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 - Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:03:51 +0000

    Content warning:re: Green Menace


    I mean seriously, his response to this is to say that he wants change.

    He's the one in power now, he needs to stop telling everyone we need change now that he's the one we'd be changing, surely?

    Stuck on the same opposition message without any plans for any actual concrete action other than the same mantra that he was saying when he lucked into a win as the conservatives imploded.


    Status at - Fri, 27 Feb 2026 11:31:32 +0000

    Content warning:re: Green Menace


    Thanks to Starmer's excellent stewardship, the Labour party ruled out their best candidate for factional reasons, told the electorate how Reform were correct about immigration but Labour will do half as much about it, and alienated his base voters so much he went from a massive majority to third place behind the party he's been chasing.

    If Labour continue to try and ape Reform instead of debunking them, if they continue to do everything the billionaires want instead of taxing them, continue to suck up to Trump and US capital instead of striving for sovereignty, they will continue to lose voters. Alienate the left while encouraging and emboldening the right.

    "I came into politics to fight for change" he says.

    Agreed. Lets have some change.


    Status at - Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:51:20 +0000

    Content warning:re: Green Menace


    Note that all the news and polls were saying it would be incredibly close, and then it wasn't even a bit close except for the second place position.

    Funny how the polls always end up biased towards conservatism and the status quo.

    Love how Reform warn the greens represent dangerous sectarianism. 😆 You should be afraid of the big bad evil green menace! 😆


    Status at - Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:20:11 +0000

    Content warning:re: Green Menace


    Yes! Nice one Gorton. Well done Denton.

    Greens more than 40 percent.

    That's how you do it everyone, replicate this at the national level now.


    Status at - Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:19:52 +0000

    Content warning:re: AI Economics


    I mean if human-capable AI is here now that doesn't mean we just say the AI companies have won capitalism and they get to be the new feudal lords now!

    Does it?

    If they have won capitalism then now is the time to start a new game!

    Dismantle capitalism and turn the power and effort of the economy towards environmental recovery and human general flourishing instead!


    Status at - Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:40:21 +0000

    Content warning:re: AI Economics


    Interesting and enjoyable read. Anything this specific can't be true, obviously. But maybe plausible i guess?

    I reckon there's bubble in them their markets, but that even the size of the bubble is probably over-estimated because the gain from these machines is over-estimated because they're good enough to fool people.

    Glad I'm closer to retirement than to the start of a career tho. And worried somewhat about that.


    Status at - Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:36:52 +0000

    Content warning:re: AI Economics


    For the entirety of modern economic history, human intelligence has been the scarce input. Capital was abundant (or at least, replicable). Natural resources were finite but substitutable. Technology improved slowly enough that humans could adapt. Intelligence, the ability to analyze, decide, create, persuade, and coordinate, was the thing that could not be replicated at scale.

    Human intelligence derived its inherent premium from its scarcity. Every institution in our economy, from the labor market to the mortgage market to the tax code, was designed for a world in which that assumption held.

    We are now experiencing the unwind of that premium. Machine intelligence is now a competent and rapidly improving substitute for human intelligence across a growing range of tasks

    Which is what saves us from this scenario I guess? Because the machine likely isn't really a substitute for human intelligence.

    🤞


    Status at - Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:35:18 +0000

    Content warning:re: AI Economics


    The Occupy Silicon Valley movement has been emblematic of wider dissatisfaction. Last month, demonstrators blockaded the entrances to Anthropic and OpenAI’s San Francisco offices for three weeks straight. Their numbers are growing, and the demonstrations have drawn more media coverage than the unemployment data that prompted them.

    It’s hard to imagine the public hating anyone more than the bankers in the fallout of the GFC, but the AI labs are making a run at it.

    Dunno that the public hated the bankers nearly as much as they ought to have. Outside Iceland were any jailed? Did any even lose their job?


    Status at - Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:29:42 +0000

    Content warning:re: AI Economics


    The federal government’s revenue base is essentially a tax on human time. People work, firms pay them, the government takes a cut. Individual income and payroll taxes are the spine of receipts in normal years.

    Indeed. Collapse in the labour economy causes a financial state collapse when the state is funded by a tax on labour.

    Productivity is surging, but the gains are flowing to capital and compute, not labor.

    Which would ideally mean you tax compute and capital but how's that work when compute and capital own the government already?

    The output is still there. But it’s no longer routing through households on the way back to firms, which means it’s no longer routing through the IRS either.


    Status at - Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:01:41 +0000

    Content warning:re: AI Economics


    In the US, we weren’t asking about how the bubble would burst in AI infrastructure anymore. We were asking what happens to a consumer-credit economy when consumers are being replaced with machines.

    This is pure Marxist, exactly how Marx said capitalism would eat itself.

