Revving Up the ds106 Engine

Posted on January 20, 2025 by Reverend

The tech noir edition of ds106 is in full swing this spring, and I’m feeling locked-in. It’s been a while since I have felt energized like this, and so much of that is rooted in commenting. Not only has ds106 given me a bunch of reasons to blog and comment, it has also re-connected me with creating a course site premised on the venerable RSS syndication bus. Last year when I was supposed to do some of this stuff for AI 106, I couldn’t look at the innards of a WordPress site. I ultimately reached out to Martha Burtis with a pleading email on a Friday evening last January to re-design the ds106.ai site and get the assignment bank back up and running. On Monday she had re-built the entire assignment bank in Elementor and re-designed AI 106—you shall know your friends by their awesome.

This year I’ve been going to the well yet again, but not with the same desperation, thankfully. I have no idea how to work intelligently with Elementor,  and for various reasons I refuse to learn. So I’ve reverted the ds106.ai site back to the TwentyTwelve theme which represents an era when I could actually try and hack WordPress.* Both Tom Woodward and Alan Levine have been helping me wrangle FeedWordPress (still alive and well!) to get the desired effect, and that’s part of the magic. Figuring out how to design the space wherein you live, work, and learn remains crucial and remains at the core of the ds106 experience. It continues to be the reason why each student gets their own domain and cPanel hosting and spends the better part of a semester building out a home on the web that’s as much about owning the design of the space as it is about shaping the tenor of their voice. Some folks might think of this as a harkening back to the “good old days,” but for me it’s a simple reminder that the web is what we make it. A bag a gold in, a bag of gold out.

Open Media Ecosystem GIF from the Reclaim Edtech series

Another sign I’m feeling the ds106 bug is that I spent the morning migrating the ds106 multisite and daily.ds106.us sites back to Reclaim Cloud so I can ensure they have more than enough resources. There was nary a glitch, which is always nice. The other sundry pieces of the ds106 environment are ds106radio (Azuracast), social.ds106.us (Mastodon), and ds106.tv (PeerTube), all of which are open source and we self-host which means we can provide an exploratory, yet safe, space that can act as a buffer from some of the insanity playing out presently in the world of social media. Thinking through how to integrate the various parts of this Open Media Ecosystem to create a multi-faceted view of the course experience is going to be the major focus of my work this semester.

Get Your Kicks with ds106

So anyway, I guess it’s time to rev up that blog engine and take to the road on the web less traveled. Get your kicks with ds106! #4life

______________________________________________

*It is also a symbolic return to an era when the idea of working collaboratively online with others using one’s blog as the starting point and source of an online identity was not as crazy as it seems thirteen years later. Some of us are still believers.

Posted in digital storytelling, Tech Noir | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

You Can’t Go Holm Again

Posted on January 19, 2025 by Reverend

This weekend I finally watched Alien: Romulus (2024) given I thought it might give me something to talk about for Tech Noir, I was right. I enjoyed the return to the original Alien (1979), which in many ways is one of the pillars of the tech noir genre with its focus on greedy hi-tech companies; sleeper agent androids designed to do the powerful’s bidding; and a dark and claustrophobic atmosphere—oh yeah, there are also the aliens that the corporation secretly direct the android to return to earth for seemingly dubious purposes. But more than anything for me from the original Alien is the beautiful visualization of the technology of the future, like captain Dallas seemingly immersed within the MU/TH/UR 6000 computer.

In fact, the entire ship is a series of automated computers that was hard to fully wrap your head around in 1979:

The internet of things was a long way off:

The visual style of Alien is part of what made it so memorable, and that doesn’t go just for the technology, but also for the sense of ominous darkness that follows each character as they are hunted by the Xenomorph.

That aesthetic even extends to Jonesy the cat:

Romulus is quite intentionally an homage to the original, and some very early shots highlight the “Cassette Futurism” of Ridley Scott’s original vision. Flickering CRT screens and blinking buttons were used to highlight the out-dated technology of the well-worn workspace of the mining ship.

MU/TH/UR 9000

This point is brought home when they highlight a similar, yet more recent, operating system the mining company is running on the abandoned ship: MU/TH/UR 9000. In fact, both the plot line and the visual aesthetic of Romulus are loosely re-tracing the original. Watching essentially the same film 45 years later is still better than most of what you’ll find on Netflix, so sign me up. I was enjoying the film up and until they introduced the likeness of actor Ian Holm (he died in 2020) who played the role of the evil android Ash in the original. He was, oddly, a different android named Rook who also had as his prime directive to ensure the aliens on board were delivered safely to the company at all costs.  Hmmm.

