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Tag: newsletters

vday: 14feb26

Published February 14, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Today I was gifted a new lapboard so I can work downstairs in the living room more effectively in the evenings. I gave in return a box of raspberry, rose and hibiscus tea from Fortnum’s and a fancy high-end citrus press.

TODAY:

Yeah, I’m reading a lot of politics news, but politics news is pretty much all the news there is right now.

John Coulthart’s { feuilleton } blog is now twenty years old.

Recent suggestions that we can improve the internet by a return to blogging strike me as unrealistic. This is an unusual form of activity, one best suited to writers (or to those who enjoy writing), to creative types rather than mere diarists, and to people who don’t suffer inordinately when they throw something into a public arena then receive little or no feedback as a result. Starting something like this today without being part of a connected community like Substack would require resilience to cope with the isolation. And yet… The blogging format still provides opportunities that can’t easily be satisfied elsewhere. 

I’m with him there. You can click through on this post’s title, scroll to the bottom and get the daily posts here as an email. But ultimately this space is for me to make notes and think in, in a space I control, thanks to WordPress.

Vaguely related, Emily Sundberg:

The problem I’m running into recently on Substack is that I’m seeing a lot of monotony in the types of writing and formatting of newsletters, and very little user innovation (I haven’t decided if this is on the users or the platform). Subscription creator monetization and parasocial relationships seem pretty intertwined to me — I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the worst case scenarios of some of the relationships that have been bred here. I hit a wall yesterday afternoon, and was overwhelmed by a feeling that was similar to how I felt when I hit publish on this essay in 2024.

OPERATIONS: I have a contract to peer at and a script to finish.
STATUS: day 186 of the plague
READING: THE QUEEN’S AGENT: FRANCIS WALSINGHAM AT THE COURT OF ELIZABETH I (UK) (US+)

A magistrate from Kent known as ‘Justice Nine-Holes’ bored through the restored wooden rood-loft so he could spy on the people of his parish.


LISTENING:


LAST WATCHED: I started HAMNET, rewatched half of THE FRENCH DISPATCH

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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reaching into fog: 13feb26

Published February 13, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Emi Mizukami

Yesterday I wrote my newsletter and then the Beehiiv editor deleted half of it, never to be seen again, which will teach me to write directly into a web page. Everything is so fucking broken these days that even writing into a web-based word processor is like reaching into fog and fooling yourself that there’s something solid in there.

I’m not on Bluesky, I glance at X once in a blue moon, I never bothered with Threads and I can go days without even thinking about IG, but this piece by Sean Bonner made me wonder what the hell is going on out there in the fog:

…a lot of conversations on BlueSky are still about how they aren’t using X. This is a pretty common thing in the beginning of any social site, but I admit I was surprised that this far long that’s still such a common theme there. And it isn’t just X, but posting about not using a whole collection of other apps and services, and also guilting/shaming others for using any of those apps and services. People are even making block lists (more on that next) of people who use other services.

Yesterday evening I made blood orange mimosas.

TODAY:

We are living in a time of great change and great boredom and at the intersection of chaotic change and mind-numbing boredom lies insanity.

I really need to get around to buying a full subscription to 8ball one of these days.

I got given a digital copy of this and am looking forward immensely:

OPERATIONS: really need to crack a broken ten-page section of script today
STATUS: 💀💀💀
READING: THE QUEEN’S AGENT: FRANCIS WALSINGHAM AT THE COURT OF ELIZABETH I (UK) (US+)
LISTENING:


THINKING ABOUT: adding to the notebook system. Also the systems novel.

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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same river: 11feb26

Published February 11, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Sorin Neamtu

Still sick. Still raining. Both conditions seem permanent.

TODAY:

Accessions:

Picked up a sample of this last year, it was on sale yesterday.

UNIT X: HOW THE PENTAGON AND SILICON VALLEY ARE TRANSFORMING THE FUTURE OF WAR, Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff (UK) (US+)

STATUS: deth
READING: A FIELD GUIDE TO REALITY, Joanna Kavenna (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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1feb26

Published February 1, 2026 by Warren Ellis

I caught the mange that’s been circulating through the town. I am currently useless and will continue to be useless for a few more days.

New newsletter is out, includes notes on ai lobsters

TODAY:

Fashion writer/editor Tish Weinstock‘s newsletter is a riot.

There’s nothing like landing in LA to make you realise you’re definitely not as hot as you thought you were. In London, I rarely leave the house unless I’m going to dinner. i.e.under the cloak of darkness and wearing copious amounts of slap. And if, by some freak chance, I am out during the day, I won’t be travelling by foot, which means I’ll never be caught en plein air. But even if I was, because it’s so grey and depressing outside, I find that my wrinkles, bags and jowls tend to be miraculously, mercifully obscured. Well, not in LA, they’re not. Bathed in the golden light of the Chateau Marmont, I was reminded how old I really was: 185.

THE MEDIEVAL DRONE SOCIETY by Laura Cannell arrived and has been on repeat.

OPERATIONS: I did manage to get a foreword written for someone. But, honestly, I’m looking at that grindcore piece and thinking that’s not the worst idea.
STATUS: all is plague
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: Ambient Daily 47 podcast
LAST WATCHED: BLOODSPORT. We rarely turn off a JCVD film in this house.

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 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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