Yeah I saw this, pretty cool shit.

I'm waiting for the peer review process to go further before I make any decisions. If the authors don't respond to the criticism, then that will be that.

 This is going to sound terrible, but like the article stated, I am disappointed  

While I am certainly no "Ripperologist" or any of that other stuff, the mystique, mystery and wild theories around the killings have kept me enraptured since childhood. 

Now, after all these damned mysteriy novels, speculations, creepy ideas about what he really was and the pictures in my mind, it turned out he was possibly just another boring lunatic. No royal family, no doctor, no conspiracy, nothing. Hehehe. It is almost like a theist finding out the truth about Christmas.

However, no matter how much hard evidence is uncovered, and no matter what the results, I am sure there will always be people out there that will be speculating about it. Like a lot of things in the world, the truth just ain't no fun.  It is so much more mysterious when you have everything from an underground cabal, to two doctors, to whatever else they have come up with, and now it just this. 

While crime writer Patricia Cornwell was great in her Kay Scarpetta books (well some of them, after awhile it just got repetitive) her "Case Closed" book was something that I thought of as a crock when it first hit the shelves. But that did not stop me from irrationally reading it of course. 

It actually was me from one of my past lives.

HAHA. Episode Wolf in The Fold. That was a good one. 

Favorite actor who played the Ripper (although the show was not that great) was David Werner in Time After Time. Where Malcolm McDowell is HG Wells. The only film role I had seen Malcolm in prior to those, was Caligula and Clockwork Orange, I thought he would have made an excellent ripper and was disappointed he was the time traveler. 

I'm going on Netflix to watch it. I got the itch to see it.

(edit)

LOL. It's been a while since I seen that episode. "DIE DIE DIE!, YOU'LL ALL DIE! I'LL CUT OFF YOUR OXYGEN AND WATCH YOU SUFFOCATE! I CONTROL THIS SHIP!"

brilliant episode.

I liked Enterprise but I guess when they knew it was ending they had to finish up in some fashion. It then went a little silly for me.

@digital
I thought every episode of S4 in Enterprise was brilliant*. It was like they took the plans for every top episode planed for future seasons and crammed them all into one.

*Except the finale. Killing Tucker and bringing in 2.5 TNG characters taking part in a TNG episode that had no real relevance to Enterprise was over the top.

Maybe if they'd had the Romulan-Earth war it would have made more sense, since the treaty discussed by Riker would have been written during the Enterprise run, but the series was cancelled before they could do the war, so all they had to work with was the concept of breaking orders to 'do the right thing'. It was all unnecessary and jarring and didn't feel right. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they just didn't have time to plan a good finale, and that they didn't have as much to work with as originally planned, but it doesn't change the fact that episode was mediocre at best.

@iwbiek
No only live action. I watched a few of the cartoons as a kid, but I never liked it much. The TOS graphics were better than the TAS graphics, which is kinda sad really.

I won't do the new movies either. The first one was a good movie, but not a good Star Trek movie. I don't like how they changed everything. As if the destruction of a single ship would have affected the entire Federation so significantly that the design of the constitution class starships would change, even though the constitution class starships were already in active service, and the Enterprise was only 12 years, at most, from launch under the command of Robert April. Blowing up Vulcan was a cheap move done poorly. They even had to rearrange the birth dates of half the senior staff just to make it work, which in my view stretches credulity beyond the breaking point.

All in all, the rewrite is shit. Worst Star Trek ever.

I was really in to Season 4... but it is too bad the cancelled it. Stupid suits.

It reminds me of Firefly. Fuckers cancelled that one but then kept shithead shows going which sucked.

I think exec's are completely out of touch with reality. 99.9% of all shows on television are complete shit.

 I loved B5. Heroes and Lost were both shows that had such great potential that were destroyed. Fringe also started as a great concept but failed to deliver. I don't get why JJ Abrams is popular in sci fi circles, he has ruined everything he touches. Now, he is probably going to ruin star wars even more than George managed. He should have lost all credibility with his first Star Trek movie.

B5 didn't gain as much traction because of appearances. Londo's hairstyle, for example. It even kept me from watching it for awhile. Everyone I've ever talked to who didn't watch it all had the same reason. But after I saw an episode during the Shadow war, I was hooked. Great show, every step of the way. In the Beginning actually made me shed a few tears.

DS9 was also a great show. The first 3 seasons were slow and boring, but when it picked up it blew everything away. Everything. Not even B5, TNG, or Firefly can touch the last few seasons of DS9. Though I'd give B5 the advantage as a series vs series; because it was consistently good every step of the way and DS9 was certainly not.

 I should probably go back and watch DS9 I never made it to the end. Life got really busy for me towards the end of its run and I watched virtually zero tv the late 90s  (too busy not growing up). I never got around to watching the end of it or Voyager. I always struggled with Voyager because I couldn't stand Chakotay, but I had a bit of a crush on Torres. Should add them to the netflix.

