Monthly Link Dump: August 2025

This is my monthly link dump, a regular monthly series containing a mix of links to interesting blog posts I’ve read from the past month covering arts & culture, myth, folklore, landscape punk, hauntology, anarchism, utopianism, the gothic, neo-fabulism, and the Weird - all discovered through my RSS feed reader (another reason why you should get a feed reader too).

“It Follows” and the emotional register of late-stage Capitalism
by Philip A. Suggars at myelectriceye

This is why the term “haunted capitalism” feels a more appropriate epithet to me than “late-stage.” Capitalism doesn’t die, it persists, populated and animated by the ghosts of futures that never fully arrived: dead city centres, empty social media networks and nostalgia for discontinued chocolate bars. We’re surrounded and invested in an epistemological infrastructure that exists only as a sort of grim hangover cure.

Dan Hays Impressions of Colorado – Lossy Snapshots of Technological Time and Place
by Stephen Prince at A Year In The Country

On first glance and as reproduced in the book, Dan Hays’ paintings of the compressed photographs etc appear to be fairly conventional replications that have been created without the use of individual pixels but the final image in the book (see image below) is a close up detail of a self-portrait which shows that the paintings are in fact built up from thousands of painted pointillist-like “pixels”, which explains why in the book Dan Hays says that the painting above took three or four months… which is sort of head boggling and illustrates an intensely focused dedication to his work.

Latest pheasant release stats point to widespread rule-breaking by shooting estates
by Guy Shrubsole at Who owns England?

25.9 million pheasants are currently being bred, reared or released in England, according to the latest official statistics I’ve obtained via a Freedom of Information request to the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA). The figure points to widespread rule-breaking by shooting estates who are failing to even register gamebird numbers – since it’s far lower than the number of pheasants the shooting industry accepts are present in the countryside.

Deposition from the Verge
by Sally McEnallay at Caught by the River

Margins are easy to ignore because they are places where nothing seems to happen. A motorway verge seen through a car window is a blurred, weedy strip that separates six lanes of traffic from farmland, new housing estates or the squat out-of-town warehouses of delivery companies. This edgeland is merely a liminal space between spheres of human activity. We have no reason or opportunity to visit unless accidents land us there.

Give Me Some Skin
by Dave Evans at Evans is a place on Earth

The cutter was one thing that artist Katie Taylor most certainly did not spare herself when she underwent a rather delicate sounding procedure and turned herself into art. Sort of. On Tuesday, I was at The Bell in Whitechapel with the London Fortean Society and I was both doing the door and operating the slideshow as the person/people who'd normally do that job were too 'squeamish' to attend Katie's 'An Unusually-Inked Artist' talk.

Stanislaw Lem, 1996
by John Coulthart at { feuilleton }

The Polish writer has been in my thoughts for the past week, now that I’ve finally got round to reading Solaris while also having watched The Congress, Ari Folman’s adaptation of Lem’s The Futurological Congress. Reading Solaris was an interesting experience when the story is so familiar from the Tarkovsky adaptation, which I’ve watched numerous times, and the Soderbergh adaptation, which has risen in my estimation in recent years.

Operatic Theatricality and Phantom Puppetry: Robert Wun Fall 2025
by S. Elizabeth at Unquiet Things

In the pitch-black Théâtre du Châtelet, models drifted out like sleepwalkers draped in the remnants of interrupted morning rituals—quilted coverlets stained with phantom blood as if breakfast in bed had been a cannibalistic affair, handbags sporting formal wear, prosthetic limbs offering assistance where none was needed, one model adorned with what looked like a high-end Korean face mask infused with something like fermented eel placenta and pickled starfish extract and imprinted with Dr. Who’s Lady Cassandra.

Vincenzo Mazzi’s caprices
by John Coulthart at { feuilleton }

Caprici di Scene Teatrali (1776) is a collection of fifteen printed plates by Vincenzo Mazzi showing suggestions for theatrical settings, several of which are prison settings. All of the scenes are distinctly Piranesian, especially the title plate which has the name of the artist and his series carved on stones inside the artwork.

The Old Crones Club
at The Peaceful Revolutionary

For most of history our accounts of the lives of others have literally been a his-story, stories told by men, often with other men as the intended readers. Even with children’s fiction it largely favoured the male characters, the kind father corrupted by his new wife, the brother trying to protect his sister, the boy who knew better than his old mother.

