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 - Thu, 02 Jul 2026 22:10:20 +0000
Have I said lately how much I love Blender? I love Blender. It's so awesome. Easily in the top ten softwares ever.
This guy knows why.
Status at - Thu, 02 Jul 2026 18:45:40 +0000
I even bought some actual books printed on actual paper. Its a bit sad, but DRM these days is somewhere between hard and impossible to break, unless you own Amazon hardware, and the trees will just have to take it.
They also don't drain the battery.
I think I'm moving to paper in general. Mostly only reading in bed anyway.
Which is ironic, because I will definitely take the paper books to a charity shop when I have read them so they will be shared whereas if they gave me a DRM-free copy I could read with my open hardware I doubt anyone other than me would read it.
Status at - Thu, 02 Jul 2026 18:28:07 +0000
Hey Fedi! I will be in Malloca for a few days very soon. In particular in Pollencia, but I'll have a car and the island isn't big.
I hope to spend most of it writing in an air conditioned hotel room or reading by a pool or on the beach and there's a boat trip planned.
But I should also try and talk to people and explore what the island has to offer I guess?
Anyone local wanna meet for dinner or drinks? Any events in the first half of this month worth checking out? Or anyone ever been there and wanna suggest something particularly fun or educational or meaningful they enjoyed?
What's the oldest thing on the island? What's the coolest? Where are the best bands? Shall we organize a Fedi Meetup?
Status at - Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:13:47 +0000
Cyber security advice:
Don't click on links in sketchy emails from sketchy companies to download their sketchy executable files and run them.
Oh, except this one particular sketchy link from a sketchy company started by US intelligence services which is closed-source and offers to scan your hard-drive completely and send all the data up to a company which still maintains a deep relationship with the CIA and the American intelligence community.
DO download that one, just not other ones.
Status at - Sun, 28 Jun 2026 10:29:16 +0000
Gary's message to the Bond Traders and Andy Burnham is quite a fun one .
Just two options: Tax the rich, or reduce living standards and dismantle welfare.
Status at - Sat, 27 Jun 2026 13:25:55 +0000
This one minute version of the tarot show took, like, most of a week or something? But that's because I made not a show but a show factory.
Hopefully one minute readings can be done much more quickly in future.
Status at - Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:44:08 +0000
I like the way in Signal you can emoji-ract to laugh at your own jokes. Simultaneously lets everyone know that you were joking and also that you are very cringe.
Status at - Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:40:15 +0000
Content warning:re: UKPol Burnham's British Blueprint
Burnham's team have a plan of some sort coming in a book here described in the New Stateman ($ refresh in firefox readermode to skip paywall)
"The Productive State"
They do seem to have some grasp of what's been going wrong for 40 years and why the state and the working class have been impoverished and indebted while the billionaires became trillionaires just from passive income.
The solution?
"The institution to rebuild the supply side is the public corporation: operationally independent, commercially mandated, borrowing in its own name against its own revenue streams, delivering investment at lower cost and priced progressively."
It's a pretty good article really. I am skeptical that it's really anything like the scale of change needed to reverse the flow of wealth from state and workers to the elite classes but maybe that's just a question of doing it as scale then?
It's a pretty good article anyway.
Status at - Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:22:36 +0000
Content warning:re: UKPol new leader
Main differences between Andy Burnham and Kier Starmer:
1) Kier has more gray hair and parts it on the other side.
2) Kier has no Northern accent
3) The pubic haven't seen that much of Andy yet and he's relatively unmonstered so far.
4) Something about busses and public control.
5) Burnham was a bit less good friends with Mandleson than Starmer was probably.
Status at - Mon, 22 Jun 2026 09:39:50 +0000
Content warning:re: UKPol Starmer Resigned
"He was a man of integrity" says the caller to the radio station 😆
My god.
Lying to get the leadership, lying about his intentions, lying constantly through his premiership even right up until Friday when he was lying that he won't quit and will fight a leadership election.
The only PM that lied more than Starmer was Boris Johnson.
Man of Integrity my arse.
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.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."
No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious - The Atlantic - Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:01:01 +0000
The Atlantic's argument that AI isn't conscious has the right conclusion and is mostly good but some of it's arguments are pretty poor. "So, given that Claude is not conscious, what are we to make of Claude’s
constitution? Perhaps the most fruitful way to think about it is as an
84-page character sheet for a role-playing game. LLMs can generate
dialogue for Julius Caesar because many books about him exist in the
training data those models used. Claude’s constitution serves a similar
role for delineating the helpful-chatbot character that customers
interact with when they’re using Anthropic’s products. To do this
effectively, Anthropic does not simply add the document to the training
data, or include it as part of the hidden stage directions that preface
each conversation a user has. The company says it uses the document when
fine-tuning the model; this involves an automated process where the
sentences emitted by the model are checked for consistency with the
document and the model is u…
Media Myopia As We Hurtle Towards Climate Oblivion – Media Lens - Sun, 31 May 2026 11:02:20 +0000
Our media continues to report on bullshit while ignoring the story: "Imagine that, instead of focusing on
short-term melodramas, leading news organisations rigorously probed
politicians, day in and day out, about the climate crisis.
Imagine that news editors and journalists
relentlessly challenged the government about current policies that are
bringing us closer to the brink of climate chaos.
Imagine that reporters investigated and
exposed the deep reluctance and state-corporate obstacles, including the
establishment media, that are blocking alternatives to climate
Armageddon.
Imagine, in other words, that we had a
sane media system. That could just mean the difference between human
survival and human erasure."
The economist billionaires fear: this is how we get a wealth tax - YouTube - Mon, 25 May 2026 13:45:19 +0000
Gary interviewing Gabriel Zucman on wealth taxes and the distribution of the tax burden between the mage rich and the poor.
Nobody Wants To Come To America, Mate - Mon, 18 May 2026 10:31:52 +0000
Professor Jiang Xueqin let Keen do the heavy lifting on the empire
question, then came in with the kill shot dressed up as polite analysis: “If you’re going to see regime change to stop this war, forget about seeing it in Iran. You need to see it in America.” --Pause on that for a second.That
is a Chinese academic, on British television, telling Piers Morgan that
the path to global stability runs not through Tehran but through
Washington. That the bloke in the Oval Office, the geriatric grift
artist with the Diet Coke button and the nuclear codes, is the
destabilising force. Not the Ayatollah. Not Xi. Not Putin. Not Kim. The
bankrupt steak salesman from Queens.And what’s wild is, he’s not wrong.