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 - Tue, 02 Sep 2025 11:44:51 +0000

    Look, he's not afraid to swear, calls a shit a shit. Go Zack.

    youtube.com/shorts/K0L36yVXy3E


    Status at - Tue, 02 Sep 2025 11:07:15 +0000

    Well Zack's won, convincingly, 20k votes to 3k votes for the others.

    So that's good.

    Now lets see if he can make the media actually reflect the message like they reflect Farage constantly.

    Gonna be harder for anti-capitalists than pro-capitalists, what with the media all being owned by the capital.


    Status at - Mon, 01 Sep 2025 18:17:45 +0000

    Content warning:re: UKPol Flags


    Here are my flags:

    :boing:
    :tardis:
    :jrbd:
    🌈

    I'm not proud of them. I didn't make them. But if I must wear a stinking badge I'd wear those over badges representing state and war and enslavement and murder.


    Status at - Mon, 01 Sep 2025 18:14:52 +0000

    Content warning:UKPol Flags


    People are disrespecting the flag of Saint George by spraying it on roads and graffitiing it on houses and plastering cheap tacky ones on lampposts.

    The prime minister was on the radio asked about flags. He's always been a flag-shagger. He said he's very proud of the flag.

    Proud of a flag?

    What does this even mean? How can you be proud of a pattern on a cloth that you didn't even design or print yourself?

    Proud of your badges? What? It isn't even one you picked, it's one you were born under.

    We don't need no stinking badges.

    It's because people mistake the symbol for the thing it symbolizes. They think in magic. The flag isn't just a symbol with a referent, it IS the country. They feel attachment and pride to the symbol, because they feel attachment and pride for the country.

    In England you can choose between two flags:

    🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 The flag of the crusades, when marauding Christians fought across Europe to murder Muslims.

    🇬🇧 The flag of the empire, when the island's nobility violently enslaved and pillaged a third of the world.

    🤔

    And people say they are proud of the flag, mistaking the symbol for those acts which they symbolize. Proud of this?

    The people who paint roundabouts claim to think they are being patriotic somehow, but painting the flag of the crusades on a mosque isn't patriotic. It's just aggressive and deliberately threatening.

    These people aren't my people.

    Think the country needs a new flag really. Maybe something with more rainbow in it. 🏳️‍🌈


    Status at - Tue, 26 Aug 2025 17:19:33 +0000

    Content warning:ukpol human rights / reform party


    In order to maximize the number of faces eaten by leopards Farage's party will exit international face-eating prevention conventions.

    "We have to get back the ability to decide, can we really feed faces to leopards? Whose faces can be eaten?.. You know what? I think three quarters of the country would cheer to the rafters as the leopards ate faces", said Farage.

    No sign of any promise to improve the lives of anyone in the UK at all, just a promise to make life harder and more difficult and even impossible here for some hated minorities.

    What a horrible man and what a terrible party.

    itv.com/news/2025-04-16/nigel-


    Status at - Tue, 26 Aug 2025 08:55:42 +0000

    Meanwhile Apple are fighting the EU trying to demand they allow sideloading.

    Could end up in an interesting situation where Android sideloading becomes banned and Apple ability for sideloading becomes legally mandated.

    That is about the only situation I can imagine where I'd switch to iOS.


    Status at - Tue, 26 Aug 2025 08:51:11 +0000

    Android planning to throw away their advantage over Apple's iOS and ban side-loading?

    techtimes.com/articles/311683/

    Starting to look more and more like ditching Android for some de-googled OS is in my future. Wonder how all those linux-phones are coming along.


    Status at - Sat, 16 Aug 2025 10:40:52 +0000

    Voting in the UK Green party elections is half over. Too late to join the party and vote, and sounds like Zack is very likely to win.

    Which is good. I voted for him.

    I think the job-share rule is important and that any job should be possible to share between workers. But in the case of the "leader", which is literally the face of the party, having two faces is difficult in the public hive mind. Even with a united front, it's litterally two faced.

    But mostly my vote was just for Zack, and would have likely voted for him in a job-share too.

    He's very personable and seems to know how to talk to the public and express not just environmental issues but other green issues like inequality and war and how your enemy is not a boat of refugees but the concentration of power in the hands of maniacs both political and corporate.

    I confess I gave up trying to read anything about the candidates and cast a vote about half way down all the other jobs being elected. I'm just adding noise. I dunno who any of these people are or even what the job entails most of the time and there's too many all at once. Should stagger them weekly or something.

    Anyway here's Zack on Mark Steel's sweary podcast being brilliant on the issues and how to explain them better than I can.

    I love Mark Steel too. Miss the sketches things it used to have in the newish revised entirely-an-interview format.

    🤞

    In two parts

    pod.link/1573424189/episode/ZW

    pod.link/1573424189/episode/Zj


    Status at - Thu, 14 Aug 2025 10:41:25 +0000

    Been to the hospital. They are pleased with the progress of the bone healing but I guess not so pleased they will take off the cast and let me drive.

    They have replaced it with a cleaner smaller sleeker much bluer one but expect this one to stay on for four more weeks.

    😦

    There goes the rest of the summer's plans.


    Status at - Mon, 11 Aug 2025 18:01:41 +0000

    Content warning:re: UKPol, Palestine Action, reply from my MP


    Emily Thornberry's formberry reply:

    Thank you for writing to me regarding the Home Secretary's decision to proscribe Palestine Action.

