Edgar's Book Round-Up, March 2026 — Broken Hands Media These will be short, because I am tired and times are tough.

Got last month's reading rounded up: www.brokenhandsmedia.com/blog/2026/4/...

It's called "the summer emotion."

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 a bunch of rather amazing and high-effort things (including...

I took too long to write my book reviews -- so there are many of them, including a lot of tech skepticism and a few rather wild books (image is Michael Cisco's 'Animal Money', which I spent the most time with.)

Schools across America are quietly admitting that screens in classrooms made students worse off and are reversing years of tech-first policies | Fortune Millions were spent putting laptops in every student’s hands. Now schools want them back as technology in the classroom is turning out not to be the miracle solution it was sold as.

It’s almost like WE ALL SAID THIS WOULD HAPPEN fortune.com/2026/04/10/a...

Missouri will gives you a free native tree if you cut down your invasive Callery pear The annual buyback program spearheaded by the Missouri Invasive Plant Council offers residents a free native tree in exchange for removing invasive Callery pear. It's part of a larger effort to encourage more sustainable, pollinator-friendly landscaping choices and educate people about what's in their backyards.

The annual "buyback" program spearheaded by the Missouri Invasive Plant Council offers residents a free native tree in exchange for removing invasive Callery pear.

I don't like coming up for air from a grading session and my internal monologue featuring the word "bloodbath" prominently.

But there we are.

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 point here is that, although liminal in function, they are not “...

Here's this on liminal spaces, including/excluding airports. www.brokenhandsmedia.com/blog/2026/4/...

Public Access Analog Horror Mystery TTRPG From the creator of Brindlewood Bay and The Between, Public Access is a roleplaying game inspired by analog and found footage horror!

We're in the last 5 days of this TTRPG kickstarter! If we get to the $430,000 the books will include Summer of the Witch, a mystery I wrote influenced by Halloween 3, Midsommar, and The VVitch! :D
www.kickstarter.com/projects/gau...

A copy of Alain Damasio's 'La Horde Du Contrevent' on a dark wood table.

@radiosaturday.bsky.social has returned and given me reason to get much better at reading French.

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, this means that what I’m being told is true, but at other poi...

A new piece about cynicism, rhetorical listening, and ego protection, dipping into recent discourse about transgender athletes and the "sad puppies" campaign to wrest control of the Hugo Awards.

(Remember that? That was pretty wild, right?)

[Crickets]

Enjoy.

Okay, I've been wondering this for years: can someone who knows about contemporary high school English classes tell me what they're saying about semicolons? Because I have to teach sixty college Freshmen not to use it like a Big Comma every semester.

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 either reactionary or nostalgic (and it’s not necessarily a str...

I'm not going to lie, but the ADD hit hard with this one: I wanted to talk about genre, but somehow ended up sprawled across political economy and epistemology. Send help.

This all grew out of the realization that there was no good way to cite video games, but the broader issue of citation is one that I've been getting increasingly deranged about.

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 intellectual programs to work. We have to read the footnotes...

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

This all kind of came out of realizing that contemporary sovereign citizens and medieval heretics are kind of the same thing.

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 geographic region. This means that another way of addressing th...

These thoughts aren't really complete, but this serves as a binding-together of some ideas and a jumping-off-point for some future things.

If anyone affected by this wants to find out what their legal recourse may be, I know some good class action lawyers.

Epstein files: Missing FBI documents related to Trump allegations released Donald Trump has consistently denied any wrongdoing in relation to Jeffrey Epstein, and his press secretary said allegations in the newly released files are "baseless".

Under the cover of war, the US DoJ has just quietly released some of the missing Epstein files that directly relate to Trump.

In which, he is accused of sexual assault by a then 13 year old who says he tried to force oral sex on her.

Shameless. news.sky.com/story/epstei...

Here it is again for the morning scrollers!

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 audiobooks.

A round of book reviews, containing fiction about gods, ghosts, and monsters, and nonfiction about serial killers, supposed AI, whether or not we'll live in space, and how (maybe) not to go insane dealing with this stupid world. Or maybe to make it happen faster. Baudrillard is hard.

doodlemancy @doodlemancy on cohost (rip): "the script at this point is just company: we're going to do something really extremely bad for our customers and possibly even people who aren't our customers. we think this is good an enormous, furious internet mob: we hate this company: we'd like to clarify our intentions. just to be clear: we're doing the same thing but we'd like you to hate it a little less now"

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 thing you wanted to do was give out any kind of personal info...

