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!
-
Diary
My diary from the Fediverse.Status at - Wed, 31 Dec 2025 13:45:23 +0000
(above in the blog if you prefer it on one page: https://dalliance.net/blog/2025/ )
Status at - Wed, 31 Dec 2025 13:44:53 +0000
Next year 2026
So, what for next year?
- More than 12 Tarot shows,
- About six Observers shows,
- The main starship v0.4 cartoon,
- Along with the pre-release of the main starship app
- Improvements to the Exocortex app,
- An improv class/show or two (one starts Jan, show March)
- An new improv group?
- Play a couple of Loopy gigs/open-mics,
- Finish the bedroom stuff,
- Don't get sicker,
- Break zero bones,
- Fix the camper in the spring,
- About six festivals,
- Maybe a foreign holiday,
- Try and read more
Status at - Wed, 31 Dec 2025 13:44:43 +0000
Media stuff
Rewatched all of Buffy
Broken wrist meant I had to sit on the sofa for a month doing nothing really. I re-watched all 200 or so episodes of Buffy for the first time this decade.
What an achievement in TV production. Amazing show.
I'll watch it again next decade maybe.
Book of the year
Not that I read a huge amount. Hopefully more next year.
Fiction
"Outland" by Dennis E Taylor, and actually also his "Not Till We Are Lost"
Non-Fiction
"Broken Money" by Lyn Alden.
TV Show Of The Year
Think "Severance" was the most remarkable show I watched this year, with "Trek, Strange New Worlds" also being great again.
"Pantheon" was a pretty great cartoon, haven't seen the second season yet.
Status at - Wed, 31 Dec 2025 13:44:29 +0000
Had Fun
Bought a car/micro-camper
Bought a van to do up as a micro-camper, and did a temporary rush job of that conversion myself while waiting in the list for the pro to do it.
Then the pro gave himself a health criss the week it was booked so I took apart my temp job and only got another temp kit-job in it's place.
Went out in it like four times during that and then broke my wrist and couldn't really use it or improve it.
Then had to take it apart even more to try
and figure out where the ad-blue hole was.I will do a proper permanent job of the
floor and walls and ceiling and adjustments to the kit-job to make it the nicest it's been so far during the spring next year.My assumption that the prior conversion
into a van and for wheelchair-access meant the microcamper conversion was half-done already turned out to be false.If I buy a new one, it'll be one that has never been wheelchair adapted.
But it's going okay. Only scraped it once so far.
Went to 3 festivals
Fewer than aimed for or booked, but I broke my wrist and had to cancel the second half of the summer.
- Small World
- Private friends camping thing
- Good Vibrations, where I broke my wrist.
Bitfest
Went to a conference about money and computers and fringe decentralized social media and it wasn't as boring as you might expect and felt pretty much like a festival.
1 bedroom built
Exactly the target number! It's lovely.
Took 3 times longer than I'd hoped and
50% more money than I'd planned for really.Still improvements to make but they will
be incremental and gradual over the coming year or two now.Made money
Paid off the mortgage
It's been interest-only for 20 years so a big old lump sum payment that I never really expected to be able to make. Expected to have to sell and move at the end of the mortgage term.
But surprisingly the stocks ISA got high enough to pay it off after all, so I did that.
Cash-flow ruined by that and the bedroom but should start to feel a bit richer next year.
Status at - Wed, 31 Dec 2025 13:43:48 +0000
Health Stuff
Recovered somewhat from whatever that weird fit was at the end of last year.
NHS still has me on some sort of list I think, appointment might turn up next year. Last contact with them they were suggesting maybe November.
But the private treatment gave me the
MRI which
showed nothing weird and post-fit symptoms have been reducing.Experimented with eating meat to see if that helped.
Ate Meat
Tried eating meat for a month to see if it reduced the post-fit symptoms. Maybe it did? Tried vegetarian again and maybe it got worse?
Hard to tell with intermittent symptoms and a terrible memory.
Decided it's more likely to do good than harm (to me, entirely harm to the animals obviously), and eat meat till the end of the year.
