week 38 / 2024

When September starts in Malmö, you can still tell yourself it's summer, especially if the weather's been good, as it mostly has been this year... but by the middle of the month, there's no fooling yourself: the evenings are getting cool, if not yet crisp, and the days are shortening at a rapid clip.

But the sunsets are just magic, and sometimes you'll get a Kandinsky scrawl of jetstreams just like this, straight lines devolving into morse code blurts or whipped by wind into smoky arabesques, and you'll be walking across town to go to a show or to meet a friend and you'll look up and you'll tell yourself, damn, I'm lucky to live here, and lucky to be alive.

Because I am, you know? And sometimes I need to be reminded of it.

Now, what have I been up to...

ticked off

• Twelve hours of full-bore worldbuilding work and note-taking for PROJECT TEMPORAL, including a couple of hours of meetings. (I'm in London next week for the next project gathering, and there is a lot of stuff still to be done; I suspect my train journey there will pretty keyboard-and-screen oriented. But it finally feels like I'm past what I think of as the middle-of-the-ocean part of the project, when you can see neither the shore where you started swimming nor the shore where you hope to make landfall, and you're starting to wonder just how far off the chart you may have swum.)
• Eight hours of writing, editing and plugging material for This Very Website, including this week's "fairy or walrus" essay. (I set up my stall here saying I wasn't going to do "hot takes", and I think that promise remains unbroken: that essay is a parody of the hot take format wrapped around a worthwhile argument, and comes endorsed by Wendy Schultz, upon whose paper it is partly based. This is my excuse, and I am sticking to it; my research journal, my rules!)
• Five hours getting myself back up to speed on the essay for Vector that circumstances required me to set aside for a while. (I'm well into extra time on this one already, and while I know for a fact that I am not the only contributor of whom this is true, I don't want to presume on the good will of the editorial team too much, having been on their side of the desk enough times to know it's not much fun.)
• Four hours of assorted direct admynistrative tasks. (What do I mean by direct admyn? I'm not entirely sure, but it's a question that makes one realise just how much of one's life involves activities which could plausibly be categorised as admynistrative. For our purposes here, it refers to "blocks of admynistrative tasks that took enough time that it felt I should note them down in my ledger of the day". No, I don't count putting stuff in the ledger as admyn. Maybe I should?)
• Twelve and a half hours of undirected writing and reading, including personal blogging. (I am here reversing an earlier decision not to include this stuff in the weekly tally, mostly because it does me good to remind myself that this is work, and counting it as such is important.)

For those interested, the core of this latter category of stuff is an hour of The Practice while I drink my coffee, immediately after getting out of bed at 6am, followed by an hour going through the previous day's RSS harvest, every morning; the latter might be thought of as the backbone of a horizon scanning discipline.

Personal blogging tends to be fitted in around other things—or, more truthfully, tends to interpose itself between other things, because something I've read or been thinking about is nagging at me.

kinmaking

No kinmaking this week, though I have been sending some emails and messages in order to set up kinmaking moments in weeks to come... and I did have three chats last week!

(It's gonna take me a while to get this pipeline flowing properly, I think; it's really not a natural thing for me, but that's exactly why I'm working to naturalise it. In the meantime, if you would like to have a chat, just ask!)

reading

XX by Rian Hughes. A thousand-page monster of a thing that I foolishly bought in its first hardback printing, maybe two and half years ago, and then tried my best to ignore due to its cumbersome mass. (See also: Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry, though I have other reasons for putting that one off.) The subtitle of XX bills it as "a novel, graphic"; Hughes is a much esteemed illustrator as well as an expert in historical typography, and has brought those skills to bear in this book, many pages of which look like a cat trampled all over the master control panel of an international printworks.

I'm only 300 pages in, and the plot is immune to concise summary. A friend asked me what sort of book it was, and I responded by saying "it's very clever, but perhaps a hair too pleased with its own cleverness"; that was 150 pages ago, and I would now amend my answer by removing the words "perhaps a hair". XX is a novel of ideas, and that's a genre I'm very fond of, but it turns out that I much prefer my novels of ideas not to stop every few pages in order to remind the reader, fairly directly, that "hey, I'm a novel of ideas, you know". We'll see how it goes.

a clipping

This is not a particularly futures-y clipping—or at least it may not initially seem to be such—but nonetheless I'm going to commend unto you this transcript of Ezra Klein interviewing the novelist and essayist Zadie Smith.

When you wake up in the morning and you turn to your social app, you are being instructed on what issue of the day is what to be interested in. The news has always played some element in doing that, but this is total. And it’s not even, to me, the content of those thoughts. There’s a lot of emphasis put on the kind of politics expressed on these platforms to the right or to the left. To me, it’s the structure — that it’s structured in a certain way. That an argument is this long, that there are two sides to every debate, that they must be in fierce contest with each other — that is actually structuring the way you think about thought.

And I don’t think anyone of my age who knows anyone they knew in 2008 thinks that that person has not been seriously modified.

And that’s OK. All mediums modify you. Books modify you, TV modifies you, radio modifies you. The social life of a 16th-century village modifies you. But the question becomes: Who do you want to be modified by, and to what degree? That’s my only question.

As mentioned elsewhere, I found that almost every paragraph of it gave me a very intense kick of recognition: a sympathetic sense that this person was looking at the world in a very similar way to myself, and reaching similar conclusions. This bit on (social) media is perhaps the most pertinent part in the context of This Very Website, but really, it's all very excellent stuff.

That's all for this week. I hope you're appreciating—or at least not put out by—the moving of these weeknotes to Sundays? Do feel free to let me know, by whatever communicative means you prefer—and do please send recommendations of things to read that you think might be of interest.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 38 of 2024. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe, but please consider supporting this research journal with a small monthly payment. You'll get access to the occasional bit of Exclusive Content™, and you'll be funding free subscriptions for those with fewer monetary resources, but first and foremost you'll get the warm glow that only ever comes from enabling fully independent and climate-focussed foresight research to continue.

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—pgr