Paul Watson’s notes, replies, likes &c.

It seems ironic that even as smart phones have made photography accessible to most people, allowing the average person to take more photos in a week than they might have in a year with film cameras, as well as access to huge free, attribution-licensed photo libraries from all those other photographers on Flickr, Pixabay, Wikimedia Commons, etc, people still “need” to generate AI graphics for their email newsletter or blog 🙄 Bottomless photos weren’t enough; now everything else must be bottomless too.

Nobody would dare to boil down Ursula Le Guin’s marvelous writing—all that fantasy, all that science fiction, poetry, essays, translations—into one idea. But in a pinch I’d pick two sentences from her 2014 National Book Award speech: “Capitalism[’s] power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”

Home of Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion and various other zines

Limited-run zine published quarterly until Spring 2022.

Founded in 2019 by writer and editor Maria J. Pérez Cuervo, with art direction by Nathaniel Hébert, HELLEBORE is a small press devoted to British folk horror and the occult.

The time for sending messages in bottles has passed. As seas toxify and rise over the shorelines, who will be left to read them? Nonetheless, we have to communicate. So we communicate. To anyone who will listen. Through the haze of wine, cannabis, SSRIs, exhaustion, overwork, climate depression, and an overwhelming anxiety at the rise of new fascisms, we communicate. Because we must. Because, for the time being at least, we are human.

England is a country in which every last space where conviviality might flourish has been colonised by a commercial imperative …. supermarket check-out operatives replaced by crap robots… unexpected item in bagging area… every surface plastered with corporate graffiti and haranguing hashtags … no trick missed to screw every last penny out of people… exorbitant parking charges in NHS hospitals (exact amount only, no change given), all the profits going to private providers …

What Surrender does offer, though, is an engaged and full-on exploration of pretty hardcore re-wilding and pro-wilderness groups, as well as a personal discussion of menopause, ageing and the fallacy and emptiness at the heart of the nuclear family model and its absence of viability when confronted with the reality of irrevocable environmental collapse.

Acid communism? Psychedelic Corbynism? Freak left? Call it what you will – but re-infuse endeavours with a spirit of radical collectivism and unselfing to revivify co-opted countercultures for a world that would be free.

IndieWebCamp Brighton … 2024-03-09…10

Taken all this into account, it is possible that the emissions from a ChatGPT query are more than a hundred times that of a conventional search query. But as I don't have enough data to back this up, I will keep the conservative estimates from above (50x - 90x; 60x most likely).

The output of generative tools based on large language models gives me the ick.

I know I sound like an old man when I go on and on about RSS, but really, it’s sitting right there and is apparently what a lot of people miss.

The Mycelium Parish News is a collection of things that have happened in our particular corner of UK counter-culture over the last year. It features a list of podcasts, books, websites and more.

In that era, people could even make their own little social networks, so the conversations and content you found on an online forum or discussion were as likely to have been hosted by the efforts of one lone creator than to have come from some giant corporate conglomerate. It was a more democratized internet, and while the world can’t return to that level of simplicity, we’re seeing signs of a modern revisiting of some of those ideas.

This essay started life as a paper for the Manchester Gothic Festival and was adapted for the Supernatural Cities Conference in Limerick 2017. It is now destined for a special OGOM edition of Gothic Studies, 'Wolves, Werewolves and Wilderness' to be published in the spring of 2018.

An analysis of Justin Barton and Mark Fisher's audio-essay 'On Vanishing Land' (2013), taking up the notion of the "eerie" in it and contrasting it to melancholy. Originally delivered at 'Five Centuries of Melancholia' conference, University of Queensland Art Museum, 4 September 2014.

The first mention of folk horror on this weblog was in 2018, where I talked about it in relation to Brexit.

It begins with a simple, profound realisation — to quit capitalism, we have to liberate ourselves from its entrenched mindset, a transformation that calls for more than economic reform; it demands a fundamental shift in how we perceive success, value community, and envision our role in the tapestry of humanity.

Writers and artists have long been fascinated by the idea of an English eerie – ‘the skull beneath the skin of the countryside’. But for a new generation this has nothing to do with hokey supernaturalism – it’s a cultural and political response to contemporary crises and fears