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Category: marks

telemetry 2jan26

Published January 2, 2026 by Warren Ellis

“Every Day Carry” is a lifestyle native to the 21st century. This hobby was directly named after “the everyday.” “Every Day Carry” concerns tools, toys and/or utensils which somebody, somehow, feels obliged to lug around on their own person. All the time. Every Day.

“Weird Everyday Carry” is a niche even more intriguing to me, because it combines my abiding interests in the oxymoronic, the everyday, and the weird. How weird is everyday weird? What are the limits to weirdness? How long has this weirdness been going on?

Sources are now telling Deadline that Netflix reportedly only wants to keep movies in theaters for 17 days after it buys Warner Bros, a move that would “steamroll the theatrical business.” Major circuits like AMC continue to insist the line must be held at roughly 45 days.

Ghana has decided to deal with the viral spread of prophetic content on social media by setting up an official reporting mechanism for sensitive predictions, a move triggered by the August 2025 helicopter crash that killed the country’s defence and environment ministers along with six others. After the accident, TikTok clips circulated showing pastors who claimed to have foreseen the disaster before it happened. Elvis Ankrah, the presidential envoy for inter-faith and ecumenical relations, now asks prophets to submit their predictions for review. Charismatic preacher-prophets have been a fixture of Ghanaian public life since Pentecostalism arrived in the 1980s, but social media has amplified their reach and made their claims increasingly outlandish. Police have threatened to arrest prophets who cannot prove their predictions eventually came true. Some two-thirds of Ghanaians favor giving divine intervention a role in politics. Ankrah recently declared that most prophecies submitted to him are “total bunk.”
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telemetry 15dec25

Published December 15, 2025 by Warren Ellis

pharmacopeia

Watched two episodes of LANDMAN, which were actually pretty good. I have a lot of time for Taylor Sheridan. YELLOWSTONE never quite landed with me, though I appreciate its craft and also that a part finally fits Kelly Reilly’s weird energy, but LANDMAN hits right for me, and the scripting is fascinating. Also seeing Colm Feore climbing inside a new skin was nice.

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telemetry 14dec25

Published December 14, 2025 by Warren Ellis

https://lastweekincollapse.substack.com/p/last-week-in-collapse-december-7

I still read The Economist most weeks, and this is my reminder to sit down with the new issue tonight.

Earlier this week, a woman made a startling discovery while hailing a Waymo autonomous cab for her daughter in Los Angeles: a quick glance into the back of the vehicle revealed a stranger, who’d been hiding from view in the trunk.

“This s*** won’t let me out,” the man shouted after being confronted, in a video shared by the woman. “They put me in here,” he added, accusing unspecified “people” of trapping him.

A chaotic followup video shows the man being detained by two police officers on the sidewalk, while the woman is talking to a Waymo representative over the vehicle’s sound system.

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Pebble Index Ring

Published December 9, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Introducing Pebble Index 01 – a small ring with a button and microphone. Press the button, whisper your thought, and it’s sent to your phone. It’s added to your notes, set as a reminder, or saved for later review.

It’s private by design (no recording until you press the button) and requires no internet connection or subscription. It’s as small as a wedding band and comes in 3 colours. It’s made of durable stainless steel and is water-resistant. Like all Pebble products, it’s extremely customizable and built with open source software.

Here’s the best part: the battery lasts for years. You never need to charge it.

https://repebble.com/index

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telemetry 5dec25

Published December 5, 2025 by Warren Ellis

So at 2pm I just put on Merrell black suede slip-ons, Carharrt utility pant, a submariner sweater, merino scarf and watchcap, leather gloves, slipped the wired mp3 player into the side pocket of the utility pant, and listened to two new music purchases while I walked into town, had a glass of wine and chatted with some people downstairs at the deli, wrote some notes on a new project, bought some cheese and walked home again.

“I wouldn’t look at this as a change in approach for Netflix movies or for Warner movies,” he said. “I think, over time, the windows will evolve to be much more consumer friendly, to be able to meet the audience where they are quicker … I’d say right now, you should count on everything that is planned on going to the theater through Warner Bros. will continue to go to the theaters through Warner Bros., and Netflix movies will take the same strides they have, which is, some of them do have a short run in the theater beforehand. But our primary goal is to bring first-run movies to our members, because that’s what they’re looking for.”

During its bid against Paramount and Comcast for Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix assured company executives it would uphold existing agreements requiring theatrical movie releases if the deal went through. No surprise, looks like he lied.

That escalated since this morning.

All told, the company has lost more than $70 billion since the beginning of 2021 on its enormous long-term VR bet, a staggering sum that has left investors itchy and unimpressed as Zuckerberg has failed to convince the public of the high-fidelity virtual spaces he long insisted we’d be choosing to spend most of our time in.

Now, as Bloomberg reports, the company’s executives are eying gigantic budget cuts, as high as 30 percent, for the teams responsible for its Meta Horizon Worlds product and Quest VR headset — another nail in the coffin for Zuckerberg’s obsession that has been a major thorn in the sides of investors for years now. Layoffs could start as soon as January, but final decisions have yet to be made.

In fact, following Bloomberg‘s reporting, Meta’s stock jumped over four percent on Thursday, underscoring the degree to which shareholders have grown fed up with the company trying to make the metaverse happen.

Feedbin just went down, but apparently it’s just me. Which might be just as well, because if I see one more clickbaity fake-outrage gibbering about Pantone’s choice for Pantone Colour Of The Year then I might just delete everything anyway.

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telemetry 4dec25

Published December 4, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Nature has retracted a headline-grabbing climate-economics study after critics found flawed data that massively inflated its predicted global economic collapse. The New York Times reports: The decision came after a team of economists noticed problems with the data for one country, Uzbekistan, that significantly skewed the results. If Uzbekistan were excluded, they found, the damages would look similar to earlier research (PDF). Instead of a 62 percent decline in economic output by 2100 in a world where carbon emissions continue unabated, global output would be reduced by 23 percent. Of course, erasing more than 20 percent of the world’s economic activity would still be a devastating blow to human welfare. The paper’s detractors emphasize that climate change is a major threat, as recent meta analyses have found, and that more should be done to address it — but, they say, unusual results should be treated skeptically. “Most people for the last decade have thought that a 20 percent reduction in 2100 was an insanely large number,” said Solomon Hsiang, a professor of global environmental policy at Stanford University who co-wrote the critique published in August. “So the fact that this paper is coming out saying 60 percent is off the chart.”

A man stands before a sinking ship. The ship will go down, the audience will watch, the metric will spike. Another entry in an endless algorithmic archive.

This is the logic of ultra-viral content: stunts, baroque challenges, a leap into lava. Each dare is designed to spike the dopamine drip yet leave no trace. The true danger was never the volcano, but the possibility that it might be lost in the scroll.

Culture is flattened by engines that reward repeatable extremes. A looped performance of risk reprocessed as engagement. Death, illegality, impossibility. All reduced to formats. 

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telemetry 2dec25

Published December 2, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Octothorpes are hashtags and backlinks that can be used on regular websites, connecting pages across the open internet regardless of where they’re hosted.

As with all indieweb stuff, I lost the will to live less than halfway through the “getting started” section of the docs, but maybe this will be useful to someone, and maybe I should return to it after more coffee.

The Hare #9 [December 2025] by Andrew Chapman

Bronze Age/Neolithic complex find, Indian menhirs… and the original rock music

Read on Substack

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