Skip to content →

Tag: working

telemetry 27oct25

Published October 27, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Unclassified: Resident Shadows

I caught Just Mustard on Jools Holland last night:

Just realised I have two issues of THE WIRE magazine and at least one TLS waiting to be read.4

https://newmodels.substack.com/p/nm-talkcore-kevin-munger-on-spiraling – what’s here is the “preview,” somehow I got the entire episode on my podcast app even though I don’t pay for the full New Models feed…?

If you rede­fine “thinking” to mean “arriving at a solu­tion through an iter­a­tive lin­guistic loop” … yes, that’s what these models do. That def­i­n­i­tion is pretty thin. We talk about humans thinking harder, which is not the same as thinking longer. I think most people know from expe­ri­ence that thinking longer gen­er­ally just makes you anxious. But that’s what the models do, and not only longer, but in parallel, all those step-by-step mono­logues spilling out simultaneously, some­where in the dark of a data center.

The modern smartphone, laden with the corporate ecosystem pulsing underneath its screen, robs us of this feeling, conspires to keep us from “true” fullness. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a bit of a day in the thralls of the algorithms.

“Dreams of the Past“, dir. Dmitri Frolov, 2022 (via)

Japan’s space agency successfully launched Sunday its most powerful flagship H3 rocket, carrying a newly developed unmanned cargo spacecraft for its first mission to deliver supplies to the International Space Station.

Comments closed

NINE BELLS cobwebbed space

Published October 1, 2025 by Warren Ellis

I’m assembling a little idea space I want to do some work in. For other people, I suppose this is like moodboarding – and I always encourage artists to show me their moodboards for the areas they’re currently interested in. For me, it’s a bit more messy and cobwebby. It’s what I want to talk about and how I want to talk about it. There’s no method, protocol, routine or discipline beyond making myself sit with an open notebook and thinking into it. Which also involves searching my memory. Sorting through the calamitous disarray of drawers and cupboards in my head for bits of films and half-remembered lines and barely recalled posters and graphics. It is the opposite of a memory palace. Not at all a wunderkammer. Anyone who’s seen my actual physical office will get the idea. Weirdly, I discover things better when they’re all over the place. And I accumulate a hundred new things into the piles every day, and covet more.

Is it weird that I want a case of mp3 players like Karl Lagerfeld? It is, right?

Comments closed

telemetry 1oct25

Published October 1, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Comments closed

morning computer space brains

Published September 29, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Millo and Seth Globepainter.

“The key is to understand how my body works and work with it, not against,” she explains. “I know I’m crap in the mornings, whether I had enough sleep or not. I wake up at 8, but I generally tackle admin, emails, and social media for work, rather than scrolling endlessly. Then, past 1pm, I go into full work mode.”

This self-awareness pays dividends. Sandrine says she can achieve four to five hours of uninterrupted deep work, excepting toilet breaks, by aligning demanding creative tasks with her peak energy periods.

Expert tips on getting into creative flow (and staying there)

Scientists studied the cognitive behavior of astronauts who have spent six months on board the International Space Station — and made some fascinating yet ominous discoveries.

…a series of tests revealed that their cognitive abilities slowed down while in space, “suggesting that processing speed, visual working memory, sustained attention, and risk-taking propensity may be the cognitive domains most susceptible to change in Low Earth Orbit for high-performing, professional astronauts,” the researchers wrote.

So astronauts’ brains malfunction. Great news.

Bonus round: microgravity activates “hidden, ancient sections of DNA called the “dark genome.” We didn’t have enough to worry about. There’s a Dark Genome now.

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

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

Comments closed

Zeppelin Studio

Published May 28, 2025 by Warren Ellis

…the term ‘studio’ derives from a verb as well as a noun. Studiolo denoted the scholar’s study or cabinet, but there was also studiare, linked to a certain kind of diligent or pleasurable work, which could take place anywhere. The word ‘studio’ was not used to describe the workplace of an artist until the late 17th century in Italy, and in Britain only from the 19th century, by which time the studio was already breaking out of its familiar four walls and beginning to move (quite literally, if we think of Charles-François Daubigny’s floating workspace on the river). Some studios, like Moreau’s, sloughed off any pretence of domesticity and achieved cavernous proportions. At the 1937 Paris World Fair, where the European dictatorships faced off against one another in monumental combat, Nazi Germany’s pavilion was guarded by a trio of bronze beefcakes (one female) sculpted by Josef Thorak. At once camp and creepy, and standing 22 feet tall, Comradeship was produced in Thorak’s atelier near Munich, designed by Albert Speer. The world’s largest studio, it could accommodate a Zeppelin.

WE DEMAND CLOISTERS, Tom Stammers

Comments closed

To Print Words Off: “the dark side of the novelistic moon”

Published October 3, 2023 by Warren Ellis

Nick Harkaway:

How often do you print?

I just realised this is a thing; that’s to say, a part of the process. Or, of my process. There’s a sense of reality in printing (and reading on paper) a finished novel. In theory, you can go through an entire creative effort without ever producing paper on your desktop, but for me there’s a separate space of “tangible book” which has a particular moment and a set of uses. This morning I printed the first two chapters to look at, and aside from the sense of pleasure in seeing a physical manifestation of work done (in this instance a sort of echo, because I held the whole book in A4 recycled a while ago) there’s a difference between words on screen and words on paper.

Holding paper, I notice different things. The work feels different – different tonal issues arise, new sections I need to rewrite. It’s akin to – but different again from – reading a book aloud and hearing the cadences, the unintentional repetitions and homonyms, the blunt force wrongness of an unmodified word. The text is not different, but the experience is, and of course it’s still the paper experience of my book that most people will have.

Fascinating. I never print! Printer ink is too bloody expensive!

Comments closed