Blog Body

Posted on July 25, 2018 by Reverend
 

Blog Body -this one is for you @adamc

A post shared by Jim Groom (@jim.groom) on


Last month my family and I had the good fortune of welcoming Adam and Katie Croom to Trento. We enjoyed a jam-packed weekend of birthday celebrations, Dolomiti hikes, and Medieval castles. Adam blogged all the details and I now have watch envy! I was honored to hear that his trip to Trento was a highlight of his Italian journey—there is some stiff competition for attractions in this place. So, Adam and Katie brought a little something as an offering to the church of bava—-and I have to say it does not suck. The Blog Boyz shirt you see above is actually  reference to something Kevin Durant said on The Bill Simmons Podcast.

You can get more details following the above link, but essentially Durant is talking smack on the focus around obscure analytics in basketball, while noting the game has changed for the worst given folks are afraid to become the latest meme on Twitter—or the butt of over analysis in the blogosphere. His term for these folks is “Blog Boyz,” and he goes on to say it in such a way over and over again during the podcast that it has, to quote the article, “entered the basketball lexicon.” While I can’t pretend to be a basketball fan (I don’t think I ever wrote about sports here), but the lasting pain of losing Durant for Thunder faithful is apparent when talking to Adam—there is still so much love there. What’s more, after listening to Durant I can understand why, he is funny and sharp. That said, I do appreciate a good t-shirt that references blogging. What’s more, probably the funniest part is when I put the shirt on this morning my daughter said to me, “Does that shirt say “Blog Body?” LOL, in fact, that might be a more appropriate slogan for me 🙂

Posted in blogging, fun | Leave a comment

A Time Capsule of UMW’s DTLT in 2010

Posted on July 24, 2018 by Reverend

So, after tracking time on the blog today given Reclaim’s 5th birthday, Tim asked me to look for the DTLT Today video episode 105 where we announced Reclaim Hosting. I found it and Tim will be posting it shortly for posterity, but while I was searching for it in my hard drives I came across this strange video I barely remember making called “Jim’s Infomerical.” For some context, Martha Burtis asked me to basically outline my process of giving a UMW Blogs course presentation since she would be doing me an ace and visiting Allyson Poska’s class to provide an overview of the system.

According to the filename the video was from January 2010—which makes sense—and it’s crazy cause I believe you can hear every one of the OG DTLT instructional technologists I came up with at UMW: namely Martha, Jerry Slezak, Andy Rush, and Patrick Murray-John. Patrick was getting ready to head to GMU’s CHNM within a month’s time, Jerry would soon leave to run UMW’s Help Desk, and it would be a skeleton crew of Martha, Andy, and I until we picked up Tim “the Ripper” Owens.  At least I think that’s right—any help would be appreciated from those who were there with specific timelines, though, cause my memory is unreliable.

Anyway, the video is a kinda selfie recording of a much younger Jim Groom walking Martha through how I would do a class demo for UMW Blogs, but more than that it is a pretty accurate peek at the level of free flow banter and fun we had as a group for many a year. Sometimes I really miss hanging with those amazing folks in a drab office in duPont Hall having a ton of fun and talking all kinds of shit. 

Posted in dtlt, DTLT Today | 11 Comments

Marking Time: 5 Years at Reclaim Hosting

Posted on July 24, 2018 by Reverend

It’s hard to believe, but yesterday was the fifth of what Tim and I are officially acknowledging as Reclaim Hosting‘s birthday. I always thought it was the 28th of July, but as I’ll talk about here soon, my memory is entirely unreliable. Reclaim is now 5 years old! That is crazy to me, it has been both very quick and at the same time seems like I have always been a Reclaimer. Time is wild, it’s been 13 years since I took a job at UMW as an instructional technologist, 10 years since EDUPUNK, 8 years since ds106, 6 years since our pilot of UMW Domains, 5 years since we created the best little hosting company around, and now almost 3 years since I followed Tim’s lead and went full time at Reclaim. I think a lot about time on this blog, in fact this blog (and my daddy blog before it) is in many ways dictated by a sense of tracking time and trying to record the quotidian things that would otherwise soon be forgotten by my increasingly porous memory. 