Ian Holm’s likeness used to play the android Rook in Romulus, you would be right to think this was an image from Alien Isolation video game that came out ten years ago

Many people took issue with the CGI used to render Ash Rook—it was terrible for sure—but that was not my biggest beef. My issue was the very danger the figure Ash warned us about in the original, namely the costs of artificial intelligence passing as human in order to serve the agenda of the rich and powerful, is unironically realized in the conceptualization of this re-make. Despite being dead for years, Ian Holm was included in the film not through re-used footage, but as a totally new character using his voice and likeness. While his estate seems to have been consulted on the inclusion, he has effectively lost agency over how the film companies use his likeness. In effect, his legacy as an actor is brought into question. Which, in turn, opens up the broader question of how such deep fakes in Hollywood impact any actor working presently (or not). One has to ask if some part of Holm’s soul (to use that term broadly) as an actor is now owned by the Alien franchise corporation (5 or 6 more years in the Hollywood mine, the company appreciates you!)—it’s prime directive being to make profits on the shoulders of those who helped make it successful: dead or alive.

“You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you? … Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.” Alien (1979)

Despite the larger ethical questions around AI, deep fakes, and the loss of control of our likeness (Hollywood just being one example), the other question worth asking is did Romulus even need this poorly executed reference? It was apparent they were returning home to the original, and quite frankly the opening scene on the mining colony; the hijacking of the abandoned ship; and the face hugging barrage was an excellent start to the movie. The aesthetic references to the original were apparent, but the plot details were different enough to be an homage while providing their own twist, but when Ian Holm’s butchered (both figuratively and literally) likeness appears, there was a sense that we could no longer go home to the original again. Not only was it forced, but it felt wrong. Holm is an amazing actor and Alien was jut one of many roles that established him as a great talent, yet here he is coming back from the dead as a terribly re-created CGI figure with a role that only his talent could save from the implicit mediocrity of the idea—but that talent is no longer with us, he is dead. What part of that equation did director Fede Álvarez fail to understand?

The cast of the 1979original Alien

Filmmaking is an act of orchestration between the director, writer(s), cinematographer, designers, and most of all the players. What made Alien so great even beyond the aesthetics were the characters and the performances that made them by greats such as Sigourney Weaver, Yaphet Kotto, Harry Dean Stanton, Veronica Cartwright, Tom Skerritt, and especially Ian Holm. It’s that alchemy that made the original one of the greatest films of the 20th century. It’s the very reason why Alien is a franchise at all, so to just mindlessly mine that talent post-humously for a half-assed wink highlights the soullessness of these franchise films. As the case with Marvel and Star Wars, we see Alien attempt redemption by returning to the source, but all the while forgetting it’s the humanity of talent that made the original great. The Tech Noir themes of this film are in many ways as much about the politics of re-making the original as the story itself. Fight me.

Posted in AI, digital storytelling, films, movies, Tech Noir | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

bavacade Update 1-19-2025

Posted on January 19, 2025 by Reverend

This week was pretty productive on the bavacade front by making real headway on the plan to start cleaning up the small things. I knocked out quite a few things on the list prepared in the last update:

  • Switch Robotron 1P and 2P button
  • Fix Millipede’s extra Matsushita chassis
  • Took apart Pole Position and add wheels
  • Investigate issues with either power board or inline power brick for Stargate
  • Test non-working Super Cobra board with game roms from working board
  • Try 440 Exidy kit on non-working Crossbow board for Cheyenne (in-process, waiting on daughter card from America)
  • Take apart Cheyenne and add wheels
  • Fix Make Trax yoke connector
  • Check chassis power plugs and clean-up any electrical tape monstrosities (ongoing, but partial progress)
  • Check and clean-up wiring for Venture
  • Fix back-up Hanterex 20″ Polo chassis
  • Fix K4600 back-up interface and main chassis boards
  • Fix wheels on Dig Dug and Bagman

Robotron

Robotron Player 1 and 2 Button Switch

The swapping of the Robotron player one and two buttons was quite easy. I just had to unscrew and swap the housing for the contact strips. Nothing’s better than a simple fix.

