velcro city tourist board
a blog by Paul Graham Raven
science fiction / social theory / climate futures / infrastructure / utopian narratology / sometimes cats
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thank you, Copenhagen
Gave my worldbuilding talk on the south campus of Copenhagen University yesterday afternoon, and I don’t mind saying that it went really well. Having a a great audience really helps: But also sometimes the planets are aligned correctly, the magic is in the room, and the thing just flows through you. Artists of many sorts…
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Malmö music futures: Waves of the Blue Sea
Three stories from me this time, based on three scenarios produced by a gloriously eccentric batch of participants in four full days of collaborative foresight exploration of “the futures of sound and song”.
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at Ogre’s Grave
It was estimated that ogres had numbered in the billions when their civilisation had met its end, and they appeared to have colonised every corner of the world. Giants who had ravaged and despoiled the Mother’s land and seas, leaving traces of huge mines and quarries where they had ripped minerals and metals from Her…
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18APR24 / the thaw
UmeÃ¥ doesn’t really get a spring, they tell me. What it gets, not long after the clocks change, is a couple of weeks when the the temperature wavers around either side of zero centigrade, while the huge piles of gritty snow that have been scraped off the roads and pavements over the last half year…
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17APR24 / sitrep
It’s snowing a bit in UmeÃ¥ this morning, and I have somehow managed to find that one cafe which, on the upside, has pretty decent coffee, but somehow doesn’t have wifi? Feels like going back in time… a vibe amplified by the very 80s radio choices. I’m trying to stick it out anyway, in the…
Who is Paul Graham Raven?
“… who, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with [his] voice, thanks to the god in [him].”