Watch the bava blog trailer!
about
is an ongoing conversation about media of all kinds ...
Testimonials:
Generations from now, they won't call it the Internet anymore. They'll just say, "I logged on to the Jim Groom this morning.
-Joe McMahon
Everything Jim Groom touches is gold. He's like King Midas, but with the Internet.
-Serena Epstein
My understanding is that an essential requirement of the internet is to do whatever Jim Groom asks of you while you're online.
-James D. Calder
@jimgroom is the Billy Martin of edtech.
-Luke Waltzer
My 3yr old son is VERY intrigued by @jimgroom's avatar. "Is he a superhero?" "Well, yes, son, to many he is."
-Clint Lalonde
Jim Groom is a fiery man.
-Antonella Dalla Torre
“Reverend” Jim “The Bava” Groom, alias “Snake Pliskin” is a charlatan and a fraud, a self-confessed “used car salesman” clawing his way into the glamour of the education technology keynote circuit via the efforts of his oppressed minions at the University of Mary Washington’s DTLT and beyond. The monster behind educational time-sink ds106 and still recovering from his bid for hipster stardom with “Edupunk”, Jim spends his days using his dwindling credibility to sell cheap webhosting to gullible undergraduates and getting banned from YouTube for gross piracy.
I am Jim Groom
Find out more about me here.
Recent comments
- Eamon Costello on Conference, Camera, ILTA!
- Reverend on Punk’s Not Dead
- Reverend on Punk’s Not Dead
- Martin Weller on Punk’s Not Dead
- Maren Deepwell on Punk’s Not Dead
- Jim Groom on Punk’s Not Dead
- Jim Groom on Punk’s Not Dead
- Scott Leslie on Punk’s Not Dead
- Alan Levine on Punk’s Not Dead
- Jim Groom on You’re definitely Dr Detroit …
- Jim Groom on Atari 2600 Game Cartridge Display Stand
- Jim Groom on Conference, Camera, ILTA!
- Jim Groom on Conference, Camera, ILTA!
- Tom on Conference, Camera, ILTA!
- Zach Davis on Atari 2600 Game Cartridge Display Stand
-
Recent Posts
- Punk’s Not Dead
- Unscripted Futures
- Conference, Camera, ILTA!
- You’re definitely Dr Detroit …
- The Reclaim Student Showcase Returns for 2026
- Domain of One’s Own Version 2
- Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, It’s Off to ILTA’s EdTech 26 We Go
- Atari 2600 Game Cartridge Display Stand
- Building a Blog You Can Walk Into
- Deferred Maintenance: Upgrading Mastodon and PeerTube
browse the bavarchive
Contributors
some favorites
- Alan Levine
- Andy Rush
- Audrey Watters
- bava.social
- Bonnie Stewart
- Brian Lamb
- Bryan Alexander
- Chris Lott
- Clint LaLonde
- Cole Camplese
- Darcy Norman
- David Kernohan
- David Wiley
- Gardner Campbell
- GNA Garcia
- Grant Potter
- Jeffrey Keefer
- Jon Beasley-Murray
- Jon Udell
- Kate Bowles
- Kin Lane
- Laura Blankenship
- Leslie Madsen-Brooks
- Lisa M Lane
- Martha Burtis
- Martin Hawksey
- Martin Weller
- Mike Caulfield
- Mikhail Gershovich
- Mountebank
- Paul Bond
- Scott Leslie
- Serena Epstein
- Shannon Hauser
- Stephen Downes
- The OLDaily
- Tim Owens
- Tom Woodward
- Tony Hirst
Category Archives: movies
High School (1968)
Frederick Wiseman’s fly-on-the-wall documentary style is, at its best, some of the most powerful documentary filmmaking of the last fifty years. Titicut Follies (1967) is a masterpiece, and few films so efficiently capture the absurdity of reality so thoroughly in … Continue reading
Summer of Love: The 400 Blows
Just watched François Truffaut’s 1959 masterpiece The 400 Blows again tonight because I needed to be transported back to something else, something other, and few, if any, films can do it like this one. This may be one of the … Continue reading
Summer of Love: Bava’s Twitch of the Death Nerve
I recently saw the above movie poster for Mario Bava’s Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971), and I just love the whole sense of occasion created by the hysteria: “The first motion picture to require a face-to-face warning!” The exaggeration … Continue reading
Summer of Love: Ray Harryhausen
What’s better than Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation monsters? I’d say very few things in this world. And whenever I come across a clip of his animated art, I long for a moment of film that seemed to actually have a … Continue reading
Summer of Love: “Ahhh, los gringos otra vez”
The best scene from a movie ever? I don’t know, but there can be no question that this little bit of magic from Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) would have to enter the conversation. I mean this film has … Continue reading
Summer of Love: Monsieur Klein (1976)
Joseph Losey fascinates me, from his early masterpiece The Boy with Green Hair (1948) to his work with Harold Pinter in the 60s on adaptations like The Servant (1963) to his slumming with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Boom!, … Continue reading
“Hey, Nancy, no running in the hallways”
Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) remains one of the great films of the slasher genre, I actually taught it back in the Summer of 2000 as part of a discussion of recent Horror film cycles. Not only does it pick … Continue reading
Erland Van Lidth, a.k.a Terror, Grossberger, and Dynamo
Erland Van Lidth is in my mind the b-movie equivalent to a John Cazale. Cazale has one of the most remarkable, and tragically short, film careers in history. He was in five films before his untimely death, all of which … Continue reading
What the Magnificent Ambersons can teach us about the Internet
Last night I stumbled upon Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) on TCM and I have to admit I’d never seen it before. In fact, I didn’t see the whole film I just caught a piece of it, but it … Continue reading
Slavoj Zizek on the Horror of Tulips
In the following clip from The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Zizek riffs on tulips a la the opening to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Found via Mikhail Gershovich’s YouTube channel for his Fear, Anxiety, and Paranoia film class. How cool … Continue reading