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status 15jun26

Published June 15, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Yesterday, as is tradition, I gave herself the first ripe raspberry of summer. Today, we were out in the garden in the rain with a bowl collecting raspberries and redcurrants.

I had a whole plan to Go Outside today, but the weather has not cooperated, so I’m indoors going through my Bandcamp queue and probably buying too many records again.

On Friday, we went to see The Cobras in Harlow, because we know the bassist, and on Saturday I went to the final Konsztrukting Soundz of the season. Konsztrukting Sounds is a monthly experimental music night, and it’s become the highlight of my month – I’m going to miss it over the summer. They’re running a crowdfunder to support the upcoming third season of the event right now.

Julian Simpson connecting his various audio fiction and prose fiction “universes” into a single space and brand made me sit into space and think for a while. At the same time, a musician acquaintance has been sharing with me the video album she’s making to support her new music project (shooting them with an old comics acquaintance of mine, it turns out), and that’s been making my brain churn too. Social media is a dead zone but the wider internet is still a possibility space.

TODAY:

Just arrived, the new issue of NORTHERN EARTH:

OPERATIONS: consulting job needs to be wrapped by Friday, but this week I also need to get a big chunk of the novella down, and I had an idea Saturday night for a short story that I absolutely want to get landed in first draft this week, so this week is going to get a bit crunchy.
STATUS: was intending to go out this morning, but it’s cold and wet again. I also need to clear this laptop off in prep for the new one that should be arriving some time in the next week – this one is still working, so long as I don’t try to do too much on it at once. Software repair processes helped it a little, but the chipset is clearly failing. Very sad.
READING: HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT, Olga Tokarczuk (UK) (US+)

I don’t know why I have stored this kind of detail while forgetting the rest of the story. It must have made some sort of sense – it was a story, after all, with a beginning and an end – but I remember nothing but the pips, which my memory, quite rightly, has had to spit out later on.


LISTENING: Harju sent me their new record and it’s amazing:


LAST WATCHED: MOCK THE WEEK summer specials
DRINK: Cafe de Parisienne liqueur, for an affogato with double chocolate ice cream I made

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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taste

Published June 3, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Marisa Aragón Ware.

All year I’ve been reading about taste. Someone somewhere identified that one of the things AI can’t do is “taste.” Now it seems a certain part of the world can’t stop talking about taste, and much of it is trying to define taste, presumably to boil it down into a useful prompt.

This is a bit of a shift from the prevailing notion of “you’re allowed to like stuff,” which turned into “can’t we just let people enjoy things,” which quickly warped into “you have to like everything or you are a monster.” Especially if lots of other people seem to like it, which is one reason why the mainstream culture is so completely flat right now. Taste was demonised by poptimists who defined themselves as victims of those with taste.

And now everyone’s turned around and gone, oh shit, the robots can create everything I said I liked and I’m a slop-eater. There is no status or cultural cache in that. People are freaking the fuck out. They’re trying to find out what taste even is.

Tastemakers have discernment. They know they don’t have to and aren’t supposed to like everything, and they immediately distrust anything so flat and edgeless that it screams of being designed to be liked by the largest number of people. They have knowledge and powers of recognition, they have context and they own their idiosyncrasies. They don’t like what other people like, because they have taste and other people don’t. Other people sit on the kerb of a street in a town that isn’t pretty enough for Instagram influencers, their skin aged prematurely by their phone screens and the digital billboards all around them, googling for peptides to restore the collagen their own phones are evaporating out of their faces and being told by the Google AI summary that tobacco reduces skin cancer. Goldfish with tits of congealed microplastic fuck in the black water sludging its way down the gutter. A “celebrity,” which they understand to mean “someone who is on a screen somewhere for a period of time longer than fifteen seconds,” appears on the nearest digital billboard. Its teeth are white. Taylor Swift white, Rylan white, bone-white, skull-white, nothing-white. The alien teeth seem to swell on the screen, as an inhuman voice drones from the frame about low-cost funerals to the musical accompaniment of something Spotify has inserted into eight million playlists this year. They know the song intimately but they don’t know what it’s called or have any context about it beyond the fact that it must be popular because all the machines make them listen to it over and over again. The teeth seem to invert and bend, twisting inwards to become the event horizon of a black hole that emits only the elongated howling word ddddeattttthhh in an utterance that sounds eerily like Pedro Pascal’s because he had a spare three minutes to ensure he was literally fucking everywhere. They run from the town into the countryside, because “people” on X have told them to “touch grass.” But the grass bends away from their feet, because even vegetal microintelligences can tell when something approaches that is essentially Wrong and no longer of this world. They fall to their knees and whisper for mercy to a seedling in the undergrowth, as an AI gardening podcaster had once told them to talk to plants. But the seedling blackens and crumbles under their graveyard breath. They crawl through the undergrowth to the shore, and look at the water, but they do not know how to feel about the water because no mathematics has told them how to feel about it, for they are basically just a meat coffin containing a low-voltage ghost that knows nothing and feels nothing beyond a faint, fearful urge to spend money on tokens to feed huge calculators that might tell them what to like. In the weeks and months to come, even the carrion eaters reject the corpse by the shore, instinctively recognising that its grey fibres contain no nutrition. Because they have taste.

