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Orbital Operations for 16 February 2025

Author

Warren Ellis
February 16, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. This month, I am 57 years old. How the fuck did that happen?

In this letter:

  • Operations

  • Model Lives

  • Books of January 2025

  • LTD

Letters about the creative life by Warren Ellis, a writer from England. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here.

OPERATIONS

OPERATIONS

Dunno about you, but for me this year quickly became The Year Of I’ve Had Enough. I turned off a bunch of news service notifications, unsubbed from a few news provisions entirely, and now I skim the papers on my phone over coffee in the morning and then check out of the news entirely until the evening, when I catch up with newsletters and read some longer articles.

I’m on my eighth book of the year as I write this. I’ve been to the cinema twice this year (NOSFERATU and THE BRUTALIST). I’ve created a shape for digital self-publishing, which regular readers know I’ve been messing around with for ages (and have dabbled in many times over the last twenty years) and have had one particular “series” idea I’m very pleased with.

Thing is, not only is the news all the bloody same, all about the same country and the same handful of main characters, and every news service reports all the incremental updates to the same bloody stories every sixty seconds: but that constant battering tide of zone-flooding shit compresses time and shrinks space to think. And I want this year to feel like a year and not three bloody weeks.

It’s not about “taking a break from the news,” which various newsletters have suggested is now A Thing. And, you know, if you live in certain places right now, taking a break from the news might feel a luxury at best and a wilful ignoring of alarm bells at worst. On a single evening last week I talked to three people setting plans to bug out of the US..

It’s more about putting the news in its damn place and creating more space to live in.

Listen, it’s already harder to think than it used to be (1):

As detailed in a study published in the journal Nature Medicine, a team led by University of New Mexico toxicologist and professor of pharmaceutical sciences Matthew Campen concluded that the average brain now contains the equivalent of one plastic spoon, or seven grams, worth of plastic.

As much as I may personally enjoy the idea of us becoming sentient plastic (2) and feel like rewatching CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (3), I also feel like brain rot, doomscrolling and a plastic spoon in the brain strongly suggests the need for new ways of doing things.

I am, of course, speaking from a position of privilege, one that is in part geographic: I live in the boring old United Kingdom, where even our fascists are frog-faced incompetents. But look. That wily producer Steve Bannon said it out loud seven years ago. How do they keep you disoriented, overwhelmed and frozen? Flood the zone with shit.

There’s a wonderful quote in this article (4):

For most people, social media gives you this sense that unless you care about everything, you care about nothing. You must try to swallow the world while it’s on fire.

And I think maybe this applies, too:

The internet has conditioned us to constantly seek new information, as if becoming a sponge of bad news will eventually yield the final piece of a puzzle. But there is also such a thing as having enough information.

You can still care. You can still be alert. But you don’t have to wallow and drown, okay? There are people who need you in one piece.

In conclusion: people keep mentioning this prick to me lately:

Bonus round:

(The music choice on that one kills me every time)

ORBITAL

MODEL LIVES

Here is a really fun and strange music video that looks like Lordess Foudre and Terry Gilliam and the ghost of David Lynch made a short film together.

The band is called Feeding Fingers, and the video is directed and animated by Steven Lapcevic.

Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM. 2025: FELL: FERAL CITY new printing, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition

BOOKS

READ IN JANUARY 2025

My notes on the books I finished in January.

Much mythologized and heavily romanticized, covert action is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the grey zone within international politics.

‘The blood tox came back saying she had drunk enough booze to banjax an aircraft carrier full of sailors.”

…he was ‘sitting’ in Russian parlance, stuck behind barbed wire in what was known as the Zone, the Soviet penal camp system. Old hands in the criminal subculture of the vorovskoi mir, the ‘thieves’ world’, would claim that their real life was that lived inside the Zone.

By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History.

I at first thought of calling this set of tributes to philosophers who are no longer with us ‘Funeral Orations’.

Now, I hold the view that neither death nor depression should be of interest to us.

  • WAR FOR ETERNITY, as previously written up here and here.

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.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

Other notes of note on my digital notebook recently:

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And that’s me this week. Find your space, protect it, and live with some abundance.

W

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