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 🙂 ).
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 villainCotton 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.
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.
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!
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 Wattersturned 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!
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.
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!
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.
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?
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!
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 🙂
December was a slow month for arcade repairs given everything else going on, but I did make some progress. In particular, I was able to finally install the Scramble multi-game chip on my spare Scramble board and install it in Super Cobra. This means that game has free play, high score saves, and several extra games like Frogger, Amidar, and more. The one weird thing with this chip set is the opening music doesn’t play all the way through, which I find odd given it does on my Super Cobra board—small sacrifice I guess.
Main Scramble board used for multi-game kit
That project took a bit longer than expected because I had to get chip E6 on the main board socketed to make sure the multi-game kit worked correctly, but that is all done now.
Chip E6 socketed in preparation for multi-game kit
The other piece for Super Cobra was getting the original Stern power supply fixed so that it has both the original and the switching power supply.
Original Stern power supply for Super Cobra
Resistor R8 blew a while back, well before my time with the game, and replacing that got the power supply working again.
Resistor R8 burnt-out
The one issue is that using the original power supply results in artificating at the top of the screen. It is relatively minor, but this does not happen with the switching power supply, so definitely an issue somewhere with the original unit. The struggle is real!
Minor yellow artifacts appear at top of screen from original power supply even after fix
Luckily the switching power supply works perfectly, so hopefully going to put the work on Super Cobra to rest for a long while.
Inline fuse in Venture that kept blowing given short in chassis AC line
Another small project was re-wiring the AC input for the monitor chassis on Venture given it kept shorting out and blowing an inline fuse that I didn’t even know existed. That was confusing. This was my first time working with an inline fuse, and once I figured it out it was a simple fix. It pushed me to clean-up all those ugly electrical tape hacks that many of these machines have. One of my to-do list items below is to clean up the rest of the wiring in Venture given it’s one of the worst offenders.
That’s it for work done, but I’m using this new year bavacade update to list some outstanding game issues/projects that I’d like to tackle in the next couple of months. Here’s to hoping!
Switch Robotron 1P and 2P button
Fix Millipede’s extra Matsushita chassis
Fix Make Trax yoke connector
Check chassis power plugs and clean-up any electrical tape monstrosities
Take apart Cheyenne and Pole Position and get them both on wheels
Investigate issues with either power board or inline power brick for Stargate
Check and clean-up wiring for Venture
Fix back-up Hanterex 20″ Polo chassis
Fix K4600 backup interface and main chassis boards
Fix wheels on Dig Dug and Bagman
Try 440 Exidy kit on non-working Crossbow board for Cheyenne
Test non-working Super Cobra board with game roms from working board
One of my projects for 2025 is to spend time each day reviewing all the posts I’ve written on a specific day since December of 2005. Twenty years of blogging is a pretty significant milestone, and it provides a good opportunity to try and clean-up as many derelict links, missing videos, and broken images as possible. The archive will never be entirely whole, but using Alan Levine‘s WP Posted Today plugin to list all posts from a specific day will make the process as easy as possible.
There are 8 posts previously published on January 5th
2022
Updating a Ghost Docker Container on Reclaim CloudOne of the things I wanted to figure out after installing Ghost as a Docker Container on Reclaim Cloud was how to update it to subsequent versions. Below is a very short video on the process as well as the … Continue reading →
2016
Reclaim Support for December 2015I’ve written about Reclaim Hosting‘s stellar support a couple of times already, and out of curiosity I took a quick look at our support statistics for December. Our average response time to new tickets during August, September, and October was 7 minutes, … Continue reading →
A Fistful of GIFsThe Western 106 force is strong with me these days. I even watched John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) last night, but more on that in another post. For now I’ll be talking about today’s Daily Create which asks us to make GIFs from … Continue reading →
2014
Tiny Tiny RSSIt’s taken me more than six months to resurrect my RSS reader (pathetic, I know), but I’ve finally imported my forlorn collection of feeds into the open source application Tiny Tiny RSS. I went with this application based on a recommendation … Continue reading →
2010
“Parade” by People Like UsAnother gem from the RSS reader from Ubuweb: People Like Us (Vicki Bennett) | U.K. Back to People Like Us in UbuWeb Film Parade (2009) A word from the artist… While viewing and sourcing content from the Great North Run … Continue reading →
Blind Date from HellCatchig up on my RSS reader is always a joy, and one of the most consistent and indisposable YouTube filters in my reader is the Media Funhouse blog, without fail there are at least 5 or ten posts that lead … Continue reading →
2009
I like my Cultra RareUpdate on 12/14/09: Unfortunately Cultra Rare is gone, for nothing gold can last. I have been exploring the Cultra Rare site I found by way of this post by Kliph Nesteroff over at WFMU’s Beware of the Blog (I’m finding … Continue reading →
2007
A Few Customizing Tips for K2The semester is coming, so here’s a little something to keep you going… Including a Custom Header Image in K2: To include a custom header in K2 you have two options. You can use the custom header tool in the … Continue reading →
To be fair, I’ve already written about doing this over a year ago and some progress was made. But there’s still a bunch of broken windows that need be repaired before the big anniversary, so labor on for love we must. I worked through the first 5 days of January which was about 70 posts—a good start. There’s only about 3800 more to go! We’ll see how far I get, but nothing’s more hopeful than tidying up your own little corner of the web.