Robotron Player 1 and 2 Button Swap

Player 1 and 2 button assembly for Robotron

Millipede

Testing the back-up Matsushita chassis for Millipede was a little more involved. I swapped out the original chassis given it was playing blind and I had easy access to a new, working chassis. That said, while installing the new one I realized that the pots for brightness and screen on the original chassis might need to be re-soldered. I promised to return to it, but given the new chassis was working great it fell to the bottom of the list.

Millipede Backup Matsushita Chassis has Washed out Red

Millipede back-up Matsushita chassis has washed out red

But I’m now chasing down all these lingering issues, so figured it was time to swap in the original chassis to see if I can get it working again, and I did. Turns out I was right about the brightness and screen pots, and a little reflowing of solder joints there got the chassis back-up and running. That said, the red on this chassis is definitely washed out compared to the new one, so may need to do some color adjustment should it be used in the future. For now it’s a good bet for a working back-up, which is always nice. The new chassis looks so good that I had to swap it back in. What’s more, I realized that the way to fix the high score going off screen at the top with the new chassis is to adjust the horizontal width coil. I ran out of time, but I will return to it this week and knock another small issue off the list.

Super Cobra

Super Cobra Main Board

Super Cobra main board with 6 game roms I had burned and added to no effect

I dug in on testing why one of my two Super Cobra boards was not working. Quick back story, I bought a Super Cobra board with a high score save kit that never worked right; there were so many glitches it was unusable. So I took the save kit out, but turns out the original graphics and game ROMs had been removed, so I needed to have a new set burned. When adding these new ROMs, the game was still throwing garbage to the screen—so nothing doing.

Super Cobra Main Board

Supper Cobra main board with the 6 original, working chips that will be copied

I was still convinced it was the game ROMs, so to test that theory I took the working 6 ROMs from the working board I have and added them to the non-working board and lo and behold it worked. So, the new plan is to have the 6 working ROMs copied to new chips, given the other copies might have been corrupted or just bad files, etc. I’m thinking 1-to-1 copies of the working chips should solve this issue, but we will see.

Stargate, Robotron, and Defender

Investigations into why Stargate restarts after a period of time continues. I’m not sure if it is solved, but it has led me to discover and clean-up other issues, so for that I’m thankful. The issue is Stargate runs fine with the original power board and brick for several hours, but then out of no where it restarts. When the board is connected to the switching power supply this never happens, which leads me to believe it’s an issue with the original power board. Power bricks seldom have issues in these games, so I started by troubleshooting the power board. To do this I swapped out a board from another Williams game I have that are compatible (namely Joust or Robotron) with Stargate.* I went to Robotron to get its power board when I discovered a pretty bad hack job that had wires individual soldered to the back of the board rather than using a connector.A sure sign of some shoddy workmanship:

Robotron Power Supply Board with Bad Soldering

Back of the power supply board in Robotron with wires directly soldered on the board, a big no no.

This is unacceptable. I removed the board and gave it to Roberto to work on, along with the Super Cobra chips. It was obvious the power board burned up at some point, and rather than addressing the issue they just worked around it for the pieces they needed. Not bavacade, Roberto will get to the source of the issue and give this power board a new lease on life.

Robotron Power Supply Unit Issues

Top of Robotron power board where you can see signs of burned connections

With the Robotron power board unusable, I grabbed the Joust board which was in much better shape.

Joust PSU Board

The Joust power board is like new comparatively.

So back to Stargate, the idea was to take the power board out of Stargate and put it in Joust and vice versa. This way if Joust restarts after several hours I’ll know it was the power board, and if Stargate restarts I’ll know it was the power brick. Well, after many hours of keeping them both on neither restarted. So it’s inconclusive, yet with each game working cleanly without restarting we arguably have a temporary fix, right? Maybe, but if experience is any lesson these things always re-emerge. Nonetheless, for the moment I’ll let it ride.

Robotron power board with wires soldered right to back of board, pretty freaking ugly

The work that will be done on the Robotron power board counts toward the broader goal of going through each game and looking for any wiring issues, and I think this will prove one of the worst offenders.

