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 - Wed, 07 Oct 2026 15:54:05 +0000
In fact, the system was not back to normal after that factory reset (but keep user-data mode).
The file zz-steamos-autologin.conf was now in /etc/sddm.conf.z/ containing instruction to boot into Plasma instead of into Steam.
[Autologin]
Session=plasma.desktopWhich is why the dashboard had a desktop icon instead of a launch-app button and I was stuck with basically only one window. Couldn't even watch two tv shows at once while playing a 2d game any more.
Not likely to do that, but deleting the file made it boot properly into steamos instead and gave me my multiple windows ability, if not need or desire.
I assume it created that file as some sort of crash-remedy when SteamOS wouldn't launch because SteamVR wasn't installed and internet didn't work.
Interesting that you can have it boot into Plasma and have steam as a second class app instead.
Status at - Wed, 07 Oct 2026 12:20:52 +0000
This month's digest/newsletter is on it's way to the email inbox all the amazing and wonderful people who asked for it.
The rest of you scum can read it here and sign up from the blog:
https://dalliance.net/blog/sep26/Containing: exploring Steam's Frame VR headset, ranting about direct democracy, free Palestine, AI and VR and Improv plus an interesting new search engine in the links section.
Status at - Wed, 07 Oct 2026 10:51:20 +0000
Played Unloop for a bit.
Pretty fun game, working with your own prior iterations in a time-loop to open all the doors at the right time to get through to the next room/loop.
Many times your job is done within a few seconds so might as well shoot yourself in the head really and get the next loop started.
So by the final time you're running through a maze waiting for the gates to open, watching the whole room be filled with your prior iterations grabbing keys to unlock doors and then shooting themselves in the head and dying on the floor.
Nice.
Status at - Wed, 07 Oct 2026 10:11:31 +0000
Well I do not recommend trying the beta channel.
After trying that it booted into a VR KDE desktop without Steam running, and without internet. And without SteamVR package installed.
Only rescue was holding the headset button during boot, using the volume keys to select the prior boot system, and doing a factory reset to make it stick.
Crikey. Really is a linux box, complete with having to fix update breakage.
Status at - Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:47:02 +0000
If you turn on Developer Mode, and set a user password, then you can ssh into the linux machine strapped to your face.
Now that is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Oh yes.
Status at - Mon, 05 Oct 2026 23:02:09 +0000
Google Earth is too much though. Crashes about 40% of the way through 'building the earth'.
Status at - Mon, 05 Oct 2026 22:51:22 +0000
Don't really need a Jellyfin player of course if Chromium is there. Just point it at the house media-server. The player works fine and I can put multiple of them around the 3d-space at will.
Could even leave one running while a game ran. Watch TV in the corner of your Serious Sam game. That's a new one on me that probably I could do before in Steam VR anyway but not on Quest.
Gives you better sense of which way you're facing as you spin about fighting monsters.
And this is all just local in the headset, it has a pretty complete Linux OS with a desktop and a browser and a file-explorer and pages of settings.
Tis very much like a steamdeck you strap on your face.
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.
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.Has Andy Burnham Ever Heard Of The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation? – Media Lens - Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:52:24 +0000
"What does it say about the new Prime Minister that climate barely merited a mention in an hour-long speech about his vision of the future? And what does it say about the ‘mainstream’ media that he was not lambasted for ignoring the severity of the threat hanging over all of us?"
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."