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Charmera: 20feb26

Published February 20, 2026 by Warren Ellis

I saw one of these on Valeluminal‘s IG account last night, and went straight to Amazon to look it up. I remember the Kodak Fling disposable camera from the 80s, and it turns out this is an intentionally low-res digital camera styled in a similar way. Charges off USB and runs off a TF card. There are six or seven different styles, and you don’t know which one you’ve got until the box arrives. Mine showed up eight hours after I ordered it.

Not my favourite of the designs, sadly, but it’ll do.

It’s about as long as my little finger and it comes with a keychain. The battery, according to reviews, gives out about three hours of steady use.

I have always loved digital cameras, but, if I’m honest, the better the iPhone camera got, the less interested I got. I loved the old digital cameras, that were a bit fuzzy and weird. I even did a photography book with an EyeModule, which was a black and white digital camera that plugged into a Handspring Visor PDA.

The Charmera comes, of course, with absolutely no instructions.

This was taken by accident while figuring out the pre-loaded image filters. I’m not mad at it at all. In fact, that was very much what I was hoping for. It’s going to get clipped to my day bag and I’m going to have some fun with it.

TODAY:

New Christina Vantzou, sadly vinyl or digital only:

Previously: Christina Vantzou

OPERATIONS: Many Things suddenly started Happening last night, right in the middle of me trying to dig my way out of all the things I’m behind on. Every time I walked away from my phone for five or ten minutes yesterday, I’d come back to another half-dozen notifications. And I still have to do Sunday’s newsletter.
STATUS: I have had to put the Apple Watch back on, which displeases me but lots of Things have suddenly started Happening. Also had to fight a cat for access to my office today. Inbox 141 and climbing.
READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)

Empedocles himself claimed to have already been a bush, a bird, and ‘a mute fish in the sea’. But now, as a doctor, poet, seer, and leader of men, he had reached the highest rung in the cycle of incarnations—and could, just about, count himself among the immortal gods. In a story that is almost certainly false but too good not to tell, he killed himself by leaping into the flames of Mount Etna, either to prove that he was immortal or make people believe that he was.

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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18jan26

Published January 18, 2026 by Warren Ellis

One thing I love about January is that all the summer clothes are cheap. And, as my family frequently have been heard to observe, when it comes to spending money on myself, I am in fact very cheap. So I just bought a bunch of linen and summer weight denim clothes for very little. This is, of course, the equivalent of Groundhog Day in the US, in that it guarantees that winter will extend into June. But I just got notification of a royalty cheque from Marvel, so fuck it. If I’m very lucky, the clothes will even fit. Online shopping, right?

Newsletter went out this morning. Minimum Viable Newsletter, as all the things I’d planned to do with it blew up on me last week. Having to pivot barely three weeks into the new year is not ideal but what’re you going to do? Not that I’ve fully landed on the pivot yet. I’ve been writing newsletters since the 1990s, and never figured out how to turn them into a “business” or any kind of useful cultural pursuit. It’s weird for me to have so much inbox competition now – every fucker has a newsletter, or an email list as we once called it. People earn millions off newsletters now, and all I ever used them for was to say hello to people, tell them what I was doing and show them stuff I was interested in. I feel faintly stupid and obsolete these days. Let’s face it, I still write on a “blog” (which is actually just a searchable database for things I’ve read, listened to or brought into the house). May as well be knapping flint like Will Lord.

TODAY:

TELEMETRY:

STATUS: Apparently I’m losing the afternoon to helping to hang curtains somewhere and it’s all very confusing. I’m putting an analogue watch on today, which is how I signal to myself that I am offline for a while.
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: New Music Show

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 greenland

Published January 12, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Dennis Lehtohen’s villages of Greenland.

From April 2025:

American tech entrepreneurs have opened up talks with officials about placing research-oriented freedom cities on the island of Greenland, according to a report in Reuters.

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Last week, news website Reuters reported that at least three anonymized sources had claimed investors in America’s tech industry have been eyeing the island, owned by Denmark, as a site for new cities.

According to the reports, the communities would be freedom cities, established with minimal regulations to promote business.

Reuters reported that the “discussions are in early stages” but suggested that the plans are being “taken seriously” by the prospective US ambassador to Denmark, Ken Howery.

“The vision for Greenland, one of the people said, could include a hub for artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, space launches, micro nuclear reactors and high-speed rail,” reported Reuters.

February 2-8, 2025: 2 °C warming locked in, Greenland melt worsens, geoengineering hopes, Indian coal rates, wet bulb heat thresholds, global debt hits $323T, heavy metal pollution in China, UK Food Security report, 1M American kids with Long COVID, Swedish mass shooting, Philippines death threats against president, USAID closure, thousands killed in eastern DRC, hypernormalization…

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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10jan26

Published January 10, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Didn’t write anything at all here yesterday, because I was stuck in admin stuff and, honestly, I just haven’t gotten going yet this year. Disgusted with myself, I’ve decided that 2026 starts today.

TODAY:

  • GODZILLA MINUS ZERO is set for November of this year. I watched the black and white version of GODZILLA MINUS ONE and enjoyed it quite a bit. Although, given that I’m peculiar, I think I liked SHIN GODZILLA a little better.
  • AI is accelerating a “collapse” of trust online, which suggests someone noticed the horse had bolted a year too late.
  • Female-only wasp species has “an unusual reproductive strategy called thelytokous parthenogenesis, in which females lay unfertilized eggs that produce only more females. This means that even a single egg hitching a ride on firewood or a car can start a new infestation. No males have ever been found.”

