5,000 Podcasts. 3,000 Episodes a Week. $1 Cost Per Episode — Behind an AI Start Up’s Plan
September 10, 2025 at 08:52PM
Comments closedWARREN ELLIS LTD Posts
Image Comics In The 2000s Humble Bundle
A few of my books in here
September 10, 2025 at 08:46PM
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OPERATIONS: Dead run to rough out the rest of the script I started yesterday, make a proper start on the newsletter, generate some text for AJ, properly write up an idea I had last night, reorganise the boards, and probably three or four other things I’ve forgotten.
STATUS: Yesterday I quit work early to make a venison daube with a whisky and redcurrant sauce and truffled mashed potato, so today I need to do all the work. 8hrs 34m sleep, inbox 101, 1500 unread pieces in the RSS reader
READING: CHOKEPOINTS, Edward Fishman (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: Night Tracks, waiting for the Proms to finish so late-night Radio 3 can go back to normal
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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Found this in the office. Turns out you can still buy it, too.
- New Google Court Doc: Open Web Is In Rapid Decline
- ‘Nuremberg’ Sparks Audience Buzz After Strong TIFF Premiere
Liz Truss’ chief of staff, Mark Fullbrook, had contacted me about my work on how to characterize and optimize successful premierships. Here, after forty years of writing about Prime Ministers, was my first opportunity actually to shape a premiership. To my dismay and discomfort, she took almost all of my advice on board, by design or, almost certainly, by accident.
Sir Anthony Seldon, be warned, comes off as something of an arrogant prick in the foreword. He has a long and storied reputation as a historian, educator and author, and so can be forgiven some of his tone due to his achievements, which include several best-selling books about successive British Prime Ministers. This is his book on Liz Truss’ time in Number 10, and I find this book’s title delicious.
At the conclusion of one meeting, towards the end of August, Hope passed a note to a senior Cabinet Office official: ‘No way you can do this politically. It would mean not hitting the 20k increase to the police force, massive real terms cuts to the NHS, breaking the “triple lock” on pensions, not delivering on the AUKUS pact [trilateral security agreement with the USA and Australia], schools falling in, the Defence Secretary and Home Secretary resigning.’ For good measure, he added, ‘It’s f**king mental.’
It is a mildly venal and painfully hard look at Liz Truss’ forty-odd days as a disaster of a Prime Minister and all the things she could have done differently. In many ways, she was hobbled from the start, by events and, in common with Rishi Sunak, all the charisma and political acumen of a lumpfish. But it’s not unfair to say she made the worst possible fist of it, and this little knife of a book probes into all the ways she fucked it up.
Seldon makes attempts to be fair, or at least empathetic, but, um..
Placing the spotlight on her personal journey up from comprehensive school, in contrast to rich public schoolboy Sunak, invited a focus on her personality and intellect, neither of which she was capable of sustaining.
It’s an illuminating, slightly gossipy book, exhaustively sourced and probably a very fitting capstone for the radioactive dump of her brief reign.
HOW NOT TO BE PRIME MINISTER (UK) (US+)
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OPERATIONS: I need to lay out an entire story structure today, and figure out how to create some stories for a couple of artists I know within some significant format restrictions. So daytime is hammering the keyboard and night time is emails and scribbling in the notebook. I barely touched my notebooks over the summer aside from general notes, so this is very much a sign of “back to work.”
STATUS: 8hrs sleep; Bee, Rabbit, Apple Watch and messaging apps are on, inbox 85 at present, and I just remembered that in a few hours I have to start a venison daube….
READING: CHOKEPOINTS, Edward Fishman (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: Night Tracks
LAST WATCHED: I got halfway through SATURDAY NIGHT (2024) before realising i wasn’t really watching it. SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE was never a thing over here in the UK, it wasn’t even screened over here until relatively recently. The actor doing Dan Ackroyd captured his voice uncannily, and seeing Nicholas Braun play both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson was actually kind of amazing, but the dialogue, particularly from the Lorne Michaels character – “It’s a whole new kind of entertainment!” – was so painfully on the nose that I kind of tuned out. It was, however, very nicely made, and I’ll probably give it another go one day.
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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morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/
Comments closed- “Humans need solitude“
- Analog to digital process – someone starting digital stuff on a manual typewriter – Julian Simpson, do not look at this
He seemed almost like he was doing his best impression of the way a regular human being walked, but having never seen one before.
Labutut’s recent speciality is fanciful fictional biographies of real scientists. He very much bends the boundaries between novel, essay, reportage and invention, and, as in his previous book, WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD, you didn’t always know which was which and what was happening. It was an excellent book.
This one zeroes in on John von Neumann, and is told in a series of statements by the people who knew him. All of which is invented, although the bare biographical elements and timeline are true. Like I said: a fictional biography. And it’s just brilliant.
Von Neumann was one of the scientific/mathematical prodigies of the 20th Century, with a deeply conflicted legacy – initiating our digital world, but using those tools to ensure the hydrogen bomb worked. And the device he used to do that, he named the Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer. The MANIAC. And a maniac is how the genius von Neumann is presented – an alien child.
Superbly written – each chapter is its own little story of him, and some of them are fully eerie. Very recommended.
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