    I believe the right to protest is a fundamental right in our democracy and I will continue to wholeheartedly defend this. I appreciate the concerns you have raised regarding proscribing Palestine
    Action, however, as there is an upcoming judicial review into the ban, I am limited as to what I can say on the matter at the moment.

    I was pleased that the near weekly protests in London and across the country, calling for an end to Palestinian suffering, have continued. I am certain we all want to see an immediate end to the immense suffering the Palestinian people are being subjected to, and the resumption of the critical aid deliveries which are so desperately needed in Gaza.

    I am thankful that the Government have now set out an approach to recognising the Palestinian state as a step towards a lasting ceasefire. If you would like to know more about my wider views on the Israel-Palestine conflict, which you can view below.

    Thank you again for writing to me on this very important issue. Let me assure you I will continue to push from within Parliament for an end to the violence and a peaceful two-state solution.

    Best wishes,

    Rt Hon Emily Thornberry MP


  • Bookmarks

    Things I have bookmarked lately.
    How Comedy Was Destroyed by an Anti-Reality Doomsday Cult - YouTube - Tue, 02 Sep 2025 09:17:40 +0000
    Love it, the film-noir monotone voice over, the mood music, the thesis, the surreal otherwordly description. Great hour of radio. How Joe Roegan destroyed comedy and reality.

    Mastodon Isn't Complying With Age Verification Because It Can't - Freezenet.ca - Sat, 30 Aug 2025 00:47:03 +0000

    Another interesting platform in all of this is, of course, Mastodon.
    Unlike Bluesky, Mastodon is actually decentralized. There is no one
    person that can make a decision on how the whole platform operates
    (which is what is happening on Bluesky right now). Servers are
    independently operated and run and spread throughout the world. So,
    first of all, who does the government sue when they believe there is
    non-compliance?

    Labour's cowardice in the face of extremism - by Ian Dunt - Fri, 29 Aug 2025 11:18:28 +0000
    Talk of mass deportation is Nazi fucking bullshit. You can pretend
    otherwise, but that's what it is. In order to even countenance it, you
    must reach a point of hatred towards a minority group which is
    reminiscent of the very worst moments of human history. In order to
    implement it, you would need a system of control and surveillance which
    goes well beyond any traditional notion of what this country, or indeed
    any free society, is about. In order to enact it, you need to split
    people into valid and invalid categories, round them up and concentrate
    them in advance of deportation, necessitating the use of camps. And yes,
    if you're going to land those planes at their destination, you will
    need to do deals with tyrannical governments so that they can murder the
    people who tried to escape them.

    Why does the US support Israel's crimes? - Jason Hickel - Sun, 24 Aug 2025 10:01:01 +0000
    This is the key point: economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation in the core. To avoid this, the core states must constantly intervene to prevent or crush any movement or government in the periphery that seeks national liberation and economic sovereignty.

    Pluralistic: “Privacy preserving age verification” is bullshit (14 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow - Thu, 14 Aug 2025 18:26:12 +0000

    "Age verification is an impossibility, and an impossibly terrible idea
    with impossibly vast consequences for privacy and the open web, as my
    EFF colleague Jason Kelley explained on the Malwarebytes podcast:"

    Yvette Cooper is Lying - Craig Murray - Tue, 12 Aug 2025 13:06:43 +0000

    The reason Yvette Cooper has proscribed Palestine Action is that she
    is a member of Labour Friends of Israel and has received £215,000 from
    the zionist lobby – which is £215,000 more than Palestine Action ever
    received on behalf of a foreign power. ---Ministers are lying to you. I have provided a little antiseptic daylight.

    Age verification: what's the harm? - Girl on the Net - Thu, 07 Aug 2025 00:02:48 +0000
    So, since July 25th most porn is now either age-gated or blocked to UK
    users entirely. You might think this is good, because isn’t that the
    point of the law? Ehhhh. Kind of. But also not really. The sites that
    child safety campaigners are usually thinking of when they make these
    arguments are the big, flash, video-based tube sites which offer porn for free.
    Those sites have the money and tech expertise to implement age
    verification without trouble, so they aren’t going anywhere any time
    soon. At the other end of the scale, though, smaller sites and hobby
    sites which don’t make a profit are more likely to struggle. As
    mentioned above, many of them are already shutting down or blocking UK
    users from some or all of the content, meaning those who are looking for
    erotic material will end up turning to the exact sites that anti-porn
    crusaders are so up in arms about.

    Didn’t Take Long To Reveal The UK’s Online Safety Act Is Exactly The Privacy-Crushing Failure Everyone Warned About - techdirt - Tue, 05 Aug 2025 09:04:40 +0000
    "Let’s be crystal clear about what this law actually accomplishes: It makes it harder for adults to access perfectly legal (and often helpful) information and services. It forces people to create detailed trails of their online activity linked to their real identities. It drives users toward less secure platforms and services. It destroys small online communities that can’t afford compliance costs. And it teaches an entire generation that bypassing government surveillance is a basic life skill."

    Why taxing the rich won’t trigger an exodus - Richard Murphy - Sun, 03 Aug 2025 19:27:01 +0000
    Will the wealthy leave the UK if they were taxed more? [no]. If they did leave could they take the UK's wealth with them? [no, they would have to sell UK assets which might get cheaper so other people could afford them]. Would we be worse off if the rich fucked off? [No] - Great explainer video from Richard Murphy.

    Surviving A Nuke With Quantum Mechanics - YouTube - Tue, 29 Jul 2025 14:34:26 +0000
    kurzgesagt video about the quantum immortality paradox. Looking forward to doing the experiment on my death bed but reckon I'll leave it until then.

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