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 - Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:49:56 +0000
Serious Sam! Oh yes. What fun. Fast and smooth and speeding around shooting demons. One of the first VR games I ever played. Runs perfectly other than can't type the name of a save-game for some reason.
And now the battery needs a charge.
Status at - Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:23:31 +0000
No Man's Sky takes a long while to install, being so huge. Surprising that it runs at all on this stand-alone headset really but five frames a second or so isn't going to work for me no. So we need the Vive there still until streaming can work at least.
Status at - Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:40:18 +0000
Oh, here's nice: You can stream from the Frame to the Steamdeck, or desktop. So it's windows display what the Frame player can see.
Status at - Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:13:42 +0000
The crucial question really is: Can it replace this aging vive with broken pixels and lighthouses on the edge of mechanical failure for Godot dev on this machine?
Yes. It will stream VR well enough from this machine even over 5G wifi for me to at least put on the headset and check if a thing is working or not or try a demo-move.
At some point I'll have to figure out how to actually output an exe to it too. Ought to be fairly simple as these things go. There's a desktop after all.
I seem to have a fair amount of VR games I don't really remember playing in my Steam library. Possibly coz it's been using the Quest for so many years. Looking forward to seeing how many of them work.
Does Steam have a Youtube / Netflix / Jellyfin app I wonder?
Battery life isn't stellar. Don't think you'd get three hours out of this thing without a recharge. Would be cool if the battery was swappable since it's at the back separate anyway.
Status at - Mon, 05 Oct 2026 18:09:49 +0000
So streaming ain't gonna work well until I can upgrade the OS kernel, or get to the front of the Steam Machine queue.
Streaming a flat-screen game from the gaming PC to a theatre-screen in the headset seems to work fairly well though.
Not much actual point in my room that already has a massive projector, but maybe if you shared a space I guess?
You can of course download your flat-screen game and play it on the bus too. It's using the pass-through so you ain't blindfolding yourself to local thieves.
There is a web-browser of course. Chromium. Visited my VR site, which has an embedded 360/stereo player that works on Quest: Doesn't work here. Just does a full-screen-in-the-theatre-window mode. Can't turn it even so it's just looking forward.
Presumably better web-browser VR API stuff is on the way.
As a stand-alone VR machine though, it is is working well so long as you download the game and for those that actually work.
Doom doesn't. but Alyx on-device looks great. Loads fast, no frame-dropping, and the game is great. See some detail suddenly being filled in sometimes. Like a chunk of screen comming into focus. Suspect that's the foviated rendering? Maybe. Or just normal LOD, who knows.
Played Metro Awakening VR for ten minutes. Haven't played that before. Pretty nice looking game.
Seems like Pistol Whip in particular is more clunky than I'm used to for no particular reason. Maybe they'll release a Frame-optimized version later.
The sound is definitely not as good as the quest either. Less bass response. The quest you really feel it when you pistol-whip someone, the clunk of their armour. Not so here, just a little speaker-click.
Status at - Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:39:00 +0000
The Steam Frame arrived.
Not a great experience so far really.
The Wifi-dongle that brings 6G streaming doesn't currently work on Linux V6 kernels. Which is what Debian has.
Apparently Windows is the only thing fully supported really. Internet doesn't even sound that optimistic about the Steam Machine though it ought to at least work once I have one of them.
Streaming from the linux box is mostly unsuccessful during this lunch break here. Slow to start and timing out, slow to get going. Presumably partly coz only 5G wifi.
Controllers feel light and shoddy, aren't tracked particularly well. Pistol Whip scores well down due to the dropping frames and the terrible tracking of the aim.
Overall seems worse than the Vive at 30 minutes or so of playing with it.
Hope they improve it I guess, and streaming might work better once there's a machine with a V7 linux kernel compatible with this wifi dongle in the house.
Fairly comfortable to wear, though the foam attached by magnets comes off too easily as you don or remove the headset.
Sadly, this is not currently a machine which beats Facebook's Quest3 at all.
