Broken Hands Media

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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.

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On Citation (Part 1) — Broken Hands Media

Citation is like infrastructure. People ignore it until it breaks down. However, we can’t treat it that way if we want our education and i

You've got to check your sources, you've got to cite your sources.

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The Shifting Ground of Sovereignty — Broken Hands Media

This is all very important, because one of the main features of the modern nation-state is the monopoly on the use of violence within a geog

Just taking a moment to get some thoughts out today -- perhaps a bit scrambled, but concerning changes in how the use of political power is justified.

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

It’s hot, and weird

Edgar has reviewed a number of books: some fiction, and some scholarly.

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Cameron's Book Round-Up: 2026, part 1 (or 1.5) — Broken Hands Media

Okay, okay, I’ve been moving at a fair clip. Car trouble has led to me doing a lot of walking, and so I’ve gotten through a lot of audioboo

A round of book reviews, featuring obscuratist philosophy, serial killers, ghosts, gods, monsters, whether we'll live in space, what time is (mostly a pain in the neck), and fungus.

Give it up for fungus.

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Inside the Panopticon: Data Breaches, Section 230, and You — Broken Hands Media

Not to be all “old man yells at cloud”, but when I was a child the assumption was that the internet was a hostile environment and the last t

Weirdly, Tumblr is doing pretty good on the measures that I talk about here. Pretty bad on some ones that I don't talk about, but I'm reasonably happy to make this one of two social networks I touch.

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You Are A Small Part Of A Very Large World: Demographics, the Dunbar Number, and John Keats — Broken Hands Media

But this isn’t just a meditation on the transitory nature of human relationships where we’re all ships passing in the night and every person

An important reminder.