week 22 / 2025
Trekking through the wilderness of story, traversing the desert of the Real—WEEKNOTES wander where they will.
This week, warfare is conducted through comics, and Canada goes its own way...
Latest
week 21 / 2025
Hanging pictures on the wall / who can say when WEEKNOTES fall?
This week, pictures are exhibited, and the devil rides out...
week 20 / 2025
Firing up the neutron beam, slicing through the materiality of the text—WEEKNOTES straddles the disciplinary spectrum like Slim Pickens straddled the bomb!
This week, facilities are toured, art is produced, projects are revealed... and houses are haunted?
unknown pleasures: an interview with Cameron Tonkinwise (part 2)
In the second part of my interview with Cameron Tonkinwise, we discuss Transition Design, prefigurative politics, dramaturgy, narratology, imagination, and... urban cycling as filtered through the philosophy of Georges Bataille?
week 19 / 2025
Counting the beats, coming in on the one—WEEKNOTES rock the rhythm 'til the tune says stop.
This week, we're up in the mountains with Olga Tockarczuk, and down in the valleys of art.
week 18 / 2025
Dodging drunk kids, spurning pagan conflagrations—WEEKNOTES marches into May with flags unfurled!
This week, the grid goes down, but the work goes on.
week 17 / 2025
Looping the loops and riding the curves—a white-knuckle WEEKNOTES that only just came in to land.
This week, a wall is hit (albeit slowly), and "AI" is treated as normal.
News
schedule adjustment notice
Hello, worldbuilders!
Just a quick note to let you know: it occurred to me this morning that my spending a bunch of time compiling weeknotes which don't get emailed to you, only to then spend a shorter amount of time two days later writing a short note alerting
hot in the city 2nite
Hello worldbuilders! It's 28°C in Malmö this afternoon, and it's reliably been around that temperature in the afternoon for close to a week now.
I quite like hot weather, really, but a lot of other folk are less keen—and I dare say I'
call it in, take it off
Hello, worldbuilders! It's been quiet here this last week, because around this time on the Sunday previous I started thinking "hmm, I don't feel so great", and by the evening I was feeling (as we Brits say) like death warmed over.
Hell knows what
less magic, more traffic
Hello, worldbuilders! It feels a lot like the roundabout just hasn't stopped spinning over the week just gone—and next week it's The Conference, which means the metaphorical carny will be reaching out his hairy hand to give it another good shove... which means there'
pass the vol-au-vents
Hello, worldbuilders! And welcome to those of you who've signed up in the last few days. Glad you could come—take a chair, get yourself a drink. How are things?
We've got no Actual Announcement this week; I would announce again that I've giving
the circus comes to town
Hello, worldbuilders! This is your weekly newsthingy... and we're gonna start with An Actual Announcement.
Talk and workshop: The Conference, Malmö, Mon 26th August 2024
I will be giving a talk entitled Wisdom for worldbuilders: fictions, futures, fandoms on the morning of Mon 26th August.
Said talk is
null but not void
Hello, worldbuilders! What's been happening at Worldbuilding Agency this week?
No essay or interview
Um, yeah—bit of an absence at the middle of the week, wasn't there? Sorry about that.
There's an interview in the pipe, but it's awaiting approval from
Weeknotes
week 50 / 2025: ancient of days
Reading round-up: Auger disowns design-as-augury; a return to Turnton Docklands; a potted history of futurology; and an anarchist's analysis of utopian bureaucracy.
week 49 / 2025: against the supposedly inevitable
Reading round-up: the end of The Line; socially constructed technological inevitability; the crusade against empathy; the Noughties as the Before Times... and the attentional friction of poetry.
week 48 / 2025: walking in the shadows
Reading round-up: dead media theory revisited; the quantified self, Victorian style; two takes on a rising China; and Aleister Crowley’s proto-pomo mental hygiene routines.
week 47 / 2025: snowblower
The end of the year is within sight, which means an early shift into reflective thinking...
week 46 / 2025: eyes on the street
So, you’re writing a short story that’s meant to explore a future. What’s the first and most crucial step in the process of getting your imagined world onto the page? It’s not what you might think...
week 45 / 2025: ten theses on “the future”
The moment to change a mental model is the moment at which it becomes an obstacle to understanding rather than a scaffold for it.
week 44 / 2025: hermit walks the dunes
I'm running a three-day course on fiction-for-futures in January! In-person, on-site, and strictly limited to no more than ten participants...