I haven’t listened to Jarre in years, and tripped over this on Arte. Balm for the electronic European soul.
Comments closedWARREN ELLIS LTD Posts
Just loaded all my ripped Phurpa CDs on to an SD card for the mp3 player. Late breakfast was an omelette made with eggs from our chickens and finished with a chive salt I infused myself with salt from up the road in Maldon and chives from my garden. That’s what my year is going to be like.
I’m drawing up plans to begin revamping the back garden this month. I got a couple of A5 hardback notebooks for Xmas, and am wondering what use to put them to. I intend to look at phone screens less this year (i developed a bad habit of reading on my phone when one of the cats sits on me in the evening and pins my left hand down, as is her wont). I read something like 56 books last year, in the end, and I’m thinking about doubling that this year. I have a backlog.
I maintain this notebook because having a daily-ish digital log is valuable for my work and general tracking of life – I’ve been doing it for so long, over various now-gone sites, that it’s baked into my practice. I may try and expand what it does.
I have a lot to do this year, and am pushing at the boundaries of that to make more time for self-directed projects – a few in collaboration, but largely things in mind that I want to do myself.
I intend a year of moving more and doing more. We’ll see how it goes. But it will definitely be a year of being less connected to whatever the hell is going on out there in the digital world, and being less part of anything but my own choices about how to live 2026.
Comments closed“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.”Comments closed
And today we start 2026.
Opened a bottle of this on New Year’s Eve, which I bought just because I’d never had it before:
It’s a revival of an ancient form of making sparkling wine, and apparently the results are a little unpredictable. I was not expecting it to taste like dry cider. I’m thinking about using the undrunk half of the bottle to roast a pork joint in, with parsnips and apples.
OPERATIONS: Today I am across several new projects, which is how I like to start the year, so today will be mostly reading and thinking. Things are starting to pile up now.
STATUS: Inbox 91, 8hrs 9m sleep, tried to snooze the alarm but the mancub has gotten into the habit of appearing in bed a couple minutes after my alarm goes off to see why I haven’t gotten up yet, the judgy little scrote
READING: PIRATE ENLIGHTENMENT, David Graeber. (UK) (US+) and M SON OF THE CENTURY, Antonio Scurati (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: GLEANN CIUIN, Claire M Singer
LAST WATCHED: del Toro’s FRANKENSTEIN, which was beautifully designed.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
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Taryn Riley, “Brood,” mixed media on paper, 14 x 11 inches.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/
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Here we go again.
This is Warren Ellis LTD, a writer’s digital notebook. I can be found here, at my free weekly newsletter, my identity site and occasionally on Instagram, which I somehow didn’t manage to get rid of. I am represented by the Cheng Caplan Company, Inkwell Management and VanderKloot Law.
I am the New York Times-bestselling author of GUN MACHINE and the Amazon Top 100 2016 author of NORMAL, co-creator of graphic novels including TRANSMETROPOLITAN, PLANETARY, TREES, FREAKANGELS and RED, and the creator, writer and co-producer of CASTLEVANIA on Netflix and THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT wherever you get your podcasts.
Being a personal notebook, it combines gathered knowledge with considerations of new culture and information, jottings and observations, fiction experiments and personal statuses and notes. This means it is essentially of no utility to anyone but me, but, if you’re reading this, you’re welcome to read over my shoulder.
Like most notebooks, zibaldones and commonplace books, it resists any attempt to impose a structure, and I’ve largely given up trying. It obeys the shape of a computer channel only insofar as it’s a chronological-feed broadcast from a station that takes unpredictable and abrupt holidays.
It is 2026. Happy new year. Let’s see what happens.
Comments closedIt is December 20 and I am having to admit today that I am tapped out for 2025. I’ll turn this back on around January 2.
I have read 52 books this year, it seems, so I’ll close this by listing some of the ones I liked best. If you’re still reading this, then happy new year. I hope it’s a good and peaceful one.
- THE BLAZING WORLD: A NEW HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONARY ENGLAND, Jonathan Healey
- THE PASSENGER, Cormac McCarthy
- HERESY: JESUS CHRIST AND THE OTHER SONS OF GOD, Catherine Nixey
- THE MANIAC, Benjamin Labatut
- THE TAIGA SYNDROME, Cristina Rivera Garza
- ERIC SATIE THREE PIECE SUITE, Ian Penman
- ULTRA-PROCESSED PEOPLE, Chris van Tulleken
- THE YEARS, Annie Ernaux
- WAR FOR ETERNITY, Benjamin Teitelbaum
OPERATIONS: I have to spend all day buried in this one job until it’s as done as I can get it.
STATUS: inbox 160.
READING: DERRIDA: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION, Simon Glendinning
LISTENING:
THINKING ABOUT: this headline I just saw on The Guardian: “Boys to learn difference between porn and real life to tackle misogyny in England’s schools”
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
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I conceived of the recent CONCLAVE as a kind of classical filmmaking that doesn’t really happen much any more. And now here’s NUREMBERG.
Hermann Goring and the rest of the surviving Nazi leadership are on trial at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity. You know the story. Army psychiatrist Doug Kelley is charged with keeping them alive until the trial, and forms a particular bond with Goring.
The performances are interesting. Russell Crowe as Goring is twinkling and avuncular. Rami Malek as Kelley is quick and a little twitchy. At the top of the film, Kelley is shown Goring’s stash of “heart pills”, pops and crunches one, proclaims them to be codeine and smiles “I’m a fan.” Goring and Kelley are both showy egomaniacs, is the thing – but Goring has achieved something in his life and Kelley, in his mid thirties and already starting to show grey hair (Malek is actually 44), hasn’t. Michael Shannon, as Justice Jackson, the man who pressed for trials rather than summary execution and achieved this by blackmailing Pope Pius, finds a sort of man-out-of-time Lincolnesque gravitas while also being hobbled by ego and wants. Richard E Grant does a stately turn, and Steven Pacey from BLAKES 7 in my childhood shows up as George Marshall.
There’s a nice set of double bookends to the film, and a message-y coda that feels a little bit nailed on but is nonetheless handily done. It’s generally a solid, well-written piece of work, almost a chamber piece – I suspect there are barely more than a dozen speaking roles. Crowe and Malek have to carry the majority of the film, and they’re very watchable: two vain, insidious charmers: but only one is comfortable in his own skin.
Seen via the WGA FYC app.
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Started scripting before 11am. I need to drive this new job off my desk by Friday, and I already had a ton of other things I need to do around the house today. I’ve got a dozen research tabs open while I write. Which I’m about to switch over to Perplexity because Google AI summaries are really getting in the way now and are almost uniformly useless. All I need is a search engine that just searches and provides links and citations. I suspect there’s now probably grounds for the argument that 2025 was the last year of the internet.
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