Mr Wickham is ready to set the record straight. Celebrating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, Adrian Lukis, who starred in the renowned BBC TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, returns to the role of Mr Wickham. Join Pride and Prejudice’s most roguish gentleman, George Wickham, on the eve of his sixtieth birthday, to lift the sheets on what exactly happened thirty years on from whe…
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I am massively sceptical of any claims that Blockchain can be useful. I even took the Certified Blockchain Professional course so I could better understand the batshittery. At the risk of appearing on QTWTAIN, and seeking a papal indulgence from Betteridge, I think I might have stumbled on a retroactive use-case for Blockchain! First up, what is LIBOR and what was the scandal which led to…
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I have rarely been this bored during a West End Show. Conor McPherson seems to have fundamentally misunderstood what makes an engaging drama and, simultaneously, what makes for an enjoyable "jukebox musical". The writing is like an exaggerated soap opera script which consists solely of angry people asking each other questions, which are then answered with more questions. Sample dialogue: Who…
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An abandoned warehouse in Deptford hosts one of the most audacious, ostentatious, and sumptuous shows I've ever attended. An immersive theatrical experience which is lush with texture, ambitious in scope, and yet - somehow - slightly less than the sum of its parts. The pre-show is exemplary. You're handed a lanyard with a room number and make your way through the imposing set until you find…
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The older I get, the more comfortable I become with complaining. Not merely moaning on social media, but writing a direct email to the perpetrator of some annoyance. I'd purchased an eBook and was appalled by how crappy the accessibility was. If you don't know, modern ePub books are just HTML wrapped in a zip file. They have all of the accessibility advantages of the web and should be easy to…
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Look, I'm an idiot. I know that, you know that, and the man on the moon knows that. Let's not get into why I'm an idiot; let's just accept that I have my peculiarities and you have yours. My idiocy is a quest to make sure all my portable electronics can recharge using USB-C. Modern smartwatches are tiny and they do a lot. As a consequence, their battery life is generally poor. The industry's…
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Dr Hibbett - he of the eponymous and well-regarded Hibbert Method - has taken the "Sing Your Thesis" concept to a brand new level. Who is Doctor Doom? I have only a passing interest in the increasingly convoluted Marvel Cinematic Universe, so I walked into this new comedy show with no idea. I assumed a baddie of some sort? I left with, if not a university education on the subject, then a…
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It looks like the new Google's Pixel 4 watch comes with yet another incompatible change in charging technology. This is a ridiculous situation. The original Pixel Watch used one type of wireless charging. Then the Pixel Watch 2 & 3 removed wireless charging and swapped to a different charging mechanism. And now the 4 has changed again. So three different charging cables in under three years.…
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I was lucky enough to score tickets to last-night's dress rehearsal. It would be unfair to review this like a completed show, instead this is a preview on what to expect and some thoughts on the "immersive" genre. Very mild spoilers ahead. I never really got the concept behind Secret Cinema. It seemed like an overhyped cult with its mish-mash of festival, improvisation workshop, and collective …
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Janice Hallett is back with another epistolary mystery. Told through a series of transcribed conversations, WhatsApp messages, and torn-out pages from diaries - we the reader have to piece together the facts and crack the case! Much like her previous novels - The Appeal and The Twyford Code - you have to be willing to suspend your disbelief a fair bit. Do people really talk like that when they…
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If you hung around video arcades in your youth, you would have seen this message burned into the phosphor of a thousand dying CRTs. Obviously this was a devilish psyop by those gits who wanted kids to stop sniffing glue and having fun. The bastards! But there's a more serious side to the corny message. Are you a winner if you've cheated? Lance Armstrong "won" multiple Toures de France. It…
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I should love Matrix. It is a decentralised, privacy preserving, multi-platform chat tool. Goodbye Slack and your ridiculous free limits. Adiós Discord and your weird gamification. Suck it IRC with your obscure syntax and faint stench of BO. WhatsApp and Telegram can stick their heads in a bucket of lukewarm sick and sing sea shanties! Let's join the future! The problem is - Matrix is shit. Not …
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