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
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 - Thu, 04 Dec 2025 17:51:41 +0000
You may remember a few weeks ago I was at the live @anon_opin show in London.
My opinions are all so very great that I won the top prize, the first ever awarded. As you would expect and is only correct.
I took the jar to the party but nobody there even heard of B3ta or Fesshole or AnonOpinion or @robmanuel
So nobody was very impressed and seemed to prefer to concentrate on the cheese and the marmalade made by their friend with his own oranges grown on his trees.
No accounting for taste.
So I got to bring most of it home and finish it off this week.
Sweet sticky delicious and orangy. Thank you maam.
Status at - Wed, 03 Dec 2025 19:13:13 +0000
The windowed doors are definitely the thing that really makes it, but the paneling trim going on today helps a lot too. More of that to be done still, just on the draws and chests really. Can't do the short draws because the clearance is too tight and they'd block the big drawers from opening.
Status at - Mon, 01 Dec 2025 18:42:40 +0000
Content warning:#yourParty #ukpol
So the temporary placeholder name "Your Party" is made permanent.
None of the options on the shortlist were good. Most of them just as grammatically inconvenient as the dumb placeholder name.
The people who decide on the short-list, who can be a member, whose votes counts and what the options are, have quite a lot of power.
Zara Sultana boycotted day one over who sets the rules and who can be involved. If Your Party have a governing body with power to override conference they end up like the Labour party and just are easily taken over and usurped by a cabal of thatcherite neoliberal capitalists.
They did allow the dual membership system and a wider governance, so Zara won on who gets to be a member and who gets to be in charge. Which is probably good.
Coz as the terrible name shows, if you put the idiots in charge you'll get idiocy not good collective decision making.
For now the membership appear to have won, and I hear are they are all very excited and fierce and canny and not likely to let the old guard just set up another dictatorship from the top.
They currently have half the membership count of the greens, less than a quarter that claimed by Reform. Lets hope they can get some attention towards something other than how billionaires think the country should be run and focus on the people.
Here's hoping they can inflate that number by draining the Labour party and Reform members who just want change really rather than actually liking anything said by Farage.
Status at - Mon, 01 Dec 2025 17:32:29 +0000
All the windowed doors up now, though some adjustment of hinges is still needed. Lots of the trim to fake the panels painted. There's struts everywhere.
No work being done tomorrow, two men in on Wednesday and Friday.
He still seems to think it might be finished by the end of the week. I still find myself doubting it.
Very glad to have a day off building and off work and off having to get up in the mornings tomorrow. I can lie in bed until noon if I want for the first time since October I think.
Status at - Mon, 01 Dec 2025 15:58:03 +0000
Huh, I see that Zip Car UK is closing down, which would be a right pain if I hadn't bought a car last year.
That's a lot of parking spaces about to be freed up I suppose. And a lot of easy-rental cars lying around the city disappearing.
Guess they just weren't making enough money?
Status at - Sun, 30 Nov 2025 18:05:56 +0000
Had a nice weekend out in Devon with friends. I had a lovely time. Blustery but dry during our walk, nice time watching them play in the folk band, lots of good friends in the house party and easy walk to hotel near by.
Status at - Thu, 27 Nov 2025 17:50:36 +0000
A couple of days of just layering varnish and painting which didn't change anything visibly enough to bother with photos. But today, the windowed doors are starting to be completed. Three of them up.
This is what really makes the difference and makes it suddenly reminiscent of the Tardis.
Hopefully it'll be finished next week, they say. But they have said that before. The windowed doors have to be finished, the detailing to make the doors look panelled, handles, holes for cables, there's a bit of coving I decided to add to help carry wires and lights across the gap above the desk. More painting. Mirrors to be glued to doors.
We shall see :fingers_crossed:
Status at - Sun, 23 Nov 2025 20:42:59 +0000
Content warning:re: bitcoin conference report
I'll now go back to not really taking about bitcoin very much at all because it's quite technical and dull and I'm not an expert at all. It's safe to unmute me.
Wonder if I gained more followers on nostr than I probably lost on fedi 😆
Status at - Sun, 23 Nov 2025 20:40:43 +0000
Content warning:re: bitcoin conference report
The conference is over now. I likely wouldn't have come for just a bitcoin thing, but I am very interested in redecentralizing the web, so it's attachment to the nostr day pulled me in.
Everyone I met was friendly and interesting and seems much more interested in making a better money system than in making money for themselves.
Our government and bank money systems are dysfunctional in all kinds of ways which are often less visible than they should be too people using them, especially to those in Europe and America who benefit from the way those systems exploit the global south.
I'm not convinced that fixing that would end wars and fix broken government as some seem to think, but I am sure our money is the source of many problems.
There are many bright, well meaning, and intelligent people building to improve bitcoin in fascinating ways with the hope of having a parallel system to transition to. With lots of work still to be done.
Can it work?
I'm sure I don't know, and I'm sure even if it's a better system it'll come with it's own unfairness and cruelty. Money will continue to be a source of suck and worry.
I'm told that the bigger conferences are often full of shitcoin scammers and suit wearing banksters who are in fact all in it too get rich and rip people off, but I found none of that here.
Here there is a real community of people trying to make the world a better place and improve the lives of their neighbours and governance of their countries.
And in the end building community is the most radical and effective way to change the world regardless of the problems of it's money system.
I had a great time. Thanks to those organising it.
Status at - Sun, 23 Nov 2025 17:45:52 +0000
Content warning:re: bitcoin conference report
Finally, Martin from BTC Prague wonders how to empower bitcoiners in the UK.
He's inspired by many UK scientists and artists and creators.
But he thinks it's declining. Socialism and regulation reducing freedom.
His home country had a peaceful velvet revolution, ending communism in the 80s.
And it now has a law that there is no capital gains tax on long term held bitcoin!
The UK, he thinks, needs to build new strong bitcoin based money to have it's own peaceful revolution.
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.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…
‘Sixth-Form Politics’ – The Propaganda Blitz Awaiting Green Party Leader Zack Polanski – Media Lens - Fri, 10 Oct 2025 12:38:57 +0000
Media Lens on the propaganda blitz Polanski will face: "As with Corbyn in 2015, the fevered ranting from the extreme
right-wing press will be accompanied by initially muted criticism from
the extreme centre, at the far end of the truncated media ‘spectrum’.
Also as we saw with Corbyn, to the extent that Polanski offers genuine
hope of change, the response from the Guardian, Observer, BBC,
Independent and others will rise in pitch until the threat to ‘adult’
genocidal and biocidal politics is removed."