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


Loopy

Pre behind some keyboard

After the band broke up, I took to playing with myself via a loop pedal. Sometimes, very rarely, even in public.


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


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


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 - Thu, 24 Apr 2025 12:32:37 +0000

    Bluesky is cancelling accounts when foreign governments ask them to, and Threads is doing adverts soon.

    The thing to understand about the corporate public messaging systems is that they do not exist to let you publish or to talk to people. That is not the point of them. That's at best just the bait laid to lure you into their trap.

    They exist to make money for the shareholders. That's why Threads exists, that's why Blockchain Inc invested to keep Bluesky running.

    Only one network exists in order to let people communicate as the point and reason for it's existence. Only one network has no shareholders and no owners.

    Only one is fighting for the user, not the shareholder.


    Status at - Wed, 23 Apr 2025 23:49:08 +0000

    Hummm. Oh. I see. Damn. This explains why it was ending up backwards even though I thought I'd fixed this bug once.

    It is reversing the eye position only depending upon which direction the source camera is facing.

    Face backwards along the Z axis and it's correct, face forwards along the Z axis and it's reversed.

    Probably some bug in the render code which is using global coordinates and ought to be using camera-relative coordinates or something like that.

    Hopefully can be fixed when I have some time at the weekend. Probably can get away with only re-rendering the first and last few hundred frames when the camera is zooming about more.

    Jeeze. Never ends does it. Bug after bug.


    Status at - Wed, 23 Apr 2025 09:11:06 +0000

    It's Saint George's day!

    Not a holiday in England, dunno about all the other countries that share a patron saint with England.

    The prime minister says it's a constant battle to try and reclaim the flag of the crusades, that England shares with the country Georgia, to make it a flag which doesn't sow division.


    Status at - Tue, 22 Apr 2025 11:40:27 +0000

    10,000 POSTS!

    Plus a whole bunch on mastodon dot rocks before it deleted all the account and then mastodon dot social before I made this server.

    Looks like each post gains me on average 0.12 followers. Most of which are now abandoned accounts I guess.

    Here's to the next 10,000!


    Status at - Tue, 22 Apr 2025 11:29:40 +0000

    So turns out the render is putting the right eye at the top instead of the left eye 🙄

    I'm sure I fixed that bug like 3 times now.

    Don't really want to re-render the whole thing on more cloud machines at large cost again, so I built a script to just just imagemagik to swap top and bottom.

    Which has been running all night to do about a third of the frames 🙄

    Seems unlikely today then now. Dunno if I'll get time Wed/Thurs.


    Status at - Mon, 21 Apr 2025 14:39:28 +0000

    Will the new pope smoke dope? Trying to figure out if I'll like him or her.


    Status at - Sun, 20 Apr 2025 22:33:28 +0000

    Content warning:re: Doctor Who - Lux


    The Doctor facing segregation, by mostly ignoring it and apparently by shining.

    Loving the callback to Neil Patrick Harris' character with the laugh. A new god from the pantheon to vanquish.

    Nice gag with adding emotional depth to the character to add more dimensions to their 2d drawing too.

    Heheheh, I thought the doctor was gonna climb out of the screen into my living room! And then he did. But it wasn't me, it was some other fans :(

    Strangest kind of forth wall breaking I've seen. Having the character discuss his own adventures with the fans. 😆

    Mrs Flood chasing him all through time somehow again too. Curious.


    Status at - Sun, 20 Apr 2025 21:06:25 +0000

    Well the system I had built for rendering the 360 stereo-vision version on multiple cloud servers is a terrible mess that I'd completely forgotten how to use.

    Figured it out though. Made better notes for next time, but it still involves syncing with the local machine and then making a new machine image and a very cobbled together frame-manager.

    Renting 16 cloud GPU machines overnight. Hopefully that should get it done. Could maybe even publish Monday or Tuesday if all is well.


    Status at - Fri, 18 Apr 2025 18:24:08 +0000

    Godot's VideoStreamPlayer plays ogg files but does not allow skipping them:

    Seeking in Theora videos is not implemented yet (it's only supported for GDExtension-provided video streams)

    These GDExtension things exist, but need to be compiled differently for each architecture. Separate and different parts of the code for windows/linux/mac.

    Which is too much of a pain, especially since I have no Mac for testing and stuff.

    I really need to be able to skip the video to different frames because (A) during animation-edit user is going backwards and forwards with time control a lot and (B) during 360 3D render it has to do a panoramic scan across the scene with time paused.

    That's all no good. No viable video player in Godot.

    So instead today I've been adding a multiple image flipbook. Fine. We'll just have to have hundreds of individual images and pick the right one based on the global time.

    Nearly done bar the render now. Just need to go through the face animation, the emotional expressions.


    Status at - Fri, 18 Apr 2025 11:28:21 +0000

    Apparently a court might make Google sell off their browser, Chrome, as a separate business.

    Which would be nice, but I don't get why anyone would buy it? They can't start charging a subscription to run Chrome browser.

    Can you really make a business from adverts on the homepage?

