exchange student and blur the town/gown divide. Decades after this film made a huge splash as an ambassador for European cycling, the class struggle at the heart of this coming-of-age tale and its impact on the high school films of the 80s remains its real legacy.

Also, I kinda love the scene where our Europhile protagonist learns the hard way about the cheating Italians Sicilians he’s been idolizing.

As has been the case over the last five months or so, the Family Pictures Podcast provides a reason to both return to and, more importantly, reflect on movies. I love movies. I love talking to MBS about movies. Hence, I love the Family Pictures Podcast. Do yourself a favor and lock it in!

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*With all apologies to the great Andy Rush who gets a well-deserved shout in this one given his love of both this movie AND cycling!

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