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, 22 Jun 2025 10:19:09 +0000
Content warning:UKPol MidEast
I see Sir Kier Starmer thinks that it's "inappropriate" for a music festival to have a band that campaigns for peace and an end to genocide, but that it's perfectly appropriate and may "alleviate" a "grave threat” for a country to bomb nuclear sites in a another country!
He thinks daubing some paint on airplanes as a protest is terrorism, but that using those planes in reconnaissance to support an ongoing genocide by Israel is a good and normal use of them.
What a fucking weasel, absolute death worshiping fuck-knuckle.
Goddamn Labour party loves them some illegal wars of aggression in the middle east. Can't get enough of it.
Please fuck off Sir Starmer.
Status at - Fri, 20 Jun 2025 22:54:36 +0000
Content warning:Doctor Who - Future, why Billie?
There's a woman I know who, when she was pregnant, was very keen to hear the opinions of crystal diviners and homeopath medics on what sex her new baby would be but wouldn't let the ultrasound-scan technician that actually knows tells her because Spoilers.
On that note, I'm happy to watch Ellie's summary of fan theories about Doctor Who just so long as I'm sure she doesn't actually have any idea what she's talking about. 😆
The main theories are:
1) Billie is not the doctorI want Billie to be the Doctor. I want to see her David Tennant impression. I don't want any nonsense about her being outside the line like the War Doctor. I want her to be the sixteenth Doctor and whoever is next to be Seventeenth.
Doing otherwise is sexism.
2) She is the tardis.
No, bad enough that the Tardis was embodied once already. No talking tardis.
3) She is Rose, pulled from the alternate universe she was trapped in.
I miss Rose like crazy, and want Rose back as much as anyone but she'd have to be Rose in her Forties not Rose in her Twenties and it's sad enough watching all my friends age and die without Rose doing it too. So hope not.
4) She is The Bad Wolf.
Sure, in some sense inevitable. The Bad Wolf is more important to time than Rose Tyler. This new entity that regenerated into the tardis is not a girl who got a geography a-level, she's a timelord who sees all of time and space. Not a mere human, even a really great mere human.
5) She is the doctor.
Ellie says "She is the doctor but there needs to be a deeper exploration of that"
You mean, like in a show that's been asking one question for 65 years: "Doctor who?"
If there isn't an exploration of who exactly is this strange "Doctor" it isn't even doing the show title justice.
6) Revisit old face
Nah. It's not just the Doctor in Rose's face, it is surely part Bad Wolf.
Ellie wasn't overjoyed to see Rose's face, but I was. It's Rose! Back, in some sense. I love Rose.
Ellie wants just one movie or a couple of specials.
Here's what I want:
The Doctor has regenerated into the Bad Wolf because there's an urgent need for five times one hour long specials to cover a year or two without Disney Funding.
In the first special, The Bad Wolf Doctor needs to team up with Nine, to save the universe.
And then in special episode two she has to team up with Ten.
And then in special three she has to team up with Eleven, then Twelve and Thirteen, Fourteen, then a big old xmas special in 2027 that is the first eight-doctor adventure in the canon.
Ending with a regeneration into some middle aged weird looking character actor that's never really done anything before and certainly I've never seen in anything except maybe that one 1980s episode of Who when he or she was a monster in latex, and he or she is brilliant and we finally get an actual run of five years of more than ten episodes a year.
In truth, I don't think even RTD knows yet, depends on contract negotiations innit.
Status at - Thu, 19 Jun 2025 08:40:30 +0000
Meridith is so cool. It's unfathomable that so many people prefer Zuckerberg's surveillance software.
Here the Signal president talks about privacy and ai and data sovereignty.
Status at - Sun, 15 Jun 2025 18:54:40 +0000
Hey Netflix, I'm never going to install a mobile phone game from an advert on your header. Never. I never install ANY mobile phone games. They are all trash.
Fed up with it all. Added block-rules for the headers of the netflix page.
Now it's just a black empty background.
This is on you Netflix.
