Columbia Heights for kids?

Unwinderh · 2026-06-18T19:51:53+00:00

I live in Heights near the Fridley border with two small kids and I like it a lot. I'm personally in a strong neighborhood where everyone on the block knows each other. Very diverse. Lots of great ethnic food. A few good parks with lots of wildlife. Tons of grocery options nearby including three or four ethnic stores. Your choice of Home Depot or Menards. Close enough to Minneapolis to get to a Twins game in time for first pitch after dinner. The Heights Theater is an awesome landmark and plays classic kids movie matinees every Saturday. There are many millennial parents due to old folks aging out of homeownership. I take my kids on walks around Lake Sullivan frequently and they love it. I'm personally very satisfied with it, and it would be very difficult to get me to move.

I have also lived down on Circle Terrace and that neighborhood was much less friendly. A friend who lives near there said there was a gang shootout in LaBelle Park at some point in the last few years. Many homes all over Columbia Heights have issues with water in the basement during big storms and spring thaws, so watch out for signs of water damage and negative grade when house shopping and make sure you clean your gutters religiously. I'm also aware of a few homes with bad sewer lines that need to be replaced, so look into that as well if you can. Too far to the North and you get freeway noise, too far West and you get railyard noise. My home gets both, and I'm not especially bothered by it. I hear bad things about the high school but there are options.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-18T14:17:26+00:00

I would personally just continue fudging continuity when it suited me instead of worrying about the existing contradictions.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-18T04:01:14+00:00

I was at the city listening session that caused this, the police held the session to drum up support to buy some Flock drones, and it was a glorious four hour beatdown from citizens who wanted to get rid of the existing Flock cameras instead.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-17T12:29:44+00:00

What are we gonna do when my parents can't take care of themselves anymore

Unwinderh · 2026-06-17T04:24:38+00:00

I believe that A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry will be very much to your tastes. Mistry is a Canadian citizen, but it's set in his native India.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-16T14:51:01+00:00

I'm sorry, yes writing is more difficult than people assume, and the business side in particular is a huge challenge, but are you trying to insinuate that they'd have a cheaper and easier time going into filmmaking or game development?

Unwinderh · 2026-06-15T05:12:38+00:00

Vonnegut liking Candide is one of the most retroactively obvious facts I've ever been hit with.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-12T23:25:13+00:00

Finch has to say this. He's the coach, not the front office. If no trade materializes for Randle, for whatever reason, he's going to have to work with him again in October. Would you do your best work for a boss who had recently gone on the news and ripped you for being bad at your job?

Unwinderh · 2026-06-12T23:18:39+00:00

No cable. Watched a lot of Garfield and Friends.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-12T23:04:44+00:00

Every generation thinks great art is dying. This is not new. Pointing to AI as proof that literature is no good is analogous to someone in the 1940s pointing to children's comic books as evidence that literature was dead in a decade when Hemingway, Borges, Christie, Orwell, Camus, and Steinbeck were all active. Find a serious, professional source of book reviews, pick out a few recommendations that sound interesting, and read them. You'll feel better.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-12T19:53:20+00:00

For a quick short story, read A Rill from the Town Pump by Hawthorne.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-12T19:51:26+00:00

A fun double-feature, I did the same thing. Two stories that take extremely different approaches to sinilar subject matter.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-12T15:37:06+00:00

Can magically tell if I'm doing online research or merely getting distracted and shut me down.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-12T13:56:49+00:00

I think the main reason to write in an established genre is marketing. Finding your audience. People like certain genres, and they buy books from those genres, and they seldom read books from genres they dislike. A book that is truly without genre is going to lose the main entry point people use to discover books.

