What is the Transraad Studios newsletter?

A friend once told me I have a unique compulsion for trivializing the momentous and complicating the obvious. In retrospect that’s how I’ve thought and written about almost everything, and it’s how I approach this newsletter. Call me a contrarian but I’ve always been way more interested in looking closely at so-called low brow media with a level of effort others would reserve for more “important” works. What’s the business angle behind throwaway entertainment, what makes niches-within-a-niche viable and appealing to its slim cadre of fans, what kind of provisional subcultures are fermenting around these outer frontiers of creative media, and how do they tie into macro events going on in the larger world?

Join me for musings on anime, manga, games, politics (everyone's favorite), history (everyone's even-more favorite), the obscure tidbits of connective tissue between those subjects, and the occasional short fiction if you ask nicely.

Profile banner by the excellent KawaiiMess

Who are you?

I’m Mark Artem, alternatively K.H. Meridian for fiction writing, cofounder and former writer at Colony Drop and the Colony Drop Zine. I now work as a professional Twitter poster at @redactedtext. Did you know I wrote a novel once when I was 26?? I wrote a novel. It’s not published but — wait where are you going?!

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High brow snobbery on low brow content

People

You may remember me as one of the writers on anime fan favorite Colony Drop. (http://www.colonydrop.com/author/mark/) These days I do... this