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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I’ve been waist deep all week in a job that’s proven to be extraordinarily difficult and awkward, which has meant wasting pretty much three days just staring at the wall while I assemble and test solutions in my head. Never underestimate how much “writing” just gazing into the distance like someone with a life-altering brain injury.

It’s Thursday morning, I have several things stuck in limbo that I can’t talk about yet, the OO-to-office line is quiet, I have 170 unread emails and 1255 unread RSS articles, so this week I’m going to pretend this is one of those popular newsletters that serves you miscellaneous news and links.

But first!

This concludes part one of COLLIDE. COLLIDE will return in the near future.

Jerome Eyquem is an artist and writer: here are his releases on GlobalComix.

• A sample survey suggested that 55% of Americans have pulled back from social media use. I think I read somewhere recently that the numbers are higher in some other countries. I forget I have Instagram most of the time, and I opened X earlier this year (I wanted to check a local news account because of a local incident) and everyone on the main feed just sounded unhinged.

• Came across a piece called PERFORMING DISTRESS with a most peculiar opening: “Strange online behaviors often mirror patterns long present offline, amplified by digital platforms. Phenomena like Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) faking, while a bizarre and excessive symptom of internet life, enacts familiar social logics long observed in historic expressions of the hysterical, including the performance of culturally intelligible distress, the formation of intense social bonds, and the contestation of institutional authority.” Is that even a real thing? Seems both complicated and pointless. But here’s what seems to be the core:

• This is really interesting: the ten greatest failures of Orson Welles. The things he never got made or got out into the world. Macbeth with an all African-American cast in 1936 that succeeded on the stage but with only four minutes surviving of the filmed performance? Making a film with Nabokov?

• Russian men are smashing and gouging their iPhones to make them look manlier. One assumes this is the “shirtless Putin riding a bear” for 2026.

• Woman prescribed Diet Coke to dissolve stomach bezoar. I fucking TOLD you not to drink that stuff, didn’t I?

• “We live with “lost futures” – a sense that the future we were promised in the 90s and 2000s never really arrived... Using hardware today is a way to inhabit an alternative timeline where tech stays weird, tactile and limited instead of collapsing into one smooth super‐app.” Ooh, fuck me, that sounds a bit like me of old, doesn’t it? But it’s not, it’s a report on JOLO, the joy of logging off, and the shift towards non-networked hardware. Worth a read, it’s a really nicely done deck, and you may find some useful tips in there too.

• That is actually a really good point: learning to develop the instinct for which idea fits which medium.

• Elliot McGucken:

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Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

Trailer for DIGGER, strong Strangelove vibes:

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

Arrived this week, the late Alexander Kluge’s final book, a collaboration with the artist Anselm Kiefer.

As I think I mentioned, I finally had to surrender and get some low-strength reading glasses, and the one real benefit to that is that I can read print without strong light again. Hence, obtaining physical books again.

I was maybe six pages in when I was absolutely shot dead by this bit:

As humans, our basic currency is our lifespan. Damn. That’s worth putting on a wall.

River had once described Lamb as a coiled sponge. That was his current mode. At any moment, without warning, he might not do anything.

I just read CLOWN TOWN, the most recent Slough House/Slow Horses novel by Mick Herron. I’ve been reading them since long before the tv show - I remember when Jackson Lamb was described as looking like Timothy Spall! (I cannot tell you how much Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb reminded me of my grandad.) If you’ve read a Slow Horses novel before, you think you know what you’re getting. If you haven’t read one before, start with the first one, this one will make no sense. The thing is… this is just another Slow Horses book. A little low energy. A little bit Herron just cranking the handle.

The royal family, apparently, never travel en masse in the same vehicle – this is to avoid the possibility of lineage-shattering accidents. That’s what they tell Andrew, anyway.

Right up until it’s not.

There’s an old term in American TV writing: “the idiot ball.” When a plot only works when one of the characters suddenly has to become stupid, then they’re carrying the idiot ball. The idiot ball gets tossed about quite a bit in this one at the start. Now, Herron knows he can get away with that, because all his characters are fuckups on some level, but it gets a bit obvious this time. Partly because a lot of this book is replay and reshuffle of established tropes. It’s low energy and missing some bite. And then…

Turns out he’s taking a minute, enjoying the tropes one more time, having fun with the machine he built before letting it go. Because there’s a sharp intake of breath towards the end. Real shit happens. It’s not cute or funny. A cascade of serious changes that strongly suggest Herron is coming in for a landing. What comes next may be savage and marvellous.

He’s fortunate he picked a gentle soul like me to play with. Else he’d be waking up in Rwanda, with a barcode where his head used to be.

CLOWN TOWN, Mick Herron (UK) (US)

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And that’s me for this week, because I need to get back to beating my head against a wall and hopefully maybe get to enjoy some direct sunlight. You go and do something better. You don’t need permission to go and enjoy yourself. See you next week, I hope.

W