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Tag: drugs

telemetry 1nov25

Published November 1, 2025 by Warren Ellis

On All Hallow’s Eve, Jennifer Lucy Allan turns the cards and listens for what they reveal, tracing sonic lines across the tarot deck. From the ghostly atmospherics of William Basinski’s Wheel of Fortune, to the arcane explorations of early electronic pioneer Ruth White and Swiss krautrock mystic Walter Wegmüller, the spread unfolds in unexpected ways, its order uncertain, its juxtapositions surprising. Expect new sounds from Argentinian artist aylu, whose spiritually-charged album journeys from personal struggle to collective resistance, as well as slow-motion noise conjured by New Zealand’s drone trio Surface of the Earth.

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Berserker Coke Spoons

Published November 29, 2024 by Warren Ellis

In ancient conflicts, courage and resilience were essential qualities for warriors venturing onto the battlefield. However, a recent study has uncovered evidence suggesting that these attributes did not always rely solely on physical strength or emotional fortitude. Recent research published in the journal Praehistorische Zeitschrift suggests that Northern European barbarian warriors during the Roman period may have used stimulants to enhance their performance in combat.

At various archaeological sites in Scandinavia, Germany, and Poland, researchers have discovered small spoon-shaped objects attached to belts, dating back to the Roman period. These objects, featuring handles between 40 and 70 mm in length and cavities just 10 to 20 mm in diameter, lacked any practical purpose for the belt but were found alongside other war-related artifacts.

According to the study led by archaeologist Andrzej Kokowski and a team of biologists from Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland, these small spoons might have been used to measure precise doses of stimulant substances before battle.

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Drugs And Skulls

Published November 24, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Marius van Boordt, “The Consecration”

A team of cognitive neuroscientists at the University of Zurich, has found that ancient Aztec “skull whistles” found in gravesites are able to instill fear in modern people. In their study, published in the journal Communications Psychology, the group recorded the neural and psychological responses of volunteers as they listened to the screams produced by the whistles.

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In digging up ancient Aztec graves dating from the years 1250 to 1521 AD, archaeologists have found many examples of small whistles made of clay and formed into the shape of a skull. These whistles still work today as they did when they were buried next to a person in a grave. They produce sounds most often described as a scream of sorts.

An international group of researchers led by the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria have uncovered the earliest evidence of Ephedra use from the charred remains of the plant in a 15,000-year-old human burial site in northeastern Morocco.

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Ephedra is a genus of shrubs native to arid regions that produces alkaloids like ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, substances utilized in traditional medicine across many cultures. Archaeological evidence of its use during the Paleolithic era is rare due to the fragile nature of plant remains.

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Dramatising The World: Toronto, 2005

Published July 11, 2024 by Warren Ellis

This is the text of a talk I gave at the Hacienda bar in Toronto on 28 April 2005. I wandered off-script and expounded/freestyled/rambled more than once — to say the fucking least — so this should probably be seen more as the original blueprint for the thing.

The literary critic Harold Bloom once said that we weren’t fully human until Shakespeare began writing: that Shakespeare completed our sapience. Which is both interesting and stark, utter bullshit. Stories are what make us human. They’re an advanced form of play. Cats have play. Sometimes very sophisticated, dramatised forms of play. But they’re not communicated or externalised. So far, only humans use stories to dramatise the way they see the world.

And we’ve always had them.

Go out to the ancient standing stones at Callanish in the Orkney Islands, at sunrise. You stand in the middle of the stone circle and turn to follow the sun. From that position, the sun is alternately occluded and revealed by the curves of the surrounding hills. The sunrise is dramatised as a struggle. As a performance. Shadows fall and twist around you like spokes, until the sun claws free of the hillside and sends light right down the middle of the circle and on to your face.

Continue readingDramatising The World: Toronto, 2005
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Published April 15, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Patrick Winn’s Narcotopia is reportage of the sort that shrinking foreign news budgets have made scarce. It is the story of the Wa, a people who once proudly collected the heads of their enemies, and who came to preside over one of the world’s most important narco-states in their homelands in the mountains of Burma. The author describes the culture of the Wa, who kept both the British and the Burmese military junta at bay, as being that of the “warrior-farmer, an anarchist who did as he or she pleased”.

https://app.the-tls.co.uk/tls_article/heroin/pugpig_index.html

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An Injection For Hunger

Published February 3, 2023 by Warren Ellis

In which writer Paul Ford tries a new drug for Type 2 diabetes management and discovers it completely switches off his previously hyperactive hunger signal and basically goes crazy-wall for a while:

“Something’s happened,” I told my wife. She is a veteran of watching me try to fix my body. I told her: Where before my brain had been screaming, screaming, at air-raid volume—there was sudden silence. It was confusing. Would it last?

I went alone that night to a Chinese restaurant, the old-school kind with tables, and ordered General Tso’s. I ate the broccoli, a few pieces of chicken, and thought: too gloopy. I left it unfinished, went home in confusion, a different kind of sleepwalker. I passed bodegas and shrugged. At an office I observed the stack of candies and treats with no particular interest.

Decades of struggle—poof. Apparently the Mounjaro molecule targets the same hormone as Ozempic, plus a second one, so it doesn’t just stimulate insulin production but also boosts energy output.

“I urgently need,” I thought, “an analog synthesizer.” Something to fill the silence where food used to be. Every night for weeks I spent four, five hours twisting Moog knobs. Not making music. Just droning, looping, and beep-booping. I needed something to obsess over, to watch YouTube videos about. I needed something to fail at every night to feel normal. And I was also manic, dysregulated, and wide-eyed, sleeping five hours a night, run-walking, with pressured speech; my friends, happy for me but confused, called me “cocaine Paul.” I bought more synthesizers off a guy from Craigslist, meeting him in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with a grand in cash. A body is not designed to lose 25 pounds in eight weeks, starting during the holidays. Beep. Boop.

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