The other benefit is all the wild things you are reminded of during the process, such as my Western106 GIFs exploring the genius of Sergio Leone, that post was a lot of fun.
Maybe craziest of all is a 2007 post about customizing the venerable WordPress theme K2 for which the original tutorial by Paul Stamatiou is still up and running—that’s truly a rarity for those old posts.
The designer I worked with for theCreepshow diorama “Something to Tide You Over” added the project to her website. I have to say it looks pretty awesome! I love the way she highlights the four panels created for the project, but then uses the images to go from mock-ups to an animated GIF of the final window—it’s super slick.
Bea Kotuk’s Project page for the bava studio production “Something to Tide You Over”
Also, I do like this little blurb of the project as well:
Jim Groom has been writing for BavaTuesdays.com for almost two decades, exploring topics like culture, ed tech, and his passion for restoring stand-up arcade machines. In 2024, he launched Bava Studio in Trento, Italy as a physical extension of his writings and creative projects. As part of the studio’s design, he included a display window featuring dioramas inspired by media moments he has written about or been captivated by over the years. I was tasked with designing and drawing the illustrations for the first display, based on “Something to Tide Me Over,” a story from the Creepshow comic series, which was also adapted for the 1982 anthology film of the same name.
It really captures the spirit of both this project and bava.studio brilliantly. It is timely that Bea should wrap this project up on her portfolio because I am getting ready to dismantle this diorama and make way for the next one which will hopefully be ready for the dead of winter 🙂 If you are looking for an illustrator and all-around awesome artist, look no further than Bea Kotuk—she’s the bees-knees! That said, you might have to wait a bit given she is already being drafted for the next diorama “Come and Play with Us.” Rock, not rot!
My colleague Noah Dorsett turned me on to Batocera a few weeks back, and over the holiday break I took some time to install it and mess around—and I’m glad I did! Batocera is an open-source and completely free retro-gaming distribution in the vein of Retropie, but not limited to a Raspberry Pi. My son could run it on his brand new Steamdeck—I’m just not so sure he would 🙂
“Why is this thing called Batocera?” – Because the creator of this project is an enthusiastic entomologist, and his son’s favorite insect is a batocera.
The video below takes you through setting up Batocera on a Raspberry Pi 4. The installation is pretty simple, just be sure to use balenaEtcher and not the Raspberry Pi Imager to flash the SD card to avoid partition errors.
Given Retropie hasn’t had a major release since 2022, I was wondering if those folks might be taking a well deserved break. I have no doubt building something like Retropie (not to mention managing the community) is a Herculean task, so it’ll be interesting to see if they return. In the interim, the Batocera project has been gaining steam, so I figured it might be worth exploring.
Game-by-game options
First impressions are the interface definitely seems a bit more modern compared to Retropie. You can interact with individual games to delete files and scrape media seamlessly. And with Advanced Game Options you manage game-by-game video, aspect ration, and audio settings which is quite useful.
Advanced Game Options
Much of this still existed in Retropie, but the menu system for interfacing on a per-game basis is much more intuitive and elegant.
