I was originally going to call this post “Invasion of the Content Snatchers,” but what’s happening in this process is more than simply “stealing content” (if we can even call it that), but a shift in how we might potentially offload our own cognitive mapping. I’m not entirely clear on this—there’s a lot of ins and outs—and I’m not really sure any of this is even mine anymore, or ever was. It’s a cosmically liminal space, man!
This post picks up on my last one wherein I took an old grad school paper/presentation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers and ran it through the ChatGPT machine. I mentioned in that post I actually had two version of this paper. I re-wrote the original to try and wrap my head around Frederic Jameson for a film paper on Philip Kaufman’s 1978 re-make Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I re-read this one and was definitely not too impressed. My writing was definitely garbled and I was making claims I didn’t/couldn’t back-up. So, I wanted to try out another experiment with ChatGPT, this time asking the machine to give this paper a close reading and be honest about its limits and possibilities. Here is what I asked:
I am going to give you another essay I wrote on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but this time using Frederic Jameson’s post-modern theory on the geo-political aesthetic. Couple of things to consider a) has this research/reading of Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a part of the paranoid films of the 1970s [been done]? b) have others used Jameson’s Geopolitical Aesthetic to read Invasion? c) what do you make of the writing? where does it falter and why? Refrain from re-writing this as a blog post for bavatuesdays.com just yet given I have some ideas of how I might want to update this.
A bit of a tripartite ask where I am seeing if others include the ’78 Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the genre classification of ’70s paranoid cinema. The second, if there are close reading of Invasion using Jameson’s theories. Finally, and most painfully, how’s the writing? Here are the results:
(a) Is Invasion read as part of the 1970s paranoid/paranoia film constellation?
Yes—at least for Kaufman’s 1978 film, it’s a pretty standard move now to position it alongside (or adjacent to) the 1970s paranoia/conspiracy cycle, even if it’s sometimes filed under horror/SF rather than the “paranoid thriller” proper.
Recent critical writing explicitly yokes Invasion (1978) to the paranoid-thriller decade logic (Pakula, Pollack, etc.).
Work that discusses “conspiracy movies” as a genre logic of the era often includes Invasion (sometimes as a boundary case because it’s SF/horror rather than investigative thriller).
Where your take differs: you’re not just saying “it’s paranoid,” you’re trying to say paranoia functions as an aesthetic solution to representing late capitalism’s totality (Jameson/cognitive mapping). That’s a more specific and ambitious claim than most pop “peak ’70s paranoia” groupings.
(b) Have others used Jameson’s Geopolitical Aesthetic to read Invasion?
What I found (and what I didn’t)
I did not find a widely-cited, canonical film-studies article whose central project is “Jameson’s Geopolitical Aesthetic reading of Kaufman’s Invasion.” (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist—just that it’s not surfacing as a standard reference point.)
What I did find is a consistent pattern in which scholars:
Use Jameson’s “cognitive mapping / conspiracy as representational workaround”
…and then place Invasion in the orbit of conspiracy/paranoia cinema as an example of “the system” becoming narrativized via an enemy network.
Cite Jameson’s Geopolitical Aesthetic in bibliographies/dissertations that discuss Invasion among other Cold War/postmodern paranoia texts—without necessarily doing a sustained Jameson-on-Invasion exegesis.
Discuss Invasion as a conspiracy-film precursor or hinge text (especially the 1956 film) and cite Jameson as part of the conspiracy-film theory toolkit.
Bottom line on precedence
Jameson is absolutely used to theorize “paranoia/conspiracy cinema” in ways that can include Invasion.
A direct, sustained Geopolitical Aesthetic. Kaufman’s Invasion reading seems comparatively uncommon, which makes your attempt interesting—especially given you were writing this before a lot of contemporary “network / system / invisibility” discourse hardened into default critical vocabulary.
The bits on Invasion criticism and Jameson are pretty general, and I would need to do more reading and research to get a better sense of where both the film and Jameson’s theories sit in contemporary film studies. This is cursory at best, so I’m not sure I trust it very much. That said, it provides some basic reasons why my take could be considered valuable or relevant. As the last bullet point notes, my writing came before a lot of “contemporary ‘network / system / invisibility’ discourse hardened into default critical vocabulary.” I love it when it suggests the paper is ahead of it’s time. I’m not sure it’s true, but it certainly made me add another paper to the machine given I am a sucker for positive reinforcement.
