Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, in the chill drizzle.

I was going to start adding new things to the newsletter this week, but, between trying to run some scripts to ground, finish a rewrite on a thing and dealing with a few flurries of bad work news (it happens), the week has gotten eaten and now it's Sunday morning.  So you'll have to put up with the usual rambling crap instead.

KARNAK #1 is out this coming Wednesday. And I think that's about all the news I have this week.  There's a lettered preview over here.

Oh! Before I forget, Scott Gosnell of the Startup Geometry podcast wanted to pass on his thanks: his show has flown up the rankings since so many of you listened to the interview he did with me and discovered all the other episodes of his fine production. That interview is still up, here.

Right.  What's next?

HALLOW

One of my favourite seasonal musics of the last few years is HALLOW by Dirty Knobs. And they've made it free/pay-what-you-want for Halloween.

https://zacbentz.bandcamp.com/album/hallow

"Ah, a new album for Halloween by Dirty Knobs, sounding, as ever, like it was recorded in Hell's deepest skull-silo" — Warren Ellis 

"Probably the first album I can actually call scary. Intended for the use of dark and gritty drone/ambient, Hollow accomplished creating a horror atmosphere. Not one of unsubtle, fly-at-your-face frights, but one of subtle, surreal mental horrors one may experience in an unfortunate reality." —Lionsef / Rate Your Music

Ninety minutes of disturbing, haunted ambient music. Play it at 4am and give all your neighbours nightmares.

BOND

Oh, hey.  Here's eight pages of the JAMES BOND book by myself and Jason Masters.  Pretty much the entire cold open, I think.  That's out in the first week of November.

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Received in email:

We cordially invite you to participate in the World Congress of Philosophy on the topic:  The Philosophy of Aristotle.

Am I actually somehow accidentally a philosopher now?  I knew I shouldn't have spoken at that philosophy festival in Hay twice. I mean, I'm flattered. But also somewhat confused. I wonder if I've reached that point where I seem wise because I talk about books and have a white beard.

Of course, right now, I am still writing KARNAK, and am therefore immersed in the viewpoint of various strains of speculative realism, tending towards the nihilistic frames of Peter Sjostedt-H and Eugene Thacker, whose STARRY SPECULATIVE CORPSE I'm currently finishing -- which volume is leading into the Kyoto School and , well:

This abyss is what Nishitani terms “nihility.” Nihility is the absence of any meaningful or necessary relationship between the human being and the world into which it is cast. This relationship of vacuity oversteps the scale of individual human beings or human collectivities; it is a vacuousness that oversteps the personal, resulting in what Nishitani terms an “impersonally personal” or “personally impersonal” relation. The human being, which had just prior taken the world for granted as its home, suddenly appears radically out of place, both in the world and in its very being...

And, previously:

"it is my wish to leave everything that I can think of and choose for my love the thing that I cannot think." I love what I cannot think. Perhaps there is no better formulation for the philosophical impulse in these religious, mystical texts. Thought questions, develops, and is led to a point where thought can no longer continue without negating itself. I love what I cannot think. 

You don't want me to talk about philosophy right now. I will make you cold, and also possibly cry.  I'll be glad when I've finished KARNAK, because having that little bastard in my head is probably doing me damage.

In any case, any philosophical thought I may have sounds too much to me like one of those false dawns of maturity you get as an adolescent: convinced the veils have parted and you have been visited by a profound notion, and seven years later you'll be too embarrassed to even privately recall it.

That said, The Great Winter Hermitage is upon me again, so we'll see how crazy I get. 

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So here's a thing I learned this week.  The newslettering system shows me its best guess as to who has never opened an edition of Orbital Operations. It does this for several reasons, not least of which is that every one of these emails costs me money, and if I removed everyone whom the system thinks doesn't want these letters, I could save $40/month.  So I sent out a note to those three thousand people saying, hey, it looks like you don't open these. Do you want to just unsubscribe so it feels less like I'm spamming you? Would it be easier to just wait and I'll remove you en masse so you don't have to worry about these any more? That sort of thing. I was trying so hard to be nice that someone on Twitter thought this system had been hacked.