I like recalling the origin myth of Reclaim Hosting, because it makes me smile. I was coming off my lowest point personally; I finally quit drinking and committed to get my mental health in order—no small task for me—and few things could have been further from my mind than starting a company.  Tim and I toyed with striking out with the idea behind Reclaim Hosting in February (?) of 2013 after a trip to Emory University, but that discussion went dormant while we ramped up for the official launch of UMW Domains (which, as it would happen, we spent Reclaim’s fifth anniversary migrating UMW’s servers to Digital Ocean 🙂 ). But once I returned from leave in the Summer of 2013 Tim approached me after his thankless vacation at the beach dealing with a Hippie Hosting server outage and, rather than throwing up his hands and jumping ship on the server admin life, he wanted to doubled down. He was like, “So, are you back or what?” [I had been mentally absent for a bit.] “Because I think we should start a company?” I was thinking to myself, “Wow, this guy is no joke, he means it?” I did think about stuff like going independent a lot, as most do, but never really committed. But when I saw how serious Tim was and I knew what I knew about him, I immediately committed. That’s the power of Tim Owens. We decided on the name Reclaim Hosting, and that day (or a day later) we were heading to the county clerk’s office to become partners in a small venture that would literally make my life more a fairytale than the ongoing farce it had become 🙂

It happened really quick, I had a like $600 left over from the $5,000 Shuttleworth Grant David Wiley got me, and we used that to fund the first two or three months of a new server (clash.reclaimhosting.com) in order to run Reclaim Hosting in parallel with UMW Domains. We got some press immediately from the Chronicle, which jump-started interest by highlighting the fact we were offering folks a domain and web hosting for $12 a year. It was definitely an experiment, but the rush early on was a good sign we may be on to something. I remember the question we kept getting during those early days was will this continue beyond the year? And, we were pretty upfront that we did not know. We were transparent that if it did continue, we could not sustain it at $12 an account, and we would have to rethink pricing, etc. We had about $1400 in the bank in May 2014, which means we were running a profit of around $800—although neither of us were being paid by Reclaim. So whether we could sustain Reclaim was definitely a question mark, but that all changed when the University of Oklahoma reached out in June of 2014 for an institutional setup, then soon after Davidson College, CSU Channel islands, and Emory University—- the rest is history. 

We have operated in the black from day 1; we always had a straightforward business model; we do not prey on our customers with product up-selling or data siphoning; and we remain fiercely independent in that we owe no one nothing—there are no investors we  have to answer to, and when an IT department or security officers find themselves puffing up their chest and making things harder than necessary to enable academic technology, we can simply walk away. In fact, one could argue it is because of those people that we even exist! I am really proud of what we start, and in that 5 years we have doubled in size in terms of people, with Lauren Brumfield growing with us for over 3 years now, and Meredith Fierro filling out support for a year and a half. Growing is tricky, and we remain vigilant of the issues tied up with getting too big too fast and forgetting why we did this to begin with. But you know what, 5 years on not much has changed: our support remains consistently solid; our prices remain as affordable as ever; and our commitment to helping faculty and students explore the open web for teaching and learning is still unflagging. 

So, all this to say happy belated birthday, Reclaim Hosting, I remain a big fan! And, in honor of our fifth anniversary we’re resurrecting our first server, namely clash.reclaimhosting.com, which will truly mark the end of something, i.e., the migration of our last two Reliable Site servers on August 4th (beathap.reclaimhosting.com and joydiv.reclaimhosting.com) will mean all of our critical infrastructure is now on Digital Ocean. A project two years in the making—what did I say about tracking time on the blog? Making the myths one post at a time.