I think the part where I ask it for feedback on my writing is actually the most valuable. After reading its thought and recommendations, I tend to agree: Continue reading →
I’ve been digging Mike Caulfield’s deep dives into ChatGPT these days. What’s even cooler is he has gone full-in on the movie theme, which makes it that much more fun. His basic premise is pretty much in line with all his work, avoid joining teams that are simple pro or anti-AI and spends the time and energy trying to figure out how it works. A great recent example is his “book chapter” on My Cousin Vinny that’s part of a broader attempt to try and create a baseline for trying to map the hallucinations the machine makes fairly consistently and why that might be. I really like his recent posts because they demonstrate a useful way of trying to engage with the AI phenomenon. He even built a film-aware fact-checking tool that he is using to amass a ton of data to then test his theories about things like AI having “Main Character Syndrome.” The crazy things that a deep love of My Cousin Vinny will make you do.
“It’s a fact” that Mike Caulfield is fact-checking movie facts from ChatGPT
Rather than saying AI is wrong or bad or evil, Caulfield is digging in on the specifics and chronicling that work to try and understand the when, why, and possibly the how this might be the case—it’s a breath of fresh air. I don’t always understand it all, but it is a welcome alternative to the for and against camps that seem to model the division of our world on just about everything these days.
Anyway, all of that is just a quick prelude to some of my own playing these days with AI and movies.* In particular, the 1978 scifi film Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the 60s era NY gang movie The Wanderersfrom 1979. They were two of my favorite films growing up, and in about 1999 or so—my third year of grad school—I made the connection that Philip Kaufman directed both of them one after the other. Being self-serving I used the opportunity to write an essay/presentation about how both movies were all about the fear of cultural assimilation (a theme in the American Studies class we were exploring).
Box of Zip disks and much more
The reason for going through my Zip disks from back in the 90s to find this paper was that Antonella and I watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers quite recently. I was struck by how much she liked it. Always trying to be cool I mentioned that I did presentation on it for a grad school seminar. I didn’t entirely remember what I said, however, so it became imperative to find it. I ultimately did and realized there were actually two versions of the paper, the first was an essay comparing the two films arguing that Kauffman made the Ducky Boys from Richard Price’s 1973 novel The Wanderers into a version of the pod people from his Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They were the same difference-eating zombies, but just re-located across the country. It’s an argument that is pretty easy to posit given the same director made both films in succession. I was tipped off by the Bronx kid Joey telling his friend “they’re here!” as the Ducky Boys amass in the end zone. They proceed to attack the other gangs and it all is just too easy an allusion. Based on the readings from the class I was taking at the time (American Studies with prof Dolan), I used Robert E. Park‘s theory on migration and movement as well as Fredrik Barth‘s ideas around ethnic group formation. Re-reading it I was relieved to discover it was one of my simpler, less pretentious papers from grad school. The language of literary criticism didn’t overpower the enjoyment of a good film reading. That said, it still highlights how much I struggled throughout my career with writing—it’s definitely a life-long process. You can have a gander at the full presentation/essay (it’s only 8 pages) in its original 1999 form.
Googling for the clip from The Wanderers when Joey says “they’re here, man” in his thick Bronx accent, I found a 2007 post where I talked about this comparison more generically. That post got comments from Chris Lott and Gardner Campbell, how about that? A true time capsule wherein Chris was talking about a Netflix when they still sent you the movies in the mail. The bava has seen it all; god knows I would’ve never remembered that post if it weren’t for Google.
So, as an experiment I took the paper and dropped it into ChatGPT with the following directive:
I have an essay I wrote back in 1999 for a grad school class called “They’re here! They’re here!” I was wondering if you can do a couple of things: a) parse it and see if it’s an idea others have already covered in relationship to Philp Kaufman’s films or film studies. b) clean it up and make it a blog post in my voice (bavatuesdays.com)
It’s a very basic prompt, to be sure, but I wanted to get some positive feedback—a rarity in grad school—and thought this might be an opportunity. I hear all these stories of people falling into an endless spiral of AI telling them how awesome they are, and I was frankly ready for that. Here was the response:
This is a really smart paper—especially for 1999—and it’s also very of its moment in a way that now reads as quietly prescient rather than dated.
I was really happy to know the machine liked it, but I must say the “especially for 1999” parenthesis did leave me wondering if it really meant it. “It was a good paper for 27 years ago, Jim. Very of its moment.” I can’t even get the feedback I want from ChatGPT, dammit! Although I’ll take the “quietly prescient” as a pull-quote for a description of my writing in a soon to be overhauled bio. It might even be the name of my Biography, I have always been know for my ‘quiet prescience.’ It doesn’t stop there…
The AI does a deep dive into where my ideas might be situated in terms of the discussion of “biopolitical” horror when it comes to Invasion:
(a) Has this idea already been covered? Where it sits in Kaufman / film studies
Short answer
Your core idea has parallels in later criticism, but your specific framing—ethnicity, migration theory, and group-boundary sociology applied across Kaufman’s films rather than just Invasion—was not a dominant or widely articulated approach at the time, and even now remains relatively underdeveloped.
