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 - Sun, 21 Dec 2025 11:57:14 +0000
Dark blue tunnel to the windows isn't great for light, getting 9 lux by the headboard on this grey midwinter day.
Course there's one thing that can be done fairly easily. Add a bit more light by reflecting it down that tunnel. A mirror bay-window effect.
Now there's more like 12 lux by the headboard on this gray midwinter morning.
Status at - Sat, 20 Dec 2025 15:24:02 +0000
The treadmill desk is up and running with provisional hardware. Powered by the mini-pc that was lying around mostly unused.
The monitor can be pushed back out of the way to place a laptop on the shelf instead if needing to work on the dayjob's PC, say.
A bit cramped and unsafe feeling. Maybe needs a handle to hold on to screwed onto the door or something.
Status at - Sat, 20 Dec 2025 13:11:09 +0000
The little robot vacuum cleaner just about fits under the bed there, slowing down slightly as it passes under due to the slight squeeze under the gap. Assuming I don't end up putting a bunch of junk under there should be the cleanest under-bed I ever had.
Status at - Sat, 20 Dec 2025 12:52:08 +0000
I has a bed.
No mattress until Monday, but a bed fully stained and varnished and constructed.
Had to wait a couple of days for varnish which never came. Went out to an actual DIY shop in the end. Gonna have a lot of spare varnish soon.
Varnished the whole room with two more coats as well as the bed twice.
A few more things to buy after Xmas and the full media setup can't happen until the new Steam Machine at its heart is released. Maybe cobble together something to plug a laptop into in the meantime? All for next year though once the mattress arrives and I can actually sleep in the bedroom.
Status at - Fri, 19 Dec 2025 13:03:45 +0000
Amazing that I can't find anything online about wheelchair converted diesel Citroen Berlingo and their adblue slot.
Just lots of people saying to find it in the place it used to be in.
Status at - Fri, 19 Dec 2025 13:02:42 +0000
So my car has been complaining I should put some exhaust emissions neutralizing fluid in it. A thing they call AdBlue I believe.
Bought a big 10l drum of the stuff ready to fill up.
But when I look at where I expect to find the hole for filling it, I just find a capped off tube and a warning sticker "See the GM Citreon Berlingo Blaze manual" for the adblue refilling hole.
Only user manual I have is the one telling me to expect it there.
The car was converted for wheelchair access at some point in its life. I think they are referring to the wheelchair-adaption manual, which the seller did not give me.
🤔
Have been looking around the car as much as I can for a couple of hours this morning to no avail. Where have they hidden this hole to fill up adblue?
Maybe it's under the engine or something now and you have to put the thing on stilts to find it?
🤷
Asked my mechanic about it and he says to bring it in on Monday. Gonna be a pain if I have to rip up the floorboards or something every year to refill that.
Status at - Thu, 18 Dec 2025 09:22:01 +0000
Added a zoom level to the Category page on the Exocortex-Log app. Can make the graphs look a lot cleaner now.
Looking back over the last 100 months here, we can see in general my social life is quite seasonal -- Festivals are a lot of social all weekend long and a couple of them in a month really bumps up the hours from my usual habit of sitting alone in a dark room pressing buttons.
The peak in 2019 is a summer filled with Glasto and Noisily and another festival or camping trip I don’t seem to have recorded the name of.
Then clearly visible is the drop-off in social activity as the COVID pandemic hit. Virtual-Social (IE zoom meetings and the like) picked up quite a bit around there but had died back to almost nothing way before the hours spent with actual people started to tick up.
Annoyingly, I have my biggest gap in data right on top of the pandemic there, where I failed to back up for months and then data became corrupted.
When the data-hole is over we see social life still not really returning until the middle of 2021 and not really getting back into stride until summer 2022.
It remains much lower now on average with lower peaks than before the pandemic too. Multiple reasons.
Work is pretty constant all the way though other than the data-hole. Dipping when I take time off for social mostly.
That data-hole is annoying. Back up your data kids.
Status at - Mon, 15 Dec 2025 23:57:27 +0000
I mean, only better...
Status at - Mon, 15 Dec 2025 23:44:17 +0000
🤔
Yes. Yeeeess...
(I have no money left, even something this simple can't happen until the new year. Even this week's groceries delivery nearly bounced. I will not have a mattress to put in this bed until waaaay after pay-day)
Status at - Mon, 15 Dec 2025 23:28:41 +0000
This block of wood, of which there are four at the corners of the bed now I've painted them, is very evocative isn't it?
I could glue a thimble atop that and some window-stickers on the side I bet... 🤔
Sheets of 1cmx1cm mirror tiles appear to be available easily. The more ideal 1cmx2xm less common.
Maybe best as a custom sticker?
Needs windows and a banner and maybe a siren light anyway when its done.
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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…