Monthly Link Dump: October 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).

Fake civility
by Pete Brown at Exploding Comma

The gist of it is that calls for civility in the public sphere are a means of control by the people in power. I think that is right; those in power want to be able to be able to say and do whatever they want without consequences or criticism, and they want to preserve that privilege for themselves. These calls are a display of dominance, a public subjugation of anyone who disagrees with them or whom they dislike.

Horror Hotels: you can check in but…
by Ray Newman at Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart

Hotels are fundamentally weird places and the sense of unease they prompt is powerful fuel for weird stories.

Even before we consider aspects of the uncanny, and the hotel in weird fiction, the very concept of the hotel is troubling.

You’re telling me I’m going to a strange town to sleep in a strange room, in a strange house, where someone I don’t know has a master key to my room?

Building Tomorrow Today
at The Peaceful Revolutionary

Across the British Isles and beyond, ordinary people are quietly building extraordinary alternatives to the world of bosses, rent, and wage labour. From worker cooperatives in the industrial North to intentional communities in the Welsh hills, from radical social centres in major cities to transition towns in rural England, a network of communities is demonstrating that another way of organising society isn't just possible, it's already happening.

Stewart Lee on Ithell Colquhoun
by Ian Holloway at Wyrd Britain

Artist, author, and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, having established her own Parisian studio in the early 1930s, met many of the key artists and became a devotee of the Surrealist Movement later, briefly, joining the British Surrealist Group before leaving due to it's restrictions on her occult research.

The Ceremonial Landscape You’ve Never Heard Of
by Mark Nemglan

These prehistoric ritual or ceremonial landscapes are utterly enigmatic and inscrutable to us. Elemental and atavistic, they appear to be hewn from the very earth upon which they are sited, brought forth by minds with worldviews and cosmologies we can never know. Yet they are accessible to us. And the residual, persistent power they possess, from potentially thousands of years of magicko-religious activity, hint at the potential for a forgotten, primal and deep gnosis.

what we can learn from listening to Radio 4
by M. John Harrison at Ambient Hotel

Politics controls the spectacle by making itself the spectacle. We vote not for the winner, but for the tournament, the psychodrama of the struggle to win played out & analysed move by move in public.

"Winter Trial" and the Werewolves of Early Modern France
by Angelisa Fontaine-Wood at Notes From The Garret

I read somewhere -- long enough ago that I've forgotten the source and certainly never checked if it was true -- that variations of "Little Red Riding Hood" were collected most densely by folklorists in the same regions in France that had the highest level of reported werewolf attacks.

Trans People Are Not A Rhetorical Device
by Bix Frankonis at Bix dot Blog

Over the years here, I’ve referenced Alan Jacobs a fair number of times. Sometimes it’s to agree with something fairly anodyne and innocuous (like for blogs to really be a thing they require not just writers but readers), but often to talk about how his lamentations over so-called cancel culture and the like are horseshit.

Psychedelic Britannia
by Ian Holloway at Wyrd Britain

Presented by Nigel Planer - who also did the Prog and Metal episodes of this series - Psychedelic Britannia tells the story of the years 1965 to 1970 as a group of bohemians led the charge to slowly psychedelicise Britain.

Europe Can’t Defend Democracy on US Servers
by Ben Werdmuller at werd.io

The need for data storage and application services that can handle sensitive information beyond the reach of America’s jurisdiction has been spoken about quite a bit, but it’s interesting to see politicians begin to talk more about social networks and social media.

Monthnotes: September 2025
by James at Orbific

The saying is, if you want something done, ask a busy person. And I have been so very busy. It seems as if I work better when there’s little margin for error. I’ve been making time to rest, wasting hours when I need to, and I feel better than usual for it. But most of the time I’ve been working towards a series of deadlines.

Climate denial and the defence of modernity
by Richard Douglas at The Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP)

What we are lacking is an inspiring vision of our lives, collective futures, and spiritual reality in a world in which we cannot keep growing forever. As much as we need policy wonks, scientists, and campaigners, Richard Douglas argues in this blog, now is the time for philosophers, religious thinkers and writers to apply themselves to social change.

An imaginative activity
by Mandy Brown at A Working Library

I think here of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, where in the language of the people of Anarres there is but one word for both work and play: in a society without capitalism, all work is the work of the imagination, soul-work, the work of art and creativity that is an effort as well as a kind of joy. This is work not labor, not something to be exploited or that can be expected to deliver; it is the work of living, of making change, of being present to the world.

From Acid Communism to Solarpunk: XG on Solarpunk Manifesto
by Mattie Colquhoun at Xenogothic

In July 2024, I spoke with Maxim Velli for an episode of the Solarpunk Manifesto podcast, and it has just gone live. We talk about blogging, the work of Mark Fisher, and how hauntology and accelerationism still have lots to offer to those thinking about our post-capitalist futures.

Rewilding the Internet – Where Would We Even Start?
by Phil Houtz at Wild Rye

Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon use the word Waldsterben, meaning “forest death,” to describe the state of the internet today.

Just like a forest that has been clear-cut and replanted with a single species, the internet is quickly depleting itself of life and vitality. The walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter, and Google each act to isolate users, starving them of interaction across the global network.

Reading Books is a form of Magic
by Oliver Rimmer at Seeds Beneath the Snow

Reading is, for most, synonymous with existing in the modern world. Whether you are aware of it or not, this subtle and perpetual decoding of signs structures your environment and the place you occupy within it, compelling certain actions whilst discouraging others.

Trailer – J.G. Ballard’s Crash (Thames Television 1974)
by Adam Scovell at Celluloid Wicker Man

Eight years later and I have another fake trailer to share; a follow-up to the previous Ballardian effort in the form of a period Thames Television adaptation to Crash. However, before writing about how this short little effort came about, a change between the first of these and this one really struck home.

Withnail & I as Occult Allegory
by Mark Nemglan

Acting and magick are acknowledged as strange but intimate bedfellows. Indeed, it has been argued that, historically, magick and spirituality gave birth to ritual and ceremony, and thence to de-sacralised theatre and drama. Theatrical works conjure the imaginal; actors channel their performances. Similarly, magicians re-enact cosmic dramas in ritual, and assume godforms to evoke the same deities. Crowley et al regularly used theatrical metaphors to describe his praxis. The inextricable bonds between acting and magick are fascinating and expansive.

What Was Britain Like Before the Apocalypse?
by Simon Reynolds at Retromania

Just about the most hauntological thing I have ever seen, and it was made in 1962! This BBC program, titled The Lonely Shore and produced under the aegis of the program Monitor, imagines a team of researchers visiting the deserted wasteland of the British Isles centuries after an undetermined and civilization-ending devastation, and trying to reconstruct a sense of this lost culture from archeological fragments - furniture, plastic artifacts, appliances, vehicles - to which are often attributed religious significance.

A feast of Poe
by John Coulthart at { feuilleton }

I could draw attention to the later editions but I’ll single out the work of Alberto Martini (1876–1954), an Italian artist whose work I find especially attractive for the way it provides a bridge between Decadence and Surrealism. His Poe illustrations appear now and then in books or articles about horror fiction but you seldom see all of them together.