Talking Back to Flying Heads
by John Michael Greer at Ecosophia

As a writer with an unruly muse, I’ve gotten used to accepting inspiration no matter the quarter from which it arrives. Even for me, though, this essay is a little odd. We’re going to be talking about one of the weirdest movies of the early 1970s, which is of course saying something; about a widely praised short story by a major science fiction author from the same era; and about what these two products of the same cultural movement have to say about the nature of human society, and thus about the kinds of futures we can expect as industrial civilization winds down.

Ghost Signs
by Keith Seatman at Test Transmission all things Keith Seatman and more

I have been randomly taking photos of Ghost signs for some years now, Ghost signs are historic, faded and outdated tatty advertising images that were painted on the outside of buildings. Ghost signs are a significant component of the historic fabric of our Roads, streets and Avenues.Over the years where ever I go I tend to always be looking up, hoping to see some faded old advertising on the side of a building or residence.

Colors
by Joe Crawford at ArtLung

I had been drawing for was long as I could remember. In the 8^th grade I had earned an award as top artist in the class. But this was 9^th grade. High school. I had chosen an elective: “Drawing.”

Trespassing for the Disabled
by Sean Prentice at Caught by the River

Suffice to say, surveying the reformed landscape of the deserving and underserving infirm, as a disabled person I find startling parallels with the Acts of Enclosure which took away the common land by legal theft, and forever redefined our relationship to the landscape and one another.

They cannot stop you making music
by Ray Newman at Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart

School music services in the UK, which used to supply many working class kids with their first instruments, have been eroding for decades. A 2019 survey found a 21% decrease in the provision of music lessons in state schools while, of course, with bloody inevitability, provision increased in independent schools.

Imagining the good life in Stoke-on-Trent: Connecting memories, nostalgia and utopia
by Kate Burningham and Sue Venn at The Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP)

This article examines how emerging ideas about a ‘good life’ in the future can be shaped through both nostalgic reflections on the past and critiques of present-day realities. While recent scholarship has begun to reconsider nostalgia as not only backward-looking but also potentially positive and future-oriented, there remains limited empirical research on how nostalgia might influence utopian visions in post-industrial contexts.

The tiny, joyful worlds that we can enter like mirrors
by Scribe at 6days

To exist in collaboration is to empower both the group and the individual – as we’re only just starting to feel now (literally the last year or two, I’d posit), the social dislocation offered by screens-that-talk-to-us removes not just the ability to think critically, but/and so the potential to think up alternatives, and to rapidly assemble solutions when we suddenly face fundamental problems with the paradigm we thought we could trust.

Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years
by Simon Collison at colly.com

Goldsworthy is not an artist to namedrop and impress people with. His work is hugely popular across the world, and that’s largely because it looks good and is, on the face of it, easy to read. A lot of his works make great postcards and there are many coffee table books. Thousands of people will book in advance and tell their friends they went to see this show and that it was great.

Will There Be Funny Hats?
by Robert Wringham at New Escapologist

The problem is: we’re paid to be there. And we’re there because we have rent to pay. We can’t laugh and joke with the people who own our time and knowingly have the power to ruin our lives with a simple “due to corporate restructuring, we have decided not to renew your contract” letter. Unless you’re genuinely committed to creating a non-hierarchical workplace (presumably a cooperative where everyone takes home the same wage and has an equal voice in the organisation’s direction of travel), the power imbalance is an insurmountable problem. Colleagues are not your friends. That’s why “colleague” is a word really. You can’t be yourself at work. And if you can’t be yourself — if you’re working under a reign of low-level fear — you can’t really have fun.

Digital Culture is Not the Problem; The Problem is Capitalism
by Mattie Colquhoun at Xenogothic

Of course, the Internet has never been a utopia, but we should at least be awake to the manner in which its potentials have been actively curtailed by a billionaire class afraid of the free circulation of information. The response to this is not retreat, however; just as retreat from society at large is not possible (or desirable) offline either. What we seek an escape from is the Digital Enclosure Acts of various governments (and the UK is once again leading the vanguard here); we must refocus our attention on the forces shaping various structures of feeling, rather than take these feelings to be unadulterated and subjective ‘truths’.

Fix the Signal
by Robin Rendle at robinrendle.com

It often feels like optimism is an act of revenge, an act of spite or rebellion, because optimism requires diligence and effort whilst pessimism feels like the default, the thing requiring no energy or effort.