    A browser is a strict money-loser, with no profit or business model. Ask Mozilla.

    If someone bought it, they would surely go bust, then when happens to it?


  • Bookmarks

    Things I have bookmarked lately.
    The Next Terrorist Attack - by Timothy Snyder - Sun, 20 Apr 2025 16:48:14 +0000


    Snyder posits that Trump's administration have weakened terrorism prevention, and would exploit any resulting attack to consolidate power: "Do not give the present regime the benefit of the doubt after it
    allows a terrorist attack to take place on American soil. Be skeptical
    about its account of who is to blame. Insist that Musk-Trump take
    responsibility. And understand that freedom
    is the first condition of security. A terrorist attack is no reason to
    concede anything to this regime. On the contrary: such a failure by
    Musk-Trump would be one more reason, and a very powerful one, to resist
    it."

    The rise of end times fascism | Far right (US) | The Guardian - Fri, 18 Apr 2025 09:25:25 +0000


    "An unspeakably dismal choice is being made before our eyes and
    without our consent: machines over humans, inanimate over animate,
    profits over all else. With stunning speed, the big tech megalomaniacs
    have quietly rolled back their net-zero pledges and lined up by Trump’s
    side, hellbent on sacrificing this world’s real and precious resources
    and creativity at the altar of a vampiric, virtual realm. This is the
    last great heist, and they are getting ready to ride out the storms they
    themselves are summoning – and they will try to defame and destroy
    anyone who gets in their way."

    Fascist Word Games and the Birth of an American Dictatorship - Thu, 17 Apr 2025 08:39:47 +0000
    the administration can “deport” over two hundred people it swears are “gang members” without due process, which it then summarily proceeds to do while filming its blatantly illegal activities for propaganda purposes. While the planes are in the fucking air, a judge orders the government to turn them around, and the regime first pretends it doesn’t understand the order, then refuses to obey it while claiming that because the planes were out of US airspace, the court has no jurisdiction to order them to return to America.

    Born in the wrong generation - by Sam Kriss - Tue, 08 Apr 2025 10:13:16 +0000
    Sam Kriss describes a nightmare AI utopia: "It’s a bright cloudless day and you’re meeting your beautiful submissive
    girlfriend for a breakfast date. You’re meeting her at the soda
    fountain. You’re meeting her at the ice cream parlour. You’re meeting
    her at the drugstore to share a malted milk. You’ve been going steady
    with your main squeeze and now you’re meeting her at the folksy
    chrome-and-cream diner on Main Street in your quiet walkable 98% white
    small American town. It’s always a bright cloudless day."

    Living in interesting times - Charlie's Diary - Mon, 07 Apr 2025 20:28:46 +0000


    Charlie Stross on the market crash and trump's presidency: "Trump's narcissism won't let him admit imposing tariffs on the entire
    planet is an idiotic idea. So he'll blame China for the market crash and
    the galloping stagflation he's just kicked off. Most of the goods,
    materials, and products that he's choked the supply of have no domestic
    US sources, or none that can be ramped up in less than years. For
    example, China just choked the supply of rare earth elements to the USA
    in retaliation, which used to be mined in the USA ... but it
    takes years and billions of dollars to build a new mine and refinery.
    He's applied sanctions to Taiwan, which sliced $300Bn off Apple's market
    cap in 24 hours because Taiwan's TSMC supplies most of the world's
    bleeding-edge semiconductors. They've been trying to build a plant in
    the USA for years, but are still years away from producing anything:
    it's not just the machinery, it's the skilled and experienced technical staff."

    FADFOA lot of people have a 'need for chaos', as long as there's no chaos - Fri, 04 Apr 2025 21:47:08 +0000
    When, in decades to come, history students look back at the late 2010s and early 2020s ... they will as one ask a confused question: “Why was there a Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party?”

    The American Age Is Over - Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:13:19 +0000
    "The American age is over. And it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it"

    Why Labour is crushing your living standards - YouTube - Sun, 30 Mar 2025 12:59:06 +0000
    Gary talks about the Squeeze Out: 1 - The rich take the resource of the working class leaving them in debt, 2 - economic collapse, 3 - the rich take the resources of the government leaving it in debt, 4 (happening now) - the rich take the resources of the middle classes, 5 - the right fight each other for resources, world war. Bleak.

    Open source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries - Ars Technica - Thu, 27 Mar 2025 01:12:25 +0000


    "According to a comprehensive recent report
    from LibreNews, some open source projects now see as much as 97 percent
    of their traffic originating from AI companies' bots, dramatically
    increasing bandwidth costs, service instability, and burdening already
    stretched-thin maintainers."

    Starmer's Thatcherite Economics - Craig Murray - Tue, 25 Mar 2025 12:36:45 +0000



    "All this is designed to reduce the fiscal deficit, allegedly. But
    reducing economic activity will reduce revenue. It is a death spiral. If
    the aim was actually to reduce the fiscal deficit, taxing those who
    have money would be far more sensible than taking money from those who
    do not."

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