With DS9 you really only need to see Emissary and The Jem Hadar, out of the first two seasons. Season 3 isn't much more interesting, but it starts picking up a bit and there is more than one episode that deals with the overall arc. It's season 4 where the shit starts hitting the proverbial fan.
But, as has always been the case with Star Trek (at least until Enterprise), there are filler episodes in every season all the way to the end, that have little or nothing to do with the overall arc. There are a number of episodes I usually skip over when watching DS9. It's really annoying to me, because by the end of season 4 they had all the necessary plot elements in place to be able to have the arc in every episode, even if it was just as the b story. I think the staff should have looked at what B5 was doing more. There were filler episodes in B5 too, but if it was a filler episode they still did something with the b or even c story that kept the arc moving.
DS9's greatest flaw was that there were always episodes that you had no reason to watch. It was trying to be another typical Star Trek series, even while it tried to do something new and different (new and different in Star Trek, anyway).

yeah, i never thought of it that way, but the prequels probably should have been five or six films. i give credit to lucas for treating his epic the way the chinese treat theirs: sprawling. the classic chinese novels (dream of the red chamber, etc.) span several volumes, and their films are similar. a different chinese version of crouching tiger, hidden dragon, more faithful to the original source material, waa basically a miniseries lasting like 12 hours. had the prequels been six films instead of three, i might have liked them better. still, i consider phantom menace a throwaway film. i don't see why it was necessary to show anakin's early childhood: it added nothing. in the first movie he's a happy, friendly little munchkin, then i'm supposed to believe he suddenly turned into a murderous freak? and padme aged, like, not at all? what the fuck? seriously, attack of the clones and revenge of the sith fit together almost seamlessly. what the fuck was the phantom menace, except a moneymaker?

Phantom was so different because it was setting the chess pieces up, while the next two movies actually moved them into play. I think it probably should have been a trilogy on its own, just because it was so far out of the timeline and did so much. It introduced the Jedi, established them as the force in the galaxy, showed they didn't directly interfere in politics, put Palpatine on the throne, introduced Anakin and Kenobi, gave Kenobi the motivation to train Anakin, gave Anakin an opening to the dark side, introduced the Sith (poorly I think, the Sith are much more interesting than they appeared in TPM), introduced Padme, introduced the droids, etc.

Thhe problem was it did way too much for a single film, and as a result it didn't do enough.

2 & 3 happened in a few years, as did 4-6. 1 being removed by a decade made it odd, and left too many questions unanswered. You have to read the books to see how Anakin was already moving to the dark side, and that is horrible from the film perspective.

I think there should have been at least two stand alone films to break things up and allow to focus more on critical issues as a result.

A good opener would have gone back to the origin of the Sith rule of two, with Darth Bane. They could have dealt with the Sith and Jedi both in such a film, and leave out the cast to come completely. That would have opened up at least half an hour to an hour of TPM to stretch Anakin and Kenobi and Padme more, which could have given them more depth.

As a second stand alone film, they could then have introduced the necessary cast for the trilogy to come, without having to devote anything extra to the Sith or Jedi.

Episode 2 then would have been the start of the trilogy. Episode 3 would still be the conclusion, and a film concentrating on the clone wars would be the perfect time to really push Anakin towards the dark side. It would have kept the time frame that 4-6 used in the process, and could have done a better job of showing Anakin's friction with the Jedi and Palpatine's developing relationship with him as well.

Moved to a different thread

   Jar Jar is to Star Wars as Brian37 is to the Rational Response Squad, an irritating distraction whose presence is utterly useless.

I have to revise my opinion on the first season of DS9. I just finished it, and I'm halfway through season 2 and season 7 of STTNG. Season 2 is shit really (with a few significant exceptions), but season 1 was surprisingly good. There were only 2 episodes I disliked, and almost every episode tied in to what happens in later seasons. I don't know how I missed all the little hints and pokes before, but they were setting things down that would pay off 2, 3, & 6 seasons later. It's rather disappointing how bad season 2 is after watching season 1. It's like they had the beginning of the story and the end of the story figured, but didn't know what to do to fill the journey.

Not really. I do agree that often it makes a difference, but when I'm committed to watching every episode anyway, keeping track of the writers can lead to the desire to skip episodes.

There are also some examples of writers making a brilliant episode one day, and a horrid one the next. A perfect example is Morgan Gendel. He wrote the amazing STTNG episode "The Inner Light", an episode that usually makes it onto lists of top ten Star Trek episodes. He also wrote the mediocre-at-best episode "Passenger" for DS9.

As I've been going back through ST overall, I've been learning some things about what was going on behind the scenes. I've been amazed to learn just how bad things were for everyone involved in the shows. Sexual harassment and discrimination, stress, and other shit. The loss of 2/3rds of the female leads on STTNG during/at-conclusion-of season 1 was directly tied to this crap. Even Roddenberry himself tried to destroy the franchise (unintentionally), he'd gotten so out of touch with what his creation was about and what humanity is. And there was constant pressure from Paramount to do this or that, which led to a number of shitty episodes, particularly in STTNG.

It's a testament to those who survived the first 2 seasons and those who took up the reigns in the third that the show ended up being so amazing. I have to say it is entirely possible that the show survived on the back of Patrick Stewart's awesomeness for the first 2 seasons. Even when he's given the most crappy material possible, he makes it watchable.

No, I didn't know there was one. I'll have to look for it.

I downloaded it last night. Won't have time to watch it until tonight though.

No problem. Did you see Trekkies 1 and 2?