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Tag: weird

content break: 23mar26

Published March 23, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Spring is surging out there in the world. A few little flashes of cold, then some rushes of warmth. I have some big pots and extra compost arriving over the next couple of days. Bot traffic is expected to exceed human traffic on the internet by 2027, and, frankly, I can already tell. I note that The Economist is now referring to the current mess in the Middle East as The Third Gulf War, a term that has a bit of a chill on it. A review of two dozen clinical trials suggests that the supposed magic fix for depression through use of psychedelics seems to be mostly down to the placebo effect. Freeze-dried elflord Bryan Johnson is livestreaming himself smoking toad pus. One study suggests that 20% of more than 14,000 books self-published through Amazon are mostly written by AI. However, something like 3.5 million books were self-published last year, and they obviously couldn’t all be checked by that study. When the net tells you to go back out into the world, you should probably listen.

OPERATIONS: One of those “touching eight different things” days
STATUS: Sleeping poorly. 7hrs 52m, stress marker of 72. I need to take this damned FitBit off again. Watching the exchange rate go up and down like a yoyo.
READING: THE VISIONARIES, Wolfram Eilenberger (UK) (US+), re-reading REALITY HUNGER, David Shields (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: The Early 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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brief: 4mar26

Published March 4, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Rupy C Tut

Headline of the day: 20 Camels Disqualified from Oman Beauty Contest for Botox Fillers and Plastic Surgery

Here’s an odd thing:

The Miniphone Ultra, or “mpu”, is essentially just a case for the Apple Watch Ultra (versions 1, 2 or 3) that turns it into a miniature, minimalist smartphone. “There’s a guy I’ve been talking to who bought [an mpu] a while back,” says Jelley. “He told me that he’s had his phone shut away in his desk for two weeks. Nowadays, that’s kind of wild.”

OPERATIONS: wiping a bunch of stuff off my boards today
READING: THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (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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telemetry 2jan26

Published January 2, 2026 by Warren Ellis

“Every Day Carry” is a lifestyle native to the 21st century. This hobby was directly named after “the everyday.” “Every Day Carry” concerns tools, toys and/or utensils which somebody, somehow, feels obliged to lug around on their own person. All the time. Every Day.

“Weird Everyday Carry” is a niche even more intriguing to me, because it combines my abiding interests in the oxymoronic, the everyday, and the weird. How weird is everyday weird? What are the limits to weirdness? How long has this weirdness been going on?

Sources are now telling Deadline that Netflix reportedly only wants to keep movies in theaters for 17 days after it buys Warner Bros, a move that would “steamroll the theatrical business.” Major circuits like AMC continue to insist the line must be held at roughly 45 days.

Ghana has decided to deal with the viral spread of prophetic content on social media by setting up an official reporting mechanism for sensitive predictions, a move triggered by the August 2025 helicopter crash that killed the country’s defence and environment ministers along with six others. After the accident, TikTok clips circulated showing pastors who claimed to have foreseen the disaster before it happened. Elvis Ankrah, the presidential envoy for inter-faith and ecumenical relations, now asks prophets to submit their predictions for review. Charismatic preacher-prophets have been a fixture of Ghanaian public life since Pentecostalism arrived in the 1980s, but social media has amplified their reach and made their claims increasingly outlandish. Police have threatened to arrest prophets who cannot prove their predictions eventually came true. Some two-thirds of Ghanaians favor giving divine intervention a role in politics. Ankrah recently declared that most prophecies submitted to him are “total bunk.”
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The Missing Time Travelers of 3025 Could Be a Real Scientific Problem

Published September 12, 2025 by Warren Ellis

The Missing Time Travelers of 3025 Could Be a Real Scientific Problem

“[The paper] shows that time travel—by enabling timeline alterations—induces a dynamic instability that—with very high probability—leads to its own erasure,” Jackson wrote. “This self-suppressing mechanism results in the asymptotic convergence of all timelines toward states in which no time machines ever exist.”

September 12, 2025 at 02:00PM

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marks for 18may25

Published May 18, 2025 by Warren Ellis

This is also where I do a search and find out Parfrey died nearly ten years ago. I knew nothing about him beyond having admired his book APOCALYPSE CULTURE back circa 1990. The article is a weird read.