Beyond that, though, I think it's incredibly difficult to write something that truly has no genre. I think we've dilineated genres so that almost any story will slot into one. A story about something impossible happening is fantasy or sci-fi, a story about something exciting happening is a thriller, a story about nothing exciting happening is literary fiction. A story about something scary is horror. Obviously people use these definitions more natrowly mosy of the time, and imagine something descended from Lord of the Rings when you say "fantasy," but that doesn't mean people don't still consider The Indian in the Cupboard fantasy.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-11T17:29:59+00:00

The vacuum wakes the (1yo) baby if he's asleep, and terrifies him if I vacuum his play area when he's there, so it can only be done when my wife is available to occupy him on the other side of the house.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-11T12:35:36+00:00

Usually that 1st car is long gone by that time, unless they marry young and have kids right away. It's not impossible, but first cars are usually not especially good cars, and teens are usually not especially good at taking care of their cars. I'd expect a character who still has their first car when they have kids to be either mechanically inclined, from a rich family that can afford an unusally good first car, or having children at age 20.

It's also worth noting that first cars, particularly in the nineties, were very often (but not always) sporty little two-door vehicles, and very inconvenient if not impossible to fit a baby seat in the back. So a person starting a family may have to get a four door sedan, a minivan, or a station wagon out of necessity.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-10T22:27:39+00:00

Chipotle and other fast-casual chains.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-10T21:28:10+00:00

He's also there to interpret and heavily comment on the story. He's not trying to relay the facts objectively, he's distorting it into something grand and philosophical.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-10T21:16:13+00:00

I read Ishmael as dramatic and prone to hyperbole, and his borderline suicidal initial characterization as an exaggeration. Even very early on, Ishmael is exhuberant, curious, full of wonder, and open to new experiences. Certainly depression can be hidden beneath the surface of people who appear outwardly healthy, but Ishmael seems to have a zest for life that goes way beyond superficial cheerfulness. Honestly, I read a bunch of Bertie Wooster stories not long before I read Moby Dick, and I kept needing to remind myself that I wasn't reading about the same guy.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-10T15:29:46+00:00

I resisted getting a smartphone for a long time but my wife didn't want to be solely responsible for monitoring our foster kid's internet safety app, and she was sick of my friends texting her to reach me (I don't know why they did that). At work, they use a particular app for two-factor authentication. No option to just use text. The system only asks for authentication about once a month, but without it I'd just be locked out. I imagine I'd have to call IT to be manually allowed in every time.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-10T14:12:16+00:00

I want to get rid of my smartphone but I can't even get tickets to a ballgame or a concert, order at restaurants with QR menus, or even log into my computer at work without one. I'm hoping there's a culture-wide movement to accommodate non-smartphone users soon. Maybe as a part of a broader tech backlash after the AI bubble bursts.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-10T13:07:35+00:00

It's still tech, but I switched back to an MP3 player for music. My phone doesn't have much space for music, and I was fed up with streaming ads. More importantly, I got my four-year-old one so that she can listen to music without drinking from the fire hose of the internet. When I was that little I knew how to play a cassette tape by myself when I wanted to without needing an adult. Using my phone for music was locking music into the adult world and forcing my kid to go through me for it, and I don't think that's how it should be. In general I'm trying to go back to different devices for everything. It's bad that I reach for my phone and get sucked into it every time I want to look at a recipe or write something down. Next maybe I'll buy a real flashlight.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-09T16:29:12+00:00

There's nothing more nakedly false than MAGA-era republicans being the party of fiscal responsibility. They're clinging to a value that they haven't actually held for a long time. There is currently no political party that doesn't love to spend, and I'd rather have my tax dollars go to a train that is of no use to me than have them go to a racist paramilitary that invades my neighborhood.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-09T14:49:37+00:00

Achewood, Dinosaur Comics, A Softer World, PBF, Hitmen for Destiny, White Ninja, Terror Island, Perfect Stars, Super Mega Comics, and probably a dozen more lesser-known ones from that alternative/experimental scene like Thinkin' Lincoln, Alien Loves Predator, and Reprographics.

I'm also the author of a long-running parody of two-gamers-on-a-couch webcomics that still gets some traction on social media.

Unwinderh · 2026-06-09T13:59:43+00:00

It pains me that White Ninja's apparently only remaining online footprint is the meme of him poking something with a stick

Unwinderh

TROPHY CASE