week 41 / 2024

This has been a challenging week, for decidedly unglamorous and domestic reasons, and next week promises to be even more so, for exactly the same reasons.

To be uncharacteristically brief:

• I mainly work from home;
• I react poorly to disruptions of routine and a sense of not being in control; and
• next week, some builders will begin renovating the bathroom of my apartment.

These three facts, when combined, result in an inability to concentrate, plan, and act. Working this week has been like trying to eat soup with my hands tied behind my back... and the builders aren't even here yet!

Of course, complaining about it won't change much—but I guess I'm British enough to get a bit of catharsis from a public moan.

Thank you for indulging me, and welcome back to WEEKNOTES. On with the show!

ticked off

• A two hour meeting for PROJECT TEMPORAL. (Yep, it's still running, and will be running for some time to come... though it should be low bandwidth until another event early next year.)
• Eight hours on PROJECT HORNIMAN. (Reading my way into this new project, taking notes, trying to conjure structure from a pile of ideas. As noted above, not the ideal circumstances for this sort of work, but you're best off complaining about the weather from beneath an umbrella.)
• Five hours planning and mapping out material for This Very Website. (I'm focussing on making a sustainable strategy for the site rather than rushing out short-term content. If you're a paid subscriber and feel I'm not giving you your money's worth at the moment, let me know; we can freeze your sub a while, or I can even refund you. But I hope you'll grant me a bit of time to get the thing rolling properly!)
• Ten hours of admyn and accounting. (The vast majority of which—maybe eight full hours?—was spent hacking through the email backlog and getting it under control. Still work to be done on that front, but I'm no longer getting avoidance flinches when I look at my inbox, and that's solid progress.)
• Ten hours of undirected writing and reading. (Because this is the closest thing I have to a religion.)

The total number of hours here looks a little low, but there's a good reason for that, quite aside from the distortion effect of the impending renovation...

kinmaking

... in that I spent an uncharacteristically large amount of time on kinmaking this week.

On Tuesday I went to a seminar at Media Evolution on "competence attraction"—less because I'm in need of international talent for my business (ahem), and more because I need to get a better understanding of the local business ecosystem in which I am now embedded (as well as, perhaps, a better understanding of business more broadly). This was mostly an afternoon of listening to presentations, but I did chat to a few people, and I think it was worth the time.

On Wednesday morning, Reeta Hafner and I convened the first of our as-yet-unnamed casual meet-ups for Malmö-based futures folk. We initially thought we might get three or four people, but in the end we had nearly thirty expressions of interest; about half of those actually turned up on the day, all of whom were delightful company. Many connections were made, and we'll be doing it again ext month; if you're reasonably local to Malmö and fancy coming by, drop me a line!

(It's notable, I think, that Reeta and I are pretty much the only people in the group who identify primarily as foresight practitioners; the others are mostly doing what I would think of as embedded futures work, applying the tools and frameworks within different institutional or corporate settings. This is one in the eye for the "there are no specialists in foresight!!!1" people, who are not only defending a paradoxical position—if foresight folk can't specialise in other contexts of application, then surely they're specialists in foresight itself?—but also apparently rather behind the curve with what's actually happening out in the trenches. Credentialism is one hell of a drug, &c &c.)

Also spent an hour chatting with Ryan Wittingslow, an Aussie philosopher and educator currently based in the Netherlands. (We met right at the start of the year, when we spent a week all but snowed in to a small early-modern townhouse just outside of Weimar at a seminar on Nelson Goodman. As you do.)

reading

This week I've found myself going back—in search of something akin to comfort, perhaps?—to the classic works of Gilbert Hernandez this week: the Palomar stories collected in Heartbreak Soup, Human Diastrophism and Beyond Palomar. Hernandez is perhaps best known for the Love & Rockets comics co-written with his brother Jaime, and I'm very fond of those too, but his solo work set in the tiny Central American everytown of Palomar has always blown me away for its ability to make something epic out of the lives of seemingly ordinary people.

There's a clearly signalled influence of classic "magic realist" fiction from the late C20th, but also a postmodern multi-threaded and genre-mashing thing going on—the sort of storytelling which would be impressive even if the author weren't also drawing hundreds of pages of deftly-observed black-and-white comics art. I'm not greatly knowledgeable about such things, but even an artistic numpty such as I can identify an incredible deftness of line and an eye for faces: Hernandez's characters all look like real people, the characters who are related by blood look like they're related, and the older or younger versions that crop up elsewhere in the narrative look like the same person at different life-stages, rather than generic cartoon children or old folk. A greatly gifted artist, and an amazing storyteller; if you've never read Hernandez, you really should.

(I should also note that I finally finished Hughes's XX, and on aggregate I do not regret staying the course—though I still think it could have been a much stronger book if the maximalism had been dialled down just a few notches.)

a clipping

It's not been a great week for quality long-reads—I haven't had the focus, really, so there's a bunch of tabs sat open waiting for it to return—but I really appreciated this two-title book review at Places Journal by Timothy A. Schuler.

I wouldn't say I liked it; reading about the increasingly inevitable impact of climate change on ordinary people is not "likable". But Schuler deftly sums up the two books and puts them in the broader context, and in so doing provides a pretty good primer on what is sure to become a wave of internal migration in the United States, driven by drought and wildfire and the economic distress that follows them.

Migration has long been seen as a secondary effect, a collateral consequence, of climate change. Yet arguably the most visceral way human beings will experience the cascading impacts of global warming will be through the loss of their homes, or their livelihoods, or their communal networks. In both The Great Displacement and On the Move, the authors chronicle the personal stories of individual Americans. They draw on copious data and numerous interviews to show us the crushing calculus that is involved in the decision to relocate, even temporarily, in the wake of catastrophe. Together these individual stories gather force to become an unsettling chronicle of migration, displacement, and retreat that is already underway.

(I sent this piece to Andrew Dana Hudson, as it's very much in his wheelhouse. If it's in your wheelhouse, too, then you should probably be reading ADH, assuming you're not already doing so.)

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 41 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.