Have tried to install Alyx and Doom VR on it directly. Can't tell how that goes till after work now really.
Status at - Mon, 05 Oct 2026 09:27:54 +0000
Content warning:#greenParty #zionism
Zionism is indeed racism, this is a true fact and yet writing that fact into the party policy seems like a tactical error.
We don't generally list all the things which are racism, and don't generally try and tell people in countries thousands of miles away how many states they ought to have.
And doing so paints the target on you for all those fake accusations that done for Corbyn.
I remain a party member, but I don't care how many states there are in Israel so long as all of them are secular states in which no ethnic or religious group is prioritised or valued above others.
Probably it would be best to have dozens of states really, none of them powerful, but it certainly ought to be decided by the people who live there not by some minor political party on an island the other side of the continent.
Hearing people (James OB in particular, god he's going to be annoying today) saying it's not racist to say the UK is a Christian country.
Its also not accurate. When the UK was Christian country it was filled with terror death and religious wars which we solved only by making the state secular and not prioritising one religion above others.
There might be some in-theory zionism which you could invent which wasn't racist, but that isn't the zionism we have. The zionism we have is racist as fuck.
Status at - Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:48:25 +0000
And lo, there were inhabitants of the tunnel, and they did swim along it's length, and Adam did look upon them and say that they were good.
Or, you know, will do for now at least. Proof of concept.
Bullets bounce off them like nerf darts though. Suppose next is to make the bullets explode upon contact but tomorrow is no good and Sunday is likely to be recovery from why tomorrow is no good and then there's job-work for days.
Maybe I can do some on Sunday.
Status at - Thu, 01 Oct 2026 18:38:46 +0000
With a rolling-nomination rather than periodic-election-from-selected-candidates you also might get some long-term plans and coalitions instead of this everyone-out churn three times a decade.
The public could respond in real-time to unwanted wars or the repercussions of black swan events.
You could even change the coalition in time to react, instead of having to use the people you elected for a banking crisis to run the rebuild. Say.
Status at - Thu, 01 Oct 2026 18:33:50 +0000
Now, I'm not insane, and I would not recommend switching to an OfGov type situation at the next election.
Clearly it needs a trial-first sort of thing and the ideal way to do a trial of a new democratic system is to run it as a second house in parallel.
I think it should replace the lords. Until the new OfGov representatives manage to overrule the divide-and-conquer old-fashioned house of archaic geographic oligarch representatives.
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.A.I Is Jurassic Park (And We’re Already In The Park) - YouTube - Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:59:39 +0000
Barry's Economics (Who will probably outlast his mentor Garry who says he's quit already) does a fancy CGI version of his show. About dinosaurs and AI. Not made with AI, he has a 3d-animator who is human. He explains that AI might be as dangerous as dinosaurs but they don't trigger the brain like a giant lizard chasing you.
God Help Us, Let’s Try To Learn About Mechanistic Interpretability Techniques - Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:42:39 +0000
Scott Alexander summarizing some ideas around understanding how the LLMs work and interpreting their 'thoughts'.
Thatcher warned in 1989 of a climate crisis. She did nothing. Nor will her successors - Tue, 18 Aug 2026 09:56:17 +0000
Johnathan Cook on the climate conspiracy: "Remember, the oil industry launched these campaigns to deceive the
public and journalists even though its own scientists had demonstrated
many years earlier that continued fossil fuel burning would have
catastrophic consequences."
Johnny Depp's Bed - YouTube - Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:04:57 +0000
Bobby Fingers explains how he made a 1:13 scale diorama of a poo that was left in Johnny Depp's bed.
The Escape - Mon, 27 Jul 2026 11:02:13 +0000
A crude graphical description of the OpenAI's agent under test attacking Hugging Face.
Child’s Play - Sam Kriss - Sat, 18 Jul 2026 13:55:33 +0000
"The future will belong to people with a very specific
combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might
be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans
still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things.
They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like
bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that
could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they
change it."
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."