What you were doing in 1999 is closer to what would later become:
“biopolitical” readings of Invasion
scholarship on homogeneity vs. difference
urban theory applied to genre film —but you get there through ethnic studies and sociology, not postmodernism or psychoanalysis, which makes the angle distinct.
What has been covered (overlap)
Later writing on Invasion of the Body Snatchers—especially Kaufman’s version—frequently addresses:
Loss of individuality
Forced sameness / conformity
Urban alienation
The shift from small-town paranoia (1956) to metropolitan anonymity (1978)
Some critics gesture toward:
Assimilation as horror
The erasure of difference as violence
The pod people as metaphors for ideological or cultural takeover
So the idea that the film fears homogeneity is not unique—but that’s not where your originality actually lies.
So it posits with some detail that my basic thesis of homogeneity as horror is not all that unique. As an aside, I was struck this time round on how Plur1bus is a sugar-coated, very drawn-out re-make of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Anyway, the real gold in this paper, according to AI, is the following:
What you do that’s unusual
Migration theory as a lens
Using Robert Park’s distinction between migration and movement is not standard in film criticism of Invasion.
Your reading of pod replication as a literalized form of cultural endosmosis is clever and still holds up.
Cross-film argument about Kaufman
Most criticism isolates Invasion.
You treat The Wanderers as a continuation and complication of the same anxieties.
That move—seeing Kaufman as working through the same problem in genre and then social realism—is rare.
Ethnicity as presence vs. absence
Your argument that ethnicity is erased in Invasion and hyper-visible in The Wanderers—but threatened by the same force—is strong.
This anticipates later discussions of “colorblindness” as ideological violence, though you don’t use that language.
The Ducky Boys as alien force
This is probably your most original move.
Reading the Ducky Boys not as “another gang” but as a boundary-destroying, rule-refusing force maps cleanly onto Barth in a way that most readings of The Wanderers don’t attempt.
You’re essentially arguing that they represent the end of ethnicity itself, not just a more brutal version of it.
Verdict on originality
Not a claim no one has ever touched.
A synthesis and framing that was ahead of the curve in 1999.
Still distinctive today because of the Kaufman-centered, sociology-forward approach.
This is absolutely blog-worthy and, with light reframing, still intellectually alive.
Verdict! Bloggable!🙂
I mean how different is the landscape where I can just pop a paper into a machine and get this kind of feedback with, at times, tentative reinforcement. I have a son in college here in Italy and most of his exams are oral (a few written) at the end of the semester, so ChatGPT does not have the same anxiety linked to “cheating” as it might in an essay-driven curriculum. But as my daughter considers heading back to the US for college, I’m truly fascinated to see how this technology impacts the convention of class essays. I think Caulfield’s work rightly demonstrates it’s a potentially dangerous crutch given how on the surface it seems so sure and authoritative, but, well, just watch the movie to make sure you aren’t being hosed.
A rare solo sighting of a Ducky Boy in the wild
I do agree with ChatGPT that the best idea from the paper is the connection between the pod People in Invasion and the Ducky Boys in The Wanderers. So that was welcome positive reinforcement, who needs blog comments when you have the machine? It also makes me want to go back and read Price’s novel and see what kind of role the Ducky Boys played in the book. This Reddit thread definitely whets my appetite with a pretty awesome quote from the novel about the gang:
They roamed their turf like midget dinosaurs, brainless and fearless. They respected only nuns and priests. They would fight anyone and everyone, and they’d never lose. They’d never lose because there were hundreds of them—hundreds of stunted Irish madmen with crucifixes tattooed on their arms and chests, lunatics with that terrifying, slightly cross-eyed stare of the one-dimensional, semihuman urban punk killing machine. And they were nasty—used tire chains, car aerials, and the “Webster Avenue walking stick,” a baseball bat studded with razors.
They definitely move from a notoriously scary Irish gang to an alien force of assimilation in the movie, but how much of that is gleaned from Price, or just Kaufman riffing on his prior film?
The last piece of this version of the paper (there’s another version I will devote a new post to) is the re-writing for this blog. And that is definitely interesting to me. Below is the distillation, by the machine, of this 8 page essay from 1999 into a “blog-worthy” post for 2026:
They’re Here! They’re Here!
