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


Exocortex Log

A logo of a brain

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 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 - Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:49:19 +0000

    RE: loops.video/v/g0QkUlZbIv

    Not sure how many people are really aware of what SpaceX and OpenAI and Anthropic are planning over the next few months.

    Everyone knows there's an AI stock market bubble, and that alone is a reason why the holders of the companies might want to offload some risk onto the rest of the stock market investors.

    But these three companies are coming in valued so highly at the peak of this bubble here that they will between them become a significant fraction of the total stock markets.

    Which means all the automatic-funds which buy companies in proportion to how much they make up of the total markets will have to buy a lot of all of them quite quickly.

    So you'll have hundreds of billions of dollars going from pension funds into the hands of the private investors offloading their AI stocks, right at the top of the AI bubble here.

    Elon and Sam are gonna take 200 billion dollars of the world's pension money just before the whole thing collapses. They are treating the stock markets as his bag-holders. Which is quite a common move, they didn't invent it or anything. But the accountants this round seem to have optimized the process. Swifter and faster and on a smaller fraction of the companies than was previously possible.

    There will be a name for the economic catastrophe produced by these three big IPOs taking automatic-investor money at the top of a bubble, leaving all the pension funds unable to meet their liabilities and pensioners going bankrupt.

    The way the media works it won't be called a fraud though, they'll label it like it was an unavoidable natural disaster which just co-incidentally transferred hundreds of billions of dollars from the pension funds to the richest dozen families on earth.

    "The 2027 AI Revaluation" or something maybe. "The 2028 Pensions Crisis". Something like that.

    Anyway, hard to fit all that into the one minute tarot reading.


    Status at - Tue, 02 Jun 2026 09:59:46 +0000

    Been watching Genndy Tartakovsky's "Primal", which is three seasons of an Adult Swim cartoon, each twenty minutes long, about a caveman and his dinosaur friend who meet in tragedy in Episode one.

    No dialogue really, all just incredible animal roars and screams and shrieks and hollering. So all the story is visual, told in the expressions and the movement and the reaction shots, and very beautifully drawn and animated to boot.

    Dinosaur is not a pet, she is an equal. Occasionally ridden, but that's the parts I like least. Seems out of character.

    No aiming for realism here. One of my favorite early ones they spent most of the time running from a zombie stegosaurus.

    Most interesting new TV I've seen in a while. All three seasons are great, though they are in order first was best and each subsequently not quite as good.


    Status at - Sat, 30 May 2026 22:36:18 +0000

    Went to Small World Spring Festival in Hedcorn Kent last weekend.

    It was very hot.

    It's been hot since. Barely done anything other than sleep on the sofa all week.

    Spent most of it lolling in the shade with a battery fan barely able to pay attention to the musicians somehow managing to jump about in the heat.

    The campervan wallpaper I put up did as I predicted and fell down quite a lot. Had the gorilla glue ready to try and patch it as it fell. The vinyl wallpaper is probably a mistake. The heat swings are too intense. It swells and the glue fails.

    Stands more chance of staying up in future, but is way more creased and shoddy looking.

    Still, it's form and function other than that are now as good as it's gonna get in a van that size. The mini-fridge isn't worth it. Coolbox just fine.

    Love small world though. Proper hippy festival. Mostly solar powered and punk and ska and folk and jazz and that whole stage just for jamming.

    Will likely be back there for the end of summer one. Nice that they open and close the summer.


    Status at - Thu, 28 May 2026 21:57:01 +0000

    I think there should be a strong social norm against quoting robots. Doing so ought to be embarrassing.


    Status at - Thu, 28 May 2026 21:41:54 +0000

    I am more against AI slop in chat channels than I am against space-based securities scams.

    You wanna do a space-themed securities scam and pass laws that mean the whole pension market has to invest then, uh.. I prefer you don't but, whatever. You do you I guess.

    Let me know your victim's address so I can warn them?

    But if you want to put machine-generated slop in my chat channels?

    Now you are affecting me personally.

    Chat with the bot to interrogate your understanding if you want? Sure. There might be better ways like a text-book. but it's undeniably quick to identify where you disagree with the average.

    To proffer your please-o-bot conversation as any evidence of anything, or to think it contributes to a public channel of real humans who are saying actual human things which are not synthesized by robots?

    The revolution ain't built like that man. That isn't how you build human communication channels.

    Keep your conversations with robots as private as your interactions with the VR Porn.

    Talk with the robots if you must but nobody wants to hear about that or your dreams.


    Status at - Thu, 28 May 2026 21:28:33 +0000

    If you wanna smoke that stuff then you do you man, believe what you want.

    But don't come quoting that slop machine at me, like it backs up a single thought.

    Or worse, like it's a thought you had.

