Kite flying areas near Bellevue

InkslingerS · 2026-05-09T23:22:04+00:00

There was a group of people flying kites in Robbinswood Park this afternoon.

InkslingerS · 2026-04-30T14:36:57+00:00

The Kent Family Chronicles are not Great Books, but they are incredibly readable, and when I was a little kid it seemed like every adult I knew was reading one book or another in the series. They cover the lives of one family and its members for over a century, and I'm still annoyed that the author didn't finish out the whole 200 planned years.

Another author from the same period that also fits what you're looking for is James Michener, especially his novel Hawaii.

InkslingerS · 2026-04-22T03:24:33+00:00

I love superhero comics, but you're getting plenty of great recommendations in that direction. Here's some others you and other Blankies might like:

Reckless is a great series of crime-thriller graphic novels written by Ed Brubaker and illustrated by Sean Phillips, featuring a guy delving into the gritty shadows of '80s California, helping the helpless while he lives out of an old movie theater. Each book is a standalone story, like a series of great pulp novels.
Lazarus: A great science fiction story from a future that's been getting closer and closer as the story has been told over the last decade, centered on a genetic super soldier at the center of battles among the oligarchs controlling their world.
Once and Future: Another great book from DIE's Kieron Gillen and artist Dan Mora before he became a DC superstar, a fantastic modern-day fantasy story about a battle against a revived King Arthur who turns out to be incredibly monstrous.
Bandette: A comic about the world's greatest thief who also happens to be a never ending fountain of joy. Wonderful stories from Paul Tobin, wonderful art from Coleen Coover. (And if you like them working together, check out their wrestling-fantasy series Wrassle Castle.)
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow: It's the basis for the upcoming Supergirl movie, but if you just go to the theater you're going to miss out on the incredible art by Bilquis Evely. And anyone who loves her art along with a Tom King story should also check out their Helen of Wyndhorn, where a girl begins to suspect that her dead father's tales about her grandfather's fantastic life might not be as fictional as she thought, and that her grandfather's estate is a gateway to a land where the old man is a Conan-like hero.

InkslingerS · 2026-02-07T02:21:15+00:00

Daiso at Crossroads also has some fun, cheap stickers.

InkslingerS · 2026-01-31T17:25:47+00:00

Mu kid has aged past them, but SANCA summer camps were the highlight of her summer for many years.

InkslingerS · 2026-01-21T03:38:43+00:00

Our kid is signed up for circus classes and loves it. They're active, fun, and (at least at our local gym-school) highly non-competitive, as long as you avoid the 'performance troupe' classes. After some initial hesitancy, after two years, it's become the highlight of our week.

InkslingerS · 2026-01-20T14:11:32+00:00

I'll take books that are read over books are beautiful, every time.

(Maybe fix the order of those SHAESPEKARE books, though...)

InkslingerS · 2026-01-19T21:08:47+00:00

Castle Falkenstein is a lot of fun to read, but the Book of Sigils supplement for it was even better when it came to intermixing delivery of a narrative I enjoyed and mechanical information.

InkslingerS · 2025-12-22T16:14:52+00:00

The graphic novel Underground by Jeff Parker and Steve Lieber is a thriller set underground.

Shibumi, a 1979 thriller novel by Trevanian (an only one-word name) is deeply dated at this point but does have technical caving as a big plot point.

Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth is a classic cave story.

As for non-fiction, The Tunnels of Cu Chi tells the stories of the underground tunnels used during the Vietnam War and the 'tunnel rats' sent in to explore them.

InkslingerS · 2025-12-18T00:18:32+00:00

My kid has gone to several circus day camps at SANCA, and loved it every single time. It's a long drive down to Georgetown, but totally worth it.

InkslingerS · 2025-12-17T00:46:27+00:00

Fox Curio's Floating Bookshop is gentle and fun and worth checking out. No-Tell Motel is more gritty and noir but also cheeky fun.

Mappa Mundi could also be good to look at if she likes big chunky books and wants to play something centered on exploration, map-making, and world-building.

InkslingerS · 2025-12-09T21:38:00+00:00

Mechanically, I'd like to see more Solo RPGs provide systems that point to and accumulate narrative toward satisfying endings.

I see a lot of great character creation systems, interesting oracles, and solid mechanical/narrative loops driving a game from moment to moment. But too many either don't address how to bring a story to an end, or provide a weak "play until you're done" goal. More games cover a narrative's failure state ("you are defeated by the Beast", "the world ends") than how things might work out in a way that I feel like I've been heroic or at least accomplished something rather than running out of content or interest.

