Weeknotes

week 02 / 2025

The winter is deep and dark, and the forest is frightening—but we've fire on which to cook the quarry, and light by which to write the WEEKNOTES. This week, the hunt is begun once more, and the optimal forsworn.

Hunters resting in a forest at night by Kilian Christoffer Zoll | image courtesy Met Museum

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends: it’s WEEKNOTES at Worldbuilding Agency!

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My name is Paul Graham Raven, and I am a consulting critical and creative foresight practitioner. I would like to help you or your organisation think through what it might mean (and look like!) to do the thing that you do in a world where the climate and the culture are changing way faster than the technology. I've done this sort of work for universities, professional institutions, charities and NGOs, as well as businesses; you can see some case studies and examples here. Whether you're wondering how I might be able to help, or if you already know what you need, drop me a line and let's arrange a chat.

I ain’t gonna lie—first week of a new year is always a challenge, and I doubt I’m alone in feeling that way. This year it feels like the engine got particularly cold over the holidays... but perhaps (as discussed last week) the real problem is that it didn’t get cold enough?

Well, whatever; we’re back on the road and rolling forward once more. What’s been happening, eh?

ticked off

Twelve hours on PROJECT TEMPORAL. (Production deadlines are looming, here, so I’ve been cranking it out on this one, up to the point of working over the weekend.)
Twelve hours (at least!) of assorted types of admyn. (Lots of out-with-the-old and in-with-the-new sorts of stuff, of course: accounting, filing stuff away, setting up buckets for a new year of paperwork. But also emails and other bits and bobs.)
Two hours fixing up and posting a reprint of an essay I wrote back in 2022 for FoAM’s Anarchive project.
Two hours meeting and meeting prep for something that I really hope I can add to the project roster next week, but which at present is still only a prospect.
Ten hours of undirected writing and reading, as always.

Now I write it all down like that, it’s a much less disappointing week of work than I thought it had been...

(... which, in case you hadn't guessed by now, is exactly why I track it and write it all down.)

kinmaking

No kinmaking this week—but that means I can share instead the results of earlier kinmakings, I guess?

I was asked to appear on two podcasts back in December, the first of which was Edward Rathke’s WOLF Podcast. Eddie did a thing through 2024 where he read every William Gibson novel, podcast-discussing each of them with different people along the way; yours truly came in as the oddball bonus guest for the oddball bonus book, namely Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine. The audio went out a few days ago:

Also available is the first part of my conversation with Bella and Bianca of BloW, which was a long (and, I think, fairly accessible) discussion of narrative in the broader, not-so-theoretical sense of the term:

Lots of fun recording both of these. Do please consider giving them a listen!

reading

Jeff Noon and Steve Beard’s Ludluda, which is the back half of their recent two-fisted Wyrd British science fantasy duology (which started with Gogmagog).

I have absolutely adored these, not least because they feel like a summoning forth of the very particular 1990s energy and vibe of Noon’s groundbreaking (and brain-breaking) early novels, which were profoundly influential and transformative for me as a writer and as a human being. There was a fecundity, a sort of organic down-the-ginnels dirtiness and warts-and-all weirdness to Vurt and its follow-ups that did for me as a writer something much like what I have to imagine Never Mind The Bollocks did for a lot of aspiring musicians in the year of my birth.

I’m rather less familiar with Steve Beard’s stuff, but I’m presuming the ram-raid occultism is his clearest fingerprint in these books—and on that basis alone, I’ll be looking for more of his gear at the soonest opportunity, innit?

I’m not going to synopsis or capsule-review these here, because I have the vague intention of writing about them at greater length elsewhere, and I want to keep my powder dry, so to speak. If you’re wondering whether you should read them, I’m just gonna say yes, in the full knowledge that around half of you (maybe more?) will bounce off pretty hard, but that you’ll still have paid for some of the sort of writing of which I think the world needs much more.

a clipping

Someone put a link for this one in the comments at my personal blog, and I think it’s worth sharing: a fairly accessible argument against optimisation as a general civilisational principle, and as an approach to living.

The problem, however, is that there’s a trade-off being ignored. What one person mistakes as inefficiency may actually be resilience. Rather than a demon to be slayed by a McKinsey exorcism, social slack is required for robustness. From modern social systems to our individual lives, we are over-optimized, courting disaster because we are deliberately slicing away the sinews that make ourselves and our world sturdier.
Brian Klaas https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/against-optimization

(Regular readers may recall that I too have invoked the Ever Given in a long discussion of optimality, but my own piece was a mite more academic in tone than this one, to say the very least.)

And on that note, I’m gonna go spend some of my Sunday being distinctly non-optimal, and I hope you’re getting the chance to do the same! Thanks for reading.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 02 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!