TODAY

TELEMETRY:

OPERATIONS: got a pitch off the desk yesterday, got some prose down, but not enough of anything else. Wiped down the boards, expired some hanging projects
STATUS: the curse of putting the winter clothes away: woke up to a rainy 13C day, so I’m in a grey waffle-knit henley and a grey Wrangler snap-front. A lightless day.

Swatch Metropolis.


READING: THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: AJ Brady warned me weeks ago that a new Boards Of Canada was coming, and I’m only just now giving it a listen.

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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wavy

Published June 2, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Craig Hubbard.

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

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.

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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21apr26

Published April 21, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Trifid Nebula.

Anduril, Palantir and SpaceX are changing how America wages war.

the Trump administration is turning to a new clique of defence upstarts that are reimagining how to wage war. They are led by Palantir, a software giant providing intelligence systems; SpaceX, whose Starshield satellite network provides reconnaissance and connectivity; and Anduril, an up-and-coming favourite that makes air and sea drones alongside anti-drone weaponry. This trio of so-called “neo-primes” have close ties with gung-ho figures in the Trump administration. And they are making the giants of the military-industrial complex increasingly nervous.

America’s legacy “prime” contractors have, in the government’s telling, grown stodgy, overpriced and risk-averse as a result of their lucrative sinecures. “If the [newcomers] are good and they get their sea legs, they’re going to win some of that business that otherwise would have gone through a traditional prime,” Mr Michael says.

n case you haven’t gotten around to reading Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska’s 2025 book, The Technological Republic, (because why would you do that to yourself?), the company best known for supplying AI-driven defense and surveillance software to the likes of the US Army, ICE and NYPD shared a 1,000-word X post this weekend covering its main points. The entire thing is both bizarre and deeply concerning. “The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal,” one of the 22 points states. “It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.”

The book is billed as “a passionate call for the West to wake up to our new reality,” and other excerpts in the social media post include assertions such as: “Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public”; “National service should be a universal duty”; “The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone”; and “Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive.”

The Oxyrhynchus Archaeological Mission, run by the Institute of Ancient Near East Studies (IPOA) at the University of Barcelona and led by Maite Mascort and Esther Pons, has identified a papyrus containing a fragment of Homer’s “Iliad” inside a Roman-era tomb dating to approximately 1,600 years ago, in the Egyptian town of Al Bahnasa, ancient Oxyrhynchus. The discovery is exceptional: it is the first time in the history of archaeology that a Greek literary text has been found deliberately incorporated into the mummification process

Link to shop. May have to get myself one of these.

My colleagues’ takes are often quite diverse, but this year a chorus has emerged — of strategists proclaiming 2026 to be the year of nostalgia. Wired headphones, workwear (back, so soon), medievalcore, landlines for kids, #90s TikTok. Reading this year’s reports, I find myself agreeing with the observations — nostalgia is big right now, and there’s an opportunity for brands to tap into it. 

But I also see nostalgia not just as a passing 2026 trend but a full-scale, post-digital revival — one that’s been a long time coming and will last beyond the end of the year.

OPERATIONS: aiming for another ten pages, plus other stuff
STATUS: incoming, new plants for the local wildlife to destroy before I can get them in the ground
READING: THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN, Giuliano da Empoli (UK) (US+)
LAST WATCHED: rewatched several episodes of TWIN PEAKS Season 3.

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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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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i left my soul in bed: 10feb26

Published February 10, 2026 by Warren Ellis

From a new Leonora Carrington retrospective.

