Adventures of a Discoverer

This is quite a new experience to talk about: from beginning to end it took four years. Let me explain. Most people have heard of Kickstarter , the crowdfunding site, but, for those who hasn't, it works like this: people that have an idea for some creative project (like a new electronic device, stage show, comic book, work of art, among many kinds of things) but don't have the money to actually implement said project can go to the website and register as a "creator". The creator, then, can start a "campaign": it tells all the people who go to the website that if he or she gets enough people to pledge to pay for the creation in advance, the project will get going and those who pledged in advance (which are the "backers") will get the creation first, plus possibly some additional goodies. For example: a comic book creator starts a campaign saying that he will create a brand new story if he gets enough backers to be able to print and publish the book ...

This Friday I went to a really cool new art space in Seattle: Cannonball Arts. One of the reasons why it's cool is because how a number of artistic entities in Seattle came together to make good use of a previously abandoned space. In the middle of downtown there used to be a large Bath, Bed and Beyond store which stayed abandoned after the chain went bankrupt. Then, Bumbershoot, the Muckleshoot Tribe, the Seattle Center and other artistic entities pooled together and acquired the building, which was fully remodeled and opened on August of 2025 as a brand new art space for the city. It is a really nice space because it is quite large, bigger than some of the more established art museums in town: it felt bigger than the Frye Art Museum and the Henry Art Gallery. Furthermore, it also has a space for live concerts, which I'm eager to check out. In fact, the team at the center had made an excellent use of the available space, making it feel very airy and roomy, which created a very...

For many years I always wanted to try paintball, but, for some reason or another, it hadn't happened yet. Last week I finally got my chance: a friend of mine was celebrating his kid's birthday at a paintball center,  Operation Paintball , in the woods south of Seattle, and he invited me. It was a lot of fun! The center provides a mask and the gun, and you pay for the boxes of paintballs (and, believe me, they go really fast). It is a great piece of advice to wear thick clothes: you immediately feel, and very clearly, when you're hit by a paintball. The center has three available fields: urban warfare, taking the hill, and the one for rookies with inflatables. We started by the rookie one, then progressed to taking the hill, in which you have to go up a slope to take over the top which is defended by some players entrenched there, and finally we went to the urban warfare field, in which various structures simulate houses and other urban structures that you have to fight for....

Just today for the first time I could go to the Oddities and Curiosities Expo, in the Seattle Convention Center. In simple terms, buying a ticket gives you access to the convention center hall where you can see a number of booths showing all kinds of weird and strange merchandise, the weirder and stranger the better. As the expo defines itself, "for lovers of strange, unusual and bizarre". As I could see myself, and you can see in the pictures, there is indeed plenty of bizarre. Animal fetuses in jars, edible ants (which I bought and I'll try later), all kinds of skulls (the animal ones being real ones), horror themed artworks, strange antiques, witchcraft paraphernalia, and a whole lot more. Besides that, the convention center was quite crowded and many people were attractions in themselves, with some elaborate horror costumes. Black clothing was the overwhelming choice: I was wearing a dark green shirt and I was like a pop of color in the crowd. In addition to the booth...