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EERIE ESSEX: Eerie Essexentrics

Published March 2, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Essex is a county full of colourful characters, and we have a fine selection of eccentric folk to share with you this month…

Lifelong Essex man here.

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WAR FOR ETERNITY, Benjamin Teitelbaum

Published January 14, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Benjamin Teitelbaum is an ethnomusicologist who got interested in the rise of the nationalist far right. This connection probably makes more sense if you’re European: Oi, turbofolk, National Socialist Black Metal etc. As he gained direct expertise in the scene, he started to see something from his deep reading show up in the world:

By Traditionalism—with a capital T—we were referring to an underground philosophical and spiritual school with an eclectic if minuscule following throughout the past hundred years.


Amid startling political gains for nationalist, anti-immigrant forces in the twenty-first century, Traditionalists on the right appeared to be carrying on with a fantasy role-playing game—like Dungeons & Dragons for racists, as a student once put it.

And Traditionalism connects Steve Bannon, the Russian philosopher/Putin-influencer Aleksandr Dugin, and the Brasilian ideologue Olavo de Carvalho. Which strongly suggests this weird and obscure “philosophy” has underpinned a lot of the strange shit of the last ten years.

I have 55 highlighted text pieces off this book. It’s an absolutely thrilling ride into crazytown. Dugin once had what was essentially a small private army who wore chaospheres as their insignia! Mike Moorcock invented that!

The book is wonderfully readable, a real-life conspiracy-theory rabbithole dive, connections made and explored and explained like the best weird thrillers, digging up stuff I’d never heard of or only encountered at its edges and brought out into bright light.

It’s interesting, too, how Teitelbaum can clearly question and abhor the ideologies present here and also empathise with, and sometimes quite enjoy, the humans. I think he quite likes Bannon, and I think Olavo charmed him a little. None of that gets in the way of Teitelbaum’s sight of the threats presented by these people. But also, there’s a sense of how small these people are. How they’re not as smart as they think they are. How fundamentally damaged some of them are. How they fail.

First book I read front-to-back this year and it was brilliant.

WAR FOR ETERNITY (UK) (US+)

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Society of the Psyop Part 1: UFOs and the Future of Media, Trevor Paglen

Published September 16, 2024 by Warren Ellis

This is really, really good.

I first met Richard Doty in 2022. I was anxious. I could feel my unease rising as his silver SUV pulled into the parking lot across from the makeshift film studio where I was working at the University of New Mexico.2 A paunchy man wearing a red polo shirt emerged. I wasn’t afraid of physical violence. Rick Doty wasn’t known for that. I was worried about my own sanity. Doty was known for that.3

Doty conducted elaborate psyop programs for the US Air Force in the 1970s and ’80s. One of his targets, a defense contractor, was so consumed by paranoia after being subjected to Doty’s craft that he was committed to a mental institution. There was also a well-respected journalist who, after enduring one of Doty’s psychological operations, spent the remainder of her career babbling about reptoids, cover-ups, and ancient alien conspiracies. A third target, a former UFO investigator who collaborated with Doty, publicly confessed to participating in a military disinformation campaign and retreated into self-imposed obscurity. We would be spending the next two days together. It turned out that I liked the guy.

I had sought out Doty because I wanted to learn about the particular form of media-making he practiced to such dramatic effect. My intuition was that Doty’s career as a cultural producer could shed some light on what media might be like in an age of recommendation algorithms, personalized news feeds, information bubbles, and generative AI.

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US once considered program to reverse-engineer alien spacecraft, Pentagon report reveals – POLITICO

Published March 8, 2024 by Warren Ellis

US once considered program to reverse-engineer alien spacecraft, Pentagon report reveals – POLITICO

“…DOD’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office did discover a program that was proposed to the Department of Homeland Security in the 2010s, code-named “Kona Blue,” to reverse-engineer any recovered extraterrestrial craft. The effort was eventually rejected by DHS leaders “for lacking merit,” and never actually recovered any other-worldly craft, according to the report.”

March 08, 2024 at 04:51PM

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