Monthly Link Dump: February 2026

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).

2036
by Anthony at Time's Flow Stemmed

Sitting on my commuter train this morning. There’s not a single person in my carriage visibly reading a book. Phones, laptops, and sleepers. No one stares aimlessly out the window. No books. Granted, digital books complicate this observation. Someone staring at their screen might be reading Proust. Might be.

Issue 100 – Freedom of all kinds is worth fighting for
by Molly White at [citation needed]

But it is also in no small part thanks to the cryptocurrency industry — and the rest of the technoligarchs — that we find ourselves with this administration, and with members of Congress who either wholeheartedly support its abuses or are too craven to do anything meaningful to stop them.

The Single Best Piece of Advice on the Creative Life
by Maria Popova at The Marginalian

To be an artist is to live suspended above the abyss between recognition and artistic value, never quite knowing whether your art will land on either bank, or straddle both, or be swallowed by the fathomless pit of obscurity. We never know how our work stirs another mind or touches another heart, how it tenons into the mortise of the world.

“community” as content, and as form
by Paul Graham Raven at Velcro City Tourist Board

Pasieka puts her finger on the core dynamic. There are two sides to the whole thing: first of all, the sense of belonging, of “community”, is as much a function of a constructed Other as it is of a shared Us; secondly, an individual’s sustained belonging in the “community” is only secured by successive surrenders of autonomy and individual identity to the group. To simplify, we might sum these up as distinction and conformity, respectively.

What is ‘What is folk horror?’
by Ray Newman at Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart

You’d be disappointed if I sold you a box set of folk horror films that turned out to contain Dawn of the Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, right? Even if it wouldn’t be that difficult to construct a clever argument for their inclusion.

When the New is Worse Than the Old
by Daniel A. Kaufman at Cathode Ray Zone

The whys of this are fascinating and complex and well beyond my expertise, so I won’t speculate as to them. What I’m interested in here are those cases where the relevant transformations seem not to represent an improvement but the opposite. Certainly, there are those who suffer from a kind of nostalgism, according to which everything new is bad and everything old is great, but far more people are prone to a variety of novelty bias, where the new is always better, and the old is always worse.

Write about the future you want
by Dave Rupert at Dave

If complaining worked, we would have won the culture war already. We’d have a reformed Elon and the White House wouldn’t be committing crimes against humanity. But that’s not the world we live in. The one we live in is much worse. If you hate the here and now, write about what would be a better future. Write about what’s good and why more of that good would be good.

A Great Social Rewilding Is Coming
by David Todd McCarty

As the enshittification of the internet hits its apex and begins to collapse under the weight of a tsunami of AI slop, humanity may very well find itself back where it started, rediscovering the genuine world of books, art, music, travel, entertainment, food, and nature. Authentic experiences that have the ability to connect us emotionally and communally, leaving lasting impressions that stay with us long after the experience has ended. It’s how we evolved as a species, and probably does a lot to explain the cognitive dissonance we feel when faced with our current state of affairs.

Communities are not fungible
by JA Westenberg at joanwestenberg.com

There’s a default assumption baked into how Silicon Valley builds products, and it tracks against how urban planners redesign neighbourhoods: that communities are interchangeable, and if you “lose” one, you can manufacture a replacement; that the value of a group of people who share space and history can be captured in a metric and deployed at scale.

Contentment is a spectrum, too
by Annie Mueller at annie’s blog

On a cold winter day, twilight enhances the coziness of my space, my routine, the comforts of my home and children and friends and hobbies. I can make a pot of stew and dance in the kitchen and get lost in a book and there are no emotions to navigate but my own. This is a peace I do not take lightly.

Course Notes: George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)
by Daniel A. Kaufman at Cathode Ray Zone

But Orwell continues to be relevant, not just because there are actual dictators — as oppose to merely aspiring ones — that are going about their authoritarianism in a much more artful manner, but because the crude and stupid version currently being attempted in the US will fail in spectacular fashion, and the brighter lights of of the movement will have to switch to more effective tactics. It also has taken on a new significance that Orwell could never have imagined in the social-media age, in which a truly astonishing percentage of ordinary, common discourse falls under the debased and disfigured description that Orwell ascribes to language in totalitarian states.

Mineral Line Incline: Access and Use
by Moreau Vazh at Taskerland

Like many of the roads criss-crossing the Somerset hills, this one appears to have started out as a holloway. Layers of flinty sediment rise up from the road before they ever meet a dry-stone wall. On both sides, rows of trees that may once have been hedges now grow so densely that even without leaves they blot out the sun. It is dark by mid-afternoon. I brake sharply so as not to miss the narrow parking space.

Pseudo-culture
by Mandy Brown at A Working Library

Don Moynihan dubs this a “clicktatorship,” a cursed word if there ever was one, no less for being accurate. André Gorz, writing more than half a century earlier, terms this “pseudo-culture,” a counterfeit culture that does not arise out of ways of living but seeks to impose itself upon it.

From a Regal Folk Art 1970s Doctor Who monster via Ghost Box’s Popular Witchcraft and Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased)’s Flowering of Folk Horror Clairvoyance to the Spectres and Afterlife of a Kate Bush Pop Video Curio: Spectral Saturday 6
by Stephen Prince at A Year in the Country

A somewhat regal folk art-esque straw sculpture… or is it another 1970s Doctor Who monster that’s escaped into the real world?

Writing Is Not Optional For Journalism
by Bix F. at BIX dot BLOG

Look, it’s absolutely true that the act of writing can truly, deeply, aggravatingly, dysregulatingly suck but there is simply no substitute for turning your reporting notes and experiences into a single, structured thing that helps other people know something about their world. That’s something that you have to do, and doing so not only is an intrinsic value but literally is part of how you get better, over time, at many (if not all) of the other steps involved in reporting.

Nostalgic for the New
by James at Relative Nostalgia

In regards to the relationship the present has with the future we can consider it as twofold. It can be hauntological due to the reliance on the past, or we can deem it nostalgic due to its absence, specifically the idea of it being meaningfully different is what has disappeared. This is not a binary distinction as it can be convolutedly both, nostalgic and hauntological.