It's rough on the internet these days.

Please take with the caveat that I am a teacher, not a security specialist or a lawyer, but I'm trying to digest and make accessible some of the things I'm coming to understand. If someone understands better, I fully welcome corrections.

The worst damage of the far right was enabled by the center right too fearful to push back against trump

Human Centric Game Design: A Manifesto Exploring how we make games designed for humans to play with humans.

Hi. If you design games, I think you should read this blog post. It's short! I agree with everything Markus says here.

personable.blog/human-centri...

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 you meet is a whole other world to which you’ll never have ...

Some thoughts driven by the observation of a persistent brain bug:

Case 1:24-cv-09429-KPF Document 227 Filed 02/05/26 Page 1 of 33 UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK FLYCATCHER CORP. LTD and FLYCATCHER TOYS, INC., Plaintiffs, -V.- AFFABLE AVENUE LLC, doing business as CJ DIST; OZMOS COMPANY LLC; EYTAN GROSSMAN, doing business as EYG DEALS; CREATIVE REWARDS INC.; JOSHUA CHAVEZ, doing business as ONESTOPFASTSHOP; TOP EXPERIENCE COMPANY LLC, doing business as WE PAY COST LLC; PRETTY PRINCESS LLC, doing business as NORVI; AYANEE LLC; FORTUNA KG LLC, doing business as FORTUNAKG; JASON MANAGEMENT LLC; JOAN ALEXANDER SORIANO, doing business as PRIMECHOICEMART; A WAHABI CORPORATION, doing business as MCPROFITS; MODA ORIGINAL LLC; VALLEY BODEGA WHOLESALE INC.; EYAD WAHBY; SAM SHAMLOO; S&N GLOBAL SUPPLY INC.; VALUE VALLEY WHOLESALE LLC; ADAM HAMIDA; and JOHN DOES 1 to 25, Defendants. 24 Civ. 9429 (KPF) OPINION AND ORDER KATHERINE POLK FAILLA, District Judge: In June 2025, Steven A. Feldman, counsel for Defendant Affable Avenue LLC ("Affable"), filed a brief in support of Affable's motion to dismiss that was peppered with false citations. Concerned about both the genesis of these misstatements and counsel's delay in correcting them, the Court issued an Order to Show Cause. Perhaps not appreciating the gravity of the situation, Mr. Feldman responded to that Order with a submission that appeared to have been created by generative artificial intelligence ("Al"), and that itself contained a false citation. The Court's response was stern and unmistakable: "Mr.

Case 1:24-CV-09429-KPF Document 227 Filed 02/05/26 Page 2 of 33 Feldman [wals not excused from this professional obligation [of verifying that the cases he submitted to the Court were valid] by dint of using emerging technology." (Dkt. #169 at 4). Mr. Feldman persisted. A few days prior to the Court's hearing on the Order to Show Cause, Mr. Feldman submitted a proposed reply brief in further support of Affable's motion to dismiss. Once again, his brief contained false citations. And at the August 22, 2025 hearing, Mr. Feldman was unable to respond directly to, much less answer, the Court's questioning about his submissions. Mr. Feldman has not, and apparently cannot, learn from his mistakes. And while the Court does not oppose the use of Al to assist in legal research and writing, it must take a stand where, as here, counsel repeatedly files submissions with false citations because counsel refuses to verify those submissions. This Court can do no more. For the reasons that follow, the Court sanctions Mr. Feldman pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 and the Court's inherent powers by striking Affable's submissions and entering default judgment against it.

Hey, so, I don’t do civil litigation, is it generally considered good when the judge does this?

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Edgar's Book Round-Up, January 2026 and Change — Broken Hands Media What a year this January has been.

Some bangers on this book round-up: www.brokenhandsmedia.com/blog/2026/2/...

My partner calls it "Hippie Feed": brown rice, lentils, chickpeas, cooked all in one pot, add jarred curry sauce when it's almost done. You can add peas to it when you warm it up. If you've got the fortitude, it benefits from having some onion, garlic and ginger sautéed with the rice.

If You Die In The Spectacle, You Die In Real Life — Broken Hands Media They object to the recording of their behavior, and they will record your murder .

The world's real fun right now.