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, 10 Jun 2026 11:39:03 +0000
If they're not doing the Xmas special then I wonder if anyone will address The Bad Wolf Doctor at all?
Could be that the Billie Piper Doctor never happens. Just completely ignore those final few seconds where her face appears after the regeneration?
Would have been better not to have those few seconds of film in the final show if they'd known it'd be a total reboot next up. Just end with the regeneration energy and no clues for next season's Doctor Who?
Probably wouldn't want to open the new rebooted show with a regeneration scene. Focus on new companion till she meets new Doctor.
I think it needs a special to join the edges really. Hopefully whoever wins the tender will want to do a short Bad Wolf Doctor episode as a prequel to the new seasons.
Hopefully in October 2027? A long wait indeed without that xmas episode. Already been more than a year.
I should cancel my BBC license and give the money to Big Finish until the new show is in place maybe.
Status at - Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:05:47 +0000
No Xmas episode for Doctor Who, and indeed it sounds like nobody has any ideas for it's future at all, so it's up for grabs to anyone who puts in the best tender.
Can we crowd-fund some way for Charlie Brooker to run it for a couple of years? Make Philomena Cunk or Barry Shitpeas be the doctor?
https://news.thedoctorwhosite.co.uk/bbc-puts-doctor-who-out-to-competitive-tender/
Status at - Tue, 09 Jun 2026 10:21:09 +0000
Content warning:re: UKPol kids and images and tech
Signal's reply:
The UK government's demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the UK be scanned on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning, will not safeguard children. It endangers us all, whilst strengthening Apple, Google, and Microsoft's market dominance and their control over our most personal information.
https://signal.org/blog/pdfs/2026-06-08-uk-surveillance-is-not-safety.pdf
Status at - Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:52:46 +0000
Content warning:UKPol kids and images and tech
I see the prime minister and home secretary are lying, just blatantly lying, about the existence of technology which can tell how old someone is and whether an image is porn or not.
They claim this technology already exists in phones and just needs to be turned on.
I mean, judges at trials haven't been able to describe what is or isn't pornography, but apparently I guess they should have just turned on the software switch in their phones! Easy!
No phone can know it's operator's age. Even if the phone's owner is registered, it can't know if it's being operated by it's owner or not.
The PM and Home Sec are lying that they think there's no reporting, no data-collection, no spying, no monitoring, involved in their impossible imaginary tech they demand must be implemented in 3 months.
They are lying that adults can turn it off without having to register the owner of the phone and it's ID with a central database.
Never head anyone even mention the environmental consequences of burning power to pass every image a camera takes through a large neural network to have it be classified as porn or not, so at least they haven't had to lie about it being free and easy and not burning energy to classify every image taken in the UK.
Good thing they have little chance of being in power when their deadline hits and the tech companies have failed to turn on the imaginary software switch to do impossible things.
Sadly, Burnham's government will probably do much the same.
Status at - Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:14:18 +0000
This month's digest/newsletter is on the way to the mailbox of all those rich lovely insider traders who know how to play the newsletter markets.
The rest of you poor bag-holding index investor scum being ripped off can get it here:
https://dalliance.net/blog/may26/Featuring rants and card-readings about SpaceX and AI stock offerings, commentary on Labour's collapse and Burnham's offer, descriptions of gigs and the building of a table, plus a new Observers cartoon.
Status at - Fri, 05 Jun 2026 10:15:53 +0000
The fact that we are having our political conversations on shitposting troll sites is a strange quirk of the modern age.
Some kind of online house-of-people's state-owned state-forum seems like a more sensible place if you were designing from scratch.
Status at - Fri, 05 Jun 2026 10:11:25 +0000
James O'Brien is on the radio asking if the government ought to leave Twitter.
He seems to have finally understood that there is no level playing field there, that the algorithm can't be used for good. That if it started to do good, the owners would just change it.
He left when he understood that the place is overrun with trolls and moderated only to keep the woke in check.
James blocked me ages ago, and I'd not ring in, but the key thing he's missing is this:
Elon musk has his own shitposting troll site that he owns.
Trump has his own shtposting troll site that he owns.
Mark Zuckerberg has his own shitposting troll site that he owns. He's got like four.
The blockchain people have their own shitposting troll site that they own (that's the one O'Brian uses).
If the government wants to use a shitposting troll site, they should also use one that they own.
Likewise LBC radio presenters really. If they want to use a shitposting troll site, they should probably use one that they own and moderate themselves.
And then, consensually, with no obligation, if they want, each of the shitposting troll sites can federate together with the others in a mesh, so that they can talk to each other and the conversation can flow between them but ownership and control is distributed to individual organisations.
Then we could decentralize ownership of the means of communication and avoid this argument about whether the government should be on twitter so we can instead argue whether UK Social should block or federate with Musk's Nazi Troll site or not.
And this system exists of course. LBC could have their own shitposting troll site by the end of next week and moderate it as they see fit.
Status at - Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:49:41 +0000
Shame we can't all go back to running ICQ really. It literally never got better than that. But ICQ would let you do things big corporations didn't like (for example send large copyrighted files directly) and was peer-to-peer and so unsurveillable.
So they did what they always do. Bought it and shut it down.
Status at - Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:35:48 +0000
Whatsapp users. Instagram users. Facebook users. Threads users. Even us Oculous users. Everyone trusts Zuck.
Status at - Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:24:06 +0000
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@mattburgess/116693207149186541
“Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine.”
Hard to know why people think this company is okay, and that everyone should be their cattle. Rather than thinking everyone on the executive team should be banned from any business activity on ethical grounds.
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious - The Atlantic - Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:01:01 +0000
The Atlantic's argument that AI isn't conscious has the right conclusion and is mostly good but some of it's arguments are pretty poor. "So, given that Claude is not conscious, what are we to make of Claude’s
constitution? Perhaps the most fruitful way to think about it is as an
84-page character sheet for a role-playing game. LLMs can generate
dialogue for Julius Caesar because many books about him exist in the
training data those models used. Claude’s constitution serves a similar
role for delineating the helpful-chatbot character that customers
interact with when they’re using Anthropic’s products. To do this
effectively, Anthropic does not simply add the document to the training
data, or include it as part of the hidden stage directions that preface
each conversation a user has. The company says it uses the document when
fine-tuning the model; this involves an automated process where the
sentences emitted by the model are checked for consistency with the
document and the model is u…
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.
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.