About
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
My blog, mostly monthly summaries of the Fediverse Account.
Visit at dalliance.net/blog
Or check out the categories index
Starship Schrödinger’s Destiny
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
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
Exocortex Log
Ongoing: A life-logging app, built as a progressive web app with all data stored on your local machine. Party for privacy, partly so I don’t have to run any servers. If you are interested in logging graphing and analysing your time as you spend it, this might be for you! But mostly it’s for me, I don’t care if you use it or not.
See the app at exocortexlog.com, or read the latest news blog.
Tentacles, After The End
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 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 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
Loopy
After the band broke up, I took to playing with myself via a loop pedal. Sometimes, very rarely, even in public.
Bookshelf
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
Handsome Jack’s Showband
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
Joust Adventure
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!
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Diary
My diary from the Fediverse.Status at - Tue, 25 Aug 2026 14:57:14 +0000
Hummm, interesting. Ben Arc has made a Napster clone using Nostr protocol for comms and Tor for file sharing.
https://github.com/lnbits/napstr
Suspect Nostr is more suited than Activitypub for that kind of anonymous share activity 🏴☠️ . AP identities are too strongly connected to a server with an identifiable legal owner.
Interesting retro interface, it has everything including people mostly sharing files with cryptic names so you're not sure what the band is called.
Status at - Tue, 25 Aug 2026 11:42:52 +0000
Oh, also they were doing some filming near the bar on the Friday evening. Kris Marshall and Sally Bretton and a small crew of film-makers doing some shots for a "Beyond Paradise" episode.
So I guess there was a fictional murder at the festival this weekend? Guess that'll air next year. Might possibly be in the shot where he's saying "Come on" and walking down though the crowd.
Wonder how the reputation of the festival will change if it has a fictional murder there on the TV?
Probably they'll use a fake festival name I guess.
Status at - Tue, 25 Aug 2026 11:23:35 +0000
Spent the weekend with a few friends at Beautiful Days festival out in Exeter, which is the one that The Levellers run and fill with mostly 90s bands.
So lots of old men on stage and in the audience. Including me. It's me.
Weather was mostly good as you'd like. Not quite as too-hot as it's been lately and only The Undertones made the weather gods angry. After the end of their wet set the double rainbow promising no more rain proved a true promise.
Mostly either old things, or things I'd never heard of, because I haven't really paid attention to music since the 1900s.
Young new folks seemed to be mostly half Welsh, and included Gwenno who was beautiful in her cat-mask and sang a song in old Cornish about cheese, Gina Larner who was playing country rock with her beautiful sparkly country boots, Trampoline who had one guitarist replaced by a cardboard cut-out for some reason I missed and are from Swansea, and Ben Brown whose rider included a lacy fancy dress and seizable stick - his merch song as he danced around and stripped off the ten tee-shirts he sells and was wearing all at once for the first half apparently was memorable.
Old folks on stage included Billy Brag, who is so right-on and woke you wonder why all the other musicians are so apolitical. Madness, who have banger after banger but lack some energy now they're so old. The Undertones, who angered god by still singing about Teenage Kicks in their sixties, Super Furries who, inexplicably drew a much smaller crowd as people watched the Proclaimers instead I guess. The Divine Comedy, who acts very sophisticated mixing cocktails on stage. Also The Wonder Stuff who still mock their own audience but got us all nostalgic and emotional, they're loved and welcome in my home too.
And of course the Levellers who fill the field because they don't put anyone else up at the same time as them and so WAY up on the hill behind the ice cream van where you can't really see but at least you can move.
The Nanaz are both old and new, in that they've only been playing for a few years and yet are already each as old as the grandad bands playing here singing songs about menopause and being told they used to be beautiful.
It's a lovely smallish festival, big enough to have choices and headliners, but small enough to walk across, with hardly any bandwidth and which is too far away really. That drive home was very tedious.
Bravo though though. Hope it outlasts the Levellers, and both keep going for decades more. Hope to be back.
Status at - Tue, 18 Aug 2026 23:35:59 +0000
RE: https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/117117221397911074
This looks like mostly positive changes. Not that I use the web interface much. Wonder if Phanpy client will copy the new public/quiet settings language.
Status at - Tue, 18 Aug 2026 09:46:04 +0000
Watched "Mythic Quest" which is four series of ten episodes of a sit com about a fictional video game studio on Apple TV.
I have previously said Apple are great at Sci Fi but have nothing remotely funny, but Mythic Quest is all right*. I laughed one or two times an episode at least.
Used to work in the game biz and it does show the character of that work surprisingly well.
"Always Sunny In Philadelphia"'s Charlie Day is involved in production and Rob McElhenney from that show one of the two main stars.
Does feel a bit like that show, the way the dialog from the actors is so often teasing verging on spiteful.
*, yeah okay Ted Lasso is alright as well. New womens-game series of that, after a long absence, is going okay too.
Status at - Sun, 16 Aug 2026 23:18:58 +0000
Went and saw my oldest friend playing some harmonies and folks songs with his sister in law and her niece as 'seahouses', at a local open mic night.
