Minneapolis, Minnesnota, and stuff like dat

General stuffGeneral resources and links for Mpls, MN. Chinese & Taiwanese Chinese, Taiwanese, etc. resources in the Twin Cities Queer resourcesGLBT, gender, etc. FandomGamers and Science Fiction geeks, yay! Media Papers, radio, etc.

I lived in Taiwan for just short of eight years. Before that, I was in Iowa for three years, and Ohio for four years before that. But through it all, I considered Minneapolis, Minnesota to be my home town.

In 2000, I took a trip to Minneapolis to visit after four long years of imprisonment in Taiwan. It opened my eyes a lot to what I had been missing. I already had a strong sense of what Muplis was, but my feelings were strongly reinforced by going back. Minneapolis has air you can breathe, and would even be happy to; beautiful parks and lakes; a good amount of parking; several fun things to do, at least if you have money, and even a good number of things that are fun to do if you don't have money; museums and crap like dat galore; and of course it's located in a state which not only guarantees the rights of gay, lesbian and bisexual people, but also guarantees the rights of transgender people. (Though those guarantees have eroded in recent years.) All in all, it's really a pretty cool place to live.

Then, I went back to Taiwan. (What the fuck was I thinking? Oh, yeah, it's where my job was). While I was in Taiwan, I collected a few tidbits on the Web to remind me of where I was, and maybe to introduce some other people to it all.

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General stuff

This is just, well, general things about Minnesota or Muplis.

• The main page of Minneapolis itself. This is the city government's page, with links to governmenty things.

• The main page of the Minnesota tourism folks, called Explore Minnesota.

• The North Star page, the main page of the Minnesota government.

• A few photos of mine from Minnesnota and Muplis.

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Asian resources

It's kind of surprising how many people in Muplis are from Asian countries, or of Asian ancestry. At least, it's surprising if your impression of the Twin Cities is all lutefisk and white people. There are actually some pretty interesting resources for Asian folks in the Cities.

• United Noodles is probably the single best Asian food store in the Cities. They don't have Weiwei A instant noodles (aka "ramen"), so that's a strike against them, but they seem to have everything else. A lot of Chinese folks in the Twin Cities do their shopping here. There are a lot of other places around, but they either don't have websites, or I can't recommend them as highly, or both.

• There are no fewer than three Chinese language schools for kids in the Cities. Minghua Chinese School is one, and the Chinese American Association of Minnesota has another. The recent addition is Yinghua Academy.

• There are also several Chinese cultural centers in the Twin Cities. The Minnesota China Service Center is one; the aforementioned Chinese American Association of Minnesota is another; the US - China Peoples Friendship Association appears to be a kind of PAC or networking organization, without community service.

• There are also Taiwan-specific resources around, such as the Taiwanese Student Association at the U of M and the Taiwanese Association of America -- Minnesota Chapter.

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Queer and Gender stuff

Note that a lot of general transgender stuff is on my Gender page. This here's just da stuff dat's directly related to Minneapolis, the Twin Cities, Minnesota or the Midwest. Also note that I have primarily included things of relevance to transgender people here; I don't have the resources to track other GLBTQI information.

• One of the biggest GLBT political organizations in Minnesota is OutFront. They're very inclusive and do lots of good political work. They also have all kinds of resources on their site, such as information on how transsexuals in Minnesota can change their drivers' licenses and how to legally change your name.

• One of the best sites in the Twin Cities seems to be called Twin Cities GLBT Life (perhaps AKA GLBT.com). Strangely, their index page doesn't seem to exist, but everything else on the site is pretty good. It's a great place to start, anyway.

• A good local GLBT magazine is Lavender. They have lots of stuff about local goings-on in the Twin Cities, mostly bar-hopping and whatnot, but a lot of other good stuff. There was another good paper in the Cities called Focus Point, but they went out of business. Too bad -- they were much less a lifestyle magazine than Lavender and much more an actual newspaper. And their coverage of TG issues was far, far better, even to the point that it actually existed. Well, maybe some day...