Posted in reclaim | Tagged , , , , | 14 Comments

Domus vindicare regnum tuum

Posted on July 16, 2018 by Reverend

One of the many cool things I took away from visiting Coventry last week was how they are re-working their support documentation to be more conceptual and visual. A teaching aide that leads you to a particular issue, rather than just a list of how-to articles. It is still a work-in-progress, but Lauren Heywood and Charlie Legge have been doing some awesome work on this project. In particular, I love the choice of metaphor, namely comparing one’s own domain at Coventry to a house. Brilliant, right?! 🙂

This animated visual model of explaining what hosting is and why it matters is pretty awesome. I got a lot of guff about this metaphor back in the day, but I think history is on my side, and it is all but clear that I was right, at least metaphorically 🙂 Rent, lease, own, or squat,  your online data still needs to live somewhere. Thank you, Charlie and Lauren, vindicare regnum, indeed!

Posted in Domain of One's Own | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

SPLOTting a Path to Coventry

Posted on July 16, 2018 by Reverend

I spent most of last week working from the UK. Coming off vacation I was back on the road, and a couple of days in London was a nice transition back. In fact, I even got to see Phantom Thread in 70 MM at the BFI IMAX theater.

And the next day I was able to catch part of a retrospective of Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio’s work—most of which was new to me. I got to see his very first film, Fists in the Pocket (I pugni in tasca), and I was really impressed. The whole film was funded by his family and I believe shot on location at a relatives home, and it’s quite gorgeous—an impressive debut. The story focuses on a young man who is losing his mind, and the ways in which he rationalizes his increasingly psychopathic behavior for the “good of the family.” It reads as a full-frontal attack on middle-class, catholic values of Italy in the 60s, and uses a dysfunctional family as the vehicle. I must say the decaying mountain villa they live in felt oddly familiar 🙂 I like Criterion’s encapsulation of the film:

Fists in the Pocket was a gleaming ice pick in the eye of bourgeois family values and Catholic morality, a truly unique work that continues to rank as one of the great achievements of Italian cinema.

But it wasn’t all films and culture, I was working most of the time in preparation for a two-day workshop at Coventry University wherein I would be both exploring the Coventry Domains platform with technologists that support different schools/departments from around the university, as well as a deep-dive into the administration of Domains with the three-person crew at the Disruptive Media Learning Lab (DMLL), namely Daniel Villar-Onrubio, Lauren Heywood, and Charlie Legge. As often happens with workshops like this, I often get more out of it than I give. As we were talking through cPanel, various application, and more, the conversation turned to SPLOTs given Daniel and Lauren have been doing an unbelievable job of promoting these small, focused teaching tools. What’s more, Coventry is the first school that has made SPLOTs available as part of their general Domain of One’s Own offering.

Daniel shared a couple of examples with me on how they’re using both the Image Collector and the Media Collector SPLOTs on one of their projects which provide excellent examples of how powerful these tools can be. The Open Web for Learning and Teaching Expertise Hub (OWLTEH) is a resource they are building for teaching and learning with the open web, and they are using both the Image Collector and the Media Collector as part of this site. The Image Collector in this case takes on the role of a catalogue of open tools faculty and students can use, it’s a resource that not only anyone can use-but also anyone can add to:

The other tool is the Media Collector, which is a similar, but in this instance it aggregates videos from a variety of sources (YouTube, Vimeo, Internet Archive, etc.) all in one place:

A slick tool that can not only collect and display, but also allow for communities to create and submit from anywhere—a quick and easy video aggregator for a course if you will.
And then there are the portfolio-based SPLOTs that are being used extensively to get graduate students up and running with a quick professional profile. There was continued interest in the various flavors of SPLOTs for this (Big Picture Calling Card, Dimension Calling Card (pictured above), and Highlights Calling Card) and one of the first of these will most definitely be Reclaim’s initial offering of a stand-alone SPLOT with it’s very own application installer independent of WordPress—though still built on it. 

But I want to return to the Image Collector SPLOT for a moment, just to highlight how these “tiny teaching tools” can really serve some interesting use cases. The above example for OpenMed is a straight up image collector that allows folks from the OpenMed project (which is project focused on creating open resources for various Mediterranean universities) to share photos, which comes in useful given there are numerous schools from across the Middle East and North Africa that are participating. Yet, Lauren showed another example of this same tool being used by an art professor for a project called WordBox.