    Here: this must be true, the robot thought it too!

    The revolution will not come to mind when conferring with their chatbots.

    The revolution will be live, not Ai-sized.

    The revolution will be humanized.


    Status at - Thu, 28 May 2026 21:19:54 +0000

    The revolution will not be AI-ised

    The revolution will not be brought to you by Facebook or Grok in four parts without commercial interruptions.

    The revolution will not be sponsored by Google Gemini or Anthropic's Claude.

    The revolution will be no re-run, brothers

    The revolution will be live.

    The revolution will not be AI-sized.


    Status at - Thu, 28 May 2026 19:40:49 +0000

    Content warning:re: UK Pol - Not In Education/Training, Private ownership of wealth


    Care homes. Of course. That's another obvious mission of BritCoOp.

    Care homes owned by british workers who work to provide care in the care home to british workers who can no longer work.

    Doesn't matter if it returns a profit if it cares for the workers from decades gone by who are it's owners.


    Status at - Thu, 28 May 2026 19:13:48 +0000

    Have recently been accused of being

    "so far left your perspective doesn't match most people's opinions"

    🙇‍♂️

    No notes.

    This is surely the educational battle before us.


    Status at - Thu, 28 May 2026 19:09:55 +0000

    Content warning:re: UK Pol - Not In Education/Training, Private ownership of wealth


    You know there's a chance it would be legal for the King to just set up Brit-Coop as an act of resignation.

    Transfer ownership of everything belonging to the crown to a new organization that has ownership by worker-hour, and a mission to rebuild the public infrastructure for the public good.

    Use government connections to get it the contracts for welfare-money-for-training.

    He won't. Nor will his kids.

    Royals aren't about that. They aren't the country. They shouldn't be it's owners.

    But it wouldn't be illegal I don't think. If anyone has his royal ear. His big ear.


  • Bookmarks

    Things I have bookmarked lately.
    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.

    The Boring Internet | Terry Godier - Thu, 14 May 2026 22:31:51 +0000
    Nobody can sell it. Nobody can pivot it. Nobody can take it public and
    gut it for shareholders. Nobody can call an all-hands meeting and
    explain that, going forward, the protocol will prioritize video.

    You’re about to feel the AI money squeeze | The Verge - Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:02:17 +0000
    Gartner forecasts that large AI companies would need to earn cumulatively close to $7 trillion in AI-driven revenue through 2029, which is close to $2 trillion per year by the end of the period. In order to achieve “historic returns,” the providers would need to earn nearly $8.2 trillion in the same period.

    Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want | The Verge - Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:29:04 +0000

    Nuclear Genocide – The Threat And The Ceasefire – Media Lens - Sun, 19 Apr 2026 23:27:59 +0000
    "Despite all the madness, horror and killing, Trump’s genocidal threat
    provoked a display of deep-seated solidarity and compassion that defied
    decades of propaganda demonising the Iranian people as ‘animals’,
    ‘savages’ and ‘primitives’. Clearly, very few of us are willing to
    tolerate the threat of nuclear genocide. In these grim times, when it
    sometimes feels like humanity has completely lost its way, that is
    something to celebrate."

    Reading is magic - by Sam Kriss - Numb at the Lodge - Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:24:15 +0000
    Sam Kriss writing on the coming illiteracy might affect politics. It's long so you know only people who read a bit will get to the end, and they prone to agree: "This is not a world we’re prepared for. All democratic politics
    assume a literate population; people who are willing to think in
    abstract terms about the kind of world they want to live in. Without
    that, democracy becomes a kind of tribal headcount, or a struggle for
    state resources between competing patronage networks. This is what lies
    behind a lot of the growing liberal panic over the decline of literacy.
    For a growing chorus of people who write in the Atlantic,
    we’re recoiling into pre-Enlightenment conditions of absolute
    domination. A population that can no longer think for itself will end up
    voluntarily ceding power to strongmen or demagogues. The end of
    literacy is the end of public reason. A post-literate world will be
    unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness, and people eating
    each other in the streets."

    The Last Quiet Thing | Terry Godier - Fri, 10 Apr 2026 21:47:46 +0000
    Your thermostat has opinions now. Your television requires a login. Your
    car updates itself overnight, and sometimes when you start it in the
    morning, the interface has rearranged itself, as if someone broke in and
    reorganized your dashboard while you slept.

    Shameless Guesses, Not Hallucinations - Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:01:58 +0000
    I hate the term “hallucinations” for when AIs say false things. It’s perfectly calculated to mislead the reader - to make them think AIs are crazy, or maybe just have incomprehensible failure modes.

    AIs say false things for the same reason you do.

    At least, I did. In school, I would take multiple choice tests. When I didn’t know the answer to a question, I would guess.

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