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Tag: film

fish weather: 15feb26

Published February 15, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Hieu Chau

It is pissing down outside and the garden, waterlogged by weeks of rain, is starting to flood. I still have to plant and re-plant dormant trees and am fast running out of time.

I decided to get the Substack app and poke around in it last night, and fuck me did I underestimate the number of newsletters out there right now. It seems to me to be roughly equivalent of those days when most people seemed to be on blogspot. I’m going to need to delete that app immediately, because I was reading on my phone for three or four hours.

And it was on one of those newsletters that I discovered that Maya Deren wrote a short book on filmmaking. And there’s a PDF linked at the bottom of that page.

OPERATIONS: finishing touches on a script, then rewrite the newsletter template
STATUS: rrrreally just want to curl up somewhere with a book for ten hours
READING: Picked up a sample of BLANK SPACE by W David Marx

Related:

If artists can only make art while standing in the middle of the town square, you’re going to get more boring art.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/book-review-blank-space

That feels flat-out brilliant.

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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It Stopped Raining Briefly: 4feb26

Published February 4, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Day 6 of the death plague. Not remotely at even half-power.

TODAY:

There’s a new Shackleton record. I thought he’d retired.

OPERATIONS: managed to get a script out yesterday, need to get 8pp out today, but I suspect the day will get in the way. Had to process some foreign right and film-related stuff last night and follow up on some production schedules.
STATUS: apparently I am going out for lunch, presumably so I can infect the outside world with The Death. I’ve ordered a case of beer as therapy.
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+) (this book is going on forever)
LISTENING: Monument Waves 008 : Atomic Moog (live) podcast

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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26jan26

Published January 26, 2026 by Warren Ellis

1236pm and I still haven’t eaten, so I have failed at the day already. Remarkably little of interest on the RSS today. The dollar continues to crash against the pound, and of course I have a payment in transit right now. I fully intended to go out for coffee this morning but it was cold and I had things to do early on – including trying to fix the fact that my newsletter header image is somehow vanishing in Beehiiv after years of working perfectly.

You ever have one of those days where you just know from the get that nothing is going to go well? Happy Monday.

TODAY:

  • A list of some of the current smart glasses options. I still wonder if glasses aren’t a dead end. In The Economist today, I read: “HSBC, a bank, estimates there are 15m users of smart glasses worldwide; Apple, which reports its latest quarterly earnings this week, is thought to have sold 250m iPhones last year alone.”
  • The film version of PROJECT HAIL MARY is going to be two hours and forty-six minutes long! I actually liked the book, but I’m going to be curious to see if Drew Goddard addressed the underlying autistic note in and the apparent asexuality of the protagonist.
  • And an IG carousel of bookshops in London, a few of which I know personally, some of which I’ve never heard off, so I’m off to look at websites:

OPERATIONS: scripts, foreword, prose series development, outline, newsletter template fixing, running out of month very very fast now
STATUS: made a venison goulash from scratch last night that turned out very well. Secret weapon:


READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING:


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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20jan26

Published January 20, 2026 by Warren Ellis

I found a weird little object online – a USB reader for floppy discs. I still have a few boxes of floppy discs from way back when that I didn’t throw out. There’s a fair chance they’re all as corrupted and rotted as shit now, but I picked up said weird little object and I’m going to see if any of those disks are recoverable. Chances are they have a lot of old Marvel, DC and Wildstorm stuff on, and while it’s not crucial to have copies of those old scripts, and they would be painful to look at, I feel like it would be kind of nice to possess them again. I’ve had so many hard drive and storage issues over the years, so many lost scripts and documents and emails, that I’ve gotten used to considering it all volatile and ephemeral and have learned not to be upset at losing things and to let go of things. To be able to recover just a handful of old pieces would have its pleasures.

In retrospect, I should have printed off literally everything and gotten filing cabinets and, I dunno, a full library system or a zettelkasten index or something, and stayed analogue. I have this memory of a bit in the old MAX HEADROOM show where Blank Reg tries to sell a cyberpunk kid a book on the grounds that it’s a “non-volatile storage medium.” Oh, bugger me, the clip’s on YouTube-

TODAY:

Accessions:

CUTS BOTH WAYS, Ed James (UK) (US+)

The 9th Rob Marshall book. I have a great fondness for these less than cosy Scottish crime novels. This one seems to be in the nature of a put pilot for a new series, so it’s probably not the one to start with.

OPERATIONS: script, foreword, prose series development, outline, newsletter
STATUS: what is this outside world you speak of
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: Night Tracks
LAST WATCHED: GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING

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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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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