Status at - Sun, 15 Jun 2025 13:52:55 +0000
Read "What went wrong with capitalism" by Ruchir Sharma.
A mildly interesting description of the major events in world an US economics in the last 50 years. Might
be a fair summary for anyone who didn't live through it or has a poor memory.In short he thinks what went wrong was government bailing out failure leading to massive debts and increa
sed inequality.Governments took over all the things instead of letting capitalism sort them out, he reckons, and wheneve
r a big industry or company fails you just get socialism for the rich and a bail-out from new printed money.Easy cheap money, constant bail-outs, government intervention, leading to zombie companies racking up every larger debt to exist, billionaires who can't fail due to government support, and a stock market that's up-only bringing a flood of inefficiently-allocated capital.
Is he right? I mean, maybe, sort of. But when an industry really can't be allowed to fail, say water supply and waterway management, allowing private capital to extract maximum resources from it isn't the best method to manage it in the first place. No wonder they need bail-outs. Capitalism fails here because capitalism isn't the right solution here. We need publicly owned national services, not robber barons without
bailouts.So, you know, half right. Perhaps these are some of the reasons why capitalism fails, but also we shouldn't even be trying to apply capitalism to every single thing in the first place.
Status at - Sun, 15 Jun 2025 12:30:02 +0000
Oh, interesting. After two days and two nights powered down in the cradle, on the third day it is risen!
Strange.
Maybe whatever controls the charging can drain from the battery even when it's at zero until even that bit of battery is also at zero and then that forces the firmware controlling the charging to reset?
Anyway. It seems to be alive again and now starts charging when put in the cradle properly.
So I guess it's back!
#pineTime #smartWatch
Status at - Sun, 15 Jun 2025 10:44:08 +0000
Had a nice time in Greenwich park with friends though. That view of the city from the hill there is magnificent. Lovely park, great observatory.
Status at - Sun, 15 Jun 2025 10:43:34 +0000
Drove through the Blackwall Tunnel to Greenwich and back to Islington yesterday.
South of the river it's all 30MPH speed limits and everything feels too fast and scary compared to the sedate and pedestrian-friendly 20MPH limits in the north.
Since I last went through it, it seems the Blackwall tunnel has added a toll.
The TFL website for setting up to pay the tolls is absolutely awful. Failed in Librewolf, Failed in Firefox. Failed because VPN. Took me four attempts in three different browsers to get it to take payment card details.
Demands *no* special characters in the password?!? And doesn't even tell you what the specific problem with the password is, just "doesn't meet the rules above"
Uses awful validation questions like "mothers maiden name". Bad enough practice to use them at all, but the "memorable date" question restricts to ddmmyy format so you can't even put in a date from outside this century.
For some reason asks for a PIN and and Password both!? Pointless. Then actually refuses the login form if you supply both!?
Setting up the auto-payment doesn't seem to have covered the charges added to the registration plate yesterday, so had to do the payment-details entering yet again to deal with yesterday's charges.Email validation message contains the link only in the HTML of the email, not the text version, so viewed in Mutt it has no link.
And this all seems to be separate from the Dartford Crossing charge, which had a less crappy but still pretty crappy signup.
Good god council programmers suck at web-dev.
Status at - Sat, 14 Jun 2025 11:55:26 +0000
Huh, so the American "No Kings Day" is happening on the same day as the Commonwealth's "Kings Official Summer Birthday".
Strange coincidence.
I think there should be no kings and no king's birthday celebrations FWIW. Power passed down the genetic line like a mutation is ridiculous, and anyway no power should be concentrated in one person like that in the first place.
Have a happy holiday, whichever you are celebrating/protesting.
Status at - Fri, 13 Jun 2025 10:50:54 +0000
I believe I have managed to prove my ID in order to comply with the new laws that say I have to prove my ID to own the business I own that I'm sure already asked me to prove my ID when I registered it.
First we tried the on-web version, but that apparently relies upon the corporates having managed to profile and track me, because it told me they had no questions upon which to base identification. Good I guess? My avoid-tracking systems must be working at least a bit?
