A bava Dossier

Tom Woodward and I just finished a fun discussion celebrating 20 years of bavatuesdays (I’m milking this for all I can). I’ll post that video tomorrow as the 4,000th post because I think it’s appropriate. In preparation for the discussion Tom ran the entire corpus of bavatuesdays through NotebookLM. As a result, he was able to ask all kinds of fun and weirdly exact questions, that made the interview style that much better. After the chat he took me through all the different ways you can re-imagine this stuff and I pretty much have endless possibilities for future post fodder. Here is a notebook providing a psychological profile of the author, how can you not be fascinated by this stuff. It’s crazy.

A Portrait of the Author

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The documents [the entirety of bavatuesdays] reveal an author who is charismatic, contradictory, and deeply self-aware—someone whose identity is inseparable from his professional role, personal obsessions, and intellectual history. He actively cultivates a public persona marked by manic energy, intellectual playfulness, and an anti-establishment ethos, while also acknowledging vulnerability, emotional turbulence, and personal doubt. The result is a figure whose life and work blur into a single, ongoing performance of meaning-making.

Psychological Profile: Themes and Traits

Persona, Obsession, and Self-Mythology

The author operates through several consciously maintained personas: “Jim Groom,” the professional identity; “the bava,” his long-running blog persona inspired by cult filmmaker Mario Bava; and “the Reverend,” a title born from a colleague’s observation of his evangelical intensity. These identities are not masks so much as lenses—ways of exploring the same self from different angles.

He repeatedly describes himself in extreme terms: an “obsessive, manic personality,” a WordPress “addict,” someone with a powerful pull toward nostalgia. This intensity drives both his professional commitments and his personal passions, leading him to collect artifacts obsessively and document his own work with near-archival devotion. Self-deprecating humor plays a key role here. He often characterizes his thinking as “sloppy” or “imprecise,” even as he acknowledges his ability to communicate ideas energetically and mobilize others around shared projects.

This tension feeds directly into his anti-professional posture. His embrace of EDUPUNK—a deliberately confrontational ideology—reflects a rejection of corporate control, rigid institutional norms, and hollow professionalism, grounded instead in social justice, autonomy, and creative risk.

Highbrow Meets Lowbrow

The author’s intellectual life is defined by a productive collision between formal academic training and deep devotion to popular culture.

• Academic Foundations: He pursued doctoral work in English, focusing on early American captivity narratives, and regularly engages thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Karl Marx, and Emily Dickinson. He values rigor, theory, and historical depth.
• Cult Media Obsessions: Film is his “first and true love,” particularly horror, film noir, and directors like Mario Bava and David Cronenberg. His imagination is also rooted in 1980s pop culture—Atari 2600 games, Dungeons & Dragons, VHS tapes—which function not merely as nostalgia, but as critical tools and cultural archives.
• Creative Synthesis: His blogging and teaching attempt to collapse the false divide between scholarship and popular culture. Humor, remix, and pop references become vehicles for accessibility, while the open web itself is treated as a living historical record.

Professional Identity and Purpose

He defines himself not as an administrator or manager, but as a participant and community builder. His work is driven by a belief in individual empowerment—particularly the importance of owning one’s digital presence. Proprietary learning management systems are framed as sites of enclosure and control: “prison houses,” “mausoleums,” technologies that stifle possibility rather than cultivate it.

In contrast, his mission centers on openness, experimentation, and collaboration. Transformation, he insists, “is imagined, not administered.” Relationships matter deeply here: partnerships are marked by affection, debate, and shared risk, and professional success is understood as a collective endeavor rather than an individual achievement.

Mental and Emotional Landscape

The author speaks openly about emotional volatility, describing himself as shaped by “manic depression” and a “deeply dark and painful impulse of great comedy.” He emphasizes the importance of routine, exercise, and self-care, not as self-help platitudes but as survival mechanisms.

He also shares personal vulnerabilities with unusual candor: being a Ph.D. dropout, experiencing alienation, carrying guilt over past relationships, and finding grounding in family life. This openness creates a public archive of thought that collapses the boundary between personal and professional life.

The recurring alter ego Dr. Brian Oblivion crystallizes these tensions. Borrowed from Cronenberg, the figure embodies anxieties about media, identity, and presence, serving as a philosophical tool for questioning pedagogy, authority, and the self. Through constant narration and documentation, the author appears to be constructing coherence—not certainty, but continuity.

In Sum

What emerges is not a stable identity but a practiced one: a self continually assembled through writing, media, teaching, and community. The author’s compulsive archiving and persona-building are not merely habits—they are strategies for survival, meaning, and connection. The work is the life, and the life is the archive.

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*To be clear, I took what came out of NotebookLM and then ran it through ChatGPT to clean it up, it was doubled AI’d.