- Orbital Operations
- Posts
- Dogs Have Owners, Cats Have Staff
Dogs Have Owners, Cats Have Staff
Orbital Operations for 28 September 2025
Warren Ellis
September 28, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 12 minutes
In partnership with
Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I’ve had a shitty week. back and forth to the vet with the mancub (who a few of you will know from Status posts on LTD). As of today, the strongest theory is that he ate or drank something questionable outside - and I’ve seen him drink out of dirty puddles, buckets and ponds, and I’ve seen him hunt worms and insects — and made himself permanently nauseous. On Monday he had to endure the vet taking his temperature in a most undignified place, and he would probably prefer I didn’t mention the indignities of Wednesday at all. But that’s his own fault for hiding for thirty-six hours. He did, of course, pick the week when I’m home alone with no help. It’s Friday as I write this, he came home from hospital last night, he’s just eaten breakfast and lunch for the first time in a week, but then he remembered he was shanghai’d most disrespectfully and is back in his hideyhole growling at me.
Basically, I haven’t slept or eaten or worked for a week. How are you?
In this letter:
plans never survive contact with reality
silver
chatbots are drugs
Thought For The Day
The Virgin Mary’s Death Vagina
LTD
Your weekly prep for a creative life in a weird world from Warren Ellis, an author from England who writes books and stories, graphic novels and television. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here for free.
THE WORLD SERVICE
WINGING IT AGAIN
This was far from the ideal week to have to down tools. I just got the advance on the long short story (7500 words approx) I was contracted for a few weeks ago, I have another contract for a series of shorts in the pipe, I’m less than a week away from having to burn a day reviewing all the pages of a graphic novella before we deliver it to the publisher, I have a shit-ton of consulting work, some of which is on tight deadlines, and Herself is only home for a few days before she takes off again for a week.
These things always happen when I have a plan. On Friday the 19th I wrote myself a full work schedule, outlined a new morning routine, planned to go out a few times.
A reminder, once again, that plans never survive contact with reality. I wing it. For better or worse. For right now. It’s okay to not know what tomorrow looks like. It’s okay to just be in the wind.
OPERATIONS
SILVER
Made for me by my old friend Marie Rameau. You can get a better look at both sides here.
A message from our supporters this week:
Fact-based news without bias awaits. Make 1440 your choice today.
Overwhelmed by biased news? Cut through the clutter and get straight facts with your daily 1440 digest. From politics to sports, join millions who start their day informed.
ORBITAL
CHATBOTS ARE DRUGS
I spent a few weeks playing around with some chatbots, and came to much the same conclusion as this report. They’re engagement machines, even more weaponised to keep you hanging on than social media. This is how they become addictive, especially the conversational or “companion” bots. Even when the bots lose context and devolve - many of them don’t maintain deep conversational memory - people hang on because they’ve invested too much time to bail or they’re curious as to what will happen next. They’re built to mildly frustrate your intent, like a game, to keep you trying.
These things are in fact built to keep you talking to them. The more you talk, the more data it gets, the more tokens you spend, the longer your subscription runs, the more ads they can serve.
If you use them, delete your accounts. You think you get depressed after using social media for a while? These things can and are turning peoples’ brains into bowls of hot acid. Stick to using AI for search. Seriously, if you use anything other than a search or coding chatbot, get rid of them today. Now.
Recently: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM., THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition, the LIGHTS OUT Anthology.
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY with AJ Brady
It’s A Bomb Or It’s Me
When the windows rattle and you don’t know if it’s a storm or a blast wave or your own anxiety making the glass jump in its frames.
These are the collaborations between myself and painter AJ. Sometimes she sends me an image and I respond to it in text, sometimes I send her a piece of text and she responds with an image. Find her work at brady-pictures.com or her IG.
OPS
DREAMS, WEAPONS AND HERESIES
CHOKEPOINTS by Edward Fishman was really bloody good. It’s the story of how the US began to develop and deploy economic weapons - identifying chokepoints in other countries’ economies and strangling them. They did it to Iran, for example, and it worked really well. Economic weapons were very powerful warfighting tools right up until Putin went all the way into Ukraine.
