week 10 / 2025
There and back again, running the risk and riding the rails—WEEKNOTES takes a trip to That London.
This week, the Chronoberg Chronicle meets its moment, and Discworld trumps Middle Earth in almost every way.
Latest
of system and story: how narrative-based futuring expands the planner’s toolkit
What use is story in the context of serious, grown-up planning? It's the best way of finding out the flaws in your existing system model—let me tell you why.
week 09 / 2025
From dead giraffes to post-apocalyptic monastics—WEEKNOTES lays it all out on the sidewalk, and lets the kids watch, too.
This week, the world is (so much) more-then-human, and fiction is (so much) more than a signal of its author's morality.
week 08 / 2025
Be it the guitar music of the post-Millenial moment, or the market shenanigans of the same period—WEEKNOTES dare look back as a way of looking forward!
This week, economics is sacred, and fixes are virtual rather than spatial.
week 07 / 2025
Old oak bears weight across a sea of years, its splits like lines in a face that's really seen some stuff—but what would it know of WEEKNOTES?
This week, wands are threefold bold and bright, a trilogy comes to an end, and Ted lays down the law.
week 06 / 2025
In February the sun returns slowly, like a scorned but needy god, and we prostrate ourselves before it with offerings of incense, firstborn lambs and WEEKNOTES.
This week, finish lines are approached asymptotically, and the eschaton is retrospectively re-immanentised.
week 05 / 2025
Past the old oak pillar and up the concrete stairs—that's where you'll find the WEEKNOTES, at least until the free beer runs out.
This week, shells are haunted, and implausible worlds imagined with an uncanny thoroughness... oh, and a short story is published, too.
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 34 / 2025: the machine stops
When life gives you lemons, make a lemonade-flavoured parable in place of the more considered content that you'd have written if you'd not lost the time to dealing with the lemons.
week 33 / 2025: how much is too much?
Or, phrased differently: what do the IPCC's climate change scenarios have in common with the Star Wars franchise?
week 32 / 2025: conspiracy culture
There's nothing like looking at the disposable popular culture of three decades previous for reminding you that there's nothing new under the sun, and that history moves in waves rather than an arc.
week 31 / 2025: churches of futurity
What can we learn about futures from thinking about them as if they were faiths or fandoms? Quite a lot, if you ask me...
week 30 / 2025: in defence of magickal thinking
Divination and foresight are a deal less different than some practitioners in either camp would have you believe—both address questions of strategy through the sensemaking process of storytelling. Perhaps you'd like a free trial by way of demonstration? Then roll up, roll up, and step this way...
week 29 / 2025: rifts in the schismatrix
Here's another way to look at the difference between science fiction and fiction-for-futures: the former is art, the latter is artifice.
week 28 / 2025: the concretisation of metaphor
The tools of science fiction can be put to use in the storying of scenarios, but in such cases, they are means to a somewhat different end. How might we usefully describe that distinction?