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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. I’m writing this on Saturday, just before I go and spend five hours in the garden, repairing a chainsaw, cutting shit down, digging a trench, planting some trees and transplanting some others. I’m still processing this omni-mange out of my system and coughing like I’ve been doing two hundred Gitanes a day for the last hundred years. I am in fact now fifty-eight years old, and probably should not be pulling trees out by their roots any more. So this may be the last note I send before my funeral.

In this letter:

• state of the operations

• pissing alien rocks

• newsletter platform specifically for artists

• Raven Belasco and the big cannon

• Deliberate Disconnection with Rain DeGrey

• book notes

• Oscars

• LTD

THE WORLD SERVICE

STATE OF THE OPERATIONS

I decided to look at the Substack app, the other day, and holy shit that was an eye-opener. There are more newsletters than ever before. It seems similar to the explosion of the blogosphere, when a thousand people seemed to pop up on Blogspot every day.

(I particularly enjoy the newsletters out of that service by Paul Krugman, Emily Sundberg, Sean Monahan and Slavoj Zizek, and Charli XCX’s recent letter was clear-sighted)

I’ve been doing newsletters on and off since the 1990s. There have been periods where almost nobody was doing them, and now everyone’s doing them. I get a dozen every day. Right now, ORBITAL OPERATIONS is probably little different to every other newsletter you get.

I have, for many years, wanted to move this newsletter into a space where it almost lands like a magazine. See, I’d love this all to be some specialist niche, but I’m just not wired like that. “A creative life in a weird world” was as reduced as I could get it. I’m a generalist: I’m interested in everything.

So, last year, I started making some changes here. In the near future, I’m going to be adding new comics work, serials, and more people will come on board to share strange and lovely things with us. I’ve got a full work schedule, all kinds of things happening, and I did just take this afternoon off to tear up a twelve-foot garden bed, but I am all in on this newsletter and trying a whole bunch of new things.

Yeah, we are living through Peak Newsletter, but please do stick around. ORBITAL OPERATIONS will, with luck, become more like itself this year.

(I cut a ten foot viburnum down to five feet, sawed down half a holly tree, cut back the vast Nazi Salvia - so named because it grows to giant size and attempts to march on London every year - all of which I had to do with hand tools because the chainsaw seized up, dug a trench, scattered a hundred litres of compost and planted three cherry trees)

• Interstellar object 3I/ATLAS appears to be urinating all over the solar system

• mad Italian pilot lands small plane on moving plane and then takes off again

• Humans are still evolving - thriving communities in the hypoxic environment of the Tibetan plateau

• I can’t recall if I put “Cantigua 100” by Barn Hoppit here last week so fuck it here it is anyway, haunted medieval music at its finest

• Recent discovery: The Black Flowers Arts Journal

• Congrats to Leinil Yu on getting engaged! (Leinil and I did a Wolverine book together decades ago - we last talked in October, I think)

• Remember the other week, when I wrote about MoltBot/OpenClaw, the lobster-branded freaky AI agent thing? The multimillionaire tech guy who created it said that his next job was to turn a cranky lobster only operable by skilled and slightly insane coders with a death wish into something his mother could use. This week, he was hired by OpenAI and OpenClaw was bequeathed to a foundation. Which would seem to mean that "the AI lobster agent his mother could use" will now be pursued and funded by OpenAI. This will be the last note about AI I write for some while - I'm removing all the current half-arsed efforts at it from my life at the moment - but this is something I will keep an eye on.

• I came across PencilBooth the other day, which frames itself as “a newsletter platform for artists.” Looks like it has a basic free plan for you to test-run it on, and it seems to be geared very much for visuals. Maybe useful to some of you?

• New Wes Anderson film on the way. THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL was the first film of his that I really loved, and I enjoyed the ones that followed on various lesser levels.

• I have a doctorate but it’s not written down what kind of doctorate it is so sometimes I decide I’m a surgeon

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This week’s bizarrerie is titled “Orban and his Very Big Gun.” I got this one while I was doing deep research for my book Blood Ex Libris into the hardcore enmity between Vlad Tepes and Mehmet II.

