week 18 / 2025

“And underneath the arch, it turned into a march / and there we found the spot to set these WEEKNOTES off...”

The restless but rather diminished spirit of social democracy haunts Sweden at this time of year, as do the darker, starker ghosts of its Christian and pagan pasts. May Day is a “red day” here, a national holiday—much as it is in many other European countries, though not Britain—but it is preceded by Valborg, the local name for Walpurgisnacht, which (so far as I can tell) has pretty much always been a Christian saint’s day grafted crudely onto a date that, for pagans, marked the real start of spring.

Valborg has various folksy traditions associated with it, but it’s mostly a piss-up for youngsters, especially in the old university towns of Lund and Uppsala, where the tradition of student mayhem is so old that it’s deemed unstoppable. My first full day visiting Lund, a little more than seven years ago, just happened to be Valborg, about which no one had warned me in advance; it was something of a surprise, then, to emerge from my accommodations around 9am to find the entire town covered with teenagers, already reeling drunk, all watched over by helicopters of loving grace. Malmö is certainly not permitted this degree of unleashed revelry—and even Lund, for the first time ever, managed to prevent it during the first year of the pandemic by the widely reported strategy of covering the city park with manure—but there are bonfires and parties. The high side of the year has begun.

May Day, meanwhile, sees the various leftist parties and their adherents march through Malmö on their way to a big gathering in one of the city’s parks. Naturally, Vänsterpartiet and the other fractions further leftward take a different route to the Socialdemokraterna; the former march trends younger and more diverse than the greying and diminishing ranks of the latter. They don’t call it “Red Malmö” for nothing… but that redness is increasingly an isolated blot in a sea of colours trending toward the other end of the spectrum—much as it is in other countries, and for much the same reason. I assume there’s a Swedish term that does much the same work as Pasokification, though I must confess to not yet having learned it.

It was fine weather for marching this year, but yours truly was head down at his desk: international clients don’t necessarily share the same holidays, and even if they had, there’s still way too much on my slate to be taking weekdays off. Indeed, it looks like I’ll be going fairly flat out until midsommar, though that does include a bunch of time earmarked for making some artworks for an exhibition later this month, which—given it presents next to zero chance of financial compensation, but also given that it will be calming and pleasurable—I can’t quite count as “work” in the more business-oriented sense of that term. Nonetheless, it is still work, which is why it will be tallied here going forward.

On which note…

ticked off

• Eight hours on PROJECT PONTIF. (Probably more hours after these weeknotes go live, too, because I’ve built up a nice bit of momentum on this, and I need to keep the plate spinning.)
• Eight hours on PROJECT PORTON. (A bunch of preset deliverable dates from PORTON are one factor in the current logjam of stuff to do, though the nice thing about PORTON is that it’s a team gig, so I don’t feel like I’m just flailing away in a vacuum.)
• Six hours of admyn. (I’m counting here an interview with a couple of students from Malmö who are doing a project related to the foresight cycles at Media Evolution; not exactly breaking rocks in the hot sun, you know)
• Five hours on PROJECT LOFTY, and probably another three or four to come this afternoon. (LOFTY is my first commissioned gig that involves making tangible things as well as writing stuff. It will surprise absolutely no one to hear that I misjudged the time it would take to finesse some of the making; as a result, the clock is running very close on some immovable deadlines, and so I’m working at the weekend in order to get the thing done. Selah.)
• Four hours preparing various aspects of the afore-mentioned art project. (More on this when time allows, and when there’s rather more to show for the effort.)
• Two hours of STPLN stuff. (The inside-baseball aspects of being part of a no-hierarchy arts organisation; lots of meetings.)
• Two hours on PROJECT WATERWAY. (Another small creative thing with a fairly imminent deadline… but my collaborator and I have assembled all we need for our proposal/pitch, apart from a brief descriptive text which I’ll hopefully run off some time this evening.)
• Oh yeah, and ten hours of undirected writing and reading, because that’s how the cake gets baked.

kinmaking

I’ve been working with Johann Schutte for a while on PORTON, and we’ve both been on the books at SOIF since around 2019 or so—me as occasional consultant, he as full time staff—but we’d never really gotten round to getting to know each other properly, so it was nice to squeeze in an hour on Wednesday for us to talk about something other than deliverables and deadlines.

reading

This week’s main reading was Where I’m Calling From, the selected short stories of Raymond Carver. Slamming through the whole selection from cover to cover in a week is probably not the best way to approach Carver’s stuff; he’s a standard-bearer for a particular sort of USian literary fiction of the latter half of the C20th, which means that you get story after story of miserable people in bleak circumstances, frequently fucking up in such a way as to make said circumstances bleaker still. To be fair, the stories aren’t all dark and doomy—but enough of them are that the accumulated affect is emotionally exhausting.

The stereotype of literary short stories, as seen from the genre side of the fence, is that they are stories in which nothing much ever happens. This is unfair, because of course something happens; what you don’t get is the neat resolution or meeting-of-expectations that is (part of) the pleasure of generic forms—though one might reasonably counter that this lack of resolutions or expectations met is in itself a generic form, just defined in the negative.

For my money, I’m less interested in the stories than the voices in which they are told, which seems to me the true magic of Carver’s work: for all their miserable situations, for all their failures and (self-)recriminations and addictions and unexamined flaws, his characters come to life on the page within the first few sentences of each piece, totally distinct and convincing. You can hear them… and perhaps that’s what makes the cumulative misery bearable, because you never lose sight of the flawed humanity on whose shoulders it’s being carried.

a clipping

PROJECT LOFTY is themed around the issue of (over)reliance on utilities infrastructure in an age of ubiquitous automation. As such, while I had a great deal of sympathy for the people of Spain and Portugal during their sudden (and as-yet not fully explained) mega-blackout at the top of the week, there was a selfish little part of me thinking “well, ain’t no one gonna be able to accuse this project of irrelevance”.

Those who have known (of) me for a while will be aware that infrastructure is one of my realms of academic expertise; as such, there was not much in this Wired piece about rebooting the Iberian grid that was revelatory to me. But if you’ll excuse me donning my doomer’s hat for a moment: as our various grids become ever more complicated, due to us bolting ever more subsystems into and onto and under them, and as global weather systems become ever more erratic, due to our having pumped way too much excess energy into an already somewhat chaotic system, you’re going to see a lot more of this stuff, you’re going to see it closer to home, and you’re going to see it sooner than you think.

That’s not reason to panic, but it is definitely reason to prepare—and reading stuff that gives you a sober and non-sensational look at what actually happens in a grid failure (note the lack of violent social unrest!) as well as the challenges facing those whose job is to “manage” (and repair) the system, is a good way to start preparing.

This is every electrical engineer’s nightmare scenario, says Paul Cuffe, assistant professor of the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at University College Dublin. “The reason we don’t have widespread outages all the time is because system operators are very conservative and very proactive about using big safety margins to make sure this doesn’t happen,” he says. Engineers plan for failures in grids or surges in consumer demand that could destabilize the power supply. “These things are unusual, but to a power engineer the latent threat of it happening is always there.”

OK, I have a prototype to finish, so I’ll leave it there. I hope all’s well with you.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 18 of 2025. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe. If you are already subscribed, please send to a friend who you think might also like it!