week 36 / 2024

Yet another week with no photography... which, if nothing else, suggests that I really need to get my shit together regarding this whole "getting out of the house" thing, or I'm going to look and sound like a cave-fish by the time February rolls round.

In the meantime, dear reader, I have archives! Above you can see a sort of land-art sculpture thing that can be found down in the hazardous and more than a little Tarkvosky-esque zone of Malmö's old kalkbrott (chalk-pit), of which I took a guided tour around this time two years ago.

(This is where the limestone came from that was used to make the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, or so I'm told—though I find it implausibly strange that they couldn't find a good source of limestone rather closer to hand? Less disputable is its status as a nature reserve and weird little ecosystemic enclave; it's had a long time to go feral in some very interesting ways. If you're ever in town, you've gotta go take a look—the size alone just boggles the mind.)

ticked off

• Sixteen hours of editing the book. (It's still not quite done—there's an "outlook" chapter and a lexicon of theoretical terms still to do—but the end is definitely within sight.
• Two hours of meetings and three hours of content assessment for PROJECT TEMPORAL.
• A couple of confused and stressful hours dealing with the consequences of decisions related to the budget for the bid for PROJECT HOTPLATE. (When I get a little more distance from this experience, I plan to write about it in greater detail, but for now suffice to say it was one of those moments where your heretofore mostly theoretical understanding of the distinction between use value and exchange value is brought to vivid, concrete and deeply uncomfortable life. Or, more simply, I got to see what happens when you underprice yourself, which is that—with, to be clear, absolutely zero intentional malice from any human being involved—you get %&¤#ed. The spreadsheet has its own relentless logic.)
• A couple of hours pasting up and formatting the first part of my interview with George Voss, which went up on Wednesday on This Very Website. (So much good stuff in there, and that's not even half of what was discussed... I'm very lucky to get to speak to such interesting people! Furthermore, you're very lucky that I take the time to get it all prepped and available as free-to-air text... so why not take out a paid subscription and help keep it free for everyone, eh?)
• Six hours of adymn. (My email inbox has been a bit Aegean stables of late.)

By way of answering a question mailed in from a reader: I have decided not to document in weeknotes the two hours of reading and writing that I do first thing every day, which is why it might look like I'm clocking much less than a "full" working week (whatever that is).

Those two hours go undocumented because a) they are as much part of what passes for my religion as they are part of my workday, and hence b) they are not open to assessment either qualitatively or quantitatively in any terms other than those they define for themselves in the moment. They are undirected, and non-negotiable. They are (an essential) part of what makes it possible for me to do what I do, but they are not "what I do". Do you see?

(You'd be forgiven if you don't. I'm not sure it entirely makes sense to me, either—but I do know it works.)

reading

I've been a bit scatterbrained in the evenings, which means that I've been mostly playing games, watching movies or reading poetry. The latter is actually not a good choice for such circumstances, because while poetry may (often) be short, it is also very demanding of focus; that I had forgotten that is a mark of how out of the habit of reading poetry I've gotten.

I started a collection of Herman Melville's short works in the middle of the week, but I'm not sure it's the right book for the moment, either. I mean, I love that prolix C19th style—but again, it's pretty demanding of your attention, and I've been short of that this week.

kinmaking

No kinmaking chats this week, but next week's already booked up as a two-fer, so that's fine. Anyway, I have been sending a lot of emails!

(If you're one of the people to whose inbox I have added: um, sorry, I love you.)

a clipping

OG solarpunk Andrew Dana Hudson is back from his summer holidays, which this year were (unexpectedly) powered by battery rather than by benzene. His latest newsletter therefore has a bunch of first-hand thoughts on what we might think of as the energy transition as seen from the other, more personal end:

It’s staggering to contemplate how much stuff was built to ensure that no fossil motorist in America need ever experience what EV owners call “range anxiety.” Beyond filling up before heading out on a long trip, Americans rarely have to plan out ahead of time where they’ll refuel or worry from the outset about whether their car will have the range to make it to their destination.

This really got me to thinking how central an image and quintessential a location the gas station is to USian storytelling, particularly cinema.

One of the beefs I have with much of the prose fiction that tries to pass itself off as solarpunk is that it just doesn't engage with infrastructure as anything other than aesthetic veneer: with apologies to Portlandia, you need to do a bit more than put a windmill on it and call it art, you know?

The questions ADH is asking himself about the charging station as an infrastructure-in-waiting are part of what makes him a great writer; understanding story means understanding where story happens, and why.

So perhaps now I have a good answer for the people who (not unreasonably) ask me how I'll recognise mature solarpunk fiction when I see it: mature solarpunk fiction will have internalised the charging station as an image and as a location in the same way that C20th cinema internalised the gas station.

(Keep an eye out for more ADH-related material here at Worldbuilding Agency in the weeks ahead, folks!)

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 36 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.