week 21 / 2025

“We serve an old man in a dry season / a WEEKNOTES keeper in the desert sun…”

It’s a cool, rainy day here in Malmö, the end of a fairly wet May week—not the ideal weather for attracting people to exhibitions. Nonetheless, my fellow STPLNers and I have had our work out and our performances on since Thursday, and to the end of today, because that’s what artists do.

(So on the off-chance you’re anywhere near Malmö Castle this afternoon, do drop in at Kommandanthuset and check out our work!)

This has been a fairly slow week, work-wise, and that’s been quite welcome; the flat-out pace of the last month or so has left me drained and out of energy. The next three or four weeks are going to be pretty busy, though: lots of workshop time next week, and then a whole bunch of intense writing commitments, pretty much all the way out to midsommar. Hard to believe we’re almost at the midpoint of the year, but there it is!

Let’s run down the numbers, then, eh?

ticked off

• Eleven hours on the SSDD exhibition. (This includes last Sunday’s final burst of making and a bunch of exhibition set-up time, but also an amount of hanging out with my cohort—wine may have been involved on Friday—and just being on-site to keep an eye on things and chat with visitors. Not exactly coalface time, in other words.)
• Eight hours on PROJECT HORNIMAN. (A sustained blast of edits, here, to get a chunk of the thing ready for its initial audience. HORNIMAN has dragged way longer than originally intended, though that’s due to workload issues on the client side as much as on mine; I think it should be done and dusted by early summer.)
• Eight hours on PROJECT PORTON. (A workshop, plus prep and write-up stuff.)
• Three hours on PROJECT VIENNETTA. (The community critique phase of the current collaborative foresight cycle at Media Evolution. The final core group workshops are this coming Monday and Tuesday, after which I will be cranking out stories for the resulting scenarios.)
• Two hours on PROJECT PONTIF. (This has been allowed to slip a bit this week, partly because I just haven’t had the spoons, as the kids say. Should get back to cranking on it next week.)
• Three hours of admyn. (Bits and, indeed, bobs.)

Plus the regulation ten hours of undirected writing and reading, as always.

kinmaking

In addition to hanging out with my STPLN cohort, it’s been a fairly social sort of week, at least by my standards. I had a few beers and a rambling chat about social psychology with Bella Salomonsson of BloW on Monday evening, and popped over the bridge to catch a seminar at CApE with Sherryl Vint and Max Haiven on Wednesday afternoon.

The kinmaking week was rounded off by a virtual visit to Cardstock, a monthly gathering hosted by John Willshire for people who work with cards in various ways; this is what happens when a friend mentions the tarot in their blog, and you email them with a mid-length ramble on the duality of interpretations of the major arcana, and in particular The Magician (aka Le Bataleur). Oddly refreshing for me to turn up to such a gathering and find I was nowhere near the weirdest person in the room; doesn’t happen often, that.

reading

I needed something easy yet absorbing to sink into this week, so I ploughed my way through all five collected volumes of Mike Carey’s run on the Lucifer comics for Vertigo.

Lucifer is an extension of the Sandman continuity, but I’ve always found myself much more attached to it than the trunk franchise, perhaps because I came late to the latter sequence, while I picked up Lucifer fairly close to its time of original publication—but perhaps also because Carey’s take on story as the raw material of reality comes with a rather more Nietzschean twist, courtesy the lensing effect of its eponymous protagonist.

I imagine there might be some among you who are raising an eyebrow at my identifying with a fictionalised version of the angel of the abyss, but this Lucifer is less the one you find in mainstream Christian dogma, and more the one you find in Milton, Blake, and other such visionaries. At the cosmic level, there is an almost gnostic necessity to him in the context of a complete universe; but at the level of character, as Carey has written him, he’s someone who sacrifices himself—and, yes, other entities—for the sake of his own sense of freedom. As such, I don’t see him as aspirational, but as a reflection of the best and worst parts of me, and (to a lesser or greater extent) of all of us... and as for my crushing on Mazikeen of the Lilim, well, that's my own business, isn't it?

Metaphysics and spirituality aside, it’s just a great, epic arc of comics storytelling, with a great roster of characters and some really distinctive artwork. Recommended.

a clipping

This week’s clipping sees Adam Tooze taking a close look at the stats on electricity generation, and in so doing provides a partial explanation for the main target of Trumpean tarriffs and Western political ire:

The huge surge in renewable capacity installation is real enough. But it is not global, in the sense of a common development proceeding at a roughly similar speed, or spreading like a wave around the world. As I pointed out in Chartbook last year and Brett Chrisophers highlighted in the FT, most of the world has seen no dramatic increase in the pace of renewable installation. The rate of expansion has generally been high, but it has not accelerated much and it is, overall, far from dramatic.

The spectacular acceleration in global renewable investment is, in fact, a story about one country: China.

Tooze notes that the US in particular has been way behind the curve on renewables installation, and that “[s]tagnation in overall demand makes the energy transition into a zero-sum game”; in other words, that’s why there is no “transition”. Meanwhile, China’s doing an unprecedented job of detaching itself from fossil fuels—though not without other costs, environmental and social, of course. It’s hard not to conclude that a lot of the posturing and bluster and panic is coming from a sense that someone else is winning the game.

The smarter, long-view strategy would be to look for ways to make said game something other than zero-sum—but you’ll forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.

OK, I need to break out my brolly and make my way uptown. I hope the weather—real, or psychic—is a little nicer wherever you are.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 21 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!