You're Impossible

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta.

New word of the week: slopper. Someone who uses ChatGPT to do everything for them.

Missionaries are dropping secret solar powered audio devices into the Brazilian rainforest to evangelise isolated and recently contacted indigenous peoples.

There’s an insane scientific paper going around claiming that lightning kills more than 300 million trees a year, not counting wildfires set off by lightning strikes, and that global biomass would be almost 2% bigger without it. Meaning the sky is trying to kill us with electricity.

By studying CMB temperature fluctuations on different scales, we can essentially "listen" to the sound of the early universe.

And in doing this, it currently seems possible that our galaxy lays right in the middle of a two billion light year wide void in the universe. Contains the phrase “analyzing distorted sounds from the early universe,” which is an amazing thing to see.

You know how impossible you are? You’re from a barren universal ditch, and yet here you are. You can do anything.

Superwood, from an American company called InventWood, is chemically treated and compressed wood projected to be up to ten times stronger than steel and six times lighter.

This week, I am just relaxing into the impossible. It’s August, things are in train, contracts are being drawn up, some things are moving and some things are stuck and I’m just letting it all happen at its own pace.

Industrial humanoid robot capable of autonomously changing its own battery so it can continue to hunt the fleshy ones

Columbia University is designing a robot that can cannibalise and merge with other robots to create “robot ecologies,” which absolutely seems safe.

I know nothing about coding, but this guy has hacked a £10 thermal printer to print out replies to him on Mastodon. This is Little Printer reinvention territory. But it interested me because I always wondered if those cheap thermal printers can be made to do tricks.

From Protein: what kind of nostalgic are you?

Fun read for this week: the great writer Kieran Press-Reynolds on how to dig for music without Spotify.

(Bear in mind that Press-Reynolds has confessed in interviews to being thoroughly brainfried and sometimes listens to a piece for less than twenty seconds. He is the canary in the Gen Z rotmine.)

(I still miss Berlin Community Radio.)

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CURRENTLY READING:

Beware writers, she said. They’re not like readers, they live solitary lives in their own books. And they really don’t do anything but write.

• THE CASE OF THE LONELY ACCOUNTANT, Simon Mason. The second of The Finder Mysteries. These are precisely books I’d love to write, in many ways - the format, around 30,000 words, the tight crime story, the philosophical turn. The first one presented as cold reportage at the start, but grew warmer as the story went on. This one starts warm - the Simenon that inspired him is more Maigret than the romans durs - but it maintains the distancing effect of the first, the way the narrator stands off from his own emotions and either doesn’t recognise or deliberately avoids cues for emotional engagement from others. Anyway, I liked the first one enough to head straight into the second. I’ve been thinking about writing in this form for years, and have been talking about it to people for years, and I’m enjoying seeing Simon Mason try it. (UK) (US)

Also, check out the unified cover design for The Finder Mysteries:

I' spent a bunch of time in the spring sketching out cover designs for a possible project using very few elements I very much like what they’ve done here.

Now, it’s time for a big heavy dense novel, so I’ve pulled THE MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut out of the digital pile it’s been sitting in for a year or two.

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, the LIGHTS OUT Anthology.

I’m writing this bit from my summer daytime berth - a local place offered me a table to work from, with wine and electricity made available. Usually, I’m here with notebook and pen, but I’m reaching a phase now where I need to be producing typed text a lot, so I picked up a folding bluetooth keyboard for the first time in many years, and am using it to type into IA Writer on my phone.

For reference, it’s the ProtoArc XK04 Foldable Bluetooth Keyboard (UK) . Which I got because it comes with its own phone stand.

(I’ve got muscle memory for smaller keyboards dating back to the 1990s.)

I sit out here, get some thinking and writing done, chat with people as they come and go, and generally have lovely afternoons. After several years of hermitage, it makes a nice change.

Someone wrote in to ask about my everyday carry these days. My EDC is kind of baked into my daily routine. I’ve been trying to reduce things, this year, So now everything comes out of one bag, one drawer and one peg. The bag itself has only had a little tuning from this version from March of this year. If enough people write in to ask about the current version and my current daily routine, I’ll unpack it all here.

This arrived on Monday. By weight, it feels like the first 24 issues of that book, of which I did twelve.

My personal log, warrenellis.ltd, is off until September 1. These shorter(ish) and unstructured newsletters will continue to hold sway until then. I’m opening my calendar for new work this month, so hit reply if you want to do anything together.

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Thanks to the one person who wrote in to ask me to bring the SPEKTRMODULE ambient music curation podcast back, and to the other person who wrote to ask why I didn’t do a Currently Listening last week. I imagine the rest of you sighed with relief.

Take care of yourself and hold on tight. See you next week.

W