diego mean mario dark ripper..

So, we had a really nice time in San Diego, wandering around the nice bits of the city, eating copious amounts of Mexican food, driving out to an Indian casino and doubling our money (OK, we only bet 20 bucks), and generally chilling out.

But, back to work, and there's some interesting stuff coming through with regard to technical partners for software archiving at the Internet Archive, which is great - but obviously, still VERY early days. Also, my spare-time Archive dealio, the Net.Labels Collection, is growing quite contentedly - a bunch of new free-to-download electronica labels are in the process of being added, yay.

But now, your media round-up du jour: movies have been watched on Showtime/Sundance (Mean Machine - dumb/fun Vinnie Jones-starring prison soccer remake, If I Should Fall From Grace - heartbreaking Shane McGowan documentary), videogames have been played (Mario Party 5 - best. party. game. evah), music videos have been watched (the recently-mentioned Michel Gondry DVD, the marvellous 'I Believe In A Thing Called Love' video from The Darkness, replete with giant space squid attacks being fended off with guitar power.)

Oh, and being a mini-Ripperologist after appreciating the labyrinthine genius of Alan Moore's From Hell, I picked up the paperback of Patricia Cornwell's 'Jack The Ripper:Case Closed', in which the forensic crime novelist spends millions of her own money trying to prove one Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper, using DNA and samples of his paintings as 'proof'. Unfortunately, as this masterful debunking, on seminal Ripper site Casebook.org proves, she's way, way off base - so much so, it's painful. I guess there's a remote chance he could have been Saucy Jack himself, but Cornwell makes the claim that Sickert wrote the majority of the Ripper Letters sent to the media around the time, even those sent from abroad, when it's abundantly clear that, as with any major event like this, you're going to get hoax letters in either the majority or entirity. And, of course, Sickert only came to Ripperologists' attention through the fascinating, but borderline insane 'Royal Conspiracy' theory that Moore adapted into the graphic novel, Freemasons and all. What's worst of all is that this is probably the best-publicized Ripper book of the past 20 years. Shame on you, Patricia Cornwell, for claiming a probably innocent man committed tens of murders, when your evidence is horrifically circumstantial at best, and plain fabricated at worst. Forensics, my ass.