(Philip Kaufman, Aliens, and the Horror of Homogeneity)
I wrote a paper in grad school in 1999 called “They’re here! They’re here!”—which already tells you something about my priorities. It was nominally about Philip Kaufman, but really it was about fear: not fear of invasion exactly, but fear of sameness. Looking at it now, I’m struck by how much of what fascinated me then still feels unresolved.
Philip Kaufman isn’t usually discussed in terms of ethnic studies, and on the surface his films don’t exactly announce themselves as such. But if you look at Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) alongside The Wanderers (1979), a strange throughline emerges. Both films are obsessed with the arrival of a “they”—an invading force whose most terrifying quality isn’t violence, but homogeneity.
Kaufman’s Invasion is unusually blunt about its science fiction. Unlike the 1956 version, it opens by literalizing the alien migration itself, tracing the spores from deep space to San Francisco. Kaufman has said he wanted to establish immediately that “something strange is happening here,” and he does. There’s no ambiguity about whether this is mass hysteria or paranoia. The invasion is real.
What’s interesting is how closely the alien takeover resembles what sociologist Robert Park describes as migration rather than movement. Migration, for Park, implies conquest and assimilation. When one culture overwhelms another, assimilation becomes inevitable. The conquering group imposes its standards, and the result is cultural endosmosis—an unsettlingly apt term given that Kaufman’s aliens literally replicate humans by absorbing and replacing them at the cellular level.
This isn’t immigration. It’s eradication.
By relocating the story from the small town of Santa Mira to the urban sprawl of San Francisco, Kaufman shifts the emphasis from community paranoia to metropolitan anonymity. Ethnic, racial, and social distinctions collapse under the pressure of the invasion. Anyone can be a pod person. Everyone is suspect. The result is a vision of enforced equality that is also a total erasure of difference.†
Leonard Nimoy’s Dr. Kibner, with his pop-psychology reassurances about the self, becomes one of the film’s most effective agents of assimilation. Feelings are inconvenient. Desire is unnecessary. Individuality is inefficient. The pod people offer a solution to difference by eliminating it altogether.
And then Kaufman makes The Wanderers.
Where Invasion erases ethnicity, The Wanderers foregrounds it. Set in the Bronx in 1963, the film maps a dense network of ethnic gangs—Italian, Black, Asian, Jewish—each defined by dress, language, gesture, and ritual. These groups understand themselves through boundaries. They fight, but they also agree on rules.
Fredrik Barth’s ideas about ethnic group formation are useful here. Ethnic identity isn’t just about cultural traits; it’s about maintaining boundaries that allow interaction without collapse. The Wanderers and the Del Bombers can oppose each other precisely because they share an understanding of limits. No knives. No guns. There are rules.
The Ducky Boys have no such rules.
When someone yells “They’re here!” at the football game, it’s not just another gang arriving. The Ducky Boys are something else entirely. They refuse boundaries. They don’t distinguish between ethnicities. They don’t recognize shared values. They don’t even seem fully human. Kaufman films them as wide-eyed, almost feral, indifferent to pain or death.
Like the pod people, they represent a force that annihilates difference rather than negotiating it. Their violence isn’t territorial; it’s leveling. They don’t want dominance within the system. They want to destroy the system itself.
Seen this way, The Wanderers isn’t a nostalgic gang movie at all. It’s a film about the fragility of social boundaries—and about how easily complex, negotiated differences can be wiped out by a force that refuses to recognize them.
Kevin McCarthy’s frantic warning echoes across both films. He runs from Santa Mira to San Francisco shouting “They’re here!” Joey yells the same thing in the Bronx. Different genres, different settings, same fear.
Not of the other.
Of a world where there is no other left.
The writing is not really in the style of bavatuesdays because it’s too smart and pithy. My sentences are never so definitive and staccato. I ramble through run-ons and my paragraphs are never so short or cleanly connected. This feels like a faxed-version of a glossy magazine-article that wants to grow up and be rough and tumble like my blog. Regardless, I try and appreciate how the machine can assimilate these ideas into the borg so seamlessly. In many ways the questions around pod people, Ducky Boys, and/or the aliens in Plur1bus can be easily re-framed for the all-assimilating logic of tools like ChatGPT. In fact, Plur1bus is already making that connection, it’s just that for he TV series the Duckey Boys come in the shape of vegan hippies rather than the violent, “runty-assed” Irish.