Defender Power Supply Board

Defender power supply board

On the topic of Williams power boards, while looking for potential power boards to swap I realized another issue I never dealt with was a problem with the Defender power board (very different from that of Stargate, Joust, and Robotron, even though a Williams game). When I was refurbishing Defender I came across an odd ROM error that I ultimately fixed by swapping out the old power board for a back-up I had (there are a lot of back-ups in bavacade 🙂 ). Finding the Defender power board I’d noted masking tape with +5V written on it, so figured there was an issue with the +5V? That’s what happens when the metadata is sparse. I re-tried it and this time it worked without any problems. More gremlins, for sure, but it’s also another back-up part I can mark as working until it inevitably doesn’t.

Pole Position

Pole Position

As a way of coping with the stress of a large, complex migration at Reclaim Hosting this weekend, I disassembled Pole Position. This was a long time coming, it’s one of the last games to get on wheels before relocating to bava.studio. I created an album of images for reference when it’s time to reassemble after fixing a few structural issues and getting it mobile. I’m gonna see if Alberto can document a bit of his process when adding the wheels given: a) it would be good to know, and b) Tim is looking to get some of the cabinets at Reclaim Arcade on wheels—which would be a huge win and put his word working skills to the test 🙂

Cheyenne

Finally, I have the missing daughter board for the 440 Exidy multi-game kit being shipped to me after a year of chasing that down. A chip on that kit went bad (this is why proprietary chips suck), and as a result the 440 kit was useless. I already have two Cheyenne boards (actually a Cheyenne and Crossbow, but effectively the same board with different ROMs), but one of them stopped working (the Crossbow to be clear). Before I embark on a repair, however, I want to see if adding the 440 kit brings it back to life. We will see….

_______________________________

*They all use the Revision B power board in my case.

Posted in bavacade, bavarcade, video games | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Listen to Our Fargin’ Podcast You Lousy Cork-suckers!

Posted on January 17, 2025 by Reverend

This week it was Johnny Dangerously (1984). I’ve not seen it in roughly 40 years and I forgot how insane its humor could get. It’s a total gag film; I kept on remarking just how much it reminded me of Airplane! throughout the podcast.

My father hung me on a hook once…once!

It’s both very stupid and very fun at the same time, even if written off by critics when it came out for its sophomoric humor. MBS argues Amy Heckerling’s film is very much the predecessor to later sophomoric filmmakers like the Farrelly Brothers. Think of it as a bridge between Mel Brooks and the world of Will Ferrell. If you had access to a VHS store in the mid-80s, chances are you’ve seen and subsequently quoted this one. Maybe that was a big reason for the joyful return to this relic of my cultural past.

“You lousy corksuckers have violated my fargin’ rights.”

For me the film is very much about meme quotes during high school after watching it in someone’s basement before going out for the night. This was the social world of movies in the 80s. Johnny Dangerously was one we endlessly quoted, you lousy cork-suckers!

Posted in Family Pictures Podcast, film, fun, movies | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Noir Chopper

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Reverend

I am creating a course aggregation site for the current Tech Noir ds106 course, and it’s been a while. Thankfully Alan Levine and Tom Woodward have been kind enough to help me hack the old gold TwentyTwelve WordPress theme to get the mother blog to show excerpts (not native to the theme) and now maybe even include photos.

Chopper from Minority Report looks a lot like Slave-1

Turns out getting excerpts to work on the main blog page was pretty easy thanks to Alan, who figured out you just need to change the line in content.php of the TwentyTwelve theme from

<?php if ( is_search() ) :

to

<?php if ( is_search() or is_home() ) :

That worked brilliantly. Now in terms of getting the feed aggregator FeedWordPress to pull images, Tom created the plugin Noir Chopper that not only creates excerpted posts but also pull in image if there is one…so this post is a test.

Update:  Tom’s plugin worked a treat! In order to get posts on the homepage to include the first image (category pages had them out-of-the-box) I had to include a clean version of content.php for that theme (or remove the change I made with Alan’s code suggestion above 🙂 ).

Posted in plugins, Tech Noir, WordPress | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Mapping My Bathroom Tile

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Reverend

I spent some time this morning using Bryan Mathers’s Remix Machine to map out the tile design for my bathroom re-design, I think it’s going to come out quite well:

Pixelated Avatars

What’s more, it doubles beautifully as my first Daily Create in eons. I was inspired by a certain dog the blogs cogs on the internet, and if you can’t see it clearly, here is the original: a headshot of Puritan super villain Cotton Mather who battles Scarlet Witch (of course) and Spider-man as part of the Marvel Team-Up series run from the 70s through the mid-80s.

