Divergent Futures
The problems worth solving, and the paths out of them.
Historical patterns and current technology. What is actually going wrong, what has actually worked before, and the credible routes that already exist or are emerging — published as they're made, not once they're perfect.
How this works
Problem → Pathway → Hope
Name the problem honestly. Map the routes people are actually taking out of it. Then say plainly what a person could do with that — hope that survives contact with the evidence is the only kind worth publishing.
Latest
Writing
- Why this site exists (and why GitHub wasn't enough) Everything gets pushed to a repository. That works beautifully for about four percent of the people who might care about it.
- Problem, pathway, hope The three-part shape behind almost everything published here, and why the third part is the one most people get wrong.
The workshop
Projects
Kardashev Ticker
How much energy humanity uses, on Sagan's Kardashev scale, with the live electricity counter underneath it. Zoom out first.
DFHIS
LaunchPath
The truth about crowdfunding, built from 590,000 real Kickstarter projects — the actual odds, a readiness score for your own campaign, and a ranked list of what to fix before you launch.
DF
Prebuild
Work out whether a hardware idea is buildable, what it takes and what it costs — before you spend your one first impression. Finds the one number the whole thing hangs on, then shows you what it actually costs.
DF
Writer's Codex
A local-first, offline-capable organiser for story worlds — characters, timelines, places, threads. No account, no cloud, no backend. All yours.
DFBOOK
Reference Pack Library
Thirteen genre reference packs — 8,562 curated entries on tropes, subgenres, authors, landmark works and craft, every worked example rated on a four-tier scale. Plain JSON, CC BY, free to download.
DFBOOK
The Divergent Futures sites
Four static sites on one shared design system — the readable front door to work that otherwise only exists as a repository.
DFHISLOTSBOOK
The source for most of this lives on GitHub. This site is the version for people who'd rather not read a repository.
Elsewhere