Atari 2600 Box Display in Batocera
I know that Retropie had media scraping for games available, but given the interface I never really dug in. With Batocera I was able to use API calls from the amazing screenscraper.fr to get a wide variety of media for my games in one fell swoop. My advice is to sign-up for an account with screenscraper.fr and don’t waste your time with the other options given there is no comparison in terms of quality and breadth of results. I have my Atari console games displaying as the original boxes, which is everything! You have quite a range of options for displaying the games, and the range of themes is pretty impressive, although I’m sticking with the default theme because it is very much in the spirit of Retropie. In fact, it’s clear the developer of Batocera was very much inspired by Retropie.
Atari 5200 Box Display in Batocera
Another cool feature of Batocera is the system let’s you know when the BIOS files you need for a specific emulator are not installed. This is quite useful when emulating systems like Atari 5200 (and many others) that require one or more BIOS files, so it’s a definite bonus to have this information right in the interface.
Missing BIOS file warning
One of the struggles I’ve had with Retropie is getting the various flavors of MAME to run. MAME is a deeply complex system that at this point emulates tens of thousands of games, and I use just a small fraction for Golden Age games like Pac-man, Donkey Kong, etc. Out of the box Batocera manages several distributions such as MAME 2003plus (0.78plus), MAME 2010 (0.139), and the most current MAME release. In fact, I was pushed to try out Batocera when I kept failing to get the most current MAME package working on Retropie, a requirement for emulating early 80s handheld games. The reason they keep around older versions like MAME 2003 and 2010 is to avoid some of the unnecessary complexities later versions might introduce.
Emulator options built-in to Advanced Options on a game-by-game basis
To Batocera’s credit, it made loading and running handhelds pretty easy. Through a bit of trial and error I figured out the handhelds work best when added to the /roms/gameandwatch folder. I got Mattel’s Dungeons & Dragons handheld working, and I can confirm it is just as confounding as it was back in 1981.
Mattel’s Dungeons & Dragons Computer Fantasy Handheld from 1981 plays well in Batocera
The dual screen Donkey Kong handheld from Ninetendo is quite fun, and it is quite fun, and like with Dungeons and Dragons, I like the way the folks who ported these made the buttons interactive—it adds to an experience that is quite hard to reproduce.
The Two-Screen Donkey Kong handheld is one of the best I got working
I did manage to get the classic Coleco Donkey Kong miniature cabinet handheld to work, but had no luck with Galaxian or Pac-man, will have to revisit those. I also have not been able to locate roms for the Zaxxon handheld, which is such an odd choice for a handheld, was Zaxxon really that popular?
The classic Coleco Donkey Kong handheld worked, although experience very different
I have finally been able to get the mini composite out on the raspberry pi working well for Retropie (more on that in my next post), but composite out for Batocera has not worked for me yet, but I will revisit these instructions soon.
Conan: Hall of Volta C64 game on the Batocera
Dealing with VICE, the C64 emulation engine, can be tricky given it might require a keyboard for various commands. In particular, I have run into issue changing disks for multi disk games like Conan: Hall of Volta. I do like that Batocera has a couple of built-in methods that allow you to do this from the gamepad of the menu, making navigating that emulator quite a bit easier. The C64 emulation wiki page provides a guide for just this and more. The wiki has proved quite useful as I’ve been navigating my way around this project, and they are using Dokuwiki which is pretty cool to see—the old web lives!
The Champ Games arcade version of Lady Bug on the Atari 2600 emulator in Batocera
I tried out some of the Champ Games ROM files, but those did not work consistently. The games with save functions and seemingly updated features would not work well. Turns out Batocera defaults to Stella2014, and if I recall correctly the 3DS version of Stella made sure all these Champ Games worked cleanly given they didn’t with Stella 2014, so that is a bummer. On the bright side I can still play them on the 3dS.
Disable Kodi Media Center from System Settings Menu
I haven’t really used the Kodi Media Player built into the Batocera, but it kept on coming up at the top of one of the menus I was using, which caused me to mistakenly get pushed into it a few times. More annoying was there was no easy way go back, so I would have to restart the system. Eventually I just disabled the Kodi Media Player in the config.txt file to spare myself that annoyance, apart from that the interface is just wonderful in the Batocera.
In my zeal and copious free time I recorded a video wherein I walk through some of the elements and features described above, as well as showing-off a few of the emulated handheld games—which are pretty fun. I’m not sure this will appeal to anyone, but once it’s been created it needs somewhere to live.
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 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.
The ABCs of Blogging: Always Be Commenting
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”:
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?
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!
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)!
https://youtu.be/12yD8JyaVvY?si=_vd2avdoTc3Q4EpJ