Monthly Link Dump: December 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).

The Face of Darkness
by Ian Holloway at Wyrd Britain

Written, directed and produced by Ian F.H. Lloyd, it's a slow and strange little film with an almost lysergic atmosphere. With it's lethargic pacing, odd camera angles - so very many close-ups - and arthouse sensibilities it's not going to be for everyone, but revolving around a suitably eldritch performance from Allister as the undead heathen it's an intriguing entry in the annals of wyrd British film.

Fonthill – House of Horrors
by Emma Heard at Weird Wiltshire

This is the second blog in the history series connected to the rather unsavoury past of the Fonthill estate in south-west Wiltshire, from guest writer David Aneurin Morgan. It’s a reminder that despite the beauty of a place such as Fonthill, there is always a chunk of dark history to be found.

Prefiguration
by Chris Ferdinandi at Go Make Things

Prefiguration is about building the future you want within the shell of existing structures. It’s generally not going to replace an existing system—at least, not in any sort of immediate or rapid time scale. But it does provide models people can look at to imagine something different. Prefiguration serves as a lighthouse for a possible future. A direction you can head in. It provides little experiments that you can try and learn from.

Why RSS matters
by Ben Werdmuller at werd.io

That invisibility has created a misconception, in some quarters, that RSS is a relic. But the opposite is true: we’ve never relied on it more. And as the social web fractures, as platforms wall off content, and as AI agents begin remixing everything they can ingest, our dependence on neutral, open standards for distributing information is about to become existential.

The difference between saying stuff and doing stuff
by Pete Brown at Exploding Comma

There are not one-cool-trick fixes to big stuff like this. It is hard, slow, incremental work, and that work has to be built from the ground level upwards from millions of human connections and local changes.

Mapping England’s Landscape Recovery Projects
by Guy Shrubsole at Who owns England?

Since Brexit, the UK Government has been engaged in lengthy reforms of farm payments – moving from the old EU Common Agricultural Policy to a new system of Environmental Land Management Schemes (ELMS). Under ELMS, there are three tiers of schemes, the highest tier being Landscape Recovery (LSR). The point of all of these schemes is to pay ‘public money for public goods’ – in particular, to pay farmers and landowners to restore damaged habitats and ailing wildlife.

English Folklore: The Ghostly Yellow Hound of Longdendale
by Zteve T Evans at Under the influence!

There are places in England and other places where encounters with strange beings occur now and then. Such places have a liminal quality existing betwixt and between what we know – the familiar and the unfamiliar – the homely and the unhomely. At times, in such places, the borders can be passed, and a flow between two worlds exists and intertwines briefly in some strange, inexplicable way. In places like this, we have strange experiences and encounters that are unfathomable, and we find ourselves face-to-face with beings that do not belong in our world.

Standing Amidst the Ruins of Substack
by Mark Nemglan

Perhaps this is why, having spent a chunk of time recently researching numerous other Substacks, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to discover that the majority are dormant, or abandoned. In many cases, the premise or niche is compelling, and it’s a great disappointment to discover the project has been abandoned. Within those moribund Substacks lurks genuinely excellent wordsmithery that, in most cases, will now be ignored; after all, who wants to subscribe to a writer who no longer writes? The landscape of creative endeavour – of which Substack is a part – is mainly populated by ruins, an occasional modest homestead, and one or two gleaming towers.

Do Trees Have Rights? Toward an Ecological Politics
by John Halstead at Another End of the World is Possible

Personhood, in this legal context, is not an ontological distinction, but a cultural one. For that reason, it is more or less arbitrary. That’s why human beings could recognize personhood, and hence rights, of fictional entities like corporations and limited liability companies, trusts and estates, sovereign political entities and even ships, while at the same time denying rights to women, people of color, and LGBT folk.

the consequences of failure are everywhere to see
by Paul Graham Raven at Velcro City Tourist Board

Magickal thinking is something of a prophylactic here, I reckon. I recall someone decrying us skeptics as falling back on an essentially demonological model of thinking with regard to LLMs, and thinking “well, yes, exactly“. After all, demons, somewhat like LLMs, simply mirror us back at ourselves. But in the case of LLMs, the mirrored unconscious—both individual and collective—is warped and remediated by the priorities and agendas of the corporate forms that have productised them: profit, and behavioural stickiness as a means to that end.

The Fungal Utopia: Seeing Utopia in Mushrooms and Mushrooms in Utopia
by Sheryl M. Medlicott at Just Utopias

As autumn turns to winter it’s time for me to summarise what I’ve read and thought about fungi this season. I started off from the current trend for fungal fiction. I found myself asking whether fungi are being used to think about better ways of being, and this made me wonder about the relationship between fungi and utopia. This led me to think about the fungi appearing in contemporary utopian fiction, and to ask what work authors are putting fungi to in their literary utopias. Here’s what I found when exploring these questions.

Plots and paranoia
by Paul Kincaid at Through the dark labyrinth

The Age of Deference, that strange Victorian hangover that had such a curious effect on British social, political, and even cultural life, was finally killed off in two London courtrooms in the early 1960s.

How to Live Fully: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Remedy for Our Resistance to Change
by Maria Popova at The Marginalian

The most assuring thing about life is that we can change, that things can change, that they are always changing. The most maddening is that despite living in a universe that is one constant transmutation of energy and matter, despite living in bodies and minds whose cells and ideas are constantly being replaced, we so vehemently resist change, too afraid to unsettle the structure of our lives — even when it doesn’t serve us.

Co-Determined: Between History and Poetry
by Mattie Colquhoun at Xenogothic

It’s my birthday today. I am 34 years old. As is tradition, I’ll be making the same lame observation I do every year. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union on 26th December 1991, it is also 34 years since the end of history.

About Brigitte Bardot and Nigel Farage
by Tim Footman at cultural snow

Talking of which, the question of how colossal a shitbag the teenage Nigel Farage might have been rumbles on. I don’t know, as I wasn’t there. But I do come from a roughly similar vintage, being four years younger than him, and am an alumnus of a similar school (selective, single-sex, sporty, cadet corps, faded grandeur, a strange blend of academic rigour and macho philistinism). And racism was bloody everywhere and as the only Jew among the student body, I was on the receiving end and I’m pretty sure that the handful of non-white kids got it even worse.

Hope for avoiding the harm from the climate and nature crisis without action is damaging and nothing but a deceiving sedative
by Richard Smith at Richard Smith's non-medical blogs

To temper the severity of the climate crisis we need plans and action. There will have to be change at every level, from the global to the personal. Without dramatic political change we will not succeed, but nor will we succeed without substantial personal change in how we live, what we eat, and how we move.

And with that I wish you all a happy new year!