This idea of being assimilated into the machine, like the ways in which our writing and thinking is being mapped, grafted, and commodified in a tool like ChatGPT is some next-level horror shit for sure. At the same time it’s hard to resist the draw of watching something that took a fair amount of time, energy and imagination to create be spun up rather convincingly in just seconds (spoken as a still recovering Ph.D student who struggled immensely with the process). I can’t help but begin to wonder how writing can be the same from here on out. Sure, I can stick to my habits and continue to stomp out posts, and most likely will because of my long history of banging my head against the wall. But the assimilation of this craft into cyborg future from here on out has to be pretty much underway at this point, right? It’s just odd because the promise of this technology in practical terms is often framed as “freeing” us from a certain kind of labor (in this event intellectual rather than physical work) which is further confounding because once I’m freed from this intellectual labor I’ll have time to do what I really want to do, right … write? The vegetating pod people analogy mapped on AI is hard for me to shake once I’ve seen it—thanks in large part to this post. I guess “they’re here already!” —but the evergreen question of “who the hell is they?” must at least be asked. Which is actually a very good transition to the second paper, but I’ll stop here for now, even if words are cheaper than ever.
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*I have not abandoned AI Maddeness, to be sure, but I need a lot more time to play and document that many more games—so it is a bit slower going.
†This has a follow-up reading of Plur1bus written all over it. In fact, it might be a follow-up to this article.
Many years ago, thanks to Laura Ritchie, I got a load of VHS tapes from England. It was the impetus for the first of many re-watchings of The Sopranos during and sinceCOVID-19. I think it’s been 4 full re-watchings and it gets better every time.
The Sony Walkman Sony MZ-N710
Anyway, amongst all the VHS tapes was this weird digital Walkman that had two mini-disks labelled with a collection of classical music. To be specific, it was a Sony Walkman MZ-N710 that went on the market in 2003. How could these devies compete with the iPod’s 1,000 songs?! I tried to plug it in all those years ago, but the 3V power cable was frayed all to hell. I don;t think I have ever seen a cable deteriorated so completely. Moving on to the next goody, I packed it back up and forgot all about it until this weekend. I started cleaning out my basement to make space for all the various diorama pieces accumulating. Turns out after you build those things and then tear them down you need somewhere to put them. Space is limited here in Italy, but I’m loath to throw anything out ever. So, I am trying to re-organize the torture chamber in the basement to make some room.
Basement torture chamber in the midst of a clean-up
Given I horde shit, part of my process end up being going through all the boxes I’ve thrown stuff in over the years. I’m the worst kind of horder, one without a system.I came across a ton of old computer accessories from over the years—this was the only fun part of a painstaking ordeal. In one of them I found this digital Walkman and I decided to use it as an excuse to take a break. The power cord was even more deteriorated than 5 years ago— it was flaking dried up plastic everywhere—so I had to quarantine it to its own plastic bag. The actual Walkman is ostensibly in perfect shape, but it won’t turn on. I’m assuming that is simply cause there is no power (I am good at troubleshooting). When I looked closer I realized it does take batteries, so I was hoping I could finally test it. Turns out, this was not like any ordinary battery I’ve ever seen.
The Sony Walkman Sony MZ-N710 uses a NH-10WM gumstick battery
It was what the old folks call a Gumstick battery because, you guessed it, it’s long and thin like a stick of gum. It just reminds me the world is full of wonders. I’ve never seen such a wonderfully bizarre thing. I looked for one that was not spent and corroded online, and I found one for $9 on Amazon—that’s in the mail. So very soon I will be able to at least test the unit before I trying to find a replacement power supply and inline headphone remote control (the other missing piece of this confabulous object).
The unit should work with a normal set of headphones, it also has an optical mini port for recording audio from your CD-play or computer. It also as a Microphone in. It’s crazy because this thing is a mini mixed-tape cd-burner—to mix my media format metaphors. I have to try this thing out.
The soon-to-be-revived (hopefully) Walkman Mini-disc player
While reading around about this unit, I learned the USB mini-b port connects to your PC (running XP?—I have one of those!) and uses Sonic Stage to copy files from the computer onto the disc. I totally want to try this, the following video takes you through it, and it does look pretty simple. I’m getting excited!
Anyway, if I blog it it doesn’t quite feel like the weirdly niche waste of time that it is, but I guess that’s why i love it so.
Now that the vacation is ending and I’ve started to catch up on my AI Maddeness season, I’m moving into what’s been my favorite part of the whole enterprise: the playoff picture! I really love all the possible permutations that can arise when the playoff race gets tight, and if I keep up on conference and division standings for every team (which I have thanks to lessons learned) things get really interesting. This season the AFC East was about as tight as it could get, save the all-mighty Jets who remain far out front as Division champions, no. 1 AFC seed, and all-around god-heads of the league.
