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!
-
Diary
My diary from the Fediverse.Status at - Thu, 27 Mar 2025 23:33:07 +0000
Content warning:re: UKPol BBCQT
On improving mental health services especially for children, they just wanna blame lockdowns and ban kids from phones, or maybe tax social networks to pay for councilors.
They all think the internet is to blame rather than the pressures of poverty and capitalism.
Gary on the other hand has been open in his book about his own mental health, and does blame poverty and that working a job won't even give you enough to feed your kids.
Earlier generations were able to earn enough to have a family and a house, and modern kids can't, that is why he thinks they're all struggling. Because they face a bleak economic future.
Status at - Thu, 27 Mar 2025 23:17:34 +0000
Content warning:re: UKPol BBCQT
On the question of how to respond to Trumps Tariffs, Gary just doesn't know. Maybe take some of the money that's flowing to US Tech companies but not details on how to do that.
Some suggest that Brexit has a benefit here, that rather than standing in solidarity with the rest of Europe we should negotiate a special deal just for us, by giving him what he wants, whatever that is.
The government want to be a bridge 🤦
Nobody even aware of Cory Doctorow's plan of removing the protections that prevent reverse engineering and forced competitive compatibility.
The thing which might actually work and do good is unthinkable.
Status at - Thu, 27 Mar 2025 23:09:14 +0000
Content warning:UKPol BBCQT
Watched BBC Question Time since Gary Stephenson was on it. He's great of course.
Everyone else is exactly the same as why I stopped watching. The panel filled with pompous bootlickers and wankers who defend the status quo and the rich, even as they attack each other.
The audience full of barely coherent idiots whose questions miss the point where they make any sense at all.
The panel other than him is unanimous that Wealth Taxes can't work because they've been tried in some places, and those places then stop trying after a while.
I mean the obvious reason for that is that wealth taxes affect the rich and the rich run the country, so they stop those policies that effectively reduce their wealth.
Strange to jump to the conclusion that it's because they're ineffective.
Status at - Wed, 26 Mar 2025 12:16:53 +0000
Content warning:UKPol Bugdet.
Shortly the chancellor of the exchequer will do a budget in which she's expected to cut a wide range of benefits and allowances and generally try and balance the books by taking from the poor to give to the rich.
Rachel the reverse Robinhood.
They won't call it Austerity, because that name is poisoned and they promised not to do anything called that, but that's what it is.
It won't work.
Duh.
Making the poor masses poorer reduces spending in the economy, which reduces government receipts, and makes the deficit bigger not smaller.
Austerity never works. Can't work.
If balancing the books matters it really needs to be done by taxing the rich to spend on the poor, so that the poor spend the money into the economy and grow the economy to increase the government receipts.
The rich end up with the money anyway, once the poor spend it. They always do.
Cutting from the poor to avoid taxing the rich just means more money goes into overseas tax havens and into pumping up the untaxed prices of assets for the rich. No growth, except in asset prices and the hordes of the owner class.
You'd hope a left wing government would get this, but of course Starmer's Labour aren't a left wing government, they are just more tory.
Status at - Tue, 25 Mar 2025 11:50:25 +0000
Content warning:re: USPol opsec
It's fine to blow people into bits but by god, you need to organize it properly! 👀
Status at - Tue, 25 Mar 2025 11:32:10 +0000
Content warning:USPol opsec
Quite a few people seem to be more shrill and angry about using a phone chat with an accidentally added journalist to plan bombing some people than they are about bombing people.
Status at - Sat, 22 Mar 2025 13:26:13 +0000
Read "Not Till We Are Lost", the fifth book in Dennis E. Taylor's "Bobiverse" series.
Another great one with the Bobs fighting against a superintelligence, exploring a strange network of abandoned civilizations, studying a species of dragons with stoneage tech, and generally being sarcastic and hip with each other.
The universe the Bobs are exploring is getting pretty vast and complicated now, though they still keep talking about the Fermi paradox. Which isn't really a thing once you have actual contact with lots of alien species. Where is everyone? Oh, there they are.
Bob was a 21st century geek, and his voice is filled with cultural references familiar to us all. It's not like Ready Player One, which often seemed to just devolve into lists of 80s things, but does make the character/s seem alive and relevant. The characters in Zombie movies often refuse to even acknowledge that they have ever previously seen a zombie movie or use the word Zombie. This isn't like that. If they see a thing that's like that thing from Star Trek they'll mention that.
Great stuff anyway, hopefully Taylor can keep doing a new one every year.
Status at - Tue, 18 Mar 2025 22:33:46 +0000
Here's an article from Medialens on fighting for your country.
