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WARREN ELLIS LTD Posts

sleep warm: 27feb26

Published February 27, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Mary Maka

It was 15C yesterday and 17C the day before that. My winter clothes hang unloved. I’m in a thin viscose base layer and a chambray snap-front in grey like it’s May.

TODAY:

New Stephen O’Malley record, not on CD ffs:

PREVIOUSLY:

New Jolanda Moletta record announced, also not on CD ffs:

PREVIOUSLY:

Accessions:

It was on sale for 99p, not certain how current it is but Jacobsen is a good writer.

PHENOMENA: US GOVERNMENT INVESTIGATIONS INTO ESP AND PSYCHOKINESIS, Annie Jacobsen (UK) (US+)

Previously: NUCLEAR WAR: A SCENARIO, Annie Jacobsen

OPERATIONS: scripting, newsletter, processed an option offer
STATUS: Frazzled by schedule but generally pretty good. Really wanted to move the office to the deli today but I have too much typing to do. Printing off visa shit for herself, for the grand trip I’m sending her on for her birthday. Inbox 116.
READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+) and THE VISIONARIES, Wolfram Eilenberger (UK) (US+)

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: music books
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tragic magic: 25feb26

Published February 25, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Klaudia Schifferle, Poem (For a Song, 2021), 2024, via Something I Saw

Gorgeous day out there, and I’m stuck indoors waiting on several deliveries and trying to get my head around a project whose first-stage parameters shifted last night, while also trying to solve the prose serial project and talking through a possible new and odd thing with an artist acquaintance.

I skimmed the news and decided I couldn’t really be bothered. It’s all the bloody same again. I could ascribe ennui to trying to cut down on the cigarettes again and still having this mange in my system, but it seems today like everyone is reporting on the same five things and I couldn’t give a shit about any of them.

TRAGIC MAGIC by Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore arrived in the post yesterday:

“In 2016, there was no way any of us could have charged for a link round-up.”

Tags: barwick music
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hung up: 24feb26

Published February 24, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Woke up, hung out with the mancub a bit, sat outside with coffee reading the news, ate berries and honey, did a couple of pages on the laptop, walked up to the coffee shop, worked in the notebook over a couple of double espressos, had a chat with the Italian ice cream man who lives at the top of the road. I feel like 90% of myself at this point, and like my 2026 has finally gotten started.

TODAY:

Lily Taylor

STATUS: inbox 116 but an embarrassing number of those are delivery notifications
READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: New Music Show
LAST WATCHED: the new series of MOCK THE WEEK

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: drugs neuro space
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the great leap forward: 23feb26

Published February 23, 2026 by Warren Ellis

I am almost back to normal – just a cough and a sore throat for the most part, which means everyone else was right when they told me this mange going around lasts three weeks or so.

I have just been informed that a new coffee shop has opened, around the corner from me. When Uber came to town last month, I considered using it to get to Leigh, where Little Fin Roastery is, and then I caught the mange. And then Uber pulled out of town, apparently because they didn’t want to meet the council’s standards on private car hire. I am not Uber’s biggest fan, but huge chunks of my area are poorly served by public transport and I’m not walking for an hour and a half just to get a decent cup of coffee. And my deli of choice doesn’t do coffee! So I’m going to walk up to the new place in an hour and see if it will serve as a morning office. And once my chest is cleared and my voice comes back, I’ll be using the deli as my afternoon office for half the week, drinking £10 glasses of fancy wine and telling myself I am getting a great deal of thinking done and I have begun the great leap forwards.

TODAY:

  • Researchers develop detachable crawling robotic hand because what we really needed was a rechargeable version of Thing from the Addams Family
  • Zelensky tells BBC Putin has started WW3
  • AI is prompting investors to reassess every business model under the sun (vaguely reminded of that tech news website that clearly used a random headline generator into which they plugged the tech buzzword of the moment, which is how you got the headline “Can IoT Help With Bicycles?” There’s also a sense of people thinking they can see a huge hammer in the distance, even though it’s mostly made of smoke, and assuming everything around them looks like a nail. I saw a story, I think on World Of Reel, about a guy who’d been given 30k to make an AI film and was trying to crowdsource an idea for what film to make on social media)

OPERATIONS: I have a huge consulting job to nail down and a prose serial project to solve and it all needs to be done this week. And I’m out on Saturday night, so I need to land the newsletter before then, too. I am copy-typing out of a notebook for the next hour.
STATUS: I really need to stop buying clothes and I really need to stop looking at the watches at Sputnik1957.
READING: READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)

…first prize went to the Wineflask, in which the almost centenarian Cratinus defended his own drinking with the line, ‘You’ll never fashion anything clever by drinking water!’


LISTENING:

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: robots tech watches
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rewarded by a return to the earth: 22feb26

Published February 22, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Sky Hopinka

Yesterday I reduced a viburnum by half, hacked back salvia and holly, raked a bed, dug a trench in it, mixed a hundred litres of compost into the trench, and planted three cherry trees. Today I am actually less achy and knackered than I expected, especially bearing in mind that I still have this plague in my system. Once I have some charge in my phone, I’m going to check the weather and see if I’m going to have the space to plant some apple trees today.

Today it’s the Swatch Metropolis, yesterday it was the G-Shock G-Rescue because it was a day of working with saws and chainsaws and other implements of destruction.

New newsletter is out.

And my fourth leather notebook cover arrived, so now I have a system that can contain everything I’m working on with space to accommodate more.

TODAY:

“Kiyoshi Awazu［KIYOSHI AWAZU SCPAP BOOK］.published by Tabata Shobo.1970.”

Accessions: The complete works of Plato


READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)

When asked why he had made death the penalty for most offences, Draco replied that he considered the lesser offences to deserve it and had no harsher punishment for the greater ones.


LISTENING: Monument Podcast (MNMT 506 : Síoda Rua) – listened to a lot of it yesterday while working in the garden and it’s an amazing mix

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: garden notebooks crime space moon books Mars japan
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Charmera: 20feb26

Published February 20, 2026 by Warren Ellis

I saw one of these on Valeluminal‘s IG account last night, and went straight to Amazon to look it up. I remember the Kodak Fling disposable camera from the 80s, and it turns out this is an intentionally low-res digital camera styled in a similar way. Charges off USB and runs off a TF card. There are six or seven different styles, and you don’t know which one you’ve got until the box arrives. Mine showed up eight hours after I ordered it.

Not my favourite of the designs, sadly, but it’ll do.

It’s about as long as my little finger and it comes with a keychain. The battery, according to reviews, gives out about three hours of steady use.

I have always loved digital cameras, but, if I’m honest, the better the iPhone camera got, the less interested I got. I loved the old digital cameras, that were a bit fuzzy and weird. I even did a photography book with an EyeModule, which was a black and white digital camera that plugged into a Handspring Visor PDA.

The Charmera comes, of course, with absolutely no instructions.

This was taken by accident while figuring out the pre-loaded image filters. I’m not mad at it at all. In fact, that was very much what I was hoping for. It’s going to get clipped to my day bag and I’m going to have some fun with it.

TODAY:

New Christina Vantzou, sadly vinyl or digital only:

Previously: Christina Vantzou

OPERATIONS: Many Things suddenly started Happening last night, right in the middle of me trying to dig my way out of all the things I’m behind on. Every time I walked away from my phone for five or ten minutes yesterday, I’d come back to another half-dozen notifications. And I still have to do Sunday’s newsletter.
STATUS: I have had to put the Apple Watch back on, which displeases me but lots of Things have suddenly started Happening. Also had to fight a cat for access to my office today. Inbox 141 and climbing.
READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)

Empedocles himself claimed to have already been a bush, a bird, and ‘a mute fish in the sea’. But now, as a doctor, poet, seer, and leader of men, he had reached the highest rung in the cycle of incarnations—and could, just about, count himself among the immortal gods. In a story that is almost certainly false but too good not to tell, he killed himself by leaping into the flames of Mount Etna, either to prove that he was immortal or make people believe that he was.

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: music eco weather camera design
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deep down: 19feb26

Published February 19, 2026 by Warren Ellis

“Amphisbaena,” The Vatican Museum, Vatican City, Peter Li

So I got given these lovely A6 notebooks the other day:

Atoms To Astronauts make some gorgeous notebooks. However, they’re A6. Which means they don’t fit the Wanderings Passport notebook cover or the newestor Field Notes-sized cover, or the Field Notes-sized cover I’ve ordered from a maker on Etsy. So I had to order one of those randomly-generated-Chinese-company-name leather notebook covers in A6 (UK), because I got bought nine of these notebooks and I really want to get working in them.

That’s the third stage of the new notebook system, and I’ll write a separate post about that at some point. And when the other cover comes in from Etsy, that will be the fourth stage. Because I’ve decided that this year is all about going deep on working on paper and thinking on to paper.

TODAY:

Today I learned that Status Quo have their own beer.

Anyone for bagpipe metal?

I wanted to pre-order thar CD for herself, but Napalm Records’ shopping system is broken.

OPERATIONS: contracts processed, setting up another reprint project (fingers crossed), scripting and planning and printing off research notes to paste into one of the above notebooks
STATUS: wearing the field watch today. Email at a dreadful 154. Still not back at full power, but getting there.
READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)

Pythagoras had always been a paragon of humility, declining to be called a ‘wise man’ [sophos] and preferring instead to be called ‘a lover of wisdom’ [philosophos]—thereby coining the term ‘philosopher’.


LISTENING:


MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: photography notebooks music
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doorway: 18feb26

Published February 18, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Shoplifter, “Chromo Sapiens” (2019).

Taking off the Fitbit and the Apple Watch, putting on the Maven watch, setting up the third stage of the new notebook system (with a fourth stage to come) – it’s rapid disconnection time. More on that tomorrow because I’ve just been told I’m apparently going out for lunch.

TODAY:

STATUS: first day in a few weeks that I’ve felt even half-human
READING: I’m faintly annoyed with what I’m reading right now – last night I started a book about maximalist novels and it was so whiny (and obsessed with the word “transversal” that I gave up, and the Walsingham book is mired in “we have absolutely no idea what he dd in these years but here’s some random speculation” – so I picked up THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)

It can be no coincidence that the hierarchical, anti-democratic Spartans, who privileged military might above all else, prided themselves on the pithiness of their speech. According to Plutarch, when an Attic orator accused the Spartans of being ignorant, Pleistoanax, the Spartan king (r. 458-409 BCE), replied: “What you say is true. Of all the Greeks, we alone have not learnt your evil ways.”


LISTENING: New Music Show

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: crime space madness darkmatter neuro DMT drugs
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The Good Mead: 16feb26

Published February 16, 2026 by Warren Ellis

He’s as shocked as I am that it stopped raining.

Newsletter went out yesterday.

I have the good mead again. Very fond of the Bloodmoon.

Today is a personal day, so I’m actually checking out until tomorrow, which will be a resumption of normal notemaking service.

OPERATIONS: Finished script and processed contract yesterday, started rebuilding the newsletter template
STATUS: going out for lunch
LAST WATCHED: Ibsen’s THE MASTER BUILDER

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: drinks
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fish weather: 15feb26

Published February 15, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Hieu Chau

It is pissing down outside and the garden, waterlogged by weeks of rain, is starting to flood. I still have to plant and re-plant dormant trees and am fast running out of time.

I decided to get the Substack app and poke around in it last night, and fuck me did I underestimate the number of newsletters out there right now. It seems to me to be roughly equivalent of those days when most people seemed to be on blogspot. I’m going to need to delete that app immediately, because I was reading on my phone for three or four hours.

And it was on one of those newsletters that I discovered that Maya Deren wrote a short book on filmmaking. And there’s a PDF linked at the bottom of that page.

OPERATIONS: finishing touches on a script, then rewrite the newsletter template
STATUS: rrrreally just want to curl up somewhere with a book for ten hours
READING: Picked up a sample of BLANK SPACE by W David Marx

Related:

If artists can only make art while standing in the middle of the town square, you’re going to get more boring art.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/book-review-blank-space

That feels flat-out brilliant.

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: film books
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