What is WordBox? Well, it…

… is an activity to support participants to practice searching for discipline specific key terms, definitions and associated words. Submissions to the glossary space include commentary on how the definition was sourced and any benefits or negatives of using particular online spaces to source information. The idea is to learn from one another’s search practices and share experience.

So, a tool to define various key terms in the field highlighting process and sharing results in the form of a glossary. It’s a single assignment that becomes a long-standing resource, and it underscores brilliantly a focused application of SPLOTs, with added bonus of students not needing to login, leave personal data, or learn WordPress to simply share an image, some text, and a link.

Continued excitement around SPLOTs is timely given the day before heading to Coventry, Tim and I spoke with Alan Levine about starting to roll SPLOTs out as stand-alone application installers. Big Picture Calling Card will be the first, but hopefully more will follow given Tim is on an Installatron application installation roll. One of the big benefits of stand-alone apps is all updates Alan makes to the SPLOTs will get rolled out to users, through the current WordPress installation of SPLOTs there is no way to incorporate updates. Another thing we are working on is more documentation and examples, which hopefully this post will provide some fodder for 🙂

But when it comes to SPLOTs right now, nobody does it better than Coventry, they are an inspiration and everyone participating in the workshop could see the immediate value of having such tools in your back pocket as an educational technologist. 

Posted in movies, reclaim | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Ancient Roman Beach Vacation

Posted on July 10, 2018 by Reverend

Pano of Chia Beaches

The beaches of Chia

I am currently in London with some downtime as I prepare for a Domains workshop in Coventry tomorrow. I’m just coming off the longest vacation I have taken in probably twenty years (if not longer). Twelve awesome days in Sardegna, a gorgeous island off the Western coast of Italy. I’m not used to taking vacations, no less long ones, but things aligned and I was really able to check-out for almost the entire time (thanks to my amazing colleagues at Reclaim). Some folks can’t sit on the beach for two weeks, but I’m not one of them. I grew up on Long Island, and summers in Atlantic Beach or some of my fondest childhood memories. I could stay on the beach for months worshipping the sun and reading books. What’s more, the beaches on Sardegna are absolutely gorgeous. Antonella and I have had a running joke for most of our relationship wherein I claimed Long Island (particularly Montauk) has the most beautiful beaches in the world. And she begged to differ given her own experiences on Sardegna. I don’t think I’m wrong per se, but after spending more time on this gem in the Mediterranean my confidence is a bit shaken.

The Beach Reading

It was truly an ancient Roman beach vacation for me given I was reading the 1972 historical novel Augustus by John Williams. It’s an epistolary novel that focuses on the life and times of Augustus and I really can’t recommend it strongly enough. I picked it up after being blown away by another of Williams’s novels, Stoner, and I think I liked it even better. I will post separately on the novel given there is much I want to say, but I’ll leave one quote here for now: “there is no wall that can be built to protect the human heart from its own weakness.”

Pano of Nora's Archaeological Site

And that was everywhere apparent to me in Pula, which was site of a Cathaginian outpost and then a Roman village (which dates from the 1st or 2nd century A.D.). The remnants from another world were everywhere, and the tour of Nora’s Archaeological site was definitely a highlight of the trip.

Columns in the Rubble

Columns in the Rubble

Remains of the Spa

Remains of the Spa

I even found an ancient Roman boy hanging around asking to play Fortnite:

Ancient Roman Kid

Below is a good look at how Nora sits out on a spectacular point surrounded almost entirely by water save a small sliver of land. 

Nora's Roman Archaeological Site

It was really good downtime was some amazing scenery, and as Italy often does, it made me think about the various arcs of history we are a result of. Right after Augustus I picked up Robert Fagles translation of The Odyssey (“the eastingest Epic”), an edition recommended to me over twenty years ago by Matt Gold, and I am finally getting around to it. I think the bava may be going through a Neo-classical period, which is definitely inline with the advent of Reclaim Video. 

Nora's Torre

To the Tower

To the Tower of Nora

Speaking of the sediments of history, 1400 years after the Roman village was built, the Spanish were in control of Sardegna (a couple of hundred years before the Italians took control) and constructed a network of towers around the island to spot pirates in the 16th and 17th centuries. The network of towers used fires on their roofs to alert each other the approach of pirates—which approved an effective defense.

