Monthly Link Dump: March 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).

Aura through the Cult of Media: synthetic becomes authentic
by Tracy Durnell at Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden

In essence, aura online grows out of scalability instead of uniqueness — out of what can spread the farthest, the fastest. “Engagement value” trumps “evidence value.” Audiences believe that the algorithm reflects and refines the wisdom of the crowd — that we can trust the algorithmic filter and feedback loop of engagement and reach to surface the best content for us. We trust the machine to know us better than we know ourselves.

The Rise of The Cult of Ultra-Nationalism
at The Peaceful Revolutionary

Have you ever noticed how some people will defend their country’s actions no matter what evidence you show them its evils? How they’ll excuse behaviour from their political leader that they’d never tolerate from a partner or friend? How questioning the system gets you labelled a traitor, whilst blind loyalty gets you called a patriot You’re not seeing tribalism. You’re watching a cult in action.

Britain’s political eruption
by Andrew Curry at The Next Wave

One of the mysteries of the current British Labour government has been its obsession with the party group known as Blue Labour, which espouses a form of social democracy that marries social conservatism with progressive economic policies. This isn’t just a parochial issue: it seems to be a feature of many struggling social democratic parties at the moment.

Searching For Originality In A Sea Of Slop
by David Todd McCarty

Maybe you’re not cut out for greatness; so few of us are, but that doesn’t mean you can’t seek out the gold. In this new era of AI slop and computer hallucinations, they’re no longer even trying to produce very good. They’re now satisfied with good enough. If it looks and sounds more or less correct, and they didn’t have to do anything other than use up enough power and water to supply a small village, they’ll do it. They are happy to pass off good enough, especially if it looks like it was difficult. To the untrained eye, it might even be good enough. But it would never pass muster with someone who understood the nuance of craft and seeks originality and true quality.

Dispatches from the Midnight Country, Love Letters to the Dark: The Nocturnal Visions of Nona Limmen
by S. Elizabeth at Unquiet Things

The Amsterdam-based artist has spent years filing dispatches from a mysterious place whose existence remains unconfirmed, a vast kingdom obscurely bordering our own, wrought of shadows and secrets, its towering cliffs and dark caves and veiled inhabitants glimpsed only in the grain and blur her analogue techniques produce. Her photographs arrive like transmissions from memory or dream, specific and sourceless; impossible to recount and equally impossible to forget.

The Big Arch Distraction (while the World is Burning)
by Brennan Kenneth Brown at brennan.day

The corporate-speak that calls a sandwich "the product" reveals the horror in the distance between the executive class and the things they sell. The distance between them and the people who eat them. Corporate CEOs cannot help but lose their humanity.. No longer knowing the burger as a thing you shove in your mouth. The burger is market share and net promoter score. The timid bite a symptom of pathology.

The Persistence of Music
by PJ Holden at www.pauljholden.com

Sometimes, late at night, I’ll put music on that is a time machine to my youth. Sometimes that time machine will take me back to being 16 years old and sat drawing comics at the kitchen table. Mum with her back turned to me, and me listening to Suzanne Vega, or Tracy Chapman, or Kate Bush.

Albert Camus on the Source of Strength and How to Save Our Sanity in Trying Times
by Maria Popova at The Marginalian

More than half a century later, his lucid and luminous insight renders Camus a timeless seer of truth, one who ennobles and enlarges the human spirit in the very act of seeing it — the kind of attentiveness that calls to mind his compatriot Simone Weil, whom he admired more than he did any other thinker and who memorably asserted that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

Monthnotes: February 2026
by James Burt at orbific

My aim for writing in 2026 was to set up a flow of work. Most of February was spent finishing the Mycelium Parish News and preparing a piece for the spoken word night. That piece, The Haunting of Wuthering Heights was fun but I’m not sure how effective a use of time it was – I don’t think I’ll use it again anywhere.

You’ll regret it
by Sam Kriss at Numb at the Lodge

Human beings have manic episodes; when it happens to an entire nation we call it empire. The affliction is the same. You prance around town with your tits practically pouring out your top, demanding drinks from strangers, snatching cigarettes out their hands. Isn’t it funny how I can do absolutely anything I want? And everybody loves me? You know you have a special destiny in the world.

Lichen, Moss & Bone: And Then Everything Sang
by Kirsteen McNish at Caught By The River

Time is suspended marionette-like, away from multiple challenges and distractions. The ghosts of the tin-mining industry are ever-present here, looming monoliths amongst burial chambers and imposing coastal stacks. The jutting cliff edge looks like serrated teeth, or a Dimetrodon spine teetering down into the sea. Opposite the house the Brison rocks rise from the ocean, locally nicknamed “General De Gaulle Having A Bath” — a sharp profile and belly rounded like Homer Simpson. Instead of De Gaulle, I see a bulky sea creature on its haunches jealously guarding the cove, or a pregnant woman in exhausted repose at the end of the world.

Lush prehistory
by Dr Kenneth Brophy at The Urban Prehistorian

There is something weirdly occult about the ways that these prehistoric symbols are used in this rite, sorry, treatment. This is a “Unique stone consultation, inspired by tarot readings to reconnect and restore inner wellbeing”. Which sort of fits in with one strand of New Age practice where prehistoric and ‘Celtic’ and Gaelic stuff are entangled and millennia squashed together. Prehistory and linguistics set in stone. One reviewer noted that the experience ‘Spiritually Connected Me to My Celtic Roots’ and there is a general sense that the symbols stone selection process is one that has a spiritual, even religious dimension.

Hardy in March
by Nige at Nigeness

The month of March really should have been called January, after the double-faced Janus, looking both backward and forward. March looks back to winter, giving us frequent reminders of its cold and gloom, and forward to spring, offering tantalising glimpses of what is to come. It is the true hinge of the year, a threshold – to use a popular five-dollar word, it is 'liminal'.

Let People Be Free
by Robert Wringham at New Escapologist

Regular readers of this blog will know our position that Universal Basic Income (UBI) is (a) a likely solution for societies who want to abolish Wage Slavery and (b) an illustration of what happens when you let people be free instead of forcing them into undignified jobs that waste everyone’s time and energy.

The First Issue of CROSSROADS Is Close Enough to Touch
by Rowan Lee at The Harvest Maid’s Revenge

If I’ve been quiet for a long time, it’s because Scary as Folk and I have been hard at work behind the scenes on Crossroads: Folk Horror in the United States. We’re both folk horror obsessives who love the vibrant UK scene of folk horror- and folk culture-inspired zines, such as Hellebore, Weird Walk, Hwaet!, Shuck, Occulture, and Myth & Lore (just to name a few). But we often wondered why the US didn’t have a corresponding scene, considering not just the passionate folk horror fans on this side of the pond but also the wealth of folklores rubbing up against each other in this diverse nation.