week 12 / 2025

Lift your skinny fists like WEEKNOTES to heaven!

Any assumptions I may have made last Saturday about being over that virus were roundly shown to be presumptuous in the extreme.

To be fair to myself, I had felt so much better on Sunday by comparison to the horrors of Friday that I might be forgiven my uncharacteristic bout of optimism as I boarded a train north to Gothenburg. But by Monday morning, as I started a day of teaching speculative design students at HDK Valand, any such optimism had been dispelled by a sleepless, nigh-hallucinatory night at the Scandic Europa.

I made it through the day, but I know I wasn’t anywhere near my best—and for that all apologies are due to the students, who endured a very rambling lecture with exceptional grace. They deserved better, really, but these things can’t be planned for.

Committing to Monday meant taking Tuesday and most of Wednesday off, less by choice than sheer physical necessity. Friday morning was the first day I really felt myself thinking straight, which mostly served to highlight how addled I’d been previously.

So, really not a stellar week with regard to work… and even what should have been a landmark expedition for pleasure, namely seeing Godspeed You! Black Emperor play Vega in Copenhagen on the Tuesday night, was compromised by tiredness, blocked ears and a (sensible) decision not to even have so much as a single beer.

Oh yeah—you’d better believe I still went. Gigs are so rare (and expensive!) these days that I have to be basically bedridden to skip ‘em. But you’d better also believe that I was that guy stood early in the atrium with his coat in his arms, listening for the last notes of the encore to start fading so he could scoot back across the bridge and get home to bed.

(This also explains this week’s choice of musical lede, in which I’ve had to rely on an album title for the words, because GY!BE are basically an instrumental act. And the linked tune, the bittersweet anthem-for-the-stateless that is “Bosses Hang”, isn’t even from that album... but look, this is my bizarre repeating newsletter-feature gimmick, and I get to break the rules that I set myself, OK?)

ticked off

• Six hours of teaching at HDK Valand. (As discussed above. Thanks and apologies alike to Ulises Aguiar Navarro and his students.)
• Eight hours on PROJECT ADVANTAGE. (As mentioned before, this one’s very short and fast, so a lot of this week’s grin-and-bear-it happened here. Thanks and apologies also to project colleagues for putting up with sub-par contributions and.)
• Four hours on PROJECT PORTON. (Similar.)
• Five hours of admyn. (Or thereabouts? Probably more in terms of clock-time, likely less in terms of actually achieving things. Selah.)
• Ten hours of undirected writing and reading, much of which felt like trying to plough a concrete field using a rusty Soviet-era tractor, but the main thing is showing up, even when—particularly when—you really don’t much fancy showing up and nothing much seems to work, because that is why it’s a practice and not some sort of hobby, right? Right.

kinmaking

Pretty much all my people-time this week has been in the context of ongoing or oncoming work, so doesn’t count for kinmaking by the weird rules I have set for this section. And that’s OK!

reading

I’m about halfway through The Story of Scandinavia by Stein Ringen, which I spotted while killing time in Gothenburg station on my way home. I’ve been desperate to get a decent sweeping English-language history of the part of the world that I’ve chosen to make my home; this book is in English, and its history is sweeping, but regrettably I’m not sure I can categorise it as decent.

It has definite merits, not least Ringen’s rather uncharacteristic approach, deliberately eschewing the opportunity to put an agreeable or self-congratulatory gloss on things, and indeed going to some lengths to portray Scandinavia as a backward edgelands of the European project, and its people as (until relatively recently) desperate scramblers-behind, their reach always far exceeding their actual grasp.

This may be something to do with Ringen’s being Norwegian, and rural Norwegian at that. Despite its size, Norway has always been the bumpkin cousin of the family, still traduced today by Swedes as a nation of mumbling farmers. Hell, technically there were a couple of centuries where there really was no Norway in any legal or geographical sense, during which all of those mountains and fjords were basically a Danish province that was occasionally referred to officially as “Norway” to keep up appearances. Ringen seems keen to point this out, as well as the many other social-historical silverfish that are prone to scuttle beneath the Scandinavian parquet at the first sight of light, and for that I commend him; I’ll bet it hasn’t made him many friends, outside of Norway at least.

Regrettably, the writing is not great: clashing, buckshot bursts of factual statements, building up to chapters which start off seeming to be temporally defined, only to veer through a couple of unexpected thematics before ending in a totally different part of the timeline and landscape. Credit where it’s due: this is a man writing in his second language, and furthermore trying to marshal well over a millennium of history into a single trade-press book for a general audience; it’s no mean task, and simply possessing that sweep of knowledge to start with is a considerable academic achievement.

Nonetheless, to make story of such materials is something else again; Ringen can do many things, but he really can’t do that. As such, I would struggle to recommend the book, even in the absence of comparable alternatives.

a clipping

Haven’t done much internet reading this week, in truth. As such, this recommendation is less a “best of the week” and more… well, more like something which I found to be much less terrible and wrong than People Online were making it out to be?

(Most likely because those people hadn’t actually read much of the piece itself beyond the admittedly ill-advised headline, which was likely not chosen by the author anyway. But why let that get in the way of a nice little bit of outrage, eh?)

Anyway, Tara Isabella Burton wants to renew the case for books as dangerous, and finishes her argument thusly:

To acknowledge that textual narratives have as much capacity to be truly dangerous as they have to be truly illuminating is to acknowledge that books, like people, are not inherently moral or immoral. Only by respecting the potential of books to destroy us – terrifying as it might be – can we have an authentic faith in their ability to put us back together again.

You might find it illuminating to see how she gets there! Then again, you might not. Reading’s funny that way.

That’s all for this week; I need to switch off and get some of that sweet, sweet equinoctial sunshine. I hope the seasonal shift is treating you well, wherever you may be.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 12 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!