Scenes from Chia

Scenes from Chia’s Pirate Look-out Tower

Well, I guess no more lounging around the pool, it is time for me to build the Domain myths squarely on the classical tradition of hospitality and conquest 🙂

The Pool

Posted in Flickr, fun | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Catching Up With Reclaim Hosting

Posted on June 24, 2018 by Reverend

I have been trying to capture as much of my latest stint back at Reclaim Hosting’s HQ as possible given it was so awesome. Everything from the Reclaim Video Grand Opening and Summer Movie Nights to a special visit from Michael Branson Smith to Centipede to the day-to-day video store awesomeness. That said, I have written little to nothing about the Reclaim Hosting core crew, although the goodness is everywhere apparent in my previous posts. But I imagine spelling that out a bit is never a bad thing. 

I wrote less than a year ago about our intention to build capacity at Reclaim, and I think this year we have definitely done that and more. We are a tight, streamlined crew of four, and while we could probably afford to grow over the coming year, we are holding off for the time being. We are all but done with our infrastructure migration to Digital Ocean—which has taken a fair amount of energy over the last year or so—and once we are finished that will be a major undertaking behind us. More than anything, Lauren and Meredith have been crucial to our steady growth and success, and we all agree it’s time for them to take on more responsibility and grow according to our needs. We did our yearly review while I was back, and it was a very good experience. We don’t pull any punches; we try and be honest about what is and isn’t working. I think that helps everyone know where they are at and what we need to be doing. It also helps that everyone starts from a basic level of intense badassery.

Tim and I run a pretty casual office environment overall, but there are extremely high expectations of support and responsiveness that has really set us apart, and it’s clear that everyone at Reclaim takes pride in that fact—not to mention how much the Reclaim Faithful appreciate it. That is not going away, but we did realize we might be able to organize that process a bit better, so we’ll be experimenting with that over the next few months.

Lauren has also been instrumental in thinking through how we can better attend to our Domain of One’s Own schools’ needs. She and I will be dividing up the account management and I’m really looking forward to this because I have no doubt the schools that run their hosting infrastructure through Reclaim will be the better for it. Lauren already talked about our clean-up and streamlining of this process, and there will be much more to come.

We also had the opportunity to dream about next steps for Reclaim Hosting’s Domain of One’s Own offering. Our vision is to free up Tim as much as possible this coming year to pursue a quite compelling vision he has mapped out for what the next generation of Domain of One’s Own might look like, and given the various requests we have been getting from schools, he may be on to something truly groundbreaking. It’s too early to over promise, but Domains 2.0 might be a big deal on the ed-tech internet 🙂

Also, the co-working space Reclaim Hosting works from and operates, CoWork, has been taking off as of late (another post I am piggy-backing on from Lauren). It was pretty packed during my time back, and folks are renting the various available spaces on the regular. It is rewarding to see CoWork begin to live up to its potential, and I think we may even consider overhauling the last untouched area as a kind of all-purpose incubator space that might second as a TV studio for a project I have burning a hole in my cerebellum.

In short, things have been super solid at Reclaim Hosting. It’s like running DTLT without all the meetings and institutional bullshit—I love it. Reclaim Hosting is now a team that I would put up against the best of ed-tech groups. We still have some growing to do, but our core is super tight, and we are #4life! I could not be happier with the chance Tim and I took on venturing out 3 years ago, and so much of that has to do with the slow, steady building of a group based on the basics: above-and-beyond support of and for faculty and students who need help exploring the web. 

Posted in reclaim | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Reclaim Video on a Thursday Afternoon

Posted on June 23, 2018 by Reverend

While Reclaim Video officially opened two weeks ago,  it did not really dawn on me until almost a week later.  After the grand opening we locked in with MBS  then road tripped to get Centipede. But as it turns out people have been quite interested in this weird strip mall storefront called Reclaim Video. I had a gentleman who works for Eurovision TV check-in to see what it’s all about, other folks that told me we need some signage on Route 3, and still more who actually wanted to become members. In fact,  Thursday afternoon we had a veritable rush, here is a look at all the folks who came to join in the fun.

