nothing here but the ghosts of summer light
issue 313 - 29th March, 2026
CJW: We’ve got a small issue this week ‘cause Dan has been under the hammer this past fortnight. Still, we’ve got some interesting stuff for you, as ever.
The Team
Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Meme collector.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, stupid.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer and purveyor of melancholy whimsy.
Climate Change & The Environment
CJW: Summer Light - Jake Skeets at Emergence
I’m writing this essay during an excessive heat warning. For days, the skies have been singed a hazy pale blue. Just the other day I went for a walk in the evening and the sunlight was pink as if a wildfire was burning nearby. We can recognize a wildfire by the way it slants the light. I held my palm in the air and watched the light fall onto my skin in shades of rage and discontent. I’m writing this essay during an excessive heat warning, and I have never been shy to heat. I’m a boy born of desert. I’m a boy born of summer. I am also a boy born of drought.
A beautiful essay about the weather, the climate, the seasons, time, and life.
Geopolitics & Empire
CJW: The Ghosts of Al-Shifa Hospital - Spencer Ackerman at Wired (Archive Link)
Gauze was supposed to be abundant. But seven foreign doctors and aid workers who volunteered in Gaza, including four who were there after the ceasefire was meant to have taken effect, described a perverse situation in which Israel permits doctors into Gaza but not medical equipment, prompting several to smuggle vital implements of care into their personal belongings. And the reality since October is that Gaza’s remaining doctors must deal with both an influx of patients needing routine treatment and a continuing, if reduced, pace of casualties from the IDF, and do it all without crucial supplies. Doctors told WIRED the public-health crisis they witnessed looked to them more like a new phase of the genocide than its aftermath. During this phase, the Israelis no longer need to open fire to kill Palestinians, though they still do that, too. (In a statement to WIRED, the Israeli occupation authority, known as the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, said it “continues to facilitate the entry of medical equipment and medicines in line with requests from international organizations.”)
A devastating read on the reality on the ground in Gaza, even still.
The resilience of Gazans and the outsiders who go in to help them breaks my fucking heart in the best way. This is the best of humanity, even as they’re being massacred by the worst of humanity:
But Gaza is more than a crime scene. “Obviously, much of it is destroyed, but Gaza City is beautiful, the people are beautiful,” Thorburn says. At Al-Ahli, she lived with 10 young women in their twenties. They were nurses, radiology technicians, medical students, lab techs. They took Thorburn to the beach to watch people fish—a dangerous activity with the Israeli navy offshore—enjoy a picnic with what food they had, and otherwise do “their very best to live a normal life.” Resisting the attempts to rip them apart, they weaved themselves together, each reinforcing the others, like gauze.
Science & Space
CJW: A petri dish of human brain cells is currently playing Doom. Should we be worried? - Rich Pelley at The Guardian
I hate the fucking headlines/framing of these sorts of articles. Should you be worried? Are you an Imp from hell inside a video game? No, you’re a human person? Probably nothing to worry about then…
And while I love the use of DOOM, I find the other part of this article to be the more interesting one:
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, where Eon Systems has scanned a fruit fly brain and recreated it as a virtual insect, the big scientific news is that the team have essentially recreated the creature’s behavioural wiring. The digital insect already knew how to behave like a fly, without any training or prompting. This challenges a central assumption of modern AI: that intelligence must be acquired. In the case of the fly, much of its behaviour appears to be built-in.
We live in SFnal times, of course. Too bad so much of our reality seems to be coming from the dystopian niche of the genre.
I wanna see them scanning all kinds of animals and seeing how they go. This is the way to look at artificial consciousness, not fucking LLMs…
Society & The Culture
LZ: Rabbit hole of medievalcore/medieval revival influencers
I've been very interested in medieval revival recently, as you may have noticed from previous issues or even my video recommendation below. But I have fallen into a rabbit hole on Instagram, and I've been manically following women who are bringing back historically accurate medieval fashion or just being whimsical and witchy all over the world. I noticed that several of them are also queer, so I guess it's a niche that will interest more than the regular goths:
Serpetin Satin -> this one is perhaps more Victorian/southern gothic coded, but still fire
Movies + TV
CJW: Ghost in the Shell (2026) Trailer
I fucking love the look of this. It has a real 80s vibe to the aesthetics, but with utterly modern animation quality and action choreography. After the absolute dogshit-looking CGI Netflix GitS show/s this is a godsend.
Videos
LZ: why we’re all escaping to fantasy & the middle ages again
I've grown very interested in medieval history and its recent revival. I've seen several video essays about it, but I liked this one that I watched recently, as it goes back to romanticism, then to the 60s, and the current revival. It also brought up some connections and takes that I didn't get. It's a common interpretation that people are looking back at the Middle Ages in a pursuit of escapism from the current events that darken the world.
Even if this period in time was once called “Dark Ages", we now know that this is bullshit Enlightenment propaganda. It was actually a very fertile moment in science, politics, arts, and even gender struggles. I've been reading this book, Femina, about women in the Middle Ages, and it's quite enlightening, but I'll talk about it when I'm finished.
Anyway, Leoni talks about how The Lord of the Rings was an inspiration in the 60s and how it's once more igniting the medieval revival in our present day. She speaks about how, in both periods, we were searching for the slow life of hobbits, but also about how the story was co-opted by conservatives and right-wingers. It's a well-known strategy, and I always recommend Contrapoints' video essay if you want to learn more.
Leoni also talks about Renaissance fairs and how the first one, in the 60s, was a communal effort in which people volunteered to make it happen and used it as an opportunity to raise funds for a radio station. Medieval fairs are quite common in Europe, and here in Southern Sweden, several are also Viking-themed. I myself will try to join them more this year, as I started training HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts), and I can't say no to arts and crafts.
Games
CJW: Marathon: The First Week - Kaile Hultner at No Escape
So why bother? Why start playing a game like Marathon and opening myself up to all the old frustrations and heartbreak that tainted my experience with Destiny? Because underneath all the sales talk and metrics hand-wringing, I genuinely believe something special is happening here. I have spent the past three nights dreaming of Dire Marsh. I am drowning in memes of Vandal smoking the Drinkable Cheeseburger like a bong and sharing it with her roommate Thief. I am floating on a cloud of incredible writing about Marathon from friends and peers who are also playing it and having revelations. I am so fucking full from hearing about sick runs and daring getaways, from seeing people make new discoveries and learn more about the gameworld. I wouldn’t trade this feeling for the world, man. And if Sony terminates Bungie, ends Marathon prematurely, it will be a travesty. It will be an outrageous overreach from a publisher—from an industry—that has done nothing but take and take and take over the last few years. But it won’t take away the fact that here, now, in this moment, we are all Runners, running.
Great, now I want to play Marathon after reading this piece. Too bad I just bought Death Stranding 2 and just don't really care much for PVP (even with a VE tacked onto the end)...
Music
LZ: Medieval music Spotify playlist
I've been a bit too obsessed with medieval music recently, but I'm not necessarily an expert. I know a little about the more ecclesiastical side of it, like Hildergard Von Bingen's compositions, but sometimes I just want something more uplifting and cheery (sorry, I swear I'm still trying to get my ecstatic visions eventually).
I have been playing a lot of Kingdom Come: Deliverance and, more recently, Manor Lords, but the first one doesn't have much of a soundtrack, and I love listening to music all the time, so I always look for something extra to listen to at the same time. It's the same for me when I play Deadlock (don't even try it, it's shit and I'm addicted to this crap), and I always get a hard techno or schranz set on YouTube to listen to. Anyways, this playlist is fun!
The Memes
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