Picture of me, long black hair in a tentacles shirt

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

Blog header image, me silhouetted against an orange/yellow sunset

My blog, mostly monthly summaries of the Fediverse Account.

Visit at dalliance.net/blog

Or check out the categories index

Starship Schrödinger’s Destiny

A crew of five stand in a green field with a flying saucer behind them next to a planet like earth in the sky.

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

A spread of cards scattered around. Each has a picture, and also a world cloud in the background

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 woman in a blue dress and a red and chrome robot flee from tentacle monsters chasing in the background

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 white pocketbook with the icon of a black and white fat penguin

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 book cover with a starburst, pyramid and eye

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

Pre behind some keyboard

After the band broke up, I took to playing with myself via a loop pedal. Sometimes, very rarely, even in public.

Bookshelf

dusty old books in a bookshelf plus logo

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

A semi-circular logo and silhouetted crowd of arms

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

Screenshot of a game, made from pictures of plush toys and balloons

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 - Sun, 16 Mar 2025 22:55:14 +0000

    And I tell you what though, it really does only just fit inside that garage. I can't get any fatter or I won't be able to squeeze my way out of the door when it's parked inside.

    My reversing skills weren't great even before I spent 20 years not driving. Now I've reversed that thing into that tiny little gap a few times.

    One time I forgot to fold in the passenger wing mirror, and then had to replace the passenger wing mirror 🙄


    Status at - Sun, 16 Mar 2025 22:16:52 +0000

    Thank goodness for Blender! Not sure I could have planned all that and had any hope of it all working out if I couldn't do it in virtual 3d first.

    3 frames to show the 3 main configurations. Sit, Desk, and Sleep.


    Status at - Sun, 16 Mar 2025 22:12:50 +0000

    And that's about as good a job as I can do really. Hopefully some of it will still be useable in a few months when it's done properly by a professional.

    At least the fridge ought to carry over.

    The bed folding down past the passenger seat is great. I'm too talk for this van really, but that makes it workable. Shame the seat/bed has to be so narrow though. The two-seater was very temping and feels like it ought to just about fit but, wouldn't really be any way to unfold it from within the van and the steering wheel gets in the way for folding the driving seat down like the passenger seat does so couldn't really go flat without also lifting up.


    Status at - Sun, 16 Mar 2025 22:08:34 +0000

    I like the easy access to battery and water and things from the back. Fair amount of storage there too which is accessible from inside if the table is up.

    Still need to put the water pump into the water cannister, and power it, and attach some sort of tap to it.


    Status at - Sun, 16 Mar 2025 22:03:34 +0000

    Then there's a whole day of carrying those things out to the van and trying to screw them into the floor.

    Had to swap the fridge and the cabinet around from the plan. The fridge is less deep than it is wide and doesn't block the table-leaf when it's at the edge with door facing the front of the car.

    I expected to have to pause here and measure up and buy some wood, but someone had thrown out a desk that matches very well and a bit more sawing managed to get that into the right shape to build a frame to hold everything in place.

    That sink is attached by only one of the six grips that are supposed to hold it. Two can't be used flat against a wooden board, and 3 aren't against anything at all right now.

    Maybe I can get to attach better when the pump and tap arrive.


    Status at - Sun, 16 Mar 2025 21:59:11 +0000

    You can get a folding leaf table, and if you saw off the bottom 15cm or so of the panels forming the sides and front of the table, and also don't bother to attach any of the the back leaf, then it becomes just the right height to mostly fit under the rear window.

    It's a little higher than the camper-fridge, but the camper fridge is pretty much the same height as a little bedside cabinet.

    There's also a small rectangular sink that fits nicely around the same width as the fridge alongside that cut down table.

    And thus, the interior can be mostly constructed in my flat. The kids in the flat upstairs kept waving as me as I was doing a terrible job of cutting down those panels with a jigsaw in the yard.


    Status at - Sun, 16 Mar 2025 21:54:52 +0000

    This chair works very well in the van. Should ideally be fastened better to the floor, but it has a nice three mode positions.

    Seating, and chaise-long, and flat as a bed with the passenger seat folded down.


    Status at - Sun, 16 Mar 2025 21:51:15 +0000

    The folks that can do an actually good job of converting it into a microcamper are busy till July, so I get to play at doing a half arsed job to tide it over until then.

    First job is taking out the floor to gain access to that underfloor area and to cover that in linoleum. Had some lying around after they did the bathroom last year.

    Then to refit the floor and cover all that in a red felt carpet.

    The job is shoddy here really. What's needed is to insulate the entire body of the car and then cover professionally and well, but I dunno how to do all that. I just used spray glue to fasten this stretch carpet to the existing wood, that'll be replaced when it's converted proper anyway.

    The roof will remain cold and metal till then.