Mark Urban finds it "disturbing" that 40% of Zoomers would not fight for the UK under any circumstances.
Media Lens, and I, think it more marvelous, a glimmer of hope.
The idea that I should risk my life to fight in a war to protect the monarch's right to reign Britain, the barely democratic first past the post system, and the increasing wealth of western oligarchs, and never ending austerity is sickening.
Fight to protect the monopolists rentierism, and Starmer's welfare cuts and attacks on the needy?
Nope.
Fight to protect this bipartisan tory oil regime that rules the country and intends to burn fuel till the walls come down?
Nope.
This country is already under occupation, by the bankers, and the capitalists, and the petrofascists that will destroy us all for more dollars in their pockets.
Every war they have executed in my lifetime was based on a lie.
They can all fuck off if they think I'd fight for any of them. Wankers.
The only worrying thing is 60% of the zoomers are apparently still falling for it.
Status at - Tue, 18 Mar 2025 10:35:55 +0000
Couple more shots from after the show. Hoopla post these things on Facebook but not on their own site.
Luckily (or perversely?) some of the group still have Facebook accounts and can forward them.
Sad how much of their web presence corporations are prepared to hand over to American Surveillance Capital.
Status at - Sun, 16 Mar 2025 22:55:14 +0000
And I tell you what though, it really does only just fit inside that garage. I can't get any fatter or I won't be able to squeeze my way out of the door when it's parked inside.
My reversing skills weren't great even before I spent 20 years not driving. Now I've reversed that thing into that tiny little gap a few times.
One time I forgot to fold in the passenger wing mirror, and then had to replace the passenger wing mirror 🙄
-
Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.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."
Würden Wir Alle Deutsch Sprechen! The Case Against Fighting For Sir Keir Starmer – Media Lens - Tue, 18 Mar 2025 22:25:36 +0000
"The fascist political systems the Allies defeated were indeed
‘monsters’, but the ‘good guys’ have spent subsequent decades fighting
wars for resources, primarily oil, which look like they will literally
cost us the Earth.
Allied soldiers in the Second World War could not foresee that they
were fighting for a state-corporate system that would feature senior oil
company executives deliberately hiding
the fact that, in the 1970s, their own company scientists had fully
understood and warned of the dire threat of climate change from the
burning of fossil fuels. Noam Chomsky argues that the ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ mentality
of the fanatically climate-denying US Republican Party, currently the
US Government, makes it ‘the most dangerous organisation in human
history’."
Signal President Meredith Whittaker calls out agentic AI as having ‘profound’ security and privacy issues - Sat, 08 Mar 2025 10:42:23 +0000
"access to our web browser and a way to drive it as well as access to our credit card information to pay for tickets, our calendar, and messaging app to send the text to your friends."
With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It | Cory Doctorow's craphound.com - Wed, 26 Feb 2025 20:27:37 +0000
An hour of Cory doing a lecture about internet enshitification, it's causes and it's solutions and how we can and must build a new better internet.
Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Proofs Of God's Existence - Mon, 24 Feb 2025 23:38:41 +0000
Scott Alexander wonders if Tegmark's "Mathematical Universe" defeats most of the arguments he sees for God's existence.
Grok Grok | Don't Worry About the Vase - Mon, 24 Feb 2025 22:55:06 +0000
Zvi on Grok: "Grok is not as smart as one might hope and has other issues, but it is better than I expected and for now has its place in the rotation, especially for when you want its Twitter integration.", but also, "Grok turned out rather woke and extremely anti-Trump and anti-Musk, as well as trivial to jailbreak, and [xAi did] rather blunt things about that ... lot of trust has been lost. It will be extremely difficult to win it back." -- as usual from Zvi, extremely long.
Honest Government Ad | Our Last Fair Election? - YouTube - Sat, 22 Feb 2025 12:26:36 +0000
Honest Government Ads from The Juice Media on Australian elections. Funny how the biggest two parties always seem to prefer a two party system instead of any kind of political plurality eh?
Pluralistic: America and “national capitalism” (18 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow - Wed, 19 Feb 2025 00:30:52 +0000
Doctorow on Piketty: "eventually the share of wealth held by the rich will reach a tipping
point, and we'll see policies that benefit the wealthy crowding out
policies that support human thriving, and the rich will get richer, and
they will feud with each other, and society will destabilize, and we
will face collapse."
Deliberative Alignment, And The Spec - Mon, 17 Feb 2025 23:56:55 +0000
who should control what the ai thinks is good and moral? "But fast-forward 2-3 years to when AIs are a big part of the economy and military, and this gets more interesting. What should the spec say? In particular, what is the chain of command?"