Image of Cotton Mather and long time bava avatar

Posted in daily create, dailyshoot | Tagged , | 2 Comments

The Automated Dark Side of ds106: Tech Noir

Posted on January 15, 2025 by Reverend

I tried to make a ds106 comeback last year with the AI 106 course, but it turns out I wasn’t even up to getting off the couch. It was a long winter, and quite a few of my responsibilities were put on pause while I worked on my mental health. There are those moments we all face, and last Spring was one of them for me. I’m just fortunate I have such amazing folks around me online and off.

Film Noir and the dark technology of armored cars with shot from the film Criss Cross.

But this semester is a new day and the bava is back in the ds106 driver seat alongside Paul Bond. Paul gave me a free pass last spring with AI 106 and for that I’m forever grateful. The bummer was I really did want to jump back into the fray, and watching AI106 from the sidelines highlighted how much fun I was missing out on. The mock AI company Aggressive Technologies born from that course experience was absolutely brilliant, and to see that group dig into the ds106 ethos of joy was, well ….a joy.

Tech Noir bar from The Terminator

This week begins yet another chapter of ds106, this time focused on a topic that I have been thinking about doing for at least ten years: Tech Noir. My mind immediately goes to movies from 40+ years ago like Alien, Blade Runner, Empire Strikes Back, and Terminator, but that’s just my opinion, man. As part of week 1’s intro, Paul and I discussed the broader noir theme in terms of 1940s Hollywood to help frame the qualified tech-focused nature of this genre that emerged in the late 70s and early 80s. In fact, since its inception the themes defining noir  quickly transcended film to include literature, design, video games, and much more.

Also, let’s not forget that back in the Spring of 2015 Paul, Martha Burtis, and I taught noir106 during my last full semester at UMW. So exactly ten years later we’re back to noir, but this time with a qualifier most relevant to our moment: technology. Paul did a nice job of locating Tech Noir in terms of the cyberpunk 80s in his “Tech Noir ds106” post::

Tech Noir was a thing of the 80s. The preceding decades had seen the horrors of the Vietnam War, the corruption of Watergate, years of inflation followed by a deep recession, with ah ever-present awareness that WWIII could be right around the corner. On top of that, computers were migrating from the realm of science fiction into people’s everyday lives and homes. So that bleakness returned, in considering where we might be going as a society.

An interesting thing about Tech Noir and cyberpunk is that they tend to look at a near future, a future that may now be in the past, like 1984. One could argue the extent to which they were right or wrong in their visions, but I think the point of sci fi is not to be prophetic but to examine the current moment through an imagined setting.

Damn Paul’s good! He’s also very mindful that focusing too much on our interests defeats the purpose of ds106. We want to try and develop a theme and then have the class run with it in directions that interest them. As a result they should be more compelled to write, design, mash-up, and playact a world of media that buoy their creativity—thankfully noir is broad enough to contain multitudes.

A GIF from Richard Siodomak’s The Killers

The other thing I like about ds106 is it always inspires me to blog and comment, which are two of the things I resolved to do more of this year. ds106 is kinda like a gym for bloggers.

Finally, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that Mastodon has been feeling pretty fun these days. I know it has its limits, but I’ve been getting help with designing the the new old course site (thank you Alan and Tom!), the daily creates are still on fire, and we’re already streaming ds06radio there. Who knows, the social.ds106.us server could be a way of interfacing the students with the network like we did with Twitter. Hope springs eternal in the ds106 breast.

 

View on Mastodon

 

You know it’s good when you have Grant Potter dropping knowledge about Criterion’s current Surveillance Cinema series or the video game series Watchdogs or even that crazy Japanese contribution to Tech Noir: Tetsuo: the Iron Man. That’s just the kind of in-passing camaraderie that made ds106 so amazing back in 2011 and allowed the class to move beyond the limits of our imagination. There’s something about having a loose, open space for sharing that makes the endeavor exciting. What’s more, given we run our own Mastodon server we can hopefully mitigate some of the adverse effects given we control the vertical and the horizontal. I mean wasn’t that what this was all about?

Blah blah blah, it’s all fine and good to blog blog blog but ds106 is about making some art, dammit. All this analyzing is paralyzing, it’s time to play this dang thing….#4life!

