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
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 - Sat, 18 Oct 2025 10:48:22 +0000
Content warning:dot gov on bluesky
Apparently the US government departments are starting to join Bluesky and are getting ratioed in that the accounts are being blocked more than they are followed.
Doesn't really seem to make sense at first. The US Department Of Transportation isn't going to show up as a reply guy in your mentions and the spooks aren't going to use that account to spy on your posts.
Is the blocking then entirely performative? Because blocks are public they are votes?
I guess really it's people deliberately reading the recommended-for-you AI-driven slop feeds.
Blocked users won't show up in your machine-learning robot-recommended feeds that people apparently must be reading over there.
Just not-following would be enough for me, I don't see things I don't follow. But if you read the robot-DJ feeds then anything can show up, so you have to preemptively block it. If only to train the robot shuffle.
Status at - Thu, 16 Oct 2025 16:15:30 +0000
More progress on the building of the woodwork here. Going pretty well.
But that will be it for a few days. Mostly coz I've caught a damn virus and wanna try and protect the builders from catching it but also because he's used up all the wood. More to be delivered next week.
Status at - Wed, 15 Oct 2025 20:44:22 +0000
Content warning:Strange New Worlds S3
Watched season three of Strange New Worlds and it was pretty great.
The Enemy Mine episode with the pilot and the Gorn stranded by the Metrons was a nice bit of retcon.
Chronologically the first holodeck episode ever (Or did Enterprise do one? I forget), and the safeties fail and nearly kill everyone aboard the ship. Tech eh? The the humans must pursue it even if it kills them. I'm not all that keen on holodeck episodes. It always has this false sense of danger where they have some fake reason to have danger so it's not all a game.
Everyone's-a-vulcan episode was stupid and funny. Star Fleet is so casual with the humanity of it's soldiers.
Nurse Chapel is still amazing even though her hair is longer and, unusually, I preferred it short.
Knowing the future in a prequel makes things quite poignant. Kirk and Spock's first handshake. Their first mindmeld. Oh, the adventures they shall have. Playing with that by making Pike know his own future too is nice meta level scripting game.
Status at - Wed, 15 Oct 2025 14:50:21 +0000
Actual flat-panel wood attached to build the sides and tops of some of the wardrobes and storage boxes done today.
Starting to take shape.
Status at - Wed, 15 Oct 2025 12:19:11 +0000
Diligently done all the physio exercises prescribed for my recovering fractured wrist for two weeks only to find it's just 4% complete.
And what's the reward for me doing that? They double the work and time it takes!
What bullshit is this? A year of wall pressups and wrist stretches taking ten minutes a day doubling every two weeks? My god.
Status at - Tue, 14 Oct 2025 14:46:01 +0000
he framework upon which the wardrobes will be built starts to take shape.
The headboard sockets are at about the right height :phew:
He was asking if the wardrobe should be backed with some kind of board or if these support struts should remain visible inside the wardrobe.
🤷
I guess it looks neater if you back it, but then there's also some lost space. It'd be painted either way of course.
Status at - Mon, 13 Oct 2025 15:08:11 +0000
Light switch changed, lamp reattached to the ceiling. Woodwork and radiator painted. Carpenter has drawn pencil lines over the walls where all the wardrobes have to be built. Think he's been spending the day mostly correcting all my measurements which are apparently even more approximate than I thought. Figuring out how to compensate for the wonky walls that aren't all at proper right angles.
Can't really see the pencil lines in the photos here but makes it easier to imagine how it'll all come together.
Status at - Sun, 12 Oct 2025 18:07:22 +0000
Maybe I should mention how well it does.
It's caught some bugs before they're published, some fairly serious. But mostly its hallucinated many problems which aren't really there.
With all the code we write being reviewed by robots now, the code is written slightly differently to avoid it going on about issues that aren't really there.
People imagine that code is written for the computer to run, but really it's always been written for the programmers to understand. Now it's also written keeping in mind it'll be reviewed by an AI that has no context or understanding tasked with nit-picking to review.
Arguably this is ending up with better code. More unnecessary re-validation of everything mostly, but its also taking longer rather than being quicker.
Is that more efficient? 🤷 Sort of maybe?
3/3
Status at - Sun, 12 Oct 2025 17:50:09 +0000
Claude is triggered to review all the pull requests that I do to the codebase at work.
While it's working, it's little icon animates like this.
Every time I see it, I imagine it straining to push out it's shit from the chocolate starfish.