    Status at - Sun, 16 Mar 2025 21:45:16 +0000

    As I said a few months ago, the estate offered me a garage meaning I finally have somewhere to put a van that I can convert into a microcamper.

    So I bought this Berlingo last month.

    I thought the fact it was already converted into a van would probably make the camper-conversion easier.

    Turns out that's likely not really the case. So it goes. It's previously been converted for a wheelchair ramp, which means the floor has been lowered, and this means there's nowhere safe to bolt rear passenger seats, and so can't have that "rock and roll" bed, that converts into seatbelted seats for passengers.

    It does add a large underfloor storage area though.

    I thought it would be fairly easy to remove the metal plates over the windows, but that turned out to be a mistaken assumption too. Was no metal plates. They'd just painted over the glass with some metallic paint. Luckily this can be just scraped off, presumably with some paint dissolving solvents applied too. Dunno. I let the professionals handle that.


    Status at - Sat, 15 Mar 2025 23:48:43 +0000

    Content warning:Musk Robots Mars

    Apparently Elon thinks he's going to send one of his humanoid "Optimus" robots on a rocket to Mars at the end of next year.

    🤨

    Radiation hardened then are they those things?

    Seems a bit pointless to build the robots radiation hardened if they're just going to hang around doing laundry and washing dishes in the suburbs.

    And yet without the hardening they won't even survive the trip.

    Seems like some people are keen to have the things in their house, but I can't imagine being comfortable giving a corporate spy-bot access to my flat. Those things are gonna be narcs man, totally.

    Surprising I haven't seen one doing a nazi salute yet.


  • Bookmarks

    Things I have bookmarked lately.
    Signal President Meredith Whittaker calls out agentic AI as having ‘profound’ security and privacy issues - Sat, 08 Mar 2025 10:42:23 +0000
    "access to our web browser and a way to drive it as well as access to our credit card information to pay for tickets, our calendar, and messaging app to send the text to your friends."

    With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It | Cory Doctorow's craphound.com - Wed, 26 Feb 2025 20:27:37 +0000
    An hour of Cory doing a lecture about internet enshitification, it's causes and it's solutions and how we can and must build a new better internet.

    Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Proofs Of God's Existence - Mon, 24 Feb 2025 23:38:41 +0000
    Scott Alexander wonders if Tegmark's "Mathematical Universe" defeats most of the arguments he sees for God's existence.

    Grok Grok | Don't Worry About the Vase - Mon, 24 Feb 2025 22:55:06 +0000
    Zvi on Grok: "Grok is not as smart as one might hope and has other issues, but it is better than I expected and for now has its place in the rotation, especially for when you want its Twitter integration.", but also, "Grok turned out rather woke and extremely anti-Trump and anti-Musk, as well as trivial to jailbreak, and [xAi did] rather blunt things about that ... lot of trust has been lost. It will be extremely difficult to win it back." -- as usual from Zvi, extremely long.

    Honest Government Ad | Our Last Fair Election? - YouTube - Sat, 22 Feb 2025 12:26:36 +0000
    Honest Government Ads from The Juice Media on Australian elections. Funny how the biggest two parties always seem to prefer a two party system instead of any kind of political plurality eh?

    Pluralistic: America and “national capitalism” (18 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow - Wed, 19 Feb 2025 00:30:52 +0000


    Doctorow on Piketty: "eventually the share of wealth held by the rich will reach a tipping
    point, and we'll see policies that benefit the wealthy crowding out
    policies that support human thriving, and the rich will get richer, and
    they will feud with each other, and society will destabilize, and we
    will face collapse."

    Deliberative Alignment, And The Spec - Mon, 17 Feb 2025 23:56:55 +0000
    who should control what the ai thinks is good and moral? "But fast-forward 2-3 years to when AIs are a big part of the economy and military, and this gets more interesting. What should the spec say? In particular, what is the chain of command?"

    Richard Wolff: Donald J. Trump and the End of America - YouTube - Mon, 10 Feb 2025 23:28:53 +0000
    Richard Wolff on Erhardt for four hours talking about the current economic situation

    How many genders are there, Daddy? (What the science says) - YouTube - Sat, 08 Feb 2025 14:11:32 +0000
    Potholer's fifteen minute answer to the question of how many genders there are (It depends on which language you're asking about, in English: none) and how many sexes there are (two, but the boundaries are fuzzy).

    UK Online Safety Act may not be safe for blog owners • The Register - Thu, 06 Feb 2025 10:25:48 +0000
    Terrible bill comes into force in March: "the Online Safety Act has a set of obligations that come into force on
    March 17, 2025, and large website operators are already concerned. Several, like London Fixed Gear and Single Speed, have stated that they will shut their online forums rather than attempt to comply. And outside the UK, online discussion site Lobsters has implemented a geoblock that will prevent UK visitors from accessing the site after March 16."

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