My Nerdery Compels Me to Try New Things

   There's a hobby game store right next to the Biomat, right... It's called Game Pulse. I've always been curious about it, ever since first walking by last Wednesday-- so, alright, I've always been curious about it, and by always I mean for a week. I've been curious about it for a week. Passing by this morning heading in to give my plasma, I saw this table with a, 40% off, paper plaquart on it, and I just had to duck in... So, no, technically, I did not "pass by."

   The place was totally dead in there. Just, the lady, sitting by that table, and nobody else. Apparently it's just because they're experimenting with new hours, for the month, and, like, nobody knows that they're open this early? So I got lucky that they happened to be open in the first place.

   It was a pretty neat place. Dragon head on the far end of the wall; big ol' boxes of nothing but MTG mana cards; Killer Bunnies expansions nobody's ever heard of. Pretty sparse place as well-- just one big open space, with a few shelves around. Reminds me of that one store from that one Far Side strip, with the high shelves...you know what I'm talking about;.If you don't... well, I'd link to it, or something, but Gary Larson doesn't tend to authorize images of his work put up onto the internet. Sparse store, anyway, but I've peeked in before during MTG tourneys and things and that exact design looks ideal for Friday Night Magic.

   Game Pulse, anyway. I wish them success, even if I couldn't patronize them at that time. (Whatever happened to Next Dimension comics back in Fallon? It just... died, one day? I'm so paranoid about that kind of thing happening to those kinds of places, now...)

   All the crazy crud that went down donating my plasma was a-mah-zing, so I'll just skip to this evening, coming out of computer art class, wondering if they've got the weekly apartment inspection this evening handled without me. (They did; we got a smiley face score on apartment cleanliness.) And, I see a collection of comic books on a table in the classroom to my right, and I notice on the door a slip of paper in comic book art style, advertising the BYU-I Comics Workshop, and I notice after that that there's people in there as well, all sitting at the desks and working on drawings of themselves designed as introductions, and...

   And I'm co-writing a comic book, now.

   It's part of the, thing, the extracurricular, curriculum, to team up with one other person, depending on whether you're more into writing or drawing... My teammate, my original teammate, can't make it to the workshops, though, so another duo graciously took me in... My co-author and I have no idea what it's going to be about, yet. Our artist is pretty incredible, though, and generically versatile (versatile in, genre, that is?), so it can go in some interesting places if we let it...

   Aside from that, there's a lot of talent throughout the group in general... There's a show-and-brag after, if anyone wants to show and brag, and so here we've got some really neat stuff you should check out.

   For this week's brag-and-tell, we had Madeleine Fisher, the artist of  Brainstorm (written by her older brother, who is it appears on his mission right now so is on a bit of hiatus) preview some of her work for this week's Precious Metal, which is ongoing, and which she is both the writer and artist of.

Brainstorm.

   Brainstorm, having only 13 issues so far due to the aforementioned hiatus, is a quick read, obviously, and very Scott Pilgrim-esque. It's about a boring guy with interesting powers, namely, to manifest his imagination into reality.

Precious Metal

   Precious Metal meanwhile is getting a Patreon sometime hopefully soon, and is by this point quite a bit larger than Brainstorm, though it probably wouldn't take over an hour to read the whole thing. It's about a thief, and his "sister" he rescued (and continues to rescue) who has magical powers and eats... well, you know. It's right there in the comic's title. It is the comic's title.

   It's reminiscent of Cucumber Quest and Paranatural in the best possible ways (and, indeed, both sites are linked to in the webcomics' obligatory link-to-fellow-webcomics collection.) It's also probably reminiscent of Nimona and Rice-Boy Universe, since those comics are also linked to, but I haven't read either of those? Though I probably should... just as you should read these!

   And that's what I've got for you.