diaTribe » review

The Peg Leg Tavern (ballad to a Sydney landmark)

Phil — Sun, 23 Jun 2019 00:45:11 +0000

Just returned from a short break to Oz.

Had a fantastic time as always; too many great experiences to recount but there is one in particular that I wanted to do a little rave about.
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Rant: Assassins Freed

Phil — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 09:46:22 +0000

A couple of years ago, I was browsing around my local branch of JB Hi-Fi and in the discount bin, I came across a cut-price copy of the original Assassins Creed.

It proved to be a reasonably entertaining game, with an intriguing storyline; the chief protaganist, Desmond Miles is kidnapped by members of a sinister organisation called Abstergo, a corporate front for the Knights Templar. Desmond’s captors explain that human DNA is actually a complex set of ancestral memories, which can be viewed by placing the subject in a device called an Animus. The Animus allows a subject to “re-live” the memories of his/her ancestor(s) in a sort of Virtual Reality environment and in doing so, “unlock” memories which are then recorded by the Animus. It’s a sort of Medieval-Arabic-Ninja-meets-The-Matrix

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Bangkok revisited (part 2)

Phil — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 02:44:30 +0000

…continued from part 1

Despite the rather full-on day I had yesterday, I was determined not to miss my planned excursion today. Even so, when the alarm woke me at 6:45am, it took some effort to drag myself out of bed.

Still, it’s amazing what an ice-cold shower and a decent breakfast will do, even without the coffee (no coffee, tea, coke or red wine for 10 days said the dentist) and by 8:30 I was on my way to the Chatuchak markets.

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Rave: Ezio Gig

Phil — Thu, 17 May 2007 06:47:00 +0000

Last night, Gavin and I went over to the Halfmoon in Putney to see Ezio live.

The Halfmoon is a unique music venue. With a history of nearly 50 years of live music, it has a proud history of promoting new talent and bands. This is where Kate Bush made her debut, where Elvis Costello was resident before signing a record deal and where U2 had their first sold-out British gig.

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Rave: Wire Daisies “Just Another Day”

Phil — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 05:52:00 +0000

Photo Credit: by Brian Marks CC-BY-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Having fallen out of touch with much of the UK music scene in the mid 90′s, (during the period I shudderingly refer to as “Clubbing and Remix Hell”) I’m enormously pleased to see the return of a growing number of original new bands emerging in a renaissance of the UK music industry.

Chief among my favourites has to be the Cornwall-based Wire Daisies. Their debut album “Just another Day” is a milestone in Indie music and rightly went straight into the iTunes charts in September 2004 when it was launched.

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