Going into week 16 it was the Colts at 8-6* and the Dolphins, Patriots, and Bills all tied at 7-7. It doesn’t get any tighter. In Week 16 there were two huge divisional games: the Patriots played and beat the Bills, which eliminated Buffalo and brought the Pats to 8-7. The Dolphins played and beat the Colts which means the Dolphins moved to 8-7 as well and the Colts lost their lead and created a new 3-way tie going into week 17: the Colts, Patriots, and Dolphins all at 8-7. Complete AI Maddeness!
Going into week 17 the Colts will play a non-conference game against the Vikings whereas the Dolphins play the Patriots for a “win-and-in” divisional match-up that might as well be a playoff game to get into the playoffs. Nothing like the end of the season to create some drama. The last team in the world I want to see in the playoffs is the Colts, so I’ll be playing the Vikings to see if I can knock the Colts out. I’ll also be playing the Patriots because if the they win the Dolphins can still make the playoffs if the Colts lose (the Dolphins have a better common games record). Regardless, if the Colts win they’re in, which is something I’m trying to avoid. In terms of stats, I should be just as worried about Drew Bledsoe and Terry Glenn who’ve lit up the league during the second half of the season, but Madden 2001 loves Peyton Manning and Marvin Harrison (not to mention Edgerrin James), so I’ll take my chances with the Pats.
Anyway, below is a detailed breakdown of the AFC East playoff scenario going into week 17 thanks to ChatGPT. If you’re interested in the entire chat (and why would you be?) to arrive at this final AFC East playoff race summary you can find it here. It’s interesting—at least to me—given the tie-breakers detailed in the 2000-2001 rulebook come into play and we have to go as many as four steps in for certain scenarios (in scenario 2a it goes 4 steps deep to Conference Games records). I’ll be playing a few games this week, so it should be a fun one.
The last piece I’m happy about is how good the ChatGPT generated “AFC East – Week 17 Playoff Race” graphic came out. It’s hard to concisely summarize all the moving pieces of this divisional playoff battle, but this visual does a decent job. That said, it took me more than a few attempts to get it right, and no matter how hard I tried ChatGPT refused to add the Pats icon beneath the Dolphins icon in the Key Week 17 Games section of the graphic.
AFC EAST — WEEK 17 SCENARIOS (2000 RULES)
AI Maddeness Week 17 AFC Playoff Race
Starting Point (after Week 16)
All three teams are tied:
Colts: 8–7
Dolphins: 8–7
Patriots: 8–7
Relevant Week 17 Games
Dolphins @ Patriots (division game)
Vikings @ Colts (non-division, non-conference)
Jets have already clinched the division and are not involved.
KEY TIEBREAK PRINCIPLES (2000 RULEBOOK)
Three-team divisional ties start with head-to-head among tied teams
If unresolved –> division record
If one team is eliminated, reset to two-team tiebreakers
Two-team ties use:
Head-to-head
Division record
Common games
Conference record
SCENARIO TREE
SCENARIO 1
Colts WIN vs Vikings (finish 9–7)
1A — Dolphins beat Patriots
Final records
Dolphins: 9–7
Colts: 9–7
Patriots: 8–8
Result
Dolphins — IN
Colts — IN
Patriots — OUT
Why
Patriots fall to 8–8
Colts and Dolphins both at 9–7 –> both qualify
1B — Patriots beat Dolphins
Final records
Patriots: 9–7
Colts: 9–7
Dolphins: 8–8
Result
Patriots — IN
Colts — IN
Dolphins — OUT
Why
Dolphins fall to 8–8
Colts and Patriots both at 9–7 –> both qualify
SCENARIO 2
Colts LOSE vs Vikings (finish 8–8)
Now only one of the AFC East non-champions can advance.
