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Tag: history

ghost of a useful computer: 13mar26

Published March 13, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Leipzig, Germany-based artist Alexander Endrullat has traded traditional Intaglio printing plates for discarded laptops. His ongoing series titled Off the Grid emerged from a familiar yet annoying scenario: owning an older device that can no longer be updated, rendering it practically unusable. Endrullat’s frustration led him to a moment of impulsivity as he pushed his device through a printing press, coincidentally discovering the distinctive technique.

I’m fascinated by the Eleusinian Mysteries, and have followed for years various theories about what was in the drink that was consumed there. Ergot has often been floated as the active ingredient, but ergotism fucks people up and can easily be fatal:

The Eleusinian Mysteries were secret religious rites in ancient Greece honoring the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone, and aimed to remove the fear of death. The ceremonies included days of fasting, rituals and the drinking of kykeon, a concoction associated with profound mystical experiences.

While written records list ingredients such as barley, mint and water, some scholars have proposed that the potion also contained hallucinogenic substances derived from ergot (Claviceps purpurea). Now, scientists have new experimental evidence that priestesses may have used this highly toxic fungus to create psychedelic hallucinations.

Briefly opened IG and decided that’s a bad idea. If IG is a drug, it’s a crap one. Rediscovering following the brush to some extent. From the Kluge book I’m currently reading:

Commentaries are not linear narratives. They work vertically. They are mines, catacombs. The working form of commentary is closer to the idea of collecting than to that of shaping. Closer to the poetics of the Brothers Grimm than the dramatic or novelistic form. Putting this particular form of narration to the test excites me.

Not least respect for the principle of FRAGMENTATION, respect for the particular and for the individual (and its defence against the merely generally available), speaks for attempting something like this over and over. Observing our ‘torn reality’ grants permission to the incomplete message.

To keep up with the algorithmic behemoths of the Big Five in Silicon Valley, any modest means will do.

A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.

From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).

The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.

Accessions:

This has been sitting in my wishlist for a while, and last night I decided to pull the trigger, because sometimes you’re just in the mood for a great writer writing about writing.

WRITING, Marguerite Duras (UK) (US+)

OPERATIONS: across several things today
STATUS: Today’s watch is the Dan Henry, which is a strong signal that I’m going to be pretty disconnected
READING: THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: great episode of Night Tracks

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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Caves And Waves: 29jan26

Published January 29, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Paper flowers preserved in a sealed Chinese cave for a thousand years.

TODAY:

This is a tripwire crossbow. I discovered Will Lord some years ago, when he was on an episode of FIRST MAN OUT, and have been following his work ever since.

FIRST MAN OUT was a show where survival expert Ed Stafford would race against someone with similar skills through some inclement part of the world. The episodes would all follow a similar pattern – Stafford would almost kill himself to win, and his competitor would rock up to the finish line a short time later having had a nice time and usually arriving in some style. I have a memory of Will Lord’s episode featuring him basically whittling a hotel room and dining like a medieval king while Stafford nearly died a couple of times and crawled around in the dark eating ants.

STATUS: went out for a glass of wine and a quick stop at the shops yesterday so of course I have a slight cough and what feels like the beginning of a chest infection today
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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morning computer crowblack

Published November 24, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Vanessa Gillings.

To begin at the beginning: It is a spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.

UNDER MILK WOOD, Dylan Thomas

The Crow Canyon Petroglyphs, the American Southwest’s most extensive collection of Navajo rock art from the 16th through 18th centuries. Some represent corn, the most sacred plant in their creation story. According to myth, white corn emerged along with First Woman (Áłtsé asdzą́ą́ ) and yellow corn with First Man (Altsé hastiin)

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

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

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THE BLAZING WORLD: A NEW HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONARY ENGLAND, Jonathan Healey

Published November 19, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Another victim was William Prynne, a firebrand Puritan. Prynne was a pompous prude with a poisonous pen, among whose literary output was a broadside against men wearing long hair, entitled The Unloveliness of Lovelocks (1628). In 1634, his Histriomastix launched an extended tirade against the theatre world, containing an attack on women who acted in plays (index entry: ‘Woman actors, notorious whores’). This was taken as, and indeed probably was, another slingshot aimed at the queen, so Prynne won little sympathy as Star Chamber tossed him in prison and snipped off the top of his ears. It was said that Attorney General William Noy laughed so hard at the punishment that he bled from his penis.

This book, covering the Seventeenth Century in England – the Civil War, the apparent end of monarchy, the Interregnum and the republics, the Restoration and all – is huge, fascinating, and a lot more entertaining than you might expect.

Healey is extremely good at the earthy details – even the godly King James is recorded as saying ‘A turd for your argument!’ to an actual bishop. It livens up the narrative considerably, although Healey handles the extensive cast of players and the timeline very well.

It’s a broad book, by design a whistlestop tour of a mad century, all folk tradition and politics, having to cover a period that went from mobs to standing professional armies, but it all remains coherent and gets into the real technological and cultural shifts:

Perhaps most revolutionary of all was the new type of publication that appeared on the bookstalls of London in 1620. Published in Amsterdam by a Dutchman, it was a folio broadsheet, untitled, bearing news – in English – from the Continent. This was the first of the English ‘corantoes’: news serials.

It’s easy to think of this as a mannered and prudish era, given the Puritans and the strong religious structure of the times. Healy reminds us that it really wasn’t – and also that it was powerfully populist. A brilliant read.

