week 10 / 2025

“I'll sweep up the streets today / take your leave, then; look away / You need something more today / I don't mind, and it's WEEKNOTES this way…”

I was in London for work this week. Because I don’t fly, that means I’ve also been on trains for more time than I was working in London… but that’s OK. People ask me all the time whether I wouldn’t rather do without the inconvenience and the time spent travelling, and the answer is no; quite aside from the environmental issues, commercial aviation is a hellscape of relentlessly extractive non-places and utter contempt for the customer, and that’s before we even get to the border-security theatrics.

People often also ask if I’m afraid of flying, which I’m not. That said, it’s a pretty unpleasant experience in any class that I could realistically afford, and very bad for your health… but even so, the actual being-in-the-plane bit is probably the least worst bit, at least for me.

Mind you, train travel is far from immune to the failures of any chronically over-optimised commercial transport network, and this trip has been a reminder of that. Seven years ago, when I first started travelling across Europe by train on a semi-regular basis, I used to set off thinking if I can just make it to the Deutsche Bahn parts of the itinerary, it’ll be fine*.

Nowadays, it’s almost the opposite, and DB’s demesne is the clusterfuck risk zone for long-haul time-sensitive travel… and given that you don’t get into or out of Scandinavia by rail without passing through Germany, that’s a problem.

EVEN SO: I would much rather do things this way than fly; even the slowness is in many ways an upside, though I dare say you could argue that’s a privileged position to take. The truly unforgivable thing is the difference in price, at which potential clients often balk (and understandably so). In most cases**, however, I would not argue that train travel should be cheaper; rather, I would argue that the cost of flying should be brought way up. You could make a good start by removing the nigh-universal subsidies of aviation fuel.

(* Note to German readers: please recall that I had been living in the north of England for nearly a decade; I was fairly easy to impress when it came to infrastructural function.)

(** The UK is an obvious exception to this rule of thumb, and as good an example of profound market failure in a natural monopoly as one could ask for.)

ticked off

Because I’ve been travelling, I’ve not been holding myself to account in the usual fashion. I do my best to work on the rails, but experience dictates that it’s wise to expect very little of both myself and the circumstances (see above), and hence treat anything I manage to get done as a bonus.

As such, chalking up a bunch of hours on PROJECT PONTIF and (mostly) keeping on top of the admyn load counts as victory. Further win-points came in the form of invoicing for the brief (and very well-received) PROJECT CASHBOX, and adding another short-and-fast project from a different client to the roster under the badge of PROJECT ADVANTAGE.

But the main show, and my reason for being in That London, was the final phase of PROJECT TEMPORAL, whose (still not quite finalised) ultimate deliverable can be seen here:

The Chronoberg Chronicle is a narrative prototype assembled as a knowledge transfer sub-project under the Times of a Just Transition global convening grant from the British Academy—an organisation which is, in essence, an answer to the question “what if the Royal Society, but for the social sciences?”

As I say, it’s still not quite finalised, and as such not fully out in the world; I will write about it in greater detail when all the Ts are crossed and the Is dotted, and when the tricky questions of distribution have been addressed. But we had a nice day of pilot workshops with the Chronicle on Wednesday, got some great and constructive feedback, and also got a bit of closure on something that ran rather longer than any of us initially expected.

kinmaking

Aside from hanging around with colleagues from TEMPORAL, I got to spend a bit of time with various folks at the workshop. It was nice to renew in-person relations with Andrew Curry (SOIF), Wendy Schultz (Jigsaw) and Richard Sandford (UCL), and to make some new friends like Jason Dinsdale (UKEA) and Ulrike Kuchner (Nottingham U).

Also went for lunch with Duncan Lawie, an old friend from the days when I still went to sf conventions, and blogging was still A Thing. Thanks for making the time, Duncan!

reading

Very little reading for pleasure this week, and what little I did wasn’t particularly pleasurable, at least for me. Percival Everett’s The Trees is a dark comedy horror about revenge murders of people who were involved in lynchings and other Klan activities in the United States.

At least, it’s billed as a dark comedy, and reviewed as such; I did not find it very funny, and I suspect most of the humour relies on experiences and cultural shapings in which I—for reasons presumed to be obvious—do not share.

And that, for the avoidance of doubt, is just fine: not all novels can or should be written for me. This one very definitely was not.

a clipping

I’ve a few good options for this week’s clipping, but I’m going to go with a late-entry odd-shot: Venkatesh Rao’s extended argument for why Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books are a far better model for thinking about the world we live in than Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the latter of which tends to inspire the weird tech mavens that Rao has sometimes worked with.

I have a rule-of-thumb: The more seriously you take Discworld, the smarter you get about Roundworld.

The silliness is a feature, not a bug. Our universe is a vast, crazy place, and we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the endless weirdness it harbors. As Douglas Adams noted, “If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”

Discworld is about curing yourself of the allure of a “sense of proportion.” There is no surer of way of becoming detached from reality and addicted to some notion of manufactured normalcy.

Quite aside from the analysis itself, there’s something very refreshing in reading an in-depth take on a classic chunk of sf/f lit from someone who has pretty much zero connection to the genre-native critical consensus; it means Rao can go places that the (often fawningly fannish) Discworld discourse rarely bothers to go.

As such, I am willing to overlook the unexplained (and likely inexplicable) aside that tries to claim blockchain technology as the closest Roundworld analog to Discworld’s narrativium, and I hope you will too. We all pick up some crazy ideas in our journey through life, and learning when to accept a few grains of sand as the cost of the oyster is all part of the adventure.

Right, I’m done—in both senses of that saying! I hope things are well with you, dear worldbuilders.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 10 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!