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retired: 1jun26

Published June 1, 2026 by Warren Ellis

After losing several hours yesterday to running every fix and check I could think of, I came to the sad conclusion that this laptop, a T580 from 2018, is now starting to fail and therefore must be sent to live on a farm. This machine has had its keyboard replaced twice over the years and kept on chugging, but now its chipset is dying. So I caught the end of the Lenovo May sale by a whisker and ordered a new ThinkPad. I doubt the new machine will have the durability of this faithful monster, which I will be sad to retire.

June already.

New newsletter went out yesterday.

TELEMETRY:

A biotech startup called Bexorg is doing something that sounds like it was ripped straight from the pages of a cyberpunk novel — or from the script of “RoboCop,” for that matter.

The company is extracting human brains just hours after their owners died and then hooking them up to specialized life support machines, Science reports. While the masses of pink mush no longer host electrical activity, most of their key functions remain intact, allowing scientists to test experimental drugs, such as potential treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, like never before.

You’d hope that the disembodied cerebrums are most assuredly dead. But according to the reporting, an extracted brain hooked up to one of Bexorg’s proprietary life support machines, BrainEX, “hovers between life and death.” There’s no spark of consciousness, and yet the brains are kept running on an artificial lung, kidney oxygenate, blood, and other fluids.

Georgia Hart.

How to fold and read an “infinity book” – tried to embed the video here from two sources but no luck

Dan Henry 1939.

OPERATIONS: got the new cover for a graphic novel reprint currently codenamed PROJECT WALLOPS, so we will be headed to solicits shortly. I need to get a script off the desk today and then figure out how to zero out all the fucking money I spent yesterday
STATUS: I am physically de-teched until such time as the Google app that replaced the FitBit app is fixed to the point where it no longer hallucinates bicycles
READING: THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: a musician sent me her two new videos last night and I am playing them repeatedly today.

Also, THE ECHOING GREEN by Zachary Paul and Celia Eydeland:

And, while I was walking: MNMT 516: Conflation Port, because techno is good for walking.


LAST WATCHED: THE HOLCROFT COVENANT
DRINK: Flint Vineyard Rose

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 walking on

Published September 2, 2025 by Warren Ellis

DOKU.

Before we parted ways the next morning at the Port of Tyne, Cindy handed me a small pamphlet, printed on soft, heavy paper. On the cover was a drawing of a woman walking in a snowstorm, face half-covered, hair and scarf blown out behind her, pine trees crowning the horizon overhead. In the top left corner was the name DORIS and in the snow at the bottom right #8. Some of the stories inside were handwritten, others typed out on typewriters or drawn as comic strips. All of them were hers. These stories were secrets shared, small human stories from her life among punks and anarchists, moments of beauty and kindness, lostness and brokenness and mending, intercut with stories that retraced younger experiences, trying to make sense of the things she had done and had done to her. Much of it was beyond my experience, places I’d never been, things I’d never even heard anyone talk about. She wrote like she was writing a letter to a friend, then she printed these letters and gave them away.

My work always involves a search for the sublime in some way, and explores perception and how we look at things, even if they are dangerous or catastrophic—like with my film Bending to Earth (2015), which shows a uranium field. But there is always this sense of fragility: catastrophe and beauty are often very much linked, and I’m interested in walking this line. I’m also interested in the unstableness of knowledge, and in what we as human beings want when we try to reach beyond knowledge, and in how we want to inscribe ourselves.

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

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

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