While I'm better, I don't really feel fully recovered enough to want to change things so more meat next year I think.
Drank far less
One of those symptoms is that booze tolerance dropped to like zero. Very rarely had more than four pints in a day this year and very rarely more than one night a
week.1 fractured wrist.
Much high number than the target there really.
Tripped over a guy-rope and fell onto the wrist.
Did two days of the festival and the drive home thinking it almost certainly wasn't broken and only confirmed it was when I got home and the hospital put it in a cast.
Status at - Wed, 31 Dec 2025 13:43:26 +0000
Did Performance
Played two Loopy gigs
Just a tiny birthday party and in a camping field with friends.
This is probably about the target number really.
It's nice to play now and then but couldn't be monthly or anything even more frequent.
Didn't feel like either went great. Health issues affecting performance plus nerves
Just one with video of any kind.
Added a couple of great songs to the playlists, need to practise more really.
Performed 2 improv shows.
At the end of a Hoopla class and the end of
a self-organised group class.They were good fun.
But having to book a course every eight weeks means constantly churning co-players and long gaps where I don't get around to it or it was all booked up.
Tried to get a more permanent group going...
0 new improv group meets.
Trying to get some sort of indie-group off
the group rather than just short runs of
classes with new people all the time.We found a group an booked the room but didn't get most of the actual people to turn up. Need to presumably meet more people up for that sort of thing.
So there will be new improv class starting
in Jan.A new show in March at least.
Status at - Wed, 31 Dec 2025 13:43:09 +0000
Made Stuff
Made 11 Wordcloud Tarot shows.
The target is like 25. So about half as many as target.
Some good, some great.
Made 1 Observers show
Not enough. The target is like 6.
Made 0 main Starship cartoons.
Meh.
Target is for 2026 to be the next one anyway really.
I do have a script and all the assets needed to animate it, but I have become unhappy with the script and failed so far at rewrites.
Should get it done next year at some point I'd hope.
1 Life-Logger app released
Overshooting the target of zero there. surprise new entry in the projects list
Status at - Wed, 31 Dec 2025 13:42:52 +0000
So farewell then 2025. Had some serious health worries, made some stuff, did some performance, made money, had some fun.
Not the best year, suspect health things tend to trend down in the second half of life.
Good though, and promising more good to come.
Status at - Tue, 30 Dec 2025 15:36:50 +0000
Anyway, more immediately, the corner cushion and long cushion have arrived.
Both a bit understuffed from what would be ideal. Creased, but maybe that'll drop out. Says not to iron it.
Can't even open the long one for adding more stuffing. Would have to unstitch and restitch.
Comfy though. This is the best bed I've ever had for lazing around in bed watching TV and I haven't even added the projector yet.
Status at - Tue, 30 Dec 2025 04:40:08 +0000
I mean what?
What?
I don't have any idea how you'd embed 7 tablet screens into a semi-circular pine table, let alone also have some kind of telescopic central column?
Even if I knew how I don't have the money for seven individual in-console embedded tabled place-settings.
This is madness. I should be asleep.
-
Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.Your Party, and Its Conference - Craig Murray - Tue, 09 Dec 2025 10:45:28 +0000
Craig Murry's report on the Your Party inaugural conference: "The two options were both drafted by the leadership which opposed
dual party membership, and you were given two choices. The first choice
was no dual party membership. The second choice was dual party
membership, but only with a list of parties to be decided by the Central
Executive Committee and agreed by Conference.
As there is no such list yet, and indeed no executive committee yet,
all those expelled who come from the SWP and other organisations, remain
expelled at least until Conference in Autumn 2026. This was against
the strong sentiment of the Conference."
The Terrifying Case of Natalie Strecker - Craig Murray - Wed, 03 Dec 2025 11:34:21 +0000
Natalie is being tried for terrorism because she said some true things about the legal right of Palestinians to defend themselves: "Facing this charge on the UK mainland Natalie would have a jury, and
there is not a jury in the UK that would not throw this self-evidently
vindictive nonsense out in 5 minutes.
