week 35 / 2024

Look, I managed to take a photo this week!

(It's a slightly lopsided photo, but the photo is less lopsided than the structure it features. I prefer to think that the lopsidedness is central to the charm of structure and photo alike.)

I didn't manage to do much else, though. I woke up last Sunday morning with an allergenic-seeming sort of scratchiness in my sinuses, and by the time the evening rolled around I was feeling like I'd been thrown down a stairwell, courtesy some drive-by viral something-or-other.

I'm pretty much over it now, five days later. But I was obliged—with colossal regret and frustration—to cancel my talk on Monday, and forego my attending The Conference through the week.

Well, shit happens. But what else happens, eh?

ticked off

• Eight hours of editing the book. (Only two more chapters to go, which means we should be able to close the lid on this gig by this time next week.)
• Another meeting on the bid for PROJECT HOTPLATE, which should be the last one before the project lead partner pulls all the stuff together and files the thing. (I can't tell you how much nicer it is to do bids in collaboration like this, as opposed to the lonely Sisyphean slog of ECR academic grant applications! I can tell you, however, that it requires thinking of one's firm in a rather more formalised way than a one-man-band consultancy is accustomed to, particularly when it comes to questions of salary. So if anyone reading has experience of being a small operator in the public-grant space, and would be willing to talk to me about how you've managed it, please get in touch!)
• Some email tennis around PROJECT HORNIMAN, the first stage of which has been agreed to in principle by both parties, and has therefore been escalated from speculative to actual. (This is gonna be a good one! Though it's also somewhat ironic, for reasons I will probably discuss at a later date.)
• Around four hours elbow-deep in Fortnox (my bookkeeping software), trying to document stuff that's happened in Stripe. (This might only have taken an hour had I not been fully plagued up at the time, and will presumably take less time once I'm used to it. Also deserves noting that I got it almost entirely wrong—but I knew that was likely, which is why I had my accountant look it over afterwards. Over the years, I've learned that I learn best by failing.)

There were also more hours of admynistrivia, but given the aforementioned issues around quality of attention, I don't think it worth counting them. Sick weeks happen, and I did what I could!

It was a huge bummer to miss The Conference, but the upside of having had it dominating this week's schedule is that the days I lost were mostly not allocated to project work anyway... and that in turn made it a lot easier than usual to just say to myself "it's ok, you're sick, just rest and ride it out".

(Note I said "easier" rather than "easy". I wrote to Jay Springett something to the effect of "I've forgotten how to do nothing", but it's not at all a recent phenomenon—and nor is it one to be celebrated.)

reading

The Last Song of Penelope by Claire North. I could (and almost certainly will) write a few thousand words on quite how much I enjoyed this book and why, and how many times it made me cry—but this is neither the time or the place. Suffice to say that I'm of the opinion that Claire North is among the very best writers in English currently operating, and this—the final book in a trilogy which retells the story of Odysseus from the point of view of the wife who waited twenty years for his return—is a fine example of why I think so.

The series is also a really interesting example of what you can do to revitalise an unfashionable narrative mode by leaning into the prevailing critiques thereof: if the omniscient third person is habitually accused of taking a god's-eye view, then why not have your narrator actually be one of the gods?

(If you are big on the bookish content, you'll probably want to follow my civilian blog, Velcro City Tourist Board, because I'm going to try my best to keep the streams at least a little separate.)

kinmaking

This was supposed to be an epic all-out week of in-person kinmaking, of meeting new people and giving them business cards, swallowing down the anxiety and the introversion and embracing the possibility of becoming a bigger and better person by way of connection and communion with others...

... but nope, I spent most of the warmest week of the year sat in my apartment feeling like death. Well, selah: sometimes the universe has other plans for you.

(It'd be nice if it sometimes told you what they were.)

a clipping

I am a shameless hipster, because I'm going to tell you that I've been reading L M Sacasas since before he had a newsletter. He has the rare patience and confidence to write (or perhaps just to publish) only when he's got something worth saying, which means every missive is an event—and if you're at all aligned with tech-critical futures or the growing resurgence of degrowthy or "convivial" philosophies, then you should really be following along (assuming you're not already, of course).

Sacasas's latest starts from the Weberian notion of the disenchantment of the world, which is a strong trigger for me; I've argued that the disenchantment in question is an unintended but nonetheless very powerful effect of infrastructure, which has obscured the enchantment of the world with prestidigitation and spectacle.

Says Sacasas:

I simply want to posit one idea for your consideration: Enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention.

In other words, what if we experience the world as disenchanted because, in part, enchantment is an effect of a certain kind of attention we bring to bear on the world and we are now generally habituated against this requisite quality of attention?

At the risk of sounding self-aggrandising, this thesis feels to me like it's going for the same place as my own, but coming at it from a very different starting point.

(If you're thinking "who the hell is Weber and what did he think was disenchanted", don't sweat it, just click through anyway: Sacasas is a patient and gentle writer—far more so than I am!—and his post is a great introduction to the concept that he's critiquing.)

Ain't it funny, though, how concepts and debates from a century or so ago are back in the discourse? Change is coming...

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 35 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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Have a good weekend.