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My New Old Walkman
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.
AI Maddeness Week 17: the AFC East Playoff Race
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
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Patriots: 8–7
Relevant Week 17 Games
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Dolphins @ Patriots (division game)
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Vikings @ Colts (non-division, non-conference)
Jets have already clinched the division and are not involved.
KEY TIEBREAK PRINCIPLES (2000 RULEBOOK)
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Three-team divisional ties start with head-to-head among tied teams
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If unresolved –> division record
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If one team is eliminated, reset to two-team tiebreakers
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Two-team ties use:
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Head-to-head
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Division record
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Common games
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Conference record
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SCENARIO TREE
SCENARIO 1
Colts WIN vs Vikings (finish 9–7)
1A — Dolphins beat Patriots
Final records
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Dolphins: 9–7
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Colts: 9–7
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Patriots: 8–8
Result
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Dolphins — IN
-
Colts — IN
-
Patriots — OUT
Why
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Patriots fall to 8–8
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Colts and Dolphins both at 9–7 –> both qualify
1B — Patriots beat Dolphins
Final records
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Patriots: 9–7
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Colts: 9–7
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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
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Dolphins: 9–7
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Colts: 8–8
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Patriots: 8–8
Automatic qualifier
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Dolphins (9–7)
Remaining tiebreak
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Colts vs Patriots (both 8–8)
Tiebreak result
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Head-to-head: split
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Division record: tied (3–5)
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Common games: tied
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Conference record:
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Colts: 6–6 AFC
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Patriots: 5–7 AFC
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Result
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Dolphins — IN
-
Colts — IN
-
Patriots — OUT
2B — Patriots beat Dolphins
Final records
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Patriots: 9–7
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Dolphins: 8–8
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Colts: 8–8
Automatic qualifier
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Patriots (9–7)
Remaining tiebreak
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Colts vs Dolphins (both 8–8)
Tiebreak result
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Head-to-head: split
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Division record: tied (3–5)
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Common games:
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Dolphins: 3–5
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Colts: 2–6
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Result
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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)
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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.
-
______________________________________
*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 🙂
2025
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.
Happy New Year from the bava!
20 Years of bavatuesdays — HD Replay
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.
Silent Night, Deadly Night Diorama Live
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
20 Years of bavatuesdays
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.
______________________
*Except maybe that fucking Cogdog!
Update: I replace the low quality stream with the higher-quality local recordings from Streamyard, read more here.
Silent Night Deadly Night Diorama Progress
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!
A bava Dossier
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
*
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.
________________________
*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.
Psycho Shower Scene in GIFS
GIF of shower head from Psycho
After wrapping this week’s Family Pictures Podcast MBS mentioned a GIF project he did back in 2013 titled “Mother Oh God Mother.” It takes each of the 54 shots from Alfred Hitchcock’s infamous shower scene in Psycho (1960) and converts them into GIFs. Every post describes the type of shot and details the action. It’s remarkable just how much the GIF slows down the action and allows you to both dissect and study the art of cinema.
Your eyes won’t believe it
For example, look at the way the camera twists and then zooms out from Janet Leigh’s eye as she lays lifeless on the floor. There’s so much happening in just that one bit of motion that’s hard to see without isolating and putting it on repeat. His old, forgotten Tumblr project is kind of like a mini film school resource, I love it so much.
Update: It’s the mother of all GIF sites (I couldn’t resist).
Silent Night Deadly Night Prints
I got the roughly 4′ hight x 2′ wide Silent Night, Deadly Night design for the over-sized Christmas VHS tape printed today. I am pretty excited with how good it looks.
Tomorrow I get the OSB board that is roughly 4′ x 2′ and attach the front cover to it. But before that I need to paint the perimeters of the boards black. That way we have no wood bleeding through. The spines are pretty solid and the OSB board fit is perfect, so just one cut in the middle (I need to remember to bring the extra set of sawhorses). I’ll also need to get both long and shallow screws to secure the spines to the front of the tape (brackets and right through).
I had luck screwing together the base for the Halloween diorama, so this should be pretty easy (famous last words).
I need to get some spray glue for attaching the glossy prints to the wood and we should be off to the races.
Apart from that, I need to put the whole thing in a bed of fake snow (Alexis recommended something today I am forgetting) and then figure out the best way to black the back walls out. I had some black plastic wrap we used on the windows and to hide the storage shelf in the arcade, I wonder if that stuff will work. Anyone have recommendations? I just want the three walls (and the ceiling) of the diorama to disappear as if into the night.
I am Jim Groom
Find out more about me here.