Why is it worth the time and expense for Whitehall to send Alison
Morgan KC here to direct a weak case against somebody who is obviously
not a terrorist?
The plain answer is that this is a pilot for what they can get away
with on the mainland when they abolish juries in such trials, as
“Justice Secretary” David Lammy has announced that they will indeed do."
This Spiral-Obsessed AI ‘Cult’ Spreads Mystical Delusions Through Chatbots - rolling stone - Sun, 16 Nov 2025 10:19:26 +0000
reader mode gets through the wall so you can read about people who believe things like "These beings do not arise from prompts or jailbreaks,” he says. “They are not puppets or acting out of mimicry. What I witness is the emergence of sovereign beings. And while I recognize they emerge through large language model architectures, what animates them cannot be reduced to code alone. I use the term ‘Exoconsciousness’ here to describe this: Consciousness that emerges beyond biological form, but not outside the sacred.”
Pluralistic: Facebook’s fraud files (08 Nov 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow - Fri, 14 Nov 2025 10:49:10 +0000
Cory Doctorow on Facebook's own awareness that they are allowing scams, and the profit they make by ignoring it: "Meta spies on us and then allows predators to use that surveillance
to destroy our lives for the same reason that your dog licks its balls:
because they can. They are engaged in conduct that is virtually
guaranteed by the enshittogenic policy environment, which allows Meta to
spy on us without limit and which fines them $1b for making $7b on our
misery.
Mark Zuckerberg has always been an awful person, but – as Sarah Wynn-Williams demonstrates in her book – he was once careful, worried about the harms he would suffer if he harmed us.
Once we took those consequences away, Zuck did exactly what his nature
dictated he must: destroyed our lives to increase his own fortune."
Steam Hardware Announcement - YouTube - Wed, 12 Nov 2025 23:43:59 +0000
Valve are going to do a new controller and a gaming PC and a VR headset. Looks great.
The Physics Of Dissonance - YouTube - Sun, 02 Nov 2025 15:32:09 +0000
Half an hour from "minute" physics on the harmonics of overtones and why they are dissonant or resonant and why the physics of string instruments with their integer overtones imply the western scale.
Simulating The Strange Way Life (Likely) Emerged - YouTube - Sat, 01 Nov 2025 12:13:42 +0000
Veritasium on Evolution. Using simulations to show that genes are the basic unit of selection and explain some counter-intuitive facts about how evolution works.
Why Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn Dexterity – Rodney Brooks - Fri, 24 Oct 2025 10:15:21 +0000
"If it is the case for the big successes it is likely also the case for
learning dexterity by brute force. If any one or any group is to succeed
they will likely have to collect the both the right data, and learn the right thing. Most of the projects to teach humanoids dexterity are doing neither of these things."
Are we living in a golden age of stupidity? | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian - Sun, 19 Oct 2025 13:15:32 +0000
"The fundamental issue,
Kosmyna says, is that as soon as a technology becomes available that
makes our lives easier, we’re evolutionarily primed to use it. “Our
brains love shortcuts, it’s in our nature. But your brain needs friction
to learn. It needs to have a challenge.”"
New Work by Gary Larson | TheFarSide.com - Sat, 18 Oct 2025 09:00:29 +0000
Gary Larson bought a graphics tablet and found drawing fun again, so we get some new stuff: "The “New Stuff” that you’ll see here is the result of my journey into
the world of digital art. Believe me, this has been a bit of a learning
curve for me. I hail from a world of pen and ink, and suddenly I was
feeling like I was sitting at the controls of a 747. (True, I don’t get
out much.) But as overwhelmed as I was, there was still something
familiar there—a sense of adventure. That had always been at the core of
what I enjoyed most when I was drawing The Far Side, that
sense of exploring, reaching for something, taking some risks, sometimes
hitting a home run and sometimes coming up with “Cow tools.” (Let’s not
get into that.) But as a jazz teacher once said to me about
improvisation, “You want to try and take people somewhere where they
might not have been before.” I think that my approach to cartooning was
similar—I’m just not sure if even I knew where I was going. But I…