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Tag: film

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 2jan26

Published January 2, 2026 by Warren Ellis

“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.”
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7dec25

Published December 7, 2025 by Warren Ellis

So I caught up on sleep. Sort of. Woke late, in any case. Put the Timex Expedition field watch on, because you want something solid and robust on your wrist when you’re having to break up a rotten pumpkin with a spade and shovel it into a compost bin.

The month is running away fast. Spent most of last night in the notebook and/or staring at the wall, figuring out the opening of a new project. During which I caught about twenty minutes of the oddest thing:

The Case of Marcel Duchamp is a 1984 British mystery film directed by David Rowan and starring Guy Rolfe, Raymond Francis, Harold Innocent and Juliet Hammond. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson come out of retirement to solve a final case concerning the artist Marcel Duchamp.

So thar’s in the queue to give a proper watch at some point.

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telemetry 17nov25

Published November 17, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Not sure if embeds for IG work yet!

Alice Diop colors in the blind spots of art history with this thoughtful short starring Kayije Kagame (Saint Omer). Countering clichés and absences in Black portraiture with the joys of real life, Fragments for Venus leaves behind Old Masters to widen the frame on where we find aesthetic pleasure.

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telemetry 16nov25

Published November 16, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Late Junction: Warped laments, serpentine hums

Verity Sharp presents another round of experimental listening taking in the unusual and exhilarating from around the globe. There’s chastening, contorted, laments from Peru’s Alejandra Cardenas (Ale Hop) as she delves into the trauma not only of her own life but that of her homeland – charting colonialism, cultural turbulence and addiction with a steely gaze. Plus an inquisitive and emotionally immediate return from Japanese experimenter Phew, paired this time with American multimedia artist Danielle de Picciotto, the duo melding their singular voices into sparse yet tense collages. Berlinde Deman meanwhile offers droning reflections on the Serpent, a unique wind instrument enhanced with effects pedals and her unique vocal stylings; and Will Glaser presents a bewildering collection of ‘Ethnographic Recordings From An Imagined Future’.

SS Rajamouli Announces “VARANASI,” a Globe-Trotting IMAX Adventure — Two 3-Hour Movies Set for 2027 Release

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telemetry 12nov25

Published November 12, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Beehiiv, who host my newsletter, is touting some transformative “winter release” for tomorrow, which I’m presuming will be some major pivot to enterprise that will simply make everything harder and less fun for someone who just wants to send a newsletter once a week.

Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Three,” which started shooting in July, has officially wrapped production. That’s four months of filming for the final chapter.

Though early reports had referred to the project as “Dune: Messiah”—a direct reference to Frank Herbert’s 1969 novel on which the film is based—Warner Bros. recently confirmed the film’s title would follow a more straightforward numerical approach. This further hints that Villeneuve could be tackling not just “Messiah,” but also parts of the third book, “Children of Dune.”

Much about Jordan Patterson’s music seems to follow a logical path. Listening to her songs, you likely wouldn’t be surprised to learn she was born in North Carolina and raised on Roberta Flack, or that she then traveled west to study at the L.A. County High School for the Arts (alumni: Phoebe Bridgers, Haim, and Sasami) and soon after discovered Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Ableton. Her warm, hand-held but slightly unsettled music is constitutive of all her influences.

What can’t be accounted for, however, is that voice, which seems to exist entirely outside any lineage or explanation. Her singing almost seems to propose a new paradigm: What if all of the stress were emphasized in the backend? What if the human lung were capable of taking its largest breath just as it reaches emptiness?

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telemetry 8nov25

Published November 8, 2025 by Warren Ellis

In a recent paper published in the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics, University of British Columbia Okanagan adjunct professor Mir Faizal and colleagues say they’ve proven that the fundamental nature of reality simply cannot be simulated on any computer.

By using mathematical theorems, they argued that some truths can only be understood through non-algorithmic understanding.

From ARMAGEDDON GOSPELS (2019)

We’re racing towards a future in which devices will be able to read our thoughts. 

You see signs of it everywhere, from brain-computer interfaces to algorithms that detect emotions from facial scans. And though the tech remains imperfect, it’s getting closer all the time: now a team of scientists say they’ve developed a model that can generate descriptions of what people’s brains are seeing by simply analyzing a scan of their brain activity.

They’re calling the technique “mind captioning,” and it may represent an effective way for transcribing what someone’s thinking, with impressively comprehensive and accurate results.

One from 2010 today:

Also, GOD DESTROYER, Osvor, 2011:

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telemetry 27oct25

Published October 27, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Unclassified: Resident Shadows

I caught Just Mustard on Jools Holland last night:

Just realised I have two issues of THE WIRE magazine and at least one TLS waiting to be read.4

https://newmodels.substack.com/p/nm-talkcore-kevin-munger-on-spiraling – what’s here is the “preview,” somehow I got the entire episode on my podcast app even though I don’t pay for the full New Models feed…?

If you rede­fine “thinking” to mean “arriving at a solu­tion through an iter­a­tive lin­guistic loop” … yes, that’s what these models do. That def­i­n­i­tion is pretty thin. We talk about humans thinking harder, which is not the same as thinking longer. I think most people know from expe­ri­ence that thinking longer gen­er­ally just makes you anxious. But that’s what the models do, and not only longer, but in parallel, all those step-by-step mono­logues spilling out simultaneously, some­where in the dark of a data center.

The modern smartphone, laden with the corporate ecosystem pulsing underneath its screen, robs us of this feeling, conspires to keep us from “true” fullness. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a bit of a day in the thralls of the algorithms.

“Dreams of the Past“, dir. Dmitri Frolov, 2022 (via)

Japan’s space agency successfully launched Sunday its most powerful flagship H3 rocket, carrying a newly developed unmanned cargo spacecraft for its first mission to deliver supplies to the International Space Station.

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