Reclaim Video on a Thursday Afternoon

We had four memberships, including Tim and Callie who were officially our first renters! Their choice was inspired, what could be a better for rental than The Shining?

Reclaim Video's very first renters!

We actually rented 6 videos on Thursday, and all hands were on the Reclaim Video deck. Here is an action shot of Tim taking some time away from infrastructure to check out some videos 🙂

Tim checking out some tapes

Two films I pushed on our visitors were Mario Bava giallo, slasher classic Hatchet for a Honeymoon (1970)—first The Shining and then Bava, this is truly my video store 🙂 

Hatchet for a Honeymoon

And then I sold the Zuni Fetish doll episode of Trilogy of Terror—and I’m sure there will be no renters’ regret for these clients!

Trilogy of Terror

And who were these lucky renters, you ask?  Well, that would be Amy and Chad from Story Collaborative next door, and they have been supporters of the idea from day 1. They rock!

Straight flush of awesome

The VHS we were playing during the afternoon was Valley Girl, which was loaned to us by Meredith’s mom before we made a point of purchasing and adding it to our collection that afternoon, along with some other gems folks recommended!

Valley Girl

And that was Thursday, and it ruled.

Posted in reading, Reclaim Video, ReclaimVideo | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Centipede Reclaimed

Posted on June 22, 2018 by Reverend

Not only did I achieve on of my life goals by helping to run a Video Rental Store while back in Fredericksburg last week, but I also checked off another bucket list item: owning a classic 80s video game cabinet. That’s right CoWork is now the home to a gorgeous 1980 Centipede cabinet that works perfectly and is all original. 

Beautiful, indeed! The high scores were not registering, but Tim has already figured out the issue (a bad electrically alterable read only memory (EAROM) chip) and swapped it out which fixed it! I wanted the game cause I love this crap, but what we didn’t realize was how welcome an addition it was to our co-working space. The volume can be turned down, and folks will randomly get up and just play a game, and it is so fun. It is an object of shared attention at times, and it only makes me want another 🙂 Tim has been tossing out the idea of giving whoever has the high school at the beginning of the month free membership for that month. I love that idea, although productivity may go way down, and we might need to charge quarters to afford it 🙂

Another thing worth noting is the gorgeous artwork on the cabinet, it is really a standalone art piece apart from the awesome rollerball gameplay.

https://twitter.com/grantpotter/status/1006640729425399810

And then Grant Potter, as he is wont to do, drops this AMA Reddit thread in Twitter featuring the Centipede programmer, Dona Bailey, who donated her Centipede machine “to the VA hospital where the author Ken Kesey worked when he was a student in the writing workshop at Stanford.” The life of a Reclaimer is always intense!

Posted in reclaim, Reclaim Arcade, ReclaimVideo, video games | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

A MBS Special Presentation at Reclaim Video

Posted on June 22, 2018 by Reverend

This blog is pretty much all Reclaim all the time these days, and I am so very alright with that fact. Between Reclaim Hosting and Reclaim Video, what more could a blogger want? I already wrote about the first Summer Movie Night hosted by Reclaim Video, but I have not yet talked about Reclaim Video’s inaugural artist-in-residence guest, so let me do that now. In keeping with the spirit of the UMW Console, which was the inspiration for Reclaim Video, we invited Michael Branson Smith (hereafter MBS) down for the grand opening. MBS’s work manages an effortless sense of fun and popular whimsy that is undergirded by a deep technical acumen and a laser sharp eye for glitches in the veil of our contemporary mediascape. This is readily apparent in his remarkable number of glitch GIFs or his animated Hitchcock movie posters, but more on those in a bit.

