Monthly Link Dump: September 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).

TR: Enys Men (2022)
by Moreau Vazh at Taskerland

Set in 1973 on an island off the coast of Cornwall, the film revolves around an older woman (played by Mary Woodvine) who appears to be alone and monitoring the state of a rare flower that grows on a cliff overlooking the sea. Initially structured to the point of being repetitious, the film’s fictional bubble starts to degrade as the woman (billed only as “the volunteer”) begins experiencing visions that collapse the boundaries between past, future, and present as well as those between external reality and the internal features of her mind. The effect is less narrative than erosion. Something begins to wear through.

The world is increasingly noisier – The paradox of choice and the generational descriptors that defy us
by V.H. Belvadi

Life is irony. Choice without effort is meaningless just as freedom without restriction is senseless. Today we harbour an expectation of infinite choice and effortless accomplishment. These simply do not go together, which is why we have more thoughts on productivity than arguably any generation that preceeded us and yet remain unproductive on most days. We overwhelmed ourselves with so much choice it cripples us on a daily basis. We no longer have a dozen annual mixtapes that can mostly agree with one another but a thousand playlists with many sharing nothing in common with others.

The impact of sea level rise on the world’s cities
by Andrew Curry at The Next Wave

The tipping point seems to be around 1.5 metres, which sounds fine in theory since the base case IPCC projections are for around a one metre increase by 2100, but that doesn’t allow for subsidence (often caused by water extraction), or the possibility of cascading climate change.

3 novels and The Great When
by Smoky Man at Alan Moore World

The Great When is the first of five books in the Long London series which is an excavation of some of the more marginal and little known points of London's history that is all stirred up into a very very baroque fantasy. And there's been a lot of books that have actually very much played into the writing of The Great When.

The Kaleidoscopic Past of the Counter-Culture Years
by Adam Scovell at Celluloid Wicker Man

The shared collective cultural experiences of those times, of whose keynotes usually make up a very generic vision of each period, is often the first step in experiencing previous eras when growing up. Their music, clothes, films and television all feed into it, and enjoyably so, even if overly simple as a way of understanding each era (I often think the first half of any given decade has more in common with the previous decade’s latter half than its own).

The Company of Wolves – Dark Fairy Tales, Lycanthropes and the Dangers of Wandering off the Path: Wyrd Explorations 37
by Stephen Prince at A Year in the Country

Little Red Riding Hood has been interpreted in a number of different ways, some of which suggest that it is variously a warning about the contrast between the safe, civilised world represented by the village and the dangers of the forest; the dangers of not obeying one’s parents; or the sometimes possibly predatory nature of men. It has also been suggested that it is a rite-of-passage story in which a girl leaves home, enters a transitional state and by going through the events in the tale becomes a woman.

Online feels truer than material reality
by Tracy Durnell at Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden

We signal belonging — and status — within our taste world by following its aesthetic preferences, be those the clothes we wear, the products we buy, the media we consume, the terms we use. Signals can be tangible, like wearing a fitness band, or intangible, like posting a link to an article. Social media amplifies the signaling power of aesthetics, extending the reach of our physical signals and expanding the realm of intangible signals.

The Gospel of the Public Library
by Robert Kingett at Sightless Scribbles

In a world that screams, that demands, that sells, that commodifies every waking second of your attention, the public library is a quiet and profound act of rebellion. It is one of the last true sanctuaries, a temple dedicated to a god that the market has tried very hard to kill: the god of the freely shared idea.

The Dog that Caught the Car: Britain's 'World-Leading' Internet
by Heather Burns at Internet Exchange

The UK’s Online Safety Act was sold as a “world-leading” child-protection law, one that would establish the UK tech sector as a global safety-tech powerhouse. Instead, it has normalized the idea that governments can bolt identity checks and surveillance layers onto the internet. Now that blueprint is crossing the Atlantic, where authoritarian-minded politicians see it as ready-made kit for censorship and control.

On leftist anti-veganism
by Grigor Malo at Grigor's webpage

A few days ago while hanging out with some comrades I encountered what seems to be a not-that-uncommon position among some leftists, at least in non-western countries: a certain dislike of vegans and veganism in general. I will briefly sum up what I understand to be their critique and why i think it’s misguided.

Britain ignores the hard-right at its own peril – The people are doing their bit, the Labour government is not
by V.H. Belvadi

Much of the progress the hard-right have made in recent times have been played down by those on the political left. Not enough seems to be said about it and whatever is said often amounts to some form of conflict avoidance. The latest spin following the 110,000-strong march in London seems to be that the hard-right has an infighting problem.

Fossilised politics
by Oli Mould at taCity

What I’ve found over the last few years, particularly as I’ve engaged with the lives of environmental activists through the now concluding OHEM project is that the continuing arch of the twenty-first century’s history will be inseparable from the politics of energy; in the broadest sense of the word. How we power our homes, workplaces, tech, infrastructures, cities, our lives, has always shaped – and is shaped by – how we ‘power’ our politics.

Taking down the Grenfell Tower
by Andrew Curry at The Next Wave

All the same, the announcement of the demolition plan used language that is quite surprising for a government department, perhaps because Angela Rayner was at the time the relevant Secretary of State (and, given her own unprivileged upbringing, perhaps has more empathy for those killed through the neglect of social housing). She has since had to resign from office because of an unrelated issue.

Self-exploiting workers
by Mandy Brown at A Working Library

The turn, here, is to note that what’s burned up is both the individual worker and the collective they might have belonged to. That is, when the worker absorbs the management ethos and becomes their own manager—when they see themselves as a project to be designed, branded, and marketed—they lose all sense of solidarity with other workers. Other workers become competitors instead of comrades. And everyone loses.

No one is coming to save us
by Tracy Durnell at Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden

It is going to be up to us to save us. And it’ll be easier with all of us than trying to go it alone.

How aesthetics destroyed privacy and polarized us
by Ben Werdmuller

The conclusions are perhaps no less troubling. While I’m not particularly moved by people worrying about what they call the “far left” — the so-called far left in America would be considered reasonably centrist in parts of Europe, with views that basically just relate to universal healthcare availability and not letting poor people die — we’re also living amidst a political climate that is increasingly reminiscent of 1930s Germany.

Gothic Selves/Artificial Others – Call for Papers
at the International Gothic Association

Once speculative, artificial intelligence now haunts contemporary society, with public discourse around its application and scope ranging from the utopian to the apocalyptic. The Gothic’s fascination with doubles, simulacra, uncanny agency, and other forms of otherness offers rich tools for examining the anxieties and crucial ethical dilemmas provoked by AI. The Gothic has long been preoccupied with the unstable boundaries between the natural and the artificial, as well as between individual subjectivity and the sublime terror of being subsumed into larger networks of terrible knowledge. From Shelley’s Frankenstein and Hoffmann’s Olympia in ‘The Sandman’, through Freud’s notion of the uncanny and the development of posthumanist thinking, the concept of artificial beings has raised profound anxieties about what it means to be human. Today, these concerns have become newly urgent in the age of generative AI, where the promise of creativity and connection is shadowed by questions of exploitation, environmental cost, and the erosion of individuality.