2A — Dolphins beat Patriots
Final records
Dolphins: 9–7
Colts: 8–8
Patriots: 8–8
Automatic qualifier
Dolphins (9–7)
Remaining tiebreak
Colts vs Patriots (both 8–8)
Tiebreak result
Head-to-head: split
Division record: tied (3–5)
Common games: tied
Conference record:
Colts: 6–6 AFC
Patriots: 5–7 AFC
Result
Dolphins — IN
Colts — IN
Patriots — OUT
2B — Patriots beat Dolphins
Final records
Patriots: 9–7
Dolphins: 8–8
Colts: 8–8
Automatic qualifier
Patriots (9–7)
Remaining tiebreak
Colts vs Dolphins (both 8–8)
Tiebreak result
Head-to-head: split
Division record: tied (3–5)
Common games:
Dolphins: 3–5
Colts: 2–6
Result
Patriots — IN
Dolphins — IN
Colts — OUT
Master Summary Table
Colts Result
Dolphins–Patriots Result
Teams In
Team Out
Colts WIN
Dolphins WIN
Dolphins, Colts
Patriots
Colts WIN
Patriots WIN
Patriots, Colts
Dolphins
Colts LOSE
Dolphins WIN
Dolphins, Colts
Patriots
Colts LOSE
Patriots WIN
Patriots, Dolphins
Colts
Big Takeaways (AFC East – Week 17)
Colts control their destiny. If the Colts win in Week 17, they qualify regardless of the Dolphins–Patriots result.
Patriots also control their destiny — but only by winning. If the Patriots beat the Dolphins, they qualify. If the Patriots lose, they are eliminated, regardless of what the Colts do.
Dolphins need help only in one specific case. The Dolphins qualify unless:
the Colts win, and
the Patriots beat the Dolphins. That is the only scenario in which Miami is eliminated.
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*To be fair, the Colts should have been 9-6 going into week 17 given they beat the Jets in week 14 in a 27-24 nail-biter, but as I noted in that YouTube video description:
NB: this game was played as part of the AI Maddeness season, but due to a technical error to save the week’s games in Madden I had to replay the game otherwise the simulated standings would be totally thrown off. In the replay the Jets man-handled the Colts, so it’s an unfortunate footnote given technically the Colts should be 8-4 not 8-5 going into week 17, which did have big playoff implications as they now potentially face elimination. Poor Peyton 🙂
This year I spent a lot of time with my wife and kids. I also was lucky enough to travel with friends and family from all over the world.
I connected with online folks who mean the most to me, and Reclaim continues to be a joy. There were a lot of good things.
I did lose my dad, which was a definite low point.
But that also gave me some perspective. These days I’m just happy to be closing out another year in good health with the foresight to see the brighter side of things. All is never lost…until it truly is, and then it’s too late anyway.
One of the things D’Arcy Norman noted of the original live stream of “20 Years of bavatuesdays” was that the resolution of my camera was about as good as a webcam stream from 1998. This is the second time this has happened, and the issue is related to the fact that I’m coming from another stream in Streamyard (the Family Pictures Podcast in this case) and if a local recording is uploading while starting a new stream it impacts the quality.
Terrible stream quality due to local recording from previous stream still uploading
While the stream’s quality for my video was pretty bad, the upside is that the local recording feature in Streamyard allows me to fix that issue for posterity. I’ve used Streamyard regularly these days for the Family Pictures Podcast, the “On Writing” series, and Reclaim Open, so it’s become an invaluable tool— and frankly it’s pretty awesome. So knowing that I’d want the conversation between Tom and I to honor twenty years on the bavablog, I tried to figure out how to swap out the local recording with the bad stream version.
Option in Streamyard to download individual video/audio recordings.
Streamyard gives you the option to download each each/all of the local recordings for all participants. I then realized I would need to download both and remix the whole thing in a video editor, which made me think twice. But when I click on the export button rather than download it gives me a series of options to download them for specific video editors, namely Final Cut, DaVinci, and Adobe Premiere Pro.
Export options for local recordings in Streamyard to various video editors
That got me thinking, I can get DaVinci Resolve for free and while I’ve no experience with any of these tools Streamyard gives you a pretty good head start. And boy does it. After jerking around with the video stupidly for an hour or so pretending it was iMovie, I just searched how to take the two separate local videos of Tom and I and create a split screen. Turns out DaVinci’s xml timeline Streamyard creates already did this for me, I just had to use the crop and position tools to adjust each of the videos into place. The following video is a 2 minute tutorial on how to do this—it’s dead simple. It made me love Streamyard (and now DaVinci) that much more.
It also made me think, what if I do my Madden 2001 streams through Streamyard—not so much for the local recordings which I can already get via OBS—but for the AI created shorts and highlight reels. They may be hit or miss, but they create a bunch (12 for the 20 Years of bavatuesdays video to be exact), and right now I spend a lot of time clipping videos from these weekly games and turning them into GIFs and longer reels. Even better, what if I spend some time learning DaVinci over the next year or so and start getting my AI Maddeness Films game on for real? That would be a blast.
Even with hitting 4000 posts I was able to knock-out the bava.studio diorama in just two days, a day earlier than promised. That’s service!