Posted in Tech Noir | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

The ABCs of Blogging: Always Be Commenting

Posted on January 12, 2025 by Reverend

I think it was the great Scottlo that underscored the “Always Be Commenting” mantra while teaching ds106 in Japan, and it’s something I’ve returned to constantly over the last 10+ years—even when not living up to it’s eternal truth.  So this blog is not only an ode to blogging, but a peaen to those folks who take the time and energy to share some love in the comments. Back in the fall of 2010 I was teaching my second ds106 course and trying to figure out what made an online course community work, and from the very beginning it was all about the “art of commenting”:

In my mind commenting is key to such an experiment as DS106, it’s a sign of both engagement, distributed sharing, and relationships outside of some central discourse of learning. With every comment, there is the possibility of a whole new conversation. It’s not always the case, and not all comments are equal, but the expectation has to be established immediately in my mind. Be part of the community, even if somewhat forced and arbitrary as we often find in any given class at the beginning. We all have to move beyond the impulse to remain unengaged and do the minimum, without the willingness to explore and discover how we learn out in the open you can not truly be a part of this course. The whole enterprise requires that we feed off each other’s ideas, we think hard about how we create for others, and both offer and respond to feedback regularly.

Damn, that kid was locked-in in 2010! Laying down truth like it was his job: the blogosphere was hot!

In fact, Twitter was where a fair amount of those comments went, and they resulted in a networked community for the course starting in 2011 that was pretty much pure magic. But comments on the work still happened in droves, and the idea of the students being engaged with each other’s work was still paramount. Twitter was like a portal to the world beyond UMW (although the course was the context) and there were some students who stepped through, but others that didn’t. With the fall of Twitter came the diaspora with folks decamping to Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn (lord bless their souls!) while others headed for the hills preaching the coming federated rapture on Mastodon. But as I’m feeling more smitten with the blog than any one platform these days, I idealistically wonder if a return to commenting might help re-focus the vision of a distributed community. I know commenting is far from perfect, and amazing bloggers like Audrey Watters turned them off on Hack Education given all the bullshit an open form on the web can result in. This is why we can’t have nice things!

via GIPHY

So acknowledging the definite limits of commenting to save the world, I’m still making a commitment in 2025 to spend a lot more time commenting on other folks work than I have in a long time. I may be overthinking this, but I have gotten the sense that folks might be planning a return to the blog. Aaron Davis is back at it, and uses a quote from Audrey Watters’s recent post to frame the title, “But here I am, blogging on my own domain. Silly me.”  If Audrey’s back, why not? I’ll join that club.

via GIPHY

My number one guy of all time, Timmmmmmmmmmmyboy,  is absolutely owning the blogosphere, as he is wont to do when he gets something in his head. I’ll ride that train to its very last stop. All aboard the blog train!

via GIPHY

But it doesn’t stop there, Tim Klapdor’s been way down in Adelaide blogging the hell out of the Southern hemisphere for some time now, and more recently he has figured out how to get his static site to ingest comments from Mastodon for specific posts—bridging the federated world and his blog, which is quite cool. I’m telling you, there is something in the blog water.

I think there’s something in the water

And of course Maren Deepwell has rung in the new year on the blog with a personal tech stack review series, that’s one I still need to comment on.

Kin Lane, the mighty API Evangelist, is always blogging and recently he made an apt analogy between AI and automobiles as he thinks out loud. I still need to blog/comment on this, there is so much awesome here. And I found it thanks to Kate Bowles on Mastodon, so how about those networked apples?

 

View on Mastodon

 

And was it my blogfather D’Arcy Norman who essentially wrote an abbreviated 30-year history of edtech on his blog like a boss? Yes indeed!

 

View on Mastodon

 

Maybe I’m just delusional, but something tells me blogging is gonna be hot in 2025! Hold all my calls, Rowan, I’m blogging (and commenting)!

Posted in blogging | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

Mission Accomplished bava.studio

Posted on January 11, 2025 by Reverend

Feeling pretty good right now. A friend of mine in Trento, Andrea, passed along a message from the Trento Strano group somewhere on WhatsApp—or whereever it is Italians are Italian together online.

Creepshow Diorama gets some love from Trento Strano. Literal translation: “I recommend taking a good look at this narrative showcase. Via Calepina[the street where it is]” 

I had told Andrea, and also mentioned the idea on this blog, that the Creepshow diorama was very much about having someone see this window and just be like WTF? The fact Samuel gets the larger sense of story and the bizarreness of a contextless scene from Creepshow on a back street of Trento is a beautiful thing.