Next we tried the android app, but apparently the phone I tried that with is too old and the app won't install.
So next option is turning up at a post office with a printed letter. I don't own a printer though, so had to have them post that to me.
Took the letter and a driving licence up to the post office today and "It's not going through" they said, pointing to a stalled progress bar on an android app on a tablet.
Um. Okay. So?
Just wait longer apparently. About ten minutes and it finally proceeded and the post office man took a photograph of me after asking me to disrobe of my robe, strip down to a teeshirt and jeans.
Not sure in what sense this has proven my ID any more than it was already proven to get the driving licence or company registration in the first place?
Apparently I now have government logins for "One Login" and for "government gateway" and they are not the same thing? But sort of are the same thing?
Can't say I really understand it. Expect they'll introduce a third government login when they do these Digital ID cards they're talking about.
God knows how I'm supposed to know which to use when the company tax records need updating in a few months.
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.She Won. They Didn't Just Change the Machines. They Rewired the Election. - Wed, 18 Jun 2025 08:24:24 +0000
evidence of election rigging?
Sales Pitch: Give Us Your Ad Business or We’ll Sue - Wed, 11 Jun 2025 08:15:06 +0000
musk sues his customers to get them to spend.
📺 Introducing the Fediverse: a New Era of Social Media - Tue, 10 Jun 2025 23:37:30 +0000
Four minute fedi explainer
Trump's Relationship With Musk Collapses in Nasty War of Words | TIME - Thu, 05 Jun 2025 22:57:44 +0000
Time sums up the word's first global Forum Admin Spat in it's full glory.
CD / Blur - YouTube - Thu, 22 May 2025 18:44:34 +0000
Captain Disillusion looks at unblurring, inverse fast furry transforms and convolutions.
Thank God for immigrants - by Ian Dunt - Striking 13 - Fri, 16 May 2025 17:56:32 +0000
A third of my friends are immigrants of one kind or another and they are all great. Wish I could deport all those who want to stop immigration. It enriches us. We are better because of immigrants. I am better because of immigrants. Here's Ian Dunt: "Imagine how much poorer the world would be without British
Asians in general. I'm not talking about the subcontinent. I'm not
talking about Britain. I'm talking about British Asians themselves, as a
distinct group, quite apart from their other loyalties or their other
identities. Imagine how much more impoverished we would be, in food and
music and literary life, in social habits and intellectual and political
history. Imagine how poor we would be, the vast riches which would have been taken away from us."
The Misconception that Almost Stopped AI - YouTube - Sun, 11 May 2025 10:54:59 +0000
Some interesting visualizations and good explanation in this video about why training a neural network by gradient descent doesn't get stuck in local minima as you train. We tend to find it hard to visualize a higher dimensional landscape, let alone one with billions of dimensions. What loos like a local minima when mapped into a 3d visualization of a 2d landscape has all sorts of escape routes in the higher dimensions. It has a good visual on the way the landscape mapping can change as a result of changes to the other parameters, creating new "wormholes" as they change. Great video.
Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast - Wed, 07 May 2025 14:42:02 +0000
NYMag has a good essay on using AI in education: "In
January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey
of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used
the chatbot to help with homework assignments." -- I guess all marks have to be in exam conditions with pen on paper in future?
OpenAI Is A Systemic Risk To The Tech Industry - Mon, 05 May 2025 11:41:05 +0000
"OpenAI currently requires more money and more compute than is reasonable to acquire. Nobody
has ever raised as much as OpenAI needs to, and based on the sheer
amount of difficulty that SoftBank is having in raising the funds to
meet the lower tranche ($10bn) of its commitment, it may simply not be possible for this company to continue."
Sowing and Reaping in Trump’s America - Thu, 01 May 2025 08:16:54 +0000
The instruments of repression, security theater, and white supremacist ideology Trump is employing to create his own patchwork dictatorship in America were embraced and installed by a largely bipartisan consensus of US political leaders happy to exploit popular reaction to increase their own power and enrich the ruling class via imperialism, extractivism, and objectively racialized exploitation.