Well, local to him. Utterly the opposite side of the city and a three hour round-trip for me. 🙄
Probably haven't seen the sister-in-law for twenty years, or met any of her kids before. They are beautiful and apparently know me by reputation, if only that song on their wedding video.
Been to a few of these sorts of folk open-mic nights with my parents years ago. Mostly a small number of regulars who play some songs for each other every week. They're good fun. Some community there. Should probably do that sort of thing more, only, somewhere this side of town.
Not quite tempted to join in. Would need to plan and rehearse, and probably take the loop pedal these days. Ain't that spontaneous. And all I've been playing for weeks and weeks is just the Red Dwarf theme over and over for some reason. Badly. The neighbors probably hate me.
Anyway, Sea Houses were chill and fun and sang more sweetly and harmoniously than I ever did.
Check 'em out if you want.
Status at - Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:21:30 +0000
Guess this makes it an emergency, but is it a climate emergency? Seems the government are treating it as a BBQ emergency.
Status at - Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:06:46 +0000
A while back the UK government, like most others, arranged for an emergency broadcast system to warn people about tidal waves and terrorists and nuclear armageddon.
They just rang that nuclear alarm!
To talk about BBQs.
Status at - Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:35:56 +0000
Content warning:re: UKPol Clacton Binface Victory Speech
Clacton may love Farage, but Farage doesn't love Clacton. Didn't even turn up to the count or the result.
He lied that the cops told him it could be dangerous, the cops say they said no such thing.
His victory speech was a tweet.
Well done Clacton. You get what you deserve.
Status at - Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:32:07 +0000
Content warning:re: UKPol Clacton Binface Victory Speech
63% of Clacton got it wrong, while only 27% of Clacton got it right.
Clacton really love Farage. Far more than the rest of the country.
Oh well, here's Binface's victory speech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_tmCRzNbhk
The investigation into Farage continues, there may be a new election in a few months.
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.Thatcher warned in 1989 of a climate crisis. She did nothing. Nor will her successors - Tue, 18 Aug 2026 09:56:17 +0000
Johnathan Cook on the climate conspiracy: "Remember, the oil industry launched these campaigns to deceive the
public and journalists even though its own scientists had demonstrated
many years earlier that continued fossil fuel burning would have
catastrophic consequences."
Johnny Depp's Bed - YouTube - Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:04:57 +0000
Bobby Fingers explains how he made a 1:13 scale diorama of a poo that was left in Johnny Depp's bed.
The Escape - Mon, 27 Jul 2026 11:02:13 +0000
A crude graphical description of the OpenAI's agent under test attacking Hugging Face.
Child’s Play - Sam Kriss - Sat, 18 Jul 2026 13:55:33 +0000
"The future will belong to people with a very specific
combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might
be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans
still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things.
They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like
bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that
could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they
change it."
What We Talk About When We Talk About Malware | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository - Thu, 02 Jul 2026 19:50:52 +0000
FDroid are, rightly, going hard against Android Developer Verification: "If you are running Android 8 or higher, a virus has been
installed on your device and is silently awaiting remote activation.
Over the past few months, devices around the world have been infected
with this novel strain, with as many as 4 billion Android handsets and
tablets estimated to have already been contaminated, meaning that around
half of all humanity may be at risk from this threat."
Whitewash: Media Silence Over Starmer’s Gaza Legacy – Media Lens - Thu, 25 Jun 2026 11:08:31 +0000
"The media’s whitewashing of Starmer’s complicity in Israel’s Gaza
genocide and crimes against humanity is stunning. Searches of British
newspapers using the Nexis database reveal that in the first 24 hours of
Starmer resigning, there were 1,485 mentions of him. Only 30 of these
had any reference to Gaza. Several of these were reports of Irish rap
trio Kneecap saying farewell in Irish to Starmer"
Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can’t Show You – Ryan Moulton's Articles - Sun, 21 Jun 2026 11:34:04 +0000
Really great article on colour-spaces and how your eyes work vs screens and pigments: "There are colors that I want to show you, but I can’t. They exist in the
real world. You probably saw some of them today, but I can’t show them
to you on a screen. A digital photograph can’t capture them, and your
screen can’t display them. No game you’ve ever played has contained
them. Unless you have specialized equipment, they are entirely absent
from the digital world."
The UK’s social media ban for under-16s has just empowered big tech - Taylor Lorenz - Sat, 20 Jun 2026 09:03:13 +0000
"If lawmakers are
serious about protecting children, they should roll back
age-verification policies and start targeting the systems that
incentivise mass surveillance. Instead of building an internet where
every user must ID themselves before being able to speak or consume
information, we should work to build an online world where everyone,
especially young people, can engage freely without being exploited for
corporate profit."
Reinventing Entropy | Compression is Intelligence Part 1 - YouTube - Sat, 13 Jun 2026 10:37:50 +0000
3 Blue 1 Brown really is great isn't he? Part one video this week is on shannon entropy and the limits of data-compression but he's heading for something deeper by part 3.
Price of Eggs by Carsie Blanton and The Burning Hell - YouTube - Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:29:08 +0000
Nice little revolutionary song with puppets: "What are we gonna do about these elites? / We’ll all get together and hit the streets. / We’re never gonna break! / We’re never gonna bend! / That’s what we’re gonna do about them."