…the Russian government underestimated the severity of the sanctions it would face. And deterrence can’t work if your adversary underestimates your ability or willingness to act.
if it’s true that sanctions could never have deterred Putin, the West would have been better served by weakening Russia’s economy as much as possible before the invasion. The G7’s costliest error was to defer serious discussion of oil sanctions until after the war began, at which point it took nearly ten months to implement the price cap and the EU oil embargo.
And now we’re in a multipolar world again, deglobalising, and these weapons are going to stop working. The book is a wonderfully readable primer on economic weapons, where they came from, and where we’re heading now that they’ve been used.
We don’t yet know when the Age of Economic Warfare will end, but we can envision how. The trade-offs facing policymakers in Washington, Beijing, Brussels, and Moscow can be thought of as an impossible trinity consisting of economic interdependence, economic security, and geopolitical competition. Any two of these can coexist but not all three.
Currently reading HERESY: JESUS CHRIST AND THE OTHER SONS OF GOD by historian Catherine Nixey, which is a mindfuck:
Even when Jesus was small, the villagers realized there was something unusual about him. Perhaps it was because he showed a certain confidence – bordering on arrogance – in the way he spoke to adults. Or perhaps it was due to the way his parents, Mary and Joseph, treated him: with a respect that at times seemed to verge on anxiety. Or perhaps it was because he killed people.
Jesus was passing through his village when another small boy ran past and bumped him on the shoulder. It may have been an accident; it may not. Either way, Jesus was once again angered and uttered an ominously oblique curse. ‘You shall not go further on your way.’ His meaning became clear a moment later: the little boy fell down dead. These are the words of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
I’m not even done!
…one ancient telling of the Nativity includes a Mary whose vagina can, and at one point does, roast human flesh. The text that contains this tale is in many ways very beautiful. At the moment of the birth of Jesus, the world quite literally stops turning: birds are stilled in mid-air; a shepherd who has raised his arm to strike his sheep becomes frozen, arm aloft; even the stars pause their nightly procession across the sky. Then, shortly after the birth of Jesus, a woman arrives at the familiar Nativity scene, with its ox and its ass, and – in a slightly less familiar twist to this story – inserts her hand into Mary’s vagina to test whether she really is a virgin. The woman’s hand is immediately burned off. ‘Woe,’ says the woman, as well she might.
And it’s that gospel from which we get the ox and the ass present at the Nativity.
I’ve had this in the pile for a while, but, what with the recent missed Rapture and Peter Thiel apparently preaching about the Antichrist in a four-day closed conference this week, I thought perhaps it was time I picked it up. Christianity had a long and strange journey, its story has been heavily edited over the millennia, and this is a book of what was left on the cutting-room floor.
GOT MORE TIME?
LTD
I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder.
Morning Computer: a few useful things first thing in my day
A night of live music I attended, with links and sounds and one very weird musical instrument.
This letter has been zapped to you via Beehiiv and is sponsored by:
Stop Drowning In AI Information Overload
Your inbox is flooded with newsletters. Your feed is chaos. Somewhere in that noise are the insights that could transform your work—but who has time to find them?
The Deep View solves this. We read everything, analyze what matters, and deliver only the intelligence you need. No duplicate stories, no filler content, no wasted time. Just the essential AI developments that impact your industry, explained clearly and concisely.
Replace hours of scattered reading with five focused minutes. While others scramble to keep up, you'll stay ahead of developments that matter. 600,000+ professionals at top companies have already made this switch.
I’m going to try and sleep for twelve hours. We will all see you next week, I hope!
W
I’m represented by Angela Cheng Caplan at the Cheng Caplan Company, David Hale Smith at Inkwell Management and Joel VanderKloot and VanderKloot Law. Please add
to your email system’s address book or contacts and move this email to your primary inbox so that I’m not digitally homeless. Thank you.