That’s when I found that Mehmet had a Transylvanian engineer during his ever-so-slightly-famous Conquest of Constantinople. (Yes, you will now have that earworm in your head. Sorry!) In a nasty detail, Orban started by offering his Big Gun to Constantine XI, but the Byzantine ruler wasn’t able to come up with the funds, so Orban took it across the street to the very guy wanting to knock down Constantinople’s walls.

The Basilic (or Basilica) cannon is one of the largest cannons ever built to this day—it could fire a 600-pound stone ball over a mile. In one of those moments where at the beginning of something new, inventors go wild trying every possible innovation as they learn the limits of their shiny-new craft, it was the very start of cannons as a concept, but our man Orban felt strongly that size mattered.

“Bigger is better” is often a flawed proposition, and while The Basilic was effective at being that century’s “weapon of mass destruction,” it also killed plenty of the people trying to operate it (or unfortunately standing too nearby), both with its tremendous recoil and its tendency to split apart after being shot. Supposedly the last time it exploded, it took Orban with it.

I just love the irony that Mehmet II, the biggest enemy of Vlad’s life (a life rather overpopulated with enemies) had a Transylvanian engineer working for him. Given how the Christian world felt about the Ottoman empire, Orban really was so desperate to make his Big Gun that he sold himself to whomever would foot the bill. It was for the best that his Big Gun might have taken him out, as he would never have been welcome home again.

Raven Belasco is the author of the BLOOD & ANCIENT SCROLLS series of novels and the novelette THAT LESBIAN VAMPIRE PIRATE STORY. Her website is at ravenbelas.co and her regular newsletter is at https://ancientscrolls.beehiiv.com/ .

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.

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.

OPS

CATCHING UP ON BOOK NOTES

Life in thirteenth-century Oxford is hard and dangerous. The homicide rate exceeds modern-day Bogota. Each year for every hundred monks attending the university (all students must be in religious orders), three are murdered, fifteen die of dysentery, and twenty-six run away to London.

A FIELD GUIDE TO REALITY by Joanna Kavenna: I picked this up a few years ago, in the teeth of some reviews that called it a difficult book.  It's really not.  It's gently eccentric, softly melancholy, quietly literary. A frustrated Oxford waitress befriends an elderly philosopher.  On his passing, she is left in his will his final work, the eponymous Field Guide.  But the box it's supposedly in is empty.  And so begins a quest through Oxford to track it down.  The DMT chrysanthemum makes an appearance. It’s a timeloose, strange, philosophical book, and I thought it was lovely.

Also at dinner is John Duns Scotus who produces rigorous and munificent works of learning until he is accidentally buried alive. His servant, who is fully aware that Duns Scotus has a tendency to catatonia, is unfortunately absent when his master collapses and doctors are summoned. Thus Duns Scotus is pronounced dead, and cast into the ground . . .

A FIELD GUIDE TO REALITY, Joanna Kavenna (UK) (US)

….the use of spies, of whom there are five classes: local spies; internal spies; converted spies; doomed spies; surviving spies.

Winter reading is for reading the things I should always have gotten around to, and I had no memory of ever having read THE ART OF WAR. Apparently it’s now marketed as a business book. It was an interesting read, greatly enhanced by extensive footnotes retelling old Chinese military stories. I mean, honestly, anyone applying ancient war theory to business should probably be avoided. But if you’re looking for a fun, short history book that is also about the best way to kill lots of people, illustrated by lovely little stories of how ancient Chinese generals arranged the killing of people, this is a great evening’s entertainment.

THE ART OF WAR, Sun Tzu (UK) (US)

SETTLE THIS FOR ME

I haven’t seen all the films nominated for best picture at the Oscars yet, and I personally think this was a bit of a dry year. What do you think?

Previously:

Do you use a paper notebook or use your phone?

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 I use paper notebooks (586)
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ I use a phone or other device as a s notebook (211)
797 Votes

via @beehiiv polls

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. I currently do one big post a day and you can subscribe to them by email if you’re so minded.

Here’s one that was specifically about the Kodak Charmera keychain digital camera.

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And that’s me for this week. It’s still winter and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, but that’s fine. Go and look at the sky, take a breath, remind yourself you made it into another year and let yourself be a little proud of yourself for coming this far. See you next week.

W