Anyway, the World of the Week was a feature of the Wongery that started in January 2013. The idea was that every week we would highlight an imaginary world not created by, owned by, or otherwise associated with the Grandmaster Wongers but that we thought was interesting. Our criteria for choosing Worlds of the Week were never explicitly stated, but essentially these were worlds that we thought had sufficiently original and imaginative features to be worth identifying, and that weren't already widely known parts of pop culture.
Of course, we're not getting as much done on the Wongery now as we'd like, but in 2013 we were even worse about keeping up with it than we are now. We only managed to get two Worlds of the Week up before neglecting the feature for a month, then getting a couple more entries up in February, missing another week, and posting what wasn't intended to be but ended up being the final World of the Week in March. After that, while there were no further updates, the feature languished unchanging on the home page for years before I finally got around to removing it, uh, let's see, apparently just this last April. In total, then, there were only ever five Worlds of the Week posted:
- An alien planet called Snaiad with detailed speculative evolution
- A lightly limned alternate Earth called Dogscape that originated in forum posts on the site Something Awful and that had a brief period of relative internet fame before being now, I think, largely forgotten
- A two-dimensional world called Arde from a novel, The Planiverse, by Wikipedia:A. K. Dewdney
- Almea, a world described on the site Zompist.com most notable for its carefully designed languages
- "Keteria", my own name for the as far as I know otherwise unnamed universe of the SCP Foundation and related projects
Well... aside from time, money may also be an issue. Originally, the World of the Week posts were illustrated with collages I created from existing images from the books or websites where the worlds were described—or, in the case of Dogscape, of an image I found on DeviantArt. I did credit the sources of the illustrations... but I didn't ask permission to use them, and that's not okay. I want to respect artists' rights, and I... wasn't doing that. So if I did relaunch the World of the Week, I'd want to do it with new, original illustrations for each world. In principle, I could make original illustrations myself, but that comes down to the time issue again, but also runs afoul of the fact that, uh, I'm not a great artist. Illustrations I created wouldn't be up to the quality standards I'd want for the Wongery. That means I'd have to get someone else to make the illustrations, and that means I'd have to pay them, and that means, well, that means it would cost money.
So is the World of the Week gone for good? Well... not necessarily. It won't be there at the hard launch of the site. But it may be up later. It depends. I'd been waffling for a while on what to do about the World of the Week; as I said, it's a feature I want the site to have, but it's one that I'm not sure we can afford, both financially and (mostly) timewise. But I think I've finally decided on what to do about it.
Another thing I'd been waffling about for a while is whether or not I was going to make a Patreon account for the Wongery. As I've mentioned before, we didn't create the Wongery primarily to make money. We created it just because we like creating imaginary worlds, and wanted a way to share our worlds so others could use them if so inclined. But that doesn't mean we have no interest in making money from it. If we could make money with the Wongery, that would certainly be a welcome benefit, and would allow us to justify spending more time on it (as well as to afford illustrations and other things to make the site better). And, well, Patreon seemed like one possible way to do so.
I still wasn't totally sure I wanted to make a Patreon account for the Wongery; I wasn't sure anyone would want to subscribe to it, and it could be a lot of work for no gain, and besides which it might seem sort of, I don't know, offputtingly venal? What decided me on the matter is my current financial straits. As I said in my previous post, the industry I work in has been in a big slump lately; I'm in a real financial pickle right now; and if I'm going to do what I want to do for the Wongery's hard launch, I may have to take out some personal loans. And, well, if I'm extending myself that much financially for the Wongery, then it seems kind of incumbent on me to take any measures possible to recoup the investment. Which I've now tentatively decided does not necessarily mean setting up a Patreon account, but only because I've done a little research and decided that Ko-fi may be a better option. I guess in principle I could have both, but that seems to be likely to take things well past the point of diminishing returns.
Anyway, I won't elaborate on my Patreon/Ko-fi plans further here, mostly because I think that could easily be the subject of a whole separate post. The reason I brought this up, though, is because it's directly related to my plans for the World of the Week. If money and time are the main impediments to the World of the Week, then it makes sense to implement the World of the Week when and if those impediments are removed, or at least when they're sufficiently ameliorated: when and if the Wongery is making enough money to pay for the World of the Week illustrations, and to justify the time spent on the feature. So... while this isn't necessarily set in stone, my current plan is to set a goal to relaunch the World of the Week when and if our total monthly income from Ko-fi reaches a certain value. (I'm currently thinking of $200, but that's a value pretty much just conjured out of thin air and may very well change.) That may, of course, never happen; it's entirely possible nobody ever cares about the Wongery and the Patreon/Ko-fi account is a complete flop and never brings in any money, or at least that it doesn't bring in enough to reach the threshold. And if that's the case, well, then, I guess there won't be a World of the Week. But when and if that threshold is crossed, the World of the Week will once again be a thing. I hope that happens, of course, not just because, well, it would mean the Wongery is making some money, but because, like I said, the World of the Week is a feature I want the Wongery to have.
When and if the World of the Week does relaunch, most of the previous Worlds of the Week will get their time in the spotlight again. The one possible exception is, ironically, the one that had been sitting on the front page of the Wongery for years until I finally removed the hiant feature: Keteria, the universe of the SCP Foundation. I'm not sure it really meets either of my unstated criteria. The worldbuilding is hodge-podged and scattershot and, while a few of the individual "SCPs" are imaginative, I'm not sure the overall concept is really interesting enough to warrant the entry. And maybe it's a false impression I get because it happens to be popular in some of the online circles I frequent, but I think the SCP Foundation is much better known than most of the other Worlds of the Week or projected Worlds of the Week, and maybe crosses the line into being already too famous to warrant highlighting here. On the other hand, all of the SCP Foundation content is released under a Creative Commons license, and that's a positive thing that I think is worth honoring and maybe nudges it back over the line to meriting inclusion after all. So right now I'm tentatively leaning toward the universe of the SCP Foundation getting a World of the Week entry after all (though maybe under a different name), but of the five original Worlds of the Week it's the one that's by far the iffiest. (I feel like in some ways parts of some of these Wongery blog posts have become sort of a... paean to open content? Which was never something I intended at all. I wanted to release the content of the Wongery itself under open licenses to make it easier for other people to use it, but it had never been my purpose to evangelize for other open-licensed projects or for open licenses in general, but I guess I'm not entirely upset that that sort of maybe ended up happening. Anyway, use Firefox.)
There are, however, a lot of other projected Worlds of the Week waiting in the wings, some that I'd intended to include when the feature was first founded but didn't get to before it was discontinued, and others that I've discovered since then. Even before I made my decision about tying its fate to subscription income, I'd still been compiling a list of worlds I'd want to highlight in anticipation of the feature someday returning. I even started writing up a few World of the Week entries, which was of course absurdly premature and there are probably a lot of better uses I could have made of that time. And of course I'll have a thread in the forum where people can nominate worlds they think are deserving of being Worlds of the Week, though whether or not the nominated worlds are granted that recognition will come down mostly to my own admittedly highly subjective judgment.
So will the World of the Week be returning? That, dear reader, is up to you. (Or more accurately it's up to Wongery readers collectively. Not to you specifically. We'll see what happens.)
Anyway, according to the Weekly World News website, the planet Nibiru may collide with Earth on November 22, 2023, so, you know, that's something to look forward to.