THE BLAZING WORLD: A NEW HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONARY ENGLAND, Jomathan Healey (UK) (US+)

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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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telemetry 17oct25

Published October 17, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Le Jardin (S4E2)

Murayghat emerged after the decline of the so-called Chalcolithic culture (ca. 4500–3500 BCE), a period known for its domestic settlements, rich symbolic traditions, copper artifacts, and small cultic shrines.

Researchers believe that climate shifts and social disruptions may have led to the collapse of the culture, and in response, Early Bronze Age groups began creating new forms of ritual expression.

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HERESY: JESUS CHRIST AND THE OTHER SONS OF GOD, Catherine Nixey

Published October 17, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Even when Jesus was small, the villagers realized there was something unusual about him. Perhaps it was because he showed a certain confidence – bordering on arrogance – in the way he spoke to adults. Or perhaps it was due to the way his parents, Mary and Joseph, treated him: with a respect that at times seemed to verge on anxiety. Or perhaps it was because he killed people.

Jesus was passing through his village when another small boy ran past and bumped him on the shoulder. It may have been an accident; it may not. Either way, Jesus was once again angered and uttered an ominously oblique curse. ‘You shall not go further on your way.’ His meaning became clear a moment later: the little boy fell down dead. These are the words of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

This is the story of very early Christianity, the things it took from to build itself, and the various versions of it that circulated back then. It’s an eye-opener.

…one ancient telling of the Nativity includes a Mary whose vagina can, and at one point does, roast human flesh. The text that contains this tale is in many ways very beautiful. At the moment of the birth of Jesus, the world quite literally stops turning: birds are stilled in mid-air; a shepherd who has raised his arm to strike his sheep becomes frozen, arm aloft; even the stars pause their nightly procession across the sky. Then, shortly after the birth of Jesus, a woman arrives at the familiar Nativity scene, with its ox and its ass, and – in a slightly less familiar twist to this story – inserts her hand into Mary’s vagina to test whether she really is a virgin. The woman’s hand is immediately burned off. ‘Woe,’ says the woman, as well she might.

And it’s that gospel from which we get the ox and the ass present at the Nativity. The gospels, odes and acts that didn’t make it into what we now know as the New Testament are really weird.

I’ve had this in the pile for a while, but, what with the recent missed Rapture and Peter Thiel apparently preaching about the Antichrist in a four-day closed conference the other week, I thought perhaps it was time I picked it up. Christianity had a long and strange journey, its story has been heavily edited over the millennia, and this is a book of what was left on the cutting-room floor.

As Robert Bellarmine, a sixteenth-century cardinal, Jesuit and inquisitor, put it, ‘I myself hardly ever read a book without feeling in the mood to give it a good censoring.’

Nixey is a terrific writer – I started reading her THE DARKENNG AGE years ago, but, honestly, it was so fucking sad I had to put it down again. This is a slightly less harrowing read, a little funnier (if darkly), and endlessly fascinating. Very recommended.

Also, this:

This, then, is a book about heresy and about how beliefs and ideas are violently silenced. But it is also about the ways in which people silence themselves. It is about the far more insidious ways in which things become first unwritable, then unsayable and finally unthinkable.

HERESY: JESUS CHRIST AND THE OTHER SONS OF GOD, Catherine Nixey (UK) (US+)

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morning computer ghost fires

Published October 8, 2025 by Warren Ellis

“Ghost Fires,” Hayv Kahraman.

Ghost shark has teeth on forehead

  • The Dash was a privateer schooner that vanished in 1815 and soon entered local legend as a ghost ship.
  • For over two centuries, eerie sightings of the Dash have tied it to omens of death and supernatural lore.
  • By blending history, poetry, and folklore, the ship’s story has become one of New England’s most enduring maritime hauntings.

    • Here’s a “Dr. Strangelove”-sounding idea: drop three consecutive nuclear missiles on the same target.

    The Chinese military simulated this shock and awe scenario in a miniaturized lab experiment in order to see what kind of damage would happen, according to the South China Morning Post, and published their findings earlier this month in the science journal, Explosion and Shock Waves.

    They found that striking a target with multiple nuclear munitions in rapid succession leaves a bigger crater and causes way more destruction than a single detonation — duh — but the scientists claim that the research is relevant because it’s the first laboratory test to accurately simulate the damage from such a brutal attack.

    But the true value from this test is probably that the military could glean data from the paper to build better bunkers that could withstand such an apocalyptic situation — a matter that’s on everybody’s mind as China and the United States size up each other’s weapons arsenal amid rising geopolitical tension.

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

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

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    7oct25

    Published October 7, 2025 by Warren Ellis

    TODAY:

    OPERATIONS: Yesterday was something of a fail on several levels. I have to really dig in today, and will be mostly offline.
    STATUS: Inbox 95 trash fire, seven and a half hours sleep
    READING: THE BLAZING WORLD: A NEW HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONARY ENGLAND, Jomathan Healey (UK) (US+)
    LISTENING: Bloomberg Daybreak Europe

    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 16sep25

    Published September 16, 2025 by Warren Ellis

    New Music Show:

    Tom Service presents a live set from the Polish sound artist and composer Anna Zaradny, recorded at at this year’s Eavesdropping festival at Cafe Oto in London. We’ll also hear the London Sinfonietta with a modern classic by Salvatore Sciarrino, his ghostly, shimmering …da una Divertimento, from 1970; and GBSR Duo perform Tim Parkinson’s Project 9000 for piano, percussion and backing track, described by the composer as “a sunset that’s been photographed, laminated and pinned on the wall of a disused office”.

    Cult Pens sent out an email to tell everyone it’s 100 days to Xmas and I almost unsubscribed.

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