Tim and I came up with the idea of hanging The Shining rug temporarily in the window while the new diorama is being built

And we’re not stopping there, we have accomplished the mission of the first WTF recorded and now we can say goodbye to “Something to Tide You Over” and get ready for “Come and Play with Us,”  a diorama that has definitely developed over the past two weeks after a conversation with MBS. That dude is ridiculous, and I believe the twins might be projected in this space using a short throw projector on plexiglass from behind. D’Arcy Norman had mentioned the idea of a projector last year for the diorama , but I couldn’t imagine it—the space seemed to small. I was thinking about it all wrong, if you can project from a short distance behind the diorama it opens up all kinds of possibilities. In fact, after telling Tim what we had discussed he demonstrated how easy it is to use tools like Canva to remove the background of a video image.

So these two projected on plexiglass from behind, and we slant the ceiling down, the floor up and start to really dial in a sense of depth and perspective. The images of the hallway also adds depth, then we have to figure out how to map the carpet to match that optical illusion. It’s all very complicated, a lot of ins and outs.

Taking apart the “Something to Tide You Over” diorama on via calepina

For that to happen, however, we have to sadly say goodbye to Creepshow. Luckily I’ll have all the pieces (we even kept the sand), so we can pull this one out of the cap at any point.

Miles gets rid of the last of the sand from Creepshow diorama

I had fun taking it apart cause I was working with my fellow culture geek Miles, and he hadn’t seen the front part of the space finished, and I think he was blown away. He sees the vision and can dig it, that’s a connection with my kid I deeply appreciate. Culture is wild and creates the opportunity for celebration and critique all at once. So mission truly accomplished on the very small scale this project is aspiring to.

The bav-o-rama in all its transitional glory

I look forward to what’s next, but today was a moment where the long, at times dark, journey to the light of creative joy found a vista. Rock, not rot!

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At Close Range: Like Father. Like Son. Like Hell?

Posted on January 9, 2025 by Reverend

MBS and I are back at it with yet another installation of the Family Pictures Podcast. “Mark it six, dude!” This time we discuss At Close Range (1986), the neo-noir that’s a vehicle for a remarkable swath of up-and-coming 80s actors such as Christopher Walken, Sean Penn, Mary Stuart Masterson, Chris Penn, Crispin Glover, Tracey Walter, David Strathairn, and Kiefer Sutherland to name a few. In fact, if nothing else this film is all about amazing performances, greatest of which is Christopher Walken’s portrayal of Brad Sr.—a character based on the real-life rural Pennsylvania gangster Bruce Johnston.

At Close Range: Daddy, Daddy, give me something

Back in 2008 I blogged about this movie as an homage to brotherly love and one of the many amazing moments wherein Brad Sr. shows his mettle as a dad 🙂 As a young father when I blogged this, I was pre-occupied with father-figures I wanted to avoid. I do think Walken’s character may be one of the most sinister father’s in recent film history. The following scene includes my favorite line of the entire film: “Daddy, daddy give me something.” I included that line in my 2008 post, which I totally forgot I’d written until after this podcast was published. It’s crazy how porous my memory has become—another reason why I really appreciate the blog as outboard memory.

As MBS captured in naming this episode “Escaping Family Destiny,” the theme that looms largest is the question of whether or not you can truly break with your family and avoid repeating all those things you promised yourself you’d never do when you became a parent. Case in point, the real-life Brad Jr. who turned state’s evidence to put his dad behind bars was ultimately unable to escape from the family tradition of crime. In 2013 he was arrested on drug-related charges and put back in prison, just like his father. The dream of Hollywood summed up in the film’s tagline, “Like Father. Like Son. Life Hell.” is a cloud that looms large over this story with the nightmarish realities of familial pre-destination. While the performances are truly amazing, the direction is not up to dealing with the profound questions around legacy that haunt pretty much every family.

I came across this fun take wherein Bill Burr tries to make sense of the coyote monologue that comes towards the end of the film. The strange, yet evocative, metaphor does break down pretty hard, and his WTF reaction is definitely one I shared, but he has a funnier, more succinct way of making that point. If you’re looking for the 4-minute version of our podcast, here it is 🙂

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