Another Year Gone: State of the Hands, 2022
If we had the money, we’d buy the right to use the monster from Oats Studios’ Zygote as our mascot. We don’t, really.
I’m not sure how far we can take this bit.
So, it’s another year on the books – I didn’t do a year-end piece last year, or the one before that, if memory serves. The pandemic (which is still ongoing) really did a number on our ability to do retrospectives over here at Broken Hands HQ.
This year, I worked more, Edgar posted a bit more often, and we have difficulty sorting out the popularity of newer pieces. It’s a bit of a difficult task, sorting the old from the new. So consider this a bit of a longer-term retrospective.
Cameron’s Best of All Time (Hits): “To Breathe the Sacred And Terrible Air: On Disco Elysium by Studio ZA/UM”
This was an early one with high traffic, largely because I used the title of Robert Kurvitz’s book to index it. While I stand by what I said in there, I still feel that it’s somewhat basic, and look forward to Edgar’s thoughts on the game when they finish it.
Cameron’s Best of All Time (Highest Read Time): “The Spectrum of Consent”
Also the best for the year. This one is not one I’m entirely confident in – I think that I need to come back to it and discuss it somewhat, because, frankly, I feel the idea’s somewhat undercooked. While it borders on sexual morality – a topic that I’ve occasionally touched upon lightly, but which I need to do a more thorough research into. While I’m not completely convinced I approached a solution in here, I still maintain that the problem I’m attempting to tackle (that consent isn’t necessarily a yes/no situation) is a problem that needs to be discussed and worked through.
Cameron’s Best of 2021 (Hits): “Exiting the Manosphere: The Male Hierarchy Is Not a Thing”
A piece I should have talked about more last year, when masculine identity politics were a bit more of a major talking point. Granted, it wasn’t my highest-hit piece that year (that would be “the Political Economy of Game Design”, a piece which hasn’t had the long tail I thought it would, largely due to the fact that it broke containment on Twitter and generated a lot of impressions that month.) Still, this piece did a good job, I feel, of laying out an anti-essentialist argument against the so-called socio-sexual hierarchy.
Cameron’s Best of 2021 (Highest Read Time): “Black Pill Bacillus”
An attempt to look at the psychodynamics of Fascism in the wake of the events of 1/06/21. While there are many important political and sociological definitions of it – that it’s imperial violence returning to the metropole, that it’s Palingenetic Ultranationalism, et cetera – I’m somewhat interested in the mental processes of those who adhere to this ideology and its fellow-travelers. Largely, this seems to be driven by despair and a tendency to simplify the morality of the world around us. Still, it’s becoming an older piece and it feels that way.
Cameron’s Best of 2022 (Hits): “Your Desires Have Been Captured: A Discourse on the Mutilated User and the Alienated Worker”
Building off of a concept that really spoke to me in my close reading of Ecology of Freedom, the Mutilated User, this piece discussed an angle of capitalist repression that is largely absent – so far as I can tell, and I’m often wrong about such things – from many Marxist critiques of the system. Namely, that it generates new desires to overlay pre-existing ones, overwriting the much more attainable ones that already exist.
Cameron’s Favorite Piece of His Own This Year: “Twenty Faux-Teen: the Phantom Decade and Post-Enthusiasm Politics”
I’m very interested in the intersection of material history and the arts – and much as a bubble is created in the market when an asset is perceived to have a higher value than it actually does, only to collapse back on itself, I get the sense that we’ve been living in a kind of phantom time for the past fourteen years, and this paradigm is going to collapse and leave us stranded with even less sense of where we are culturally.
Cameron’s Favorite Piece of Edgar’s Writing: “A Painting of Lot's Wife and She's Looking at You: Artworks in Cosmic Horror”
Favorite piece on the website, at least. This one built off of some of our discussions of Cosmic Horror, and examines the theory of art presented in a number of Cosmic Horror stories – which Edgar correctly (I feel) identifies as less deep than they first appear, which is a springboard into further discussion. I do love when they talk trash on Lovecraft, wax poetic about Ligotti, and get real analytical on the stuff between those poles.
Edgar’s Best of All Time (Hits): “Something To Do On the Way To the Grave: Fisher's ‘Depressive Hedonia’ and Getting Some Hobbies”
I’m consistently surprised by how long the tail has been on this one. I flatter myself that my arguments that finding something to really just dive in to sticks in people’s brains, but it’s probably just something that comes up when you look up “depressive hedonia.” In any case, I stand by what I said, and still highly recommend getting a hobby. As a bonus, if it’s something you can use to make or alter clothing, you get the additional gift of saying, “Thanks! I made it!” when people tell you it’s cool.
Edgar’s Best of All Time (Highest Read Time): “‘Sketching The Monster at Its Heart’: An Appreciation of Neoreaction a Basilisk”
I’m glad to see the numbers on this one. Sandifer’s book continues to hit, even several years after its publication, and if I can convince people to read her stuff, I will have done something good. A recent tweet noted the similarity of one passage to the end of Glass Onion, which I also loved, so really all I can say here is that it’s a really good book.
Edgar’s Best of 2021 (Hits and Highest Read Time): “Edgar’s Book Round-Up, January-February 2021”
Weird! I sort of assume no one reads these, and I’m not sure why this one did as well as it did. Some good books there, though, and with most of them, it feels simultaneously as if I read them very recently and a very long time ago. I see this is where I discussed Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire, and it would be very cool if more people read that.
Edgar’s Best of 2022 (Hits): “Edgar's Book Round-Up, June 2022”
Man, that was a good month for reading. Emezi’s You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, White’s Hell Followed with Us, and Queering Translation, Translating the Queer on one list? God, I read good stuff.
Edgar’s Best of 2022 (Highest Read Time): “The Facts In the Case of You”
Frankly, I had to read this one again to try to remember what I was talking about, which may explain why the read time is so high. I feel like this one never quite came clear, but it is still a fun little romp through looking at stuff and being meat.
Edgar’s Favorite Piece of Their Own This Year: “Desperate Lines: On Reading”
Okay, so this is actually from early in 2021, but it’s a two-year retrospective, so I’m including it. It’s kind of waffly, I guess, but fuck it: I like talking about books and reading, and I think I made my point — reading stuff is not just good but actually necessary to living a reasonable life, and you should do it intensely, all the time — pretty well. I also just like that statue.
Edger’s Favorite Piece of Cameron’s Writing: “Testosterone Is a Hell of a Drug: Masculinity and Authoritarianism”
I like Cameron’s writing on masculinity a lot, and this piece is no exception. I suggest reading the piece, instead of just taking my word for it, but I will note that I forgot about the brief discussion of Sean Bonnette’s lyrics with AJJ, and was delighted anew by Cameron’s analysis.
That’s it. We’ll see you next week.
Keep it broken, stay hands, and follow us on our various social media.
Okay, so that’s 2022 over and done with — felt like a real filler episode of a year. Let’s move on to 2023.
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