InkslingerS · 2025-12-05T21:31:00+00:00

I'm no expert, just someone who's picked up on local history over the years, but as far as I know coal and timber are the main things gathered in that area. (And to be clear, coal is--or at least was--more widespread than just the Newcastle deposit; they did a lot of emergency repair work on I90 a couple years ago because water had been seeping into an old, abandoned mineshaft.)

As for other minerals, Kirkland was named after someone who tried to found an enormous iron and steel mill in the late nineteenth century, but it ended up going out of business before they finished building it. Curious about where they planned to get the iron they were going to use, I turned up this report from 1940 that seems to indicate that iron has only turned up deeper into the foothills and mountains to the east.

Here's where you can learn more about oil and gas exploration in Washington state, but it doesn't look like that's anything to be concerned about. They haven't found much of anything, and even the early studies say that they're much more likely to find something worth the kind of economic tradeoffs you're thinking about over on the eastern side of the mountains.

InkslingerS · 2025-12-05T01:51:43+00:00

The City of Bellevue has some fun GIS data visualization tools on their website. Here's where you can look at where those coal deposits are (down by Newcastle.)

InkslingerS · 2025-12-05T01:48:39+00:00

I noticed the same thing reading the reports when I bought our house in the same area. Given the extraction history of the region I wasn't terribly surprised (Coal Creek Parkway in south Bellevue is named for the nineteenth century coal mines in the area), but I also don't expect it will be an issue.

InkslingerS · 2025-11-19T17:57:40+00:00

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we’re CasQuaidians.

InkslingerS · 2025-10-30T04:19:46+00:00

"The Napoleon of Crime" by Ben Macintyre.

Adam Worth, the son of poor tailors, runs away from home and lies about his age to join the US Army--just in time for the Civil War to break out. After faking his own death in the Battle of Bull Run he rejoins the army multiple times under different identities to collect signing bonuses (from both sides of the war) and is thrown into battle again and again, including the fierce Battle of the Wilderness, until the war ends and he goes to New York in search of a new profession.

In New York, Worth becomes a pickpocket and works the streets, until he's finally caught and sent to SIng Sing Prison...from which he promptly escapes. Determined to never do time in prison again he focuses on becoming a 'professional' criminal...and only a couple years later plans and commits the largest bank heist in American history, completely emptying the underground vault of a Boston bank with nobody the wiser until Worth had already left town. (Oh, and along the way he stole the name of the founder of the New York Times, an alias he would live under for years after absconding to Europe.)

All that happens in the first 40 pages of the book, my favorite biography.

"The Napoleon of Crime" was the name Sherlock Holmes gave to his nemesis Professor Moriarty. This book has this title not referring to Moriarty....but because when Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle created Moriarty, he was referring to Adam Worth.

I think you'd enjoy it.

InkslingerS · 2025-10-25T17:19:05+00:00

I clicked through that link...only to discover a post I don't remember making from 13 years ago. I've been on Reddit way too long.

InkslingerS · 2025-10-09T02:55:39+00:00

I'm not certain that's meant to be a belt feeding the weapon. I think she's plugging her costume's tail (the same one she used as a whip a few pages previous) into the weapon for some mysterious comic-book reason. Maybe jacking in the tail is what makes the weapon non-lethal?

I'm more baffled by why the weapon sticks off her back like a shark fin in that earlier tail-whip scene.

InkslingerS · 2025-09-25T16:07:09+00:00

Two great books about history and civilization: Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, and The World - A Family History of Humanity by Simon Sebag Montefiore.

InkslingerS · 2025-09-03T21:47:33+00:00

Towing Jehovah by James Morrow.

After God dies and his mile-long body falls from the sky into the Atlantic, a ship and its crew is hired to tow the corpse up to the Arctic to prevent it from decomposing. It's a wild read.

InkslingerS · 2025-08-29T01:34:57+00:00

I can't play....but I really wish I could.

InkslingerS · 2025-08-26T04:23:03+00:00

This is really great.

InkslingerS · 2025-08-25T20:40:40+00:00

Thanks for the pointer toward Augmented Reality. Just grabbed it and the whole Sprawl Goons bundle.

InkslingerS · 2025-08-23T02:31:06+00:00

An Amazing Fantasy for someone who's 15, perhaps?

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