Monthly Link Dump: July 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).

In The Park: The Folklore Of South London Parks
by Dave Evans at Evans is a place on Earth

Most of his focus was on the parks that fell into the boundaries of the former Great North Wood (an area still commemorated in the names of places like Norwood and Norbury) and that would mean the boroughs of Lewisham, Southwark, Lambeth, Croydon, and Bromley. Not just parks - which often close at night - but commons too which tend not to. When in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were plans for enclosure of the commons huge protests broke out.

“The constellations were at our feet this whole time”: We Feed The UK’s earthy utopias
by Sheryl M. Medlicott at Just Utopias

What’s the crossover between land work and utopia? I feel there is one, although it’s hard to articulate. Isn’t utopia science fiction, set in not-real places with fictional technology? How can that relate to working the land?

The Automated Labyrinth, and How I Slew the Minotaur
by Robert Kingett at Sightless Scribbles

The modern world’s version of the Minotaur is not a half-man, half-bull. It is the automated phone system of your health insurance company. It lives in a labyrinth of menus and hold music, and its only purpose is to devour your will to live.

28 Years Later: Where Folk Horror Meets the Apocalypse
by Rowan Lee at The Harvest Maid’s Revenge

It didn’t seem like a coincidence to me that the folk horror revival of the mid/late 2010s came hot on the heels of a long trend of dystopian and apocalyptic narratives. I would argue that this is a natural progression in pop culture–that folk horror is what logically comes after the post-apocalyptic era. Post-post apocalyptic, if you will.

Mervyn Peake documentary
by Ian Holloway at Wyrd Britain

The 1998 documentary below features family, friends, and contemporaries such as Quentin Crisp and celebrates his work and a life cut short by illness.

The law that can be named is not the true law: On secret societies, civil wars, Palestine Action, and the word of God
by Sam Kriss at Numb at the Lodge

What makes things even more difficult is that Palestine Action does not exist. Unlike other terrorist groups—like, say, ISIS—they dissolved as soon as the proscription took effect. Nobody will ever be prosecuted for being a member of Palestine Action, because Palestine Action has no members.

The Weight of a Voice
by Robert Kingett at Sightless Scribbles

A voice has weight. A voice has mass. I know this because I live in a world where I am perpetually being struck or lifted by the voices of others. When sight is removed from the equation, the other senses don't just get sharper, much to sighted people's amusement, they are re-contextualized. And the human voice becomes the primary tool for navigating the emotional landscape of the world. It's not just a carrier of words; it's a physical force.

more on the new book
by M John Harrison at the M John Harrison blog

At one level The End of Everything is about trying to live as if nothing has gone wrong. At another it’s a gentrification satire. Aliens not as space invaders but as incomers from another dimension, paralleling the arts-gentrification of Margate & Deal. A sense that the original invasion of the UK’s south eastern seaboard by middle class Londoners is repeated in the appropriation of human space by the aliens.

week 28 / 2025: the concretisation of metaphor
by Paul Graham Raven at Worldbuilding Agency

This week I have been trying to articulate the difference between science fiction per se and the sort of work I do when I make fictions from futures scenarios. I think I’ve got my finger on it, but it’s tricky to define in a way that’s satisfactory. Nonetheless, I’m going to throw up what I’ve got so far, and see if it lands with any of you.

“Got your number”: 118118 as the cultural ghosts of a future we never had
by Oli Mould at taCity

In many ways, 118118 represent, no, ARE, the peculiar genius of a Fisherian capitalist realism: even when a service is structurally pointless, it can still be culturally productive. The 118 campaign didn’t succeed because people needed it, it succeeded because people remembered it and copied it (I distinctly remember many a drunken cricket fan in 118 get up in the Western Terrace during the 2005 Ashes Tour). It was affective surplus with no infrastructural base. A Baudrillardian signifier unmoored from any need to signify. Just as Blairism relied on the image of reform without its substance, so too did 118 services present the aesthetic of utility without any meaningful use. It was privatisation as simulacrum.

Reading, thinking, doing
by Ray Newman at Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart

I’ve also been inspired by Paul Watson in a couple of ways. First, by his monthly round-up of interesting reading, much of which really is interesting for once. And, secondly, by his habit of maintaining a proper RSS feed reader, which is how he manages to stay on top of other people’s blogs.

The Vegan Morality Policy
by Terence Eden at Terence Eden’s Blog

In the UK, the Vegan Society has a complex history. It is, at best, an advocacy group rather than the final arbiter of veganism. They cannot expel you from being vegan. They cannot whip you in the town square if you eat honey. You cannot beg them for forgiveness if you accidentally eat seven cheeseburgers.

The reversing of the Enlightenment
by Richard Smith at Richard Smith's non-medical blogs

Two days ago, as I was assembling myself to go to Garsington I listened by chance to a broadcast on Radio 4 about the Dark Enlightenment, which has been an oddball theory about ending democracy and egalitarianism and returning to kings, the modern version being “tech titans.” The broadcast argues that this strange theory has now become the aim of powerful men like Peter Theil, Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, and J D Vance. Putin is already there, and Orban, Erdogan, and Modi are all potential followers. Trump may not bother to read the long blogs of the advocates of the Dark Enlightenment, but he’s up for kings so long as he is the king of kings.

Beyond the Fields We Know: A Cabinet for Lord Dunsany
by Dirk Puehl at Once Upon a Time...

He was born Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18^th Baron of Dunsany, in 1878 — though no self-respecting deity in all the Lands of Dreaming would have answered to such a name. No, he may have entered the world as the scion of one of Ireland’s venerable peerages that day in the old metrop, but Dunsany belongs not to the annals of Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Not really. His actual roots burrow into a half-lit borderland between dream and memory, of Yeats and Lady Gregory, where cities drift like ships and gods thrum like wind in the floorboards. His is the hand that penned The Gods of Pegāna, a psalter for pantheons never worshipped, and opened the way for those who would later walk “beyond the fields we know.”

Guv’nor
by Craig VI Slee at Cold Albion

It’s not so easy to think about governing — ourselves, or others. We developed politics and ideology as a kind of shortcut; scaffolding for the cognitive and practical processes to serve as tools for worlding. But we rarely ask “who were the people who made the tools, let alone own them, and what biases and postures might they (wittingly or unwittingly) impress upon us.