WARREN ELLIS LTD
storytelling, knowledge work and culture

WARREN ELLIS LTD

WARREN ELLIS LTD

WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.

Time Reflections

Warren Ellismorning computer

Fashion designer Paul Smith re-hanging Musee Picasso’s permanent collection.

Scientists have hypothesized for more than six decades the possibility of observing a different form of wave reflections, known as temporal, or time, reflections. In contrast to spatial reflections, which arise when light or sound waves hit a boundary such as a mirror or a wall at a specific location in space, time reflections arise when the entire medium in which the wave is traveling suddenly and abruptly changes its properties across all of space. At such an event, a portion of the wave is time reversed, and its frequency is converted to a new frequency.

Sandra Mujinga:

Berthe Morisot

Warren Ellispodcasts
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the influential painters at the heart of the French Impressionist movement: Berthe Morisot (1841-1895). The men in her circle could freely paint in busy bars and public spaces, while Morisot captured the domestic world and found new, daring ways to paint quickly in the open air. Her work shows women as they were, to her: informal, unguarded, and not transformed or distorted for the eyes of men. The image above is one of her few self-portraits, though several portraits of her survive by other artists, chiefly her sister Edma and her brother-in-law Edouard Manet.

(I’m actually trying to find an efficient way to log podcasts I like and want to track later. BBC won’t give me an embed, but it will apparently generate a QR code?)

13mar23

Warren Ellisstatus

Wow, that photo is blurry. Pretty sure my old iPhone 8 is dying now. Anyway. Coffee’s ready. High winds outside have already destroyed one of the mini-greenhouses I built and sited yesterday.

ON DECK: tranche 2 of consulting job, DEPT MIDNIGHT polishes
INBOX: 63
LISTENING: Unclassifed
READING: dipped back into AGAINST THE DAY for reasons
OUTSIDE: “If anyone in this theatre commits an act of violence at any time during this show, you will be awarded the Oscar for best actor and permitted to give a 19-minute speech”

Everywhen

Warren Ellismorning computer

Simon Reynolds pulled up a collection of lovely unusual old reggae record covers.

In Stanner’s 1956 essay, “The Dreaming“, he attempted to tease out a translation of Indigenous temporality. “The Dreaming conjures up the notion of a sacred, heroic time of the indefinitely remote past, such a time is also, in a sense, still part of the present”, he suggested. “One cannot ‘fix’ The Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen.”

Everywhen.

It was a bold, memorable term. Stanner’s attempt to bring Indigenous knowledges into an Australian public discourse reflected his belief in the importance of understanding Aboriginal history and history-making.

The ARTnews guide to Cubism (and beyond):

10mar22

Warren Ellisstatus

Sleet and high winds, but our two chickens are still happily laying a monstrous number of eggs. I’m waiting out the disgusting weather and hoping I can build out the two new growhouses on Sunday, maybe even rebuild the shallow berms and swales that got torn down by the local wildlife and warm up that soil.

ON DECK: scripting, actor call, newsletter
INBOX: 56, getting to emails later
LISTENING:


OUTSIDE: “Thank you for being a valued Amazon Kindle Newsstand subscriber. We are writing to inform you that we have made the decision to stop selling Kindle magazine and newspaper subscriptions on Amazon.” Shit! Goodbye London Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement. What a backwards move by Amazon. I wonder what prompted it

Intelligence In A Dish

Warren Ellislinks and bookmarks
Recent advances in human stem cell-derived brain organoids promise to replicate critical molecular and cellular aspects of learning and memory and possibly aspects of cognition in vitro. Coining the term “organoid intelligence” (OI) to encompass these developments, we present a collaborative program to implement the vision of a multidisciplinary field of OI.

Organoid Intelligence!

8mar23

Warren Ellisstatus

It is brutally cold out there and I have a lot to do today and my eyes are fucked from staring at a recalcitrant script all day yesterday.

ON DECK: finishing that script, reviewing the deliverables on a job offer, putting together my notes for a phone conference tomorrow
INBOX: 51, I have a lot to reply to
LISTENING: as above
READING: finishing the new Krasznahorkai
OUTSIDE: “The Comfortable Darkness of Felix Macnee” is a great headline

ETA: 1121am, the sleet just arrived

How To Build A Blog Without Social Media

Warren Ellisthe isles of blogging

Well, you can’t. Right?

That’s the received wisdom. You have to post on social media to direct people to your blog because nobody has RSS feeds any more, nobody curates what we used to grudgingly call “the blogosphere,” message boards in the old style are now Slacks and Discords and you can’t reach into those black boxes, and… blogs are old and niche now anyway. Microposting took away the impetus for most writers to self-publish.

Except some of us want to write complete statements in places we own and control, and garden our own thoughts and experiences in an interlinked, searchable way.

As I noted in a previous post, traffic to this site is predictable, and always has been. It got close to doubling if I had a link posted on Twitter, and went right back down the next day if I didn’t. Neither number is huge. LTD has always been subject to pauses and hiatuses, chiefly because my job is writing and in busy periods there hasn’t always been enough writing left in me on a given day to sustain this site.

I would like to change that in 2023. I am also not using social media, and don’t intend to. If Twitter in 2018 didn’t hold any pleasure for me, Masto and Post aren’t going to get me in 2023. And with the changes to Twitter, it seems to many people like they’re technically shadowbanned if they don’t cough up for Blue. There is an argument for using social media as a syndication engine, but honestly, right now, I don’t see that game as being worth the candle.

So here’s my 2023 experiment. Building LTD up in a sustained way without doing the thing everyone’s been doing since the 2010s – leaning on social media as the one and only growth tool.

Let me point you now to ooh.directory, Phil Gyford’s growing directory of living blogs. And it updates live when any of them post a new piece. That’s one plank in a new stage for personal publishing. (Great job, Phil, by the way.)

“Growth” isn’t necessarily the thing that interests me. Doing proper work on this site, connecting things up properly, sustaining– these are the things to look at. Can it be done without having to send up brief, dim, desperate flares on social media a dozen times a day? Let’s find out.

(A not fully baked thought that I apparently wrote down on Jan 6.)

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