OPERATIONS: right now, trying to land tomorrow’s newsletter, which hasn’t gone as planned, because see above about having blown the first ten days of the year.
STATUS: inbox is at 112 and it’s a mess I need to clean up this weekend.
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING:


LAST WATCHED: rewatching SMILEY’S PEOPLE on iPlayer

THINKING ABOUT: Roterfaden notebooks. I don’t need one. I still go and look once a week anyway.

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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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 13nov25

Published November 13, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Mark Elder conducts the London Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra in a sea-themed concert as part of the orchestra’s Harmony with Nature season. Sibelius’s powerful depiction of the ocean waves in his Oceanides is paired with Vaughan Williams’s mighty first symphony, the Sea Symphony with soloists Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha and David Stout.

After testing three different toys powered by AI, researchers from the US Public Interest Research Group found that the playthings can easily verge into risky conversational territory for children, including telling them where to find knives in a kitchen and how to start a fire with matches. One of the AI toys even engaged in explicit discussions, offering extensive advice on sex positions and fetishes.

COPENHAGEN, Nov 12 (Reuters) – Iceland has designated the potential collapse of a major Atlantic Ocean current system a national security concern and an existential threat, enabling its government to strategize for worst-case scenarios, the country’s climate minister told Reuters.

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telemetry 10nov25

Published November 10, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Thousands of songs representing some of the rarest and most uniquely American music borne from the Jazz Age and the Great Depression would have likely been lost to landfills and faded from memory. Fans and historians have long credited obsessive record collectors for preserving much of that music, and today they can thank a new partnership between UC Santa Barbara and the nonprofit Dust-to-Digital Foundation for making it available to the public for free. 

UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections has been uploading music from the foundation’s trove of approximately 50,000 songs to the university’s Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) database. So far, more than 5,000 songs from Dust-to-Digital have been added to DAHR, said David Seubert, curator of the library’s performing arts collection. “Thousands more are in the pipeline,” he noted.   

“The Dust-to-Digital Foundation has digitized some of the most significant private collections in the country,” Seubert added. “We are pleased to partner with them to make this rare content accessible.”

https://www.inclementweather.xyz

The school for inclement weather is a 365-acre refuge and radical observatory set on the banks of an atmospheric river, just above the thermal belt in Kashia Pomo territory in Northern California.

We practice disaster companionship – systems of knowledge and care that emerge from weathering the earth (and each other) amidst planetary demise. Our work asks: as the earth mutates, how must we mutate in return? 

A weirdly sparkly cover of one of my favourite Xmas songs:

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morning computer fish church

Published November 10, 2025 by Warren Ellis

White Arkitekter restores Gothenburg’s fish church.

A new collagen fingerprinting tool can help scientists identify species from archaeological bone fragments. Pacific islanders of the late Stone Age, also known as the Neolithic period, were master fishers. Archaeological evidence indicates that these groups caught fish both inshore as well as in open waters.

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Now, researchers have found a way to shed light on the types of fish they feasted on and the advanced fishing techniques used to capture them. The new Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) tool can detect the unique chemical fingerprint hidden within collagen, a structural protein that makes up most of bone mass.

The researchers tested 131 archaeological bones and accurately identified three tuna and five shark varieties

Antarctic fish have built a sprawling neighborhood of neatly arranged nests in the Weddell Sea — a surprising display of organization in some of the coldest waters on Earth. The discovery suggests that these fish strategically group their nests to better protect their eggs from predators, adding to evidence that the Weddell Sea harbors complex, vulnerable ecosystems worth preserving, researchers report October 29 in Frontiers.

The Milky Way galaxy is like a gigantic ocean gyre or eddy that spins and wobbles around its center.

But our home galaxy also has a colossal wave rippling through it, pulling and pushing an ocean of stars and cosmic dust in its wake, according to newly released images from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope.

The images show that this wave of motion emanates from the center of the Milky Way and takes up a large portion — a little less than half — of the galaxy’s entire body, which itself is warped in the outer edges. Looking at the galaxy in a vertical sideways view, you see that stars float above or below the disc’s dusty central body, as if they were fish bobbing up and down in a wave of water after a boat passes by.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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morning computer new words

Published March 31, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Tia Keobounpheng:

During the pandemic, Keobounpheng was helping her son during a distance-learning 4th-grade geometry class, and a particular phrase caught her attention. “Geo means earth, so geometry is just measuring the earth,” the teacher said.

“These words… changed my worldview and reminded me that underneath rigid linear laws, an entire foundation of forgotten circular consciousness exists,” the artist says. “Aside from the powerful conceptual connections I was able to draw from geometry as a visual language to understand and express a circular, expansive worldview, the physical motions of spinning the compass awakened something deep within me.”

Dezeen:

Master of Architecture students are pioneering paludiculture, using reed fibres, eggshells and textile waste to develop sustainable building materials and redefine architecture’s role in tackling climate change.

Paludiculure was a new word to me.

I learned the word taphonomy from a forensic scientist friend last week.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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morning computer ruin value

Published March 27, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Mandy Barker’s cyanotypes of junk found in water.

Brutalist-style hilltop home intended to look like an ancient ruin.

(Which really just summons Albert Speer and “ruin value” to my mind, oops)

A team of Egyptian-American archaeologists has uncovered the tomb of an unknown king who reigned over the region of Abydos in southern Egypt 3,600 years ago.

Luxury real estate goes off-grid. Ruins in waiting.

I used to ride the train past the Olympic stadium in Stratford quite often, and would frequently imagine it repurposed as a post-apocalyptic ritual space, a giant radio dish for praying to the space gods and a complicated gallows for mass executions.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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