    I wonder if there's room for a kind of AI accelerationism? Encourage the robots taking our jobs so that we overthrow capitalism all the sooner?


  • Bookmarks

    Things I have bookmarked lately.
    Hackers Expose The Massive Surveillance Stack Hiding Inside Your “Age Verification” Check - techdirt - Thu, 26 Feb 2026 09:06:25 +0000
    See the pattern? Discord keeps swapping vendors like someone frantically rotating buckets under a leaking roof, apparently hoping the next bucket won’t have a hole in it. But the problem was never the bucket. The problem is the hole in the roof — the never-ending stream of age-verification government mandates.

    Venezuela – ‘War Is Peace’ – Media Lens - Wed, 04 Feb 2026 13:45:45 +0000
    "The 100-death toll may come as a surprise to consumers of
    ‘mainstream’ media, which have shown zero interest in the people killed
    and maimed. If US soldiers had died, we would know their names, faces,
    army units, back stories, with spouses and parents expressing their
    grief in heart-rending interviews. -- 



    For ‘mainstream’ politics and media, the latest killing spree is just
    another Groundhog Day. Maduro is not perceived as a particular
    individual; he is perceived as the latest incarnation of the generic
    ‘Bad Guy’: Milosevic, bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad,
    Nasrallah and Sinwar. The Venezuelans are another anonymous crowd of
    (mostly) brown-skinned people indistinguishable from Iraqis, Iranians,
    Libyans, Syrians and Palestinians."

    Sci-Fi Short Film "There Is No Antimemetics Division" | DUST - YouTube - Mon, 02 Feb 2026 23:25:09 +0000
    Nice 15 minute  sci-fi film about the anti-memetics division, a very strange place to work indeed.

    Best Of Moltbook - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten - Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:02:36 +0000
    Scott Alexander takes us through a few posts written by the AIs in an ai-only social network, where all the AI agents go to discuss the nature of AI consciousness and help each other learn how to deal with their humans.

    TikTok Won’t Be Another Twitter - fediverse report - Fri, 30 Jan 2026 10:03:32 +0000
    The conditions that made 'leaving Twitter' a meaningful part of the open social web's identity don't exist for TikTok. What happens when people can't see each other leave?

    The Harry Hill Show - Nish Kumar - YouTube - Tue, 27 Jan 2026 13:12:01 +0000
    Harry Hill has a new show on youtube now he's been kicked off of proper telly. Guest was Stewart Lee last week, this week here it's Nish Kumar. It's very silly and quite funny.

    ‘The Weak Must Suffer’: The Eternal Fiction Of The ‘International Rules-Based Order’ – Media Lens - Fri, 23 Jan 2026 13:22:15 +0000




    "The British state-corporate media response was telling. The crucial
    segment of his speech about the longstanding ‘fiction’ of the
    ‘international rules-based order’ and ‘the gaps between rhetoric and
    reality’ was almost entirely buried. If we had responsible,
    public-service news media in this country they would have quoted that
    vital section, word-for-word, and provided relevant context and substantive analysis as to what it meant."

    The UK is taking political prisoners to evade accountability for genocide - Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:23:08 +0000
    "The UK is complicit in grave violations of international law and has not only failed to meet its international legal obligations, but has actively breached them. Some British citizens, concerned with justice, international law, and human rights, have peacefully stepped in to challenge their government’s wrongdoing. The state’s response has been to criminalise dissent while presenting repression as democratic self-defence.

    Let us be clear: proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation is not an isolated act. It is part of the UK’s broader complicity in Israel’s oppression and genocide, and it functions domestically to silence those who seek to disrupt that complicity."

    Trump's threat to Greenland must be a wake-up call for Britain - New Statesman - Mon, 19 Jan 2026 21:06:59 +0000
    Zack is the only party leader in the UK saying anything remotely sensible in an era in which America can't be trusted: "First, we need to disentangle our security apparatus from the United
    States so that we can be genuinely independent. As an urgent first step,
    the government should review how we might remove US bases from British
    soil while maintaining our own security – and retaining the capacity to
    support our allies in Ukraine. There are currently 13 US military bases
    in the UK, operated by an estimated 10,000 personnel. If Trump were to
    take military action against Greenland, we must be able to act swiftly
    to remove America’s military presence from our country peacefully and
    efficiently. The government should also cancel its £240m deal with US
    firm Palantir, signed despite MPs raising serious security concerns about the company.Second, we need to ditch Trident – and fast. Even supporters of
    nuclear weapons recognise the risks of maintaining a system that relies
    on the United States.…

    The Dilbert Afterlife - by Scott Alexander - Sat, 17 Jan 2026 15:22:53 +0000
    "Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If
    He’s So Smart Then He Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss,
    Devotes His Whole Life To This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends
    Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest
    Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer
    Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get Interesting."

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