Its hard to unsee.
2/3
Status at - Sun, 12 Oct 2025 17:48:08 +0000
This is the logo for Anthropic's AI model "Claude".
Twenty seconds in MS Paint could draw the thing and it looks like, well, lets call it a "chocolate starfish"
1/3
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.New Work by Gary Larson | TheFarSide.com - Sat, 18 Oct 2025 09:00:29 +0000
Gary Larson bought a graphics tablet and found drawing fun again, so we get some new stuff: "The “New Stuff” that you’ll see here is the result of my journey into
the world of digital art. Believe me, this has been a bit of a learning
curve for me. I hail from a world of pen and ink, and suddenly I was
feeling like I was sitting at the controls of a 747. (True, I don’t get
out much.) But as overwhelmed as I was, there was still something
familiar there—a sense of adventure. That had always been at the core of
what I enjoyed most when I was drawing The Far Side, that
sense of exploring, reaching for something, taking some risks, sometimes
hitting a home run and sometimes coming up with “Cow tools.” (Let’s not
get into that.) But as a jazz teacher once said to me about
improvisation, “You want to try and take people somewhere where they
might not have been before.” I think that my approach to cartooning was
similar—I’m just not sure if even I knew where I was going. But I…
‘Sixth-Form Politics’ – The Propaganda Blitz Awaiting Green Party Leader Zack Polanski – Media Lens - Fri, 10 Oct 2025 12:38:57 +0000
Media Lens on the propaganda blitz Polanski will face: "As with Corbyn in 2015, the fevered ranting from the extreme
right-wing press will be accompanied by initially muted criticism from
the extreme centre, at the far end of the truncated media ‘spectrum’.
Also as we saw with Corbyn, to the extent that Polanski offers genuine
hope of change, the response from the Guardian, Observer, BBC,
Independent and others will rise in pitch until the threat to ‘adult’
genocidal and biocidal politics is removed."
AI Slop Is Killing Our Channel - YouTube - Tue, 07 Oct 2025 14:40:18 +0000
Kurzgesagt's video on how AI is hurting the internet and artists with its creative theft and confident lies.
How Labour Sold Their Souls To Billionaires | Gary Stevenson | Zack Polanski - YouTube - Wed, 01 Oct 2025 22:40:56 +0000
Gary Stephenson talks to Green-Party-UK leader Zack Polanski on Zack's podcast. He thinks we should look at economics like a car mechanic, no wait, like a medical system. They congratulate each other a lot and chat about Gary's one topic focus, inequality. Gary doesn't want to reduce inequality he says, just stop it getting worse!
Pluralistic: The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh (27 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow - Sun, 28 Sep 2025 10:13:59 +0000
Bain & Co says that the only way to make today's AI investments profitable is for the sector to bring in $2 trillion by 2030 (the Journal notes that this is more than the combined revenue of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple Nvidia and Meta):
What Fresh Hell is This? - Craig Murray - Fri, 26 Sep 2025 13:09:54 +0000
"The calculation is that Reform will oppose the measure on libertarian
grounds, and that this will allow Starmer to show himself as tougher on
immigration than Reform."
The Man Behind Blender, Ton Roosendaal | Bad Decisions Podcast #69 - YouTube - Tue, 23 Sep 2025 09:18:37 +0000
Ton Roosendaal is great, he is why Blender is so great and why the organization he has built is so perfect an example of Free Software doing well. Always wants to do the right thing the right way ever since buying his own software from his bankrupt company to make it free.
It's Your Party and I'll Cry If I Want To - Craig Murray - Sat, 13 Sep 2025 11:20:51 +0000
I cannot stress to you enough that this is not a glitch it is a feature.
Nor is it a teething problem. Those who currently hold the reins are
determined to make sure those reins cannot be voted out of their hands. I
have had a number of conversations with people actually in charge of
instituting all this, and the prevention of direct democracy and the
structuring of the party instead through controlled committees and
caucuses is for them a given.
How & Why Did Big Tech Turn To The Right? - SOME MORE NEWS - Sat, 06 Sep 2025 13:34:51 +0000
How big tech took over the world and why Amazon produced a War Of The World movie in which Amazon and Google save the day, on a google youtube video with Cory
How & Why Did Big Tech Turn To The Right? - SOME MORE NEWS - Sat, 06 Sep 2025 13:34:51 +0000
How big tech took over the world and why Amazon produced a War Of The World movie in which Amazon and Google save the day, on a google youtube video with Cory