Getting out of bed apparently used up all the calories I had remaining in my body.

David Lynch’s estate is now eBaying some of his items.

Solar flare:

New AAASMR music radio show from Angela Winter:

TODAY:

OPERATIONS: still zero energy, so today is for scriptment – that version of scripting where you just slap down dialogue and vague directions and then go back when you feel human to convert it up into full script.
STATUS: two steps from the boneyard
READING: A FIELD GUIDE TO REALITY, Joanna Kavenna (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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THE HOUR OF THE PREDATOR, Guiliano da Empoli

Published February 9, 2026 by Warren Ellis

The hour of the predator is essentially just a return to normality. The anomaly was the brief period during which we believed that we could curb the bloody quest for power with a system of rules.


Pair that shit with Mark Carney talking about the end of rules-based international order the other week.

I read this short, witty and fairly scary book over Xmas. It’s a series of pen-portraits of autocrats and global political entities – the opening section on how the United Nations doesn’t actually work at all is both funny and horrible, and feels particularly pointed this month.

da Empoli is a longtime political operator and writer who’s been around power a lot. He’s very good at pointing out how political theatre is reflected across history and across the world right now in ways we don’t always see.

A less common occurrence is for a head of state to appear dressed in an outfit of his own invention, made for him by Miss Universe’s stylist. Yet this is what happened when Nayib Bukele, the young president of El Salvador, appeared in an indigo tunic with golden floral motifs embroidered on the cuffs and collar, giving him a look midway between Simón Bolívar and a Star Wars character.


The details are great. In the round – especially paired with AUTOCRACY INC – it goes a good way towards contextualising our present moment. So impressed was I that I picked up another of his books right after.

THE HOUR OF THE PREDATOR (UK) (US)

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eaten by pigs: 9feb26

Published February 9, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Bruno Pontiroli

I started to feel a little better yesterday, managed to overextend myself by cleaning out the chicken coop and turning the compost bins, and then got mild food poisoning. I’m ready to lay down on the edge of the property and get eaten by pigs like in DEADWOOD.

I have remembered, for the first time in a week, to do my short stack: 2000mg liposomal nicotinamide riboside with TMG and Pterostilbene, Vit D3 and K2, 1 Floradix for insurance, taken with a bowl of blueberries, blackberries, almonds and honey.

TODAY:

  • How Japan’s prime minister will use her massive new mandate
  • SpaceX shifts focus from Mars to Moon, which seems from here to be about Musk working hard to realign himself with the White House. Also, since the US is all about the Moon in terms of space policy right now, the money is right there, and SpaceX has its eye on ramping to 10,000 launches per annum, largely in pursuit of lofting space-based AI compute. It’s also worth nothing that Japan have now started beaming space-based solar power back to earth via microwave.
  • PROJECT HAIL MARY trailer. People are saying it contains spoilers. It does not. A trailer for a buddy movie that introduces both buddies does not constitute a spoiler.

Bought myself a leather notebook cover that can contain up to six Field Notes notebooks, from InkitLeather here in the UK.

I also had my eye on the covers from Veyrona, but it looks like they might be winding down.

Additionally, I saw something unusual on MUJI, of all places: a Vietnamese variant on the French chore jacket, long-cut/fingertip-length, in a blend of denim and kapok, which I picked up in a medium grey with matching wide-leg trouser.

I’m wearing a new ribbed grey 100% cotton henley that I picked up for a song from a site that didn’t appear to know they were selling it, under a black Carharrt work shirt I’ve had for a dozen years and which seems to be indestructible, paired with a black Carharrt utility pant. I love workwear and I cannot lie. I fell back in love with clothes a few years back and am enjoying it a lot.

STATUS: siiick
READING: A FIELD GUIDE TO REALITY, Joanna Kavenna (UK) (US+) , M SON OF THE CENTURY, Antonio Scurati (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: Just discovered Duo Ruut via Night Tracks on Radio 4:


Had to hunt around a bit, but it is on CD.

About to switch on the Retro Nano and stream some podcasts from the phone: I deleted hundreds of episodes of stuff from the app that I know I will simply never get to.

LAST WATCHED: bit of Ibsen’s THE DOLL’S HOUSE on BBC 4.

THINKING ABOUT: continuing the shift away from devices to writing on paper for everything

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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