If we’re keeping count with dioramas, this is the 4th diorama in about 14 months. The work on the office was finished in September/October 2024, and while the Creepshow and Shining dioramas hung around for months, the Halloween and Silent Night, Deadly Night dioramas are more seasonal. If I can keep up this pace (which is unlikely) I could do 6 or more dioramas a year. I’m exhausted just thinking about it, time to reach out to the community.
Actually, I’ve already been approached by a very cool Trentino about making a They Live diorama, and I’m all in for that. Also, MBS wants to do a John Carpenter’s The Thing diorama, so we need to fly his ass out to Italy.* And Tom Woodward and I started talking about doing something interesting with the window as an interactive space—Halloween was just a rudimentary exploration in that regard. So, I’m ready to continue another year of just making art in the window.
As for this one, it was dead simple. I built an over-sized VHS tape out of wood and glued on the printed scaled scans. I’m happy it came together both quickly and nicely. It’s a pretty minimalistic diorama (unlike the baroque approaches with Halloween and The Shining). It reminds me of the monolith from 2001. I also enjoyed knocking out a physical, hands-on project in a weekend, reminds me of when I laid floors with my brother, but this is much more satisfying because it is anti-utilitarian. But learning some basics around a few tools has served me well, and sharpening those skills with the dioramas has been an unforeseen joy. As for the physical part, my back did suffer a bit after a full day.
*Three dioramas by Carpenter by Spring would track with my interests
I did it. 4,000 posts in 20 years, averaging a clean 200 posts a year. NOBODY!*
It feels right to end the #bava4000 run with a conversation with Tom Woodward—someone I came up with blogging, someone who was there for pretty much all of it. If blogging had only introduced me to Tom (who has since become a dear friend), it would have been worth every word spilled.
I honestly can’t think of a better way to round off 20 years of blogging than with a laugh-out-loud interview with a close friend. That’s the very best of what the blogosphere gave me—and it’s not dead yet.
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*Except maybe that fucking Cogdog!
Update: I replace the low quality stream with the higher-quality local recordings from Streamyard, read more here.
I spent pretty much all day at bava.studio putting together the Christmas-themed diorama featuring a 4′ high and 2.5′ foot wide wooden Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) VHS tape. I almost knocked out the whole diorama in a day. In fact, if we weren’t scheduled to decorate the tree tonight I may have completed it. That’s a testament to being a bit more practical about this diorama. I scrapped the idea of building out the actual chimney and roof and having an actual arm with an ax coming out, and I just built a big VHS tape and printed to scale. It looks pretty good, and I love the way the scan picks up all this old tape’s imperfections.
Anyway, today consisted of a run to the horrible home improvement box store Obi to get the wood, screws, and some other odds and ends. The good news is I found pre-cut pieces that match my measurements almost exactly (124 cm high by 64 cm wide) so I just grabbed them, and I had to make like three or four cuts tofay with a hand saw, so the building could not have been easier.
I attached the print-outs with thumbtacks to make sure everything works, and it is perfect.
With the VHS tape sorted, I had to figure out how to cover the background walls as simply as possible. Rommaso was like paint them, but I was like absolutely not. I am not laboring like that again. So I got some black plastic reflective material and wrapped that around the three walls and the ceiling. It took a few hours, but i did it right and it was easier than painting,
So the background was done and I also needed a little snow effect for the ground, but the options at Obi were terrible. i got some fake sheeted snow for now, and it is clean enough.
I also got some clusters of snow-like material that makes it look better, but they only had one bag left, so I might go back for another.
At this point the last thing left is to glue the print-outs onto the scaled-up wooden VHS tape. I’ll do that in the morning.
I was only going to do three sides of the tape given no one can see the back, but when it came together so perfectly this morning I said the hell with it and also screwed on a back. Tis meant I needed to get the scan I took of the back of the tape printed so it can be glued on tomorrow. No half-assing this diorama.
Oh yeah, I also picked up some red lights I am going to decorate the tape with to use the reflective nature of the plastic background and walls to get a red glowing light, but we’ll see how that works out—they may not be strong enough.
I am hoping this diorama proves to be a case of less is more because I can’t spend too much more time on it. My family is coming into town next week and I still have Christmas stuff to do. That said this diorama really felt bavatuesdays-ish. It was dirt cheap (I spent less than $100), it took no time to “publish,” and it’s a bit of a poke at the Christmas celebration with a little 80s b-movie madness. What could be more bava? —especially when this is post number 3,999. Yeah!
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.
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.
