week 49 / 2024

Welcome back, dear friends, to WEEKNOTES at Worldbuilding Agency.

The Swedes have started the slow wind-down to the end of the year already, but things are still fairly full-speed-ahead here at Magrathea Towers; lots of stuff to do, plus plans to make for the new year. Feels very good, I must say, to be back to relative normality—a full week in which my schedule was fully under my own control!

Let's scrape down the boards, then:

ticked off

• Twelve hours on PROJECT HORNIMAN, a mix of reading (with note-taking) and drafting. (Nice to get a decent chunk of work on this one, as it got rather shoved aside during The Times of the Bathroom.)
• Seven hours on This Very Website, mostly editing and pasting up next week's interview. (Which has been a lot of fun, because it's a Bruce Sterling interview, and you really get maximum value of out of time spent listening to that man.)
• Three hours on PROJECT TEMPORAL, which was all one much-needed meeting. (The end-game of this is not yet in sight, but it's now on the map, at least.)
• Three hours of admyn toward other projects. (New house rule: if I spend an hour or less doing paperwork, it's admyn, even if it's all paperwork for the same project. Trying to streamline the weeknotes mathematics a bit, here.)
• Ten hours of undirected writing and reading.

kinmaking

More kin-restoring, in the form of a two-hour ramble-chat with the quietly brilliant Richard Sandford, currently at UCL. Richard's very smart indeed, and thinks off the beaten track, futures-wise—which is why this conversation, without any prior decision that it should do so, ended up giving me some really useful ideas and directions for work on HORNIMAN and PONTIF.

(I think it's a mark of how enjoyable the conversation was, in and of itself, that I didn't actually recognise that utility until much later in the day.)

reading

Not been a great week for leisure reading, really, but I've made a decent dent in Timothy Denevi's Freak Kingdom, a Hunter Thompson biography that focusses on his political writing and activism between the mid-Sixties and mid-Seventies. I already know the general arc of the story, from both Thompson's own accounts and some others, but Denevi's willingness to go to other sources for contextual detail and depth is appreciated, even if the deliberately novelistic style can feel a little overwrought at times.

a clipping

We'll let this one do its own promo work, I think:

While the pain of large infrastructure projects can be put into statistics — number of years delayed and billions spent — the cost of such projects is ultimately personal to the people working on them and the citizens frustrated by the lack of payoff to their tax dollars and mundane suffering. I want to make sense of the lifecycle of such large infrastructure projects — how are they planned? What factors determine if they will be successful or not?

There's more than a bit of that whole "guh, governments amirite?!" eye-roll routine about it, which means I shouldn't have been surprised when it started veering a bit crypto* toward the end. But the basic point stands: governments really do struggle with infrastructure projects these days—with the CCP being a notable exception, if not perhaps the rule-proving exception these people think it is—and thinking about why that might be is worthwhile.

That said, assuming that the answers in this piece are entirely correct, let alone the full picture, would be extremely unwise. However, clicking through just to gawp with genuine envy at the map of high-speed rail growth in China is the very soul of wisdom.

( * Ironically, perhaps, I have no idea who the authors are, because it seems they're tagged only as links to things that are on some blockchain or another. Are the se things wallets? Tokens? Damned if I know! People who want to argue that being "on chain" makes everything identifiable and traceable really haven't reckoned with the fact that, for most people, more than two clicks of a mouse means "I dunno, I guess it was some guy?" Which, now I come to think of it, is probably a big part of the appeal...)

That's all for this week, folks; thanks for reading. Keep 'em peeled for the Bruce Sterling interview next week! In the meantime, cheerio.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 49 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.