Picture of me, long black hair in a tentacles shirt

Dalliance.net is Pre’s homepage, index of his projects, updates on his blog. That sort of thing. You can subscribe in various ways.

Projects

Blog

Blog header image, me silhouetted against an orange/yellow sunset

My blog, mostly monthly summaries of the Fediverse Account.

Visit at dalliance.net/blog

Or check out the categories index

Starship Schrödinger’s Destiny

A crew of five stand in a green field with a flying saucer behind them next to a planet like earth in the sky.

Ongoing: An Interactive Sci-Fi story for Virtual Reality about the adventures of the crew of a flying saucer.

Visit at starshipsd.com

Wordcloud Tarot

A spread of cards scattered around. Each has a picture, and also a world cloud in the background

Ongoing: My tarot decks have the meanings of the cards written on the card in a world-cloud. There’s also a video show with a reading about politics most weeks.

Visit at wordcloudtarot.com

Tentacles, After The End

A woman in a blue dress and a red and chrome robot flee from tentacle monsters chasing in the background

A 30 minute animated movie about the last woman alive on a planet ravaged by tentacle monsters from outer space.

Tentacles is complete, visit the archive at tentacles.org.uk

Book: Do Dream Sheep Bleat?

A white pocketbook with the icon of a black and white fat penguin

A short story book about magic and memes and reality.

Dreamsheep is complete, you can buy a copy or read it online at dalliance.net/dreamsheep

Book: Yes, The Conspiracy Really Exists, And Furthermore It’s All Your Fault.

A book cover with a starburst, pyramid and eye

A long rant about how stupid humans screw up humanity.

The book is complete, you can buy a copy or read it online at dalliance.net/yes

Handsome Jack’s Showband

A semi-circular logo and silhouetted crowd of arms

My punk cover’s band.

Despite some online-only gigs, the band didn’t make it though the pandemic, you can watch some old gig videos online at handsomejacks.co.uk

Bookshelf

dusty old books in a bookshelf plus logo

An album of songs inspired by some of the best books on my bookshelf.

The album is complete, you can listen to the songs at dalliance.net/bookshelf

Joust Adventure

Screenshot of a game, made from pictures of plush toys and balloons

A little web-game I made back in 2011 with the hope people might pay me to make level 2.

I don’t think anyone ever finished level 1. Too hard.

Can you do it?

The project is abandoned, you can still play level one at dalliance.net/joustadventure. So far as I know, I’m the only person to ever complete the level. Let me know if you do!

  • Diary

    My diary from the Fediverse.
    Status at - Tue, 19 Nov 2024 11:49:24 +0000

    When landowners were given tax-breaks on their farms in the 1980s, land became valuable for more than just the land.

    Ownership of the land becomes a tax-hedging scheme, which inflates it's price.

    When Clarkson bought his farm, he paid more for it than it's really worth, because it came bundled with a tax-avoidance system.

    I can't say if he wanted it primarily in order to avoid taxes, that's for him and his accountants to know. Perhaps he'd rather it'd been cheaper and properly taxed.

    But investment corporations surely are are pushing up the price of land because of this, making land a monetary asset rather than just valued by the productive capacity.

    Soon farming families are priced out, and the land is owned primarily by tax-avoidance corporations and gentry, who rent the land to the farmers that work it.

    Now the tax-dodge goes almost entirely to the rich, and working farmers pay them rent for the privilege.

    Is concentration of wealth in monopolistic capital a side-effect of a well-intentioned scheme to help farmers? Or is it a deliberate act from the party of capital to increase it's own power and riches?

    Hard to say, that's for the Conservatives and their accountants to know, but we can still reverse the effect before it's too late.


    Status at - Tue, 19 Nov 2024 11:01:49 +0000

    I read "Speech! How language made us human" by Simon Prentis, in which he explores some ways in which language affects what kind of animal a person is.

    We can dismiss the idea that language is the actual stuff of thought, the thing the brain uses to think: My mum's typical sentence proves it utterly "Where did I put the thingy, you know, the whatsit".

    She clearly thinking of a thing without knowing the word for it, so words aren't the base unit for thought.

    Yet language is also clearly the thing which gives us such a deep and rich culture, and he is entertaining and enlightening as he goes though what some of that means.

    He's really optimistic in the final pages, that our international agreement and commitment to law and human rights - a thing borne by language - can bring about some approximation of world peace.

    Course, it was written before the start of world war 3 in 2022. Will we be able to talk ourselves out of it escalating? Or will we talk ourselves into another final catastrophic global meltdown?

    That's the thing about language I guess. Could argue either side.


    Status at - Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:01:12 +0000

    A wormhole in time opened up and out fell this future timeline about bluesky:

    2025 - Golden age, new 3rd party clients.
    2026 - Adverts on the site
    2027 - Bitcoin Integration
    2028 - Charge other companies for API access to relays
    2029 - 3rd parry clients access revoked
    2030 - Sold to Amazon Consortium
    2031 - Must now be logged in to view threads on the web app.

    This is only one possible future. The real future could go faster or slower than that, or the whole internet could get shut down during WW3.


    Status at - Mon, 18 Nov 2024 16:08:40 +0000

    😆 300 chars? Really? 😆

    Where is the app that allows 5000 characters? Or is this network not really decentralized?

    Oh. It's owned by a company? That took blockchain capital? 😆

    Best just be a mirror of a the free network then. 💻


    Status at - Mon, 18 Nov 2024 15:13:56 +0000

    I'm going to close the connection from this account to bsky through Bridgy, and instead switch to a shadow account over there mirroring the posts here.

    If you're one of the very few reading this through the bidgy connection you should switch to following @dalliance.net over there - bsky.app/profile/dalliance.net

    If you're reading this from the new mirror account, hello! 👋


    Status at - Sun, 17 Nov 2024 17:18:19 +0000

    Everyone's going mad for Starter Packs where someone else chooses dozens of celebrities for you to follow and you can follow the popular people all at once!

    Hard to imagine anything more irritating that having a feed filled with some bunch of wankers picked by someone else, unless it was lists of journalists and influencers.

    Oh, that's what they mostly are 🤢


    Status at - Sun, 17 Nov 2024 13:57:30 +0000

    I sometimes hear paranoid cat-owners worried that foxes might murder their kitty, but the roles are the other way around in the battle that unfolded outside my window just now.

    This cat is clearly harassing the poor frightened fox.

    After a bit of frightened panic around my yard the fox fled, jumping over the fence towards the neighbours.

    The cat followed, with intent to bully.


    Status at - Sun, 17 Nov 2024 11:46:59 +0000

    Well, failed even harder this morning and saw no progress on any bars at all. Someone in the group did get through to the ticket-page, but not soon enough to fill it in before the sold-out message.

    So gonna have been at least a five year gap, even if successful next year. Guess it's likely Glasto is over for me.


    Status at - Sat, 16 Nov 2024 12:06:05 +0000

    Here's what I'm thinking now: holding my account data on my own server which is still reliant upon the master indexes doesn't really have much advantage over using their public data-stores.

    Not enough advantage to be worth a fiver a month for yet another virtual-machine at Hetzner, certainly.

    Especially when the account would be, at best, a mirror of some of the posts already stored and backed up here on my Mastodon server on Fedi.

    Why would I need to duplicate that data-store in a different format just to push the content into their central index?

    Seems like I can skip the PDS step and just inject it directly to their public systems.

    If I wasn't already in control of my public microblog data I guess there might be more point to it. But, I already got a self-owned store and that one has a nicer front end that actually shows web-pages.

    So this one PDS server lasted less than 24 hours. Gonna delete it now.


    Status at - Fri, 15 Nov 2024 22:58:14 +0000

    One of my test-accounts is tentacles.at.dalliance.social

    But if you visit that as a URL you just see a error page:

    This is an AT Protocol Personal Data Server (PDS): github.com/bluesky-social/atpr

    Most API routes are under /xrpc/

    Which just seems deliberately obtuse.

    Guess I I can redirect those kinds of requests to a profile page in the bluesky app. Maybe even a copy of it running on my hardware. Or probably just some local script to fetch the API result and format it for web?


  • Bookmarks

    Things I have bookmarked lately.
    The Really Dark Truth About Bots - YouTube - Tue, 19 Nov 2024 20:44:50 +0000
    Putin's Puppets on Twitter: Benn Jordan is counting the bots.

    George Lucas Wasn’t Done With The Prequels, so we Finished Them - YouTube - Mon, 18 Nov 2024 16:53:51 +0000



    George Lucas had Star Wars stolen from him by Disney, and was never able to release a Special Edition of the Prequels. The crew takes it upon themselves to bring balance to the force.

    Two Weeks in Beirut - Craig Murray - Thu, 14 Nov 2024 01:58:59 +0000
    Craig Murray's diary of two weeks in Beirut. Sounds like war is mostly about bureaucracy and death.

    Spain’s Climate Catastrophe – A Glimpse Into The Near Future – Media Lens - Mon, 11 Nov 2024 16:32:40 +0000






    Media Lens on the Spanish floods and the press's pathetic response: "Unfortunately, the catastrophic floods in Valencia, Spain offer a
    glimpse of how, in the absence of the kind of drastic action that is
    currently nowhere on the horizon, human societies will ultimately be
    dismantled and destroyed."

    The End of US Democracy Was All Too Predictable by Jason Stanley - Project Syndicate - Mon, 11 Nov 2024 00:01:30 +0000


    Jason Stanley describes how democracys fall: "As Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, democracy is at its most vulnerable
    when inequality in a society has become entrenched and grown too
    glaring. Deep social and economic disparities create the conditions for
    demagogues to prey on people’s resentments, and for democracy ultimately
    to fall in the way that Plato described."

    AnarchoNinaWrites: "Went to bed outrageously pisse…" - jorts.horse - Fri, 08 Nov 2024 12:47:37 +0000
    Anarcho Nina explains how to stop fascism. Don't deliberately fight cops, but if you put your body in the way of profit the cops will come and fight you: "There are people right now putting their bodies on the line to stop a genocide; join them. There are people right now putting their bodies on the line to stop banks boiling our kids like soup; join them. There are people right now putting their bodies on the line to stop weapons manufacturing; join them. There are people right now putting their bodies on the line to oppose police militarization and Cop Cities; join them. There are people risking violence to oppose fascist organization; JOIN THEM"

    Project Gold - Blender Stylized Rendering Showcase - YouTube - Fri, 08 Nov 2024 03:01:43 +0000
    Latest Blender showcase animation, looks slick.

    It's time to stop buying into tooth-fairy politics. No one's bringing salvation - Wed, 06 Nov 2024 18:39:55 +0000


    Johnathan Cook on why Trump won: "Kamala Harris didn't lose because she's a woman or because she's black. She
    lost because, if your political and media system – rigged by donors –
    limits the choice to two hardline neoliberal candidates, with anything
    else denounced as “communism”, the most hardline, neoliberal candidate
    has an edge. Over time, the system keeps moving further to the
    hardline, neoliberal right."

    Mantic Monday: Judgment Day - by Scott Alexander - Tue, 05 Nov 2024 13:10:54 +0000
    Scott Alexander on #us #election #predictionMarkets: " Tomorrow - if we are so lucky - there will be a result. The great
    function that has consumed us for so long will return 0 or 1. The
    pundits who guessed 51-49 will be hailed as prophets; the pundits who
    guessed 49-51 will get bullied out of public life. The winner’s campaign
    operatives will be praised as world-historic geniuses, the loser’s
    mocked forever as utter nincompoops. Thousands of lifelong public
    servants who backed Mr. 49% will be tossed from DC like used toilet
    paper and replaced with thousands of hacks who backed Mr. 51%. Funding
    streams will go dry. Whole lands will turn to economic deserts. Fortunes
    will be destroyed. A few people will make good on their exile and
    suicide threats. Most won’t. The Union will either survive or not. If it
    survives, we’ll do it all over again four years later."

    voter analysis video from onion news network - Tue, 05 Nov 2024 02:00:16 +0000
    ha. Very good. really rooting into the voting patterns

Subscribe