week 24 / 2025

Greetings from a very sunny Stockholm, and welcome to a Minimum Viable WEEKNOTES.

This weekend is probably the closest thing I’m going to get to a holiday away from home this summer, and I have made the executive decision to spend as little of it as possible on work. I will record my hours and make note of my kinmaking activities, because that’s mostly for my benefit, but that’s all you’ll be getting—so no shame in clicking away if you’re usually here for the discursive stuff! We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled broadcasts next week.

ticked off

• Fourteen hours on PROJECT PORTON. (We’re into the big deliverable on this project, and yours truly has responsibility for making sure it comes out right—so lots of thinking and planning regarding structure, and reviewing what’s come before.)
• Eight hours of admyn. (A bunch of applications in here, for both positions and contracts. Dull work, but it’s gotta be done.)
• Five hours on PROJECT PONTIF. (Landed a long-awaited conceptual breakthrough on PONTIF early in the week, which was very welcome. I had been feeling stuck, writing my way around something I just couldn’t see clearly, but the path forward is now plain, if far from clear.)
• Plus ten hours of undirected writing and reading, of course.

kinmaking

Monday was lunch with Svante Landgraf, literature scholar, during which we totally failed to talk about House of Leaves—a conversational lacuna which, given the nature of that book, is arguably thematically apropos.

Wednesday morning was Mikko Dufva’s “fireside futures chat” at Media Evolution, though no actual fire was required. I had the privilege of monopolising Mikko’s attention a few weeks back, so I was mostly just audience for this event, but I met some interesting people in the post-discussion mingle.

My doctoral supervisor on the social-scientific side, Liz Sharp, passed through Malmö on Thursday as part of a slow return by rail to the UK from Finland. Nice to catch up with happenings back at my alma mater, and in the mother country… and to discuss my PhD and its rather difficult final phases from a position of temporal (and hence emotional) distance. I will always be quite conflicted about it, I suspect, but it seems I am much less so than I was when I left the UK.

Finally—and still ongoing at time of writing—hanging out in Stockholm with dear friend and sort-of-colleague Anna Krzywoszynksa, sociologist of soils at the University of Oulo and all-round excellent human being. There is a professional element to this meet-up, as it happens, but that is couched in a very agreeable amount of wandering around in the sunshine and drinking beers in the shade.

That’s all for this week, folks. Back to normal—or what passes for such around here, at least—next week.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 24 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!