A couple of months ago we asked MBS to help us create the Reclaim Video website, and he really killed it—which is no surprise. The coolest thing about his process is that he has been working diligently at learning Javascript for the last two years in order to a fill a hole in the curriculum of his academic program at York College (how awesome is he?). It is inspiring to see someone take on a new challenge like programming and use the experience as a way to learn with his students and through the art of teaching. What’s more, his efforts allowed him to further expand his artistic vision—which we hope the site above represents just the start of our future collaborations. Speaking of which, the controls for the TV, as well as the various videos on the shelf are all controlled via Javascript, and during our full-day Reclaim Video project marathon on Saturday, MBS took some time to explain how he developed the site and what he has learned about javascript along the way. It was really educational to listen to Tim (who is also teaching himself Javascript right now) and MBS discuss how the distinctions between CSS, HTML, and Javascript are beginning to blur. I need to dig into this more, because it really was eye-opening to hear them talk about this guy DOM all the time 🙂

My summer goal is to see if I can get a better understanding of how javascript is being used on the Reclaim Video site, and maybe even work to integrate a feed of blog posts into the design somehow. We’ll see, hopefully it is small and easy enough for me to get a sense of how the pieces work without too much shock.

Scared Stanley Kubrick GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

We also spent part of the day revisiting the Raspberry Pi Video Looper program which we used for the UMW Console as part of the TV broadcast setup. It was fun to revisit this project (one I’ve been dyingt o resurrect in one form or another for Reclaim Video), and thankfully MBS blogged his work so thoroughly 3 years ago that Tim was able to to get the Video Pi Looper working as we were talking.

VideoPi

Even cooler, while we were out shopping for RCA component cables and an input switcher to connect the 80s stereo and video equipment in the video rental store (more on that project below), we saw an off-the-rack 40″ flatscreen TV for next to nothing. Tim and I both had the same idea, and the first takeaway project of the day was born, who says digital signage has to suck? The Reclaim Video animated GIF movie poster screen is bucking the trend of boring as Dentist office product-laden monitors:

Vertigo animated movie poster matches the chairs @ReclaimVideo

A post shared by Jim Groom (@jim.groom) on


It’s pretty amazing, and currently it features MBS’s Hitchcock aniamted GIF movie poster series, and they rule, as you can see below:

It was wild how quickly we got this done, and that was just one project. There were two others! One was getting the stereo and video equipment in Reclaim Video streamlined.  We wanted the betamax, VCR, and lasersisc players all to run through the Aux input on the 80s Fisher stereo receiver so they would be in stereo! I was born for this after almost 3 years working at Audio Visual Services (AVS) at UCLA in the early 90s! I may understand nothing about Javascript, but the bava can wrangle an RCA cable setup like a champion.

I had it all mapped out cleanly and my schematic actually worked, save for a bad cable that MBS tipped me off on, using a 4 component RCA switcher running through the AUX input on the audio side and then converting the video signal from Coaxial to RCA so that we could run into our TV that only has Coax and RF—we are OG!

So, that was my contribution, and I was awesome. As a reward we enjoyed the Risky Business laserdisc in stereo, and Tangerine Dream never sounded better. “What happened to my egg, Joel?”

The final project, which is still under construction, is a project MBS mentioned many moons ago to me in passing that I have not been able to shake. This might be affectionately named the Fuck Shit Movie Database. The idea is working off the simple thesis that language in popular 80s movies was out of control, and what we would think of as R movies today (for language, but also adult themes, nudity, etc.) were often PG (or PG-13) in the 80s. So, we are collecting the data for the top 20 grossing Hollywood films from 1970 through 2000 and searching the subtitle (SRT) files for all instances of fuck and shit (we may expand our search for other terms, but we will start with those venerable staples of profanity) to see how often these terms were used over the course of 30 years and if we can gain any insight. We will also be able to track by rating and year, so it is the start of what could be a larger database and data visualization project, or so we hope. I just loved hanging out with MBS and hearing him say, “Did you know Stir Crazy had 34 shits and 5 fucks?”

The numbers in the mid to late 80s get crazy, trust us—but no spoilers 🙂 It was an absolute blast having MBS down to Reclaim Video for our grand opening, and really cemented for Tim an I how much this space needs to be about having fun, bringing in creative maniacs, and returning to some of the insanity that got us here.

Posted in Reclaim Video, ReclaimVideo | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments