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Category: the isles of blogging

the Isles of Blogging

Broadcasting House: 8

Published October 17, 2025 by Warren Ellis

This entry is part 8 of 8 in the series Broadcasting House

Resurfacing this old blogchain.

I was reading it over earlier for the first time in years, which helpfully reminded me that IFTTT doesn’t connect well to this install due to being much more secure and I shouldn’t pay for IFTTT Pro to try and automate some nagging stuff.

As per part 7 of this chain, I had a programming guide for much of this year, but time and energy led me to let go of it – I wasn’t getting to much of the material I wanted to write in this space. And some fucked-up part of my back-brain always resists regimen and structure.

I found myself writing about the Chronofile on the newsletter that goes out on Sunday, in tandem with the current state of livestreaming – some people are livestreaming eight hours a day seven days a week. In comparison, elderblogs (thanks again for that one, Venkat) barely manage four posts a day and usually a hell of a lot less. Which is fine. Not everyone wants to read or write a chronofile – weeknotes are enough for most people.

Are there new tricks to be pulled with apparently deprecated tools? I dunno. I have a bunch of stuff I want to try, when I get the spare time and energy. In certain spaces, there’s talk again of what WordPress can do. And people are still building – Cozy Mode made me laugh.

So I’m back to thinking out loud to myself about all this some more.

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Rolling

Published April 3, 2025 by Warren Ellis

My position on this site has always been torn between the writer’s notebook, the computer channel and the chronofile. I have decided to split the difference by leaning on the scheduling function. Nobody’s reading this, so I could bunch all my notes into a six-hour window if I wanted. But I find it pleases me to extend them out over a rolling 24-hour schedule. And reading them back at the top or bottom of every day mirrors the way I review my paper notebooks. I’m writing these things down to remember them, after all.

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Quotebacks No Longer Supported On Chrome

Published March 6, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Quotebacks is a great blogging tool. Select some text on the website and activate the extension, and it spat out the text in a nice quote box with the article title and link laid in under it.

Chrome no longer supports it as a native extension. Right now, the bookmarklet seems to still work, but it feels loke the web deprecating one more tool of use than the Quotebacks creator missing a step.

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Published December 6, 2024 by Warren Ellis

I’ve got a new theme up and running on this site. I don’t love it. One or two things seem to be permanently busted (why can’t I change the “WARREN ELLIS LTD” text header and why is it blurred?) (ETA: I changed themes again and that went away) and I can’t get the primary menu to display (ETA: changed themes again and it came back). And Quotebacks doesn’t look as good in this theme. But it will have to do for now. At least I convinced the theme to stop showing excerpts only.

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Published December 5, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Something broke on LTD earlier today – it seems like part of the theme I’ve been using, Alia, got mangled and turned the site into a column two characters wide on mobile. I’d already left the office when this mysteriously happened, so I’ve just switched the theme on my phone (I have a couple of other basic themes installed for emergencies), which fixed it. So if you’re a regular visitor and wondering why things look different, that’s why. I’ll find some time in the next few days to try and figure out what happened and probably install a new theme.

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Published October 13, 2024 by Warren Ellis

It is interesting that a kind of semi-public notebooking is how my blogging story is wrapping up. A kind of semi-public notebooking is a good description of the original vibe of blogs, circa 2002-09.

But we’ve moved on to a deeper kind of notebooking now (deeper in the sense of much more richly and densely hyperlinked internally). A much deeper kind than blogs can sustain. Deep notebooking and content gardening too, aren’t blogging — and shouldn’t try to be. That would be selling that new medium short.

Hmmm.

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The Bypass

Published August 16, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Paul Graham Raven:

Responding to the revelation that one of his friends does book-binding as a hobby, and has started a newsletter in order to have somewhere to talk about that, Paul addresses what in some ways has been the perpetual lament of the blogger, ever since blogging was a thing: why don’t I have as much mojo for this as I feel like I should have?

It took me a long while, but I found my bypass for this: I use the best blogging tool in the world, WordPress, but it’s not a blog except in its earliest and rawest terms – a web log. It’s a notebook, and you keep logs in a notebook.

“Though not private memoirs, and not quite public histories, zibaldoni were considered important containers of culture. Florentines took the transmission of their written culture as seriously as they did the transmission of the family name from one generation to the next.”

A blog comes with the suggestion of a certain commitment: the blog is essayistic now, and that requires energy. Mojo. And when you already write for a living, that energy is mostly going elsewhere. A notebook is a thing you pick up when you need to make a note, and you may not pick it up for days at a time. The commitment with a notebook is simply keeping it at hand all the time.

The big shift for me was in deciding this is a notebook. And the pleasure of using WordPress is that it can make pretty much any kind of note that I need with very little friction. I’m probably bending the intent of WordPress a little, but tools are there to be tested.

So, yeah, sometimes I’ll go a few days without making a note, and then I’ll log four things I need to remember in a row on a Friday afternoon.

Now, if I had the mojo, I’d follow the brush. But I’m making this note in a pause between sections of script, and the script is where the energy needs to be today. Tomorrow may be different. Nothing to lament over.

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AI Voice Hallucination / Electronic Voice Phenomenon

Published July 26, 2024 by Warren Ellis

What grabbed me here was the accidental voice reconstruction.

The project group used machine learning voice changing software, off the shelf, made for streamers.

The scratches and taps on the metal were transformed by the proto-AI into fragments of voice: burbles and syllables that sound something like a person speaking, but not quite. You strain to hear.

(I didn’t ask but I got the impression that the group didn’t originally intend for this to be part of their project, even though it was part of their demo by the time I spoke with them. That’s what you get from working directly with material.)

And this is something new:

Where does the voice come from?

Novelty in the signal.

This is essentially Electronic Voice Phenomenon.

Within ghost hunting and parapsychology, electronic voice phenomena (EVP) are sounds found on electronic recordings that are interpreted as spirit voices. Parapsychologist Konstantīns Raudive, who popularized the idea in the 1970s, described EVP as typically brief, usually the length of a word or short phrase.[1]

Enthusiasts consider EVP to be a form of paranormal phenomenon often found in recordings with static or other background noise. Scientists regard EVP as a form of auditory pareidolia (interpreting random sounds as voices in one’s own language) and a pseudoscience promulgated by popular culture.[2][3] Prosaic explanations for EVP include apophenia (perceiving patterns in random information), equipment artifacts, and hoaxes

Those babbling voices from the sheet metal are not noise in the signal. They’re the point. Sources of creation are rare and here’s a new one!

What would happen if we listened to the voices?

Old radio in new graveyards.

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A Starter List For Your RSS Reader (Updated Jul 2024)

Published July 1, 2024 by Warren Ellis

People keep asking me where I find stuff, or where to start with an RSS reader.

If you happen to be discovering RSS for the first time, About Feeds tells you all you need to know, nice and easy. I use a paid app called Feedbin connected to an iOS app called Reeder, but, as you’ll see, there are plenty of free options out there. It is my massive daily magazine of the new and curious.

What follows is just a selection of my list, not the whole thing. Pretty sure all of these are still active. Maybe you’ll find something you want to follow.

Note also: Substack generates an RSS feed of the newsletters on its system that can be added to your RSS reader without having to make an account at Substack. Eventually they will notice this, but it works for now.

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For Those Interested In Online Forums

Published May 28, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Jay Springett did a piece earlier today about the current state of forum software. It’s interesting just as a “state of the art” gathering of information. Looks like Vanilla is still going, in some form, too. I’d rather murder myself than ever go near any kind of online forum again. But a return to forum life for people who actually want to think and talk would fit with the current tone of the dark-forest-y online discourse I’ve seen.

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