Broken Hands Media

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Cameron's Book Round-Up: 2026, part 4 — Broken Hands Media

I’ve been reading too much too fast: working my summer job, that’s something that I can certainly acknowledge: I have plenty of time to li

The image here is taken from the book that I enjoyed the least, though for some parts of my ongoing intellectual project, it's the most important to discuss: the Lensman books are essential to understanding space opera, and also the poor image of science fiction in critical assessment.

For books I did enjoy and recommend, I should note that this includes reviews of some real bangers. Chief among these:

Black Flame, by Gretchen Felker-Martin.

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke.

The American War, by Omar El Akkad.

Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett.

The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon

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Edgar's Book Round-Up, June 2026 — Broken Hands Media

Despite a childhood punctuated by driveway M80s and bottle rockets, I have lost my taste for fireworks.

More book reviews from Edgar, running the gamut from contemporary horror through writing craft and critical museum practice, all under the shadow of a true "nineteenth century chungus."

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Heat Piece (Ergodicism #1) — Broken Hands Media

I’m trying something different today. I’m going to be brief, and I’m going to be relatively transparent about a lot of things. You should

A new style of piece from us -- looking back over prior pieces and binding them together to give a new perspective on things: here, we look back over our genre of "heat piece" and use it to put forward a new perspective on things.

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Irony and Enantiodromia: Why Do Online Communities Flip? — Broken Hands Media

This tendency to equate Tumblr and 4Chan is out of a desire to present dichotomous oppositions: 4Chan is made up of libertarians, fascists,

This is prompted by the number of books I've read about the online segment of the culture war that act as if Tumblr and 4Chan are equal and opposite forces -- something that I think exists partly to absolve the worst elements of chan culture for their role in everything since 2016.

Still, there is a kind of mirror in a certain dynamic I've noted, that I think might be a trait of online communities (if not subcultures in general) to adopt more and more outlandish beliefs, behaviors, or practices as their user base cycles.

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The Enclosure of Cash — Broken Hands Media

When I say that the cash system is being enclosed, I mean that the combination of banks, payment processors, and similar agencies who actual

In those brief moments where I have any amount of money, I'm struck by how difficult it is to make that money move where I want it to. This is a lot like Early Modern England. Kind of.

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What Counts: The Limits of Quantified Reasoning — Broken Hands Media

We tend to focus on the value of things put into the terms of numbers, because this allows us to look at it and convince ourselves that we’r

This is an old saw for me: reducing things down to numbers often obscures the truth.

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Book reviews -- concerning fantasy, grief, history, and other topics:

Cameron’s Book Round-Up: 2026, part 3 — Broken Hands Media

We’re finishing up a bit of traveling, and this is the last of our prepared posts: reviews of books I read between April and now. Find ins

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Edgar's Book Round-Up, May 2026 — Broken Hands Media

Weird month. Some really good books in here, though.

A series of book reviews from our prodigious reviewer.

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Sleepwalking through the Haunted Mall: The Decline of Online — Broken Hands Media

The dead internet theory is a conspiracy theory. The idea is that most of the activity that you see online is executed automatically, by bo

I managed to get some Bookchin in there with Deleuze and Lyotard. I'm either getting good at this or my sense for what's pretentious is absolutely broken.

Anyway: have you noticed how much astroturfed bullshit there is online? This one's a series of thoughts on that.

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For Those Who Come After: A Review and Analysis of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 — Broken Hands Media

Death is an ever-present companion, hence one of the two mantras that the game hammers home: “when one falls, we continue.”

I finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 yesterday, went outside for ten minutes to middle-distance, and then came back inside to start writing this. It's not a perfect game, not really, but it's one of the best games I've seen in a while.

(Apparently, between this and Disco Elysium, the hack to make me love a game is to prominently and very early on feature a fucked up sky of some kind.)

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Edgar's Book Round-Up, April 2026 — Broken Hands Media

I can’t quite account for much of the month and I somehow read 18 books during it, so we are keeping this thing brisk .

Edgar read SOOOO many books this past month.

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Oxenfree and Corduroy Psychedelia — Broken Hands Media

This, I believe, is part of the psychedelia connection: there is an affinity between the fever dream and the hallucination, both have the a

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Edgar's Book Round-Up, March 2026 — Broken Hands Media

These will be short, because I am tired and times are tough.

Edgar has built up a bit of a backlog -- reviewed here are a number of fiction and nonfiction books well worth reading.

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Cameron's Book Round-Up: 2026, part 2 — Broken Hands Media

Happy tax day, I’m way down a grading hole and not sure when I can come back up for air, but Edgar did our taxes this year right after doing

Some rather wild book reviews -- for which I took too much time, and so I have far too many.

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Passing Through: on Liminality — Broken Hands Media

All of these places have similarities, mostly big windows so you can watch the planes taxi around, like megafauna for mechheads, but my poin

Edgar, on Liminality.

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Wading through the Bullshit: Rhetorical Listening and Cynicism — Broken Hands Media

I wrote a while back that, while I don’t tend to believe people, I believe that they want me to believe what they’re saying. Sometimes, t

I know this is the no-nuance website, but it can be good and useful to empathize with and understand people whose positions you will fight tooth and nail.

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Letters from the Ablation Period: Genre, Cultural Production, and Late (Terminal?) Postmodernism — Broken Hands Media

We’re now – by some measures – fifty or sixty or eighty years into this project, and it seems to me that both left and right have turned eit

I'm not going to lie, the ADD hit hard on this one. I think I passed through some interesting territory, but it got weird.