Tag: money

wavy

Published June 2, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Searching hard for my motivation today, because I am not particularly in my body or particularly with it. Not enough coffee in the world, everything is kind of wavy, and I really need to wipe down the boards and reset things. And also start backing things off this machine in prep for the arrival of the new one. But a musician has been sending me raws of her new music videos and maybe I’ll just sit and watch them for a while.

Received in post, a gift from the author as routed through my literary agent: A POCKETFUL OF HELLFIRE, Alan LaRue (UK) (US+)

Alan LaRue was a devoted reader of the Ken Socrates World News Organization when he was young. Like any fan, he read all the articles and books, he knew and adored the Gonzo journalism, the crazy adventures and the wild personalities. He was especially enamoured with Ken himself, the wildest and most Gonzo of them all. He had even written and sent in few fan letters full of glowing praise and insight only a truly dedicated follower would appreciate. The letters included his return address, and a joking offer of drinks on him, someday, should Ken ever find his way to Alan’s neck of the woods.

Then, after the sad collapse of the KSWNO, after its founder being missing, assumed dead for years, Ken showed up at Alan’s door, looking for those drinks, and his quiet life as a librarian and amateur pie baker was turned on its doughy little head. Humanity itself was under dire, imminent threat and, according to Ken, only they could save it.

TODAY

Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?
“Trump said something about an Israeli leader that no U.S. president has ever said publicly: Netanyahu “will do whatever I want him to do” on Iran.”
Google owner Alphabet to sell $80bn in stock to fund AI spending spree
(Ed Zitron rubbing one out as we speak)

TELEMETRY:

Here’s the weird flex of the day: the cover of Charli xcx’s new record MUSIC, FASHION, FILM is a simple shot of… John Cale, Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorcese. And an ashtray.

Scientists accidentally build broadly biblically accurate angel shaped robot that actually might as well be a giant virus

OPERATIONS: script and pitch
STATUS: The weather has turned cool and rainy, and the mancub is sad and needs comforting, as he’s been living in the garden ever since the top of the summer arrived. Or, as I have long suspected, he thinks I control the weather and he figures that if he’s nice to me I’ll bring the sun back.
READING: THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+) (hey, it’s a really long book)
LISTENING: “Vika Hidas,” Draamakuu:

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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only hover briefly: 8feb26

Published February 8, 2026 by Warren Ellis

^{Yasmine Anlan Huang}

Today I feel like I might have hit the midpoint of The Mange, as I feel a little stronger and clearer. Currently deleting some distraction apps and putting the AI devices in a drawer – the Bee can no longer access current information, it tells me, and the Rabbit can’t perform scheduled tasks without a reminder to perform them, which kind of defeats the purpose of scheduling tasks. Currently shopping for new notebook covers – I have a passport-sized Wanderings notebook cover and a newestor leather cover sized for Field Notes notebooks, of which I still have a ton from years of being on the Field Notes subscription service, and I have a feeling I need at least one more of the latter. Although this might also be the year I crack and get myself a Roterfaden. Scriptorium-monk mode!

Today’s newsletter went out at 10am UK time.

TODAY:

Why the dollar may have much further to fall. FFS
Scientists Intrigued by Possible Hollow Structures Under Surface of Venus.
VILPA, or vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity, or “the gym is bullshit now”

STATUS: it is time to blitz out my inbox, my RSS feed and my podcast queue. Having to clean-slate everything barely six weeks into the year is not where I thought I’d be.
READING: finished THE ART OF WAR, Sun Tzu (UK) (US+) last night. As previously noted, I tend to use winter to read the books I should have read/re-read years ago.
LISTENING: Oh my god, this. I discovered Barn Hoppit last night and this is extraordinary:

LAST WATCHED: FIRST BLOOD. There are, as far as I’m concerned, only two Rambo films: FIRST BLOOD and RAMBO.

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:

Former Bank of England analyst insists UK must plan for a financial crisis in the event that the US government announces the discovery of alien life: “UAP disclosure is likely to induce ontological shock and provoke psychological responses with material consequences … There might be extreme price volatility in financial markets due to catastrophising or euphoria, and a collapse in confidence if market participants feel uncertain on how to price assets using any of the familiar methods.”
Inventor building AI-powered suicide pod – playing with ChatGPT? Cut out the middle man and go straight to the chatbot death box.
Humans returned to the British Isles after the last Ice Age 500 years earlier than we thought, largely down to the balmy climate of southern England, where I live

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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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 1oct25

Published October 1, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Bloomberg Daybreak Europe: US Shutdown Begins As Stocks Drop & Gold Rallies On Funding Standoff
(i have a terrible habit of listening to podcasts with one earbud while playing music in the office)
Arrived: Vivolife Thrive raw cacao protein powder
12 Booker Prize 2025 nominees share their writing spots
Odd Lots: Tarek Mansour on Kalshi’s Plan to Create Markets in Everything (prediction matkets)
Sibelius’ Karelia Suite Intermezzo 1:

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CHOKEPOINTS, Edward Fishman

Published September 30, 2025 by Warren Ellis

CHOKEPOINTS by Edward Fishman was really bloody good. It’s the story of how the US began to develop and deploy economic weapons – identifying chokepoints in other countries’ economies and strangling them. They did it to Iran, for example, and it worked really well. Economic weapons were very powerful warfighting tools right up until Putin went all the way into Ukraine.

…the Russian government underestimated the severity of the sanctions it would face. And deterrence can’t work if your adversary underestimates your ability or willingness to act.

if it’s true that sanctions could never have deterred Putin, the West would have been better served by weakening Russia’s economy as much as possible before the invasion. The G7’s costliest error was to defer serious discussion of oil sanctions until after the war began, at which point it took nearly ten months to implement the price cap and the EU oil embargo.

And now we’re in a multipolar world again, deglobalising, and these weapons are going to stop working. The book is a wonderfully readable primer on economic weapons, where they came from, and where we’re heading now that they’ve been used.

We don’t yet know when the Age of Economic Warfare will end, but we can envision how. The trade-offs facing policymakers in Washington, Beijing, Brussels, and Moscow can be thought of as an impossible trinity consisting of economic interdependence, economic security, and geopolitical competition. Any two of these can coexist but not all three.

Don’t be put off by the list of acronyms in the front. I didn’t have to refer to it once, because Fishman takes pains all the way through to keep clarity and context. It is a really well written book, very readable, very well structured, very recommended.

CHOKEPOINTS, Edward Fishman (UK) (US+)

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