Within seconds I was accused of, in my favourite response to the note, being "Angry Dad with a surveillance system." Within a few hours I learned the many ways in which some people in that segment read OO, including on a secure antique greenscreen terminal. A few people took the time to tell me that I'm a Big Brotherish monster before unsubscribing simply because the newsletter system tries to tell me if anyone's reading this thing, which is fair enough. Some people never view the pictures I put in this, in case that triggers the tracker. Some people, knowingly or not, utilise mail systems that work very hard to disable any kind of tracking.

All that said: half of that segment registered as having opened the note, and that engaged group doesn't match the count of the "no opens" segment.  So Campaign Monitor's best guess is off.  It was the first time I'd tested their guessing, of course, so now I have more of a baseline to work with. So, if you're one of that segment and you received this? Based on the response and the tracking, I decided not to change anything for the moment. Hi. 

Always learning things.  Just trying to make sure that the people who want to receive this continue to do so, and that the people who don't can be free of it.  In your honour, this is an image-free edition of OO.

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THE VITAL ABYSS is a novella by James SA Corey, which is part of "his" ("Corey" is two guys) Expanse sequence.  If you haven't read any of those, don't read this.  If you have read the first couple of books, then get this - it's a lovely angle on some events in the early books and shows an extra string or two to the writers' bows.

THE VITAL ABYSS  (UK) (US)

Also, the Expanse sequence is being made into a tv series called THE EXPANSE. If this is meaningless to you, the Expanse books begin as a fairly grounded story about early-stage colonisation of the solar system and then go bugfuck within about three hundred pages.  They pretty much stay bugfuck, but also have surprisingly deft touches -- like the fact that most people on Earth are on Universal Basic Income, a note that makes you realise they've thought about this world a little more than they really needed to.

If you want to get ahead of the tv series, start with the first volume, LEVIATHAN WAKES (UK) (US)

THE EXPANSE: trailer

I read most of them on planes. Good fun. And thank god for Kindles. I was on a lot of planes for a while there, and these books are big.

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Wrote a short thing about Molly Crabapple for the limited-edition, museum-quality print of hers that 20x200 will be releasing on Thursday.  If you're interested, hit that link and subscribe to their newsletter.

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I have decided that I need to catch up with webcomics again. If you're doing a webcomic, send me a link. If you're not doing a webcomic and have just decided you need to send me a link to your favourites, don't. Let me filter this.

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Let me just pause to freak out anyone who's known me a long time.  My daughter turned twenty the other day.  TWENTY.  Staggered through the door with flu caught off a fresher, green streaks in her hair and demanding food and vodka.

So. Proud.

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A song from a few years ago that's been stuck in my head all day, so now it's stuck in yours: "Goddess Eyes" by the wonderful Julia Holter.  She has a new record out called HAVE YOU IN MY WILDERNESS.  (site)

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This is an interesting development.  Tim Ferriss does a weekly newsletter, and his most recent tweet about it -- right here -- allows you to subscribe from inside the tweet.  I'm presuming this is some Twitter For Business paid service.  Given that we are either at Peak or Plateaued Twitter, this is probably the best time to try it - especially for Ferriss, who is now at a potential 1.3 million followers.

If you like newsletters with tons of links, get Sean Bonner's.

The LENNY newsletter is killing it, with a short (and very good) bit by Jennifer Lawrence and an interview with Gloria Steinem in the last seven days.

The only comics-related newsletter I get is Kelly Sue & Matt's.

This is why I try to be a little careful about who receives this one. There are a lot of great newsletters around right now, and that can turn into inbox landfill pretty fast.

Newsletters, as you can see from examples one and two above, have also become a form of cultural power projection.  I bet you that, in short order, LENNY will reach people (like me) who have never seen GIRLS.  Ferriss will be reaching people who miss his Twitter blasts and convert them into podcast listeners, increasing both his sponsorship fees and his opportunity potential: if you're someone like Ferriss, being out in the world and being able to quantify his presence in the world will bring opportunity to him. Newsletters have become fully Important again.  

I've been doing these since the 1990s.  I'll be still here after everyone once more decides that they're crap.  Because I like writing you letters.  See you next week.

- W