My name is Braden. Names matter, but they are only an entry point, a way into a longer conversation about who we become through what we carry with us. I am someone who pays attention to stories. Not only the ones we are told to revere, but the ones that slip quietly into our lives and stay there. I don’t separate “high” art from everyday culture, because I’ve never found that distinction convincing. A comic panel, a late-night rerun, a game played too long after midnight; these things shape us just as powerfully as any canonized text. They teach us how to feel, what to notice, and what kinds of lives seem possible.
If that makes me a pop-culture enthusiast, so be it. But I think of it less as consumption and more as participation in shared mythologies. These are the stories we return to when the world feels heavy or unclear. Art shows up in many forms, be it paperback and vinyl, screen and silence, play and pause. I would argue it doesn’t require a gallery, only impact. I write to make sense of what has stayed with me. To trace how films taught me about grief, how books gave language to feelings I didn’t yet know how to name, how games asked me to choose, and live with those choices. I’m not trying to explain these stories away. I’m trying to honor them by understanding what they did to me.
If you’re here reading this, you’re already part of that process. Not as an audience, but as someone walking alongside the same questions: what lasts, what matters, and why certain stories refuse to let us go. If something I write lingers with you, if it resurfaces later, unprompted, then the exchange has worked. We will have shared meaning. And that, to me, is art.