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meander: 12mar26

Published March 12, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Dani Guindo.

Running late on a post here today because all the energy was with the prose serial thing I started on Tuesday. Always go where the energy is.

Had a couple of brief meanders through my RSS feed and etc, and there appears to be fuck all worth noting, so I will try again tomorrow.

OPERATIONS: produced around 2000 words of prose yesterday, have produced another 700 today and the first draft of that job is done. Have to pivot to a script and the newsletter. Full day.
STATUS: Inbox is at 132, mostly because last night I was writing prose in the mail app and sending it to myself for this morning, which is a TERRIBLE habit but sometimes things just come to me in fragments while I’m away from a notebook and those fragments can be fleeting.
READING: THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+)

LAST WATCHED: WAR MACHINE on Netflix

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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buds: 10mar26

Published March 10, 2026 by Warren Ellis

The cherry trees I transplanted the other week are coming into bud, which mean I didn’t kill them. Go me. You will also note some scat on the soil, because whenever I clear a garden bed, every cat and fox in the area considered that an invitation to shit all over it. This is actually very bad, as cat shit is toxic. So I have another job – scoop up the shit and surrounding soil, re-mulch it, put down a bunch of sharp sticks, and sow catnip at the back of the garden, away from the crop plants.

Li Hui

Seems awfully quiet out on the internet today, so I’m going to take it as a sign to wander off with my notebook.

OPERATIONS: deep in development
STATUS: trying to work out if I can buy myself three days of just working in the garden
READING: THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+)

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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deep down: 19feb26

Published February 19, 2026 by Warren Ellis

“Amphisbaena,” The Vatican Museum, Vatican City, Peter Li

So I got given these lovely A6 notebooks the other day:

Atoms To Astronauts make some gorgeous notebooks. However, they’re A6. Which means they don’t fit the Wanderings Passport notebook cover or the newestor Field Notes-sized cover, or the Field Notes-sized cover I’ve ordered from a maker on Etsy. So I had to order one of those randomly-generated-Chinese-company-name leather notebook covers in A6 (UK), because I got bought nine of these notebooks and I really want to get working in them.

That’s the third stage of the new notebook system, and I’ll write a separate post about that at some point. And when the other cover comes in from Etsy, that will be the fourth stage. Because I’ve decided that this year is all about going deep on working on paper and thinking on to paper.

TODAY:

Today I learned that Status Quo have their own beer.

Anyone for bagpipe metal?

I wanted to pre-order thar CD for herself, but Napalm Records’ shopping system is broken.

OPERATIONS: contracts processed, setting up another reprint project (fingers crossed), scripting and planning and printing off research notes to paste into one of the above notebooks
STATUS: wearing the field watch today. Email at a dreadful 154. Still not back at full power, but getting there.
READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)

Pythagoras had always been a paragon of humility, declining to be called a ‘wise man’ [sophos] and preferring instead to be called ‘a lover of wisdom’ [philosophos]—thereby coining the term ‘philosopher’.


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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melt: 7feb26

Published February 7, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Ragnar Axelsson

Day… 9? 10? 35? Of this appalling plague. Managed to summon the energy this morning to do the newsletter, and that’s tapped me out.

TODAY:

You know what? That on its own has convinced me to turn the internet off, open a bottle of Fraoch and read a book.

Accessions:

I read a sample of this last year, and yesterday I got a ping to tell me it was on sale. Fits right into winter reading.

THE GANG OF THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)

READING: THE ART OF WAR, Sun Tzu (UK) (US+)
LISTENING:

LAST WATCHED: lots and lots of news

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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18jan26

Published January 18, 2026 by Warren Ellis

One thing I love about January is that all the summer clothes are cheap. And, as my family frequently have been heard to observe, when it comes to spending money on myself, I am in fact very cheap. So I just bought a bunch of linen and summer weight denim clothes for very little. This is, of course, the equivalent of Groundhog Day in the US, in that it guarantees that winter will extend into June. But I just got notification of a royalty cheque from Marvel, so fuck it. If I’m very lucky, the clothes will even fit. Online shopping, right?

Newsletter went out this morning. Minimum Viable Newsletter, as all the things I’d planned to do with it blew up on me last week. Having to pivot barely three weeks into the new year is not ideal but what’re you going to do? Not that I’ve fully landed on the pivot yet. I’ve been writing newsletters since the 1990s, and never figured out how to turn them into a “business” or any kind of useful cultural pursuit. It’s weird for me to have so much inbox competition now – every fucker has a newsletter, or an email list as we once called it. People earn millions off newsletters now, and all I ever used them for was to say hello to people, tell them what I was doing and show them stuff I was interested in. I feel faintly stupid and obsolete these days. Let’s face it, I still write on a “blog” (which is actually just a searchable database for things I’ve read, listened to or brought into the house). May as well be knapping flint like Will Lord.

TODAY:

TELEMETRY:

STATUS: Apparently I’m losing the afternoon to helping to hang curtains somewhere and it’s all very confusing. I’m putting an analogue watch on today, which is how I signal to myself that I am offline for a while.
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: New Music Show

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 greenland

Published January 12, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Dennis Lehtohen’s villages of Greenland.

From April 2025:

American tech entrepreneurs have opened up talks with officials about placing research-oriented freedom cities on the island of Greenland, according to a report in Reuters.

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Last week, news website Reuters reported that at least three anonymized sources had claimed investors in America’s tech industry have been eyeing the island, owned by Denmark, as a site for new cities.

According to the reports, the communities would be freedom cities, established with minimal regulations to promote business.

Reuters reported that the “discussions are in early stages” but suggested that the plans are being “taken seriously” by the prospective US ambassador to Denmark, Ken Howery.

“The vision for Greenland, one of the people said, could include a hub for artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, space launches, micro nuclear reactors and high-speed rail,” reported Reuters.

February 2-8, 2025: 2 °C warming locked in, Greenland melt worsens, geoengineering hopes, Indian coal rates, wet bulb heat thresholds, global debt hits $323T, heavy metal pollution in China, UK Food Security report, 1M American kids with Long COVID, Swedish mass shooting, Philippines death threats against president, USAID closure, thousands killed in eastern DRC, hypernormalization…

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

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

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morning computer sunfall

Published November 17, 2025 by Warren Ellis

After six momentous leaps from a small aircraft, skydiver Gabriel C. Brown completed his mission. Brown is friends with astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy and now, also one of his collaborators. Together, the pair created a stunning image that shows the adventurous subject falling in front of the sun.

How to Brew Solar Powered Coffee

This guide explains how to construct an energy-efficient coffee maker powered by a small solar panel.

Google’s new “Project Suncatcher” aims to launch Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) into space, creating a solar-powered, satellite-based AI network capable of scaling machine learning beyond Earth’s limits. Google says a “solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on earth” for near-continuous power using a “dawn-dusk sun-synchronous low earth orbit” that reduces the need for batteries and other power generation.

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

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

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morning computer lichen

Published November 5, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Jason McCombe, “Lichen Mantis”

That bungalow was where I first read Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place—a chorus of a novel about a small town in New England called Varennes. It features the voices of all kinds of creatures that live there: humans, yes, but also cats and dogs, beavers and moose, even lichen. You could call it ecofiction if you like the sound of that word, but I do not, so I will call it visionary, which is how I would describe pretty much everything that Kathryn Davis has written.

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

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

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