• Probably the major local transgender group is the City of Lakes Crossgender Community. They're primarily for crossdressers, not for transsexuals; take that for whatever it's worth.

• The Brass Rail, Hotel Amsterdam and Saloon have their own site, which doesn't actually say much, called Gay Minneapolis.

• A good site to start looking for queer academics in Minnesota is the U of M's GLBT Programs Office.

• Another site that has links to good academic resources is at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Midwest Kaleidoscope.

• The Minnesota Pride committee have their own website, which is naturally about the march in June.

• Oh, I suppose I shouldn't forget the Program in Human Sexuality, which is located in Minneapolis.

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Fandom, gamersville, etc.

Minnesota is a great place to live if you're into SF, gaming and other such geekish things. Minneapolis is actually one of the birthplaces of RPG's. M.A.R. Barker, designer of Tekumel, lives here, and I think Dave Arneson does, too. Several famous SF authors live here or have lived here: Steven Brust, Emma Bull, Neil Gaiman (I think), other folks who I also haven't read anything by.

Maybe more importantly, Minnesota has quite a nice fandom/gaming community. For a relatively small area (about a million people in the Metro, specifically) it has a very high concentration of cool geeky people.

Note also that I have other SF and gaming-specific links on my SF and RPG page, many of them strongly related to Minnesota.

• A good place to start is Minn-StF, the Minnesota Science Fiction Society. They put on Minicon, the first SF con I ever went to. It's still a great con with lots of cool programming (*ahem*), chatting, friendly people and other such good things.

  Minicon used to be huge. Several thousand people, every year. As some people have put it, "It was basically like running a WorldCon every year." For whatever reason -- there are many versions, and I was not there, so I have very little idea What Really Happened -- the big Minicons split. Some people continued on with a smaller, leaner Minicon, the one that exists today.

• Other people wanted to keep it the same size and formed a different group, the Minnesota society for Interest in Science FictIon and fanTaSy (MISFITS) and a different Con: CONvergence. It now regularly has 2000+ people and shows no signs of slowing down. It's a very fun con, with a different vibe than Minicon. I prefer them both for different things.

  Unfortunately, the split was not amicable. A lot of people got hurt, and MISFITS and Mnstf are only now, a decade later, starting to bury the various hatchets. Hopefully the future will have good things for both groups.

• The Minicon split also resulted in a couple other Cons. MarsCon is primarily a media convention, with a very heavy contingent of parties. Like a smaller version of Convergence, really. I've never had a particularly good time there; parties are not my thing (going into a room with a bunch of strangers to be either drunk or alienated? No thanks!), and "media" often tends to mean anti-intellectualism in my book.

• The other major local con is Diversicon. It's quite small -- rarely more than 125 people -- but it has very cool programming (with a slight feel of academic-level seriousness) and a very comfy feel.

• There are other cons, too. There's the Mnstf fallcon, which has changed names many times. For 2006, it's Convivial. And there are many other cons: the Minnesota Gamer's Convention, which seems to be just getting off its feet; Anime Detour, the main local dedicated manga & anime con; and Fallcon, which seems to be the main local comic convention.

• When I was still living in Muplis, I spent far, far too many hours at Phoenix Games and its earlier incarnation, the Little Tin Soldier (or the "Tin", as I came to call it). Too many hours, and also not nearly enough. Their website isn't really functioning, but hopefully one day it'll be useful again. Their selection of used games is probably the best in the Twin Cities; certainly better than the Source, anyway (though the Source has far more new games). They've also started selling retro PC games. The Source is probably a better store overall, but Phoenix still has a special place in my heart.

• I think my favorite SF bookstore in Muplis is DreamHaven. They have an excellent selection and lots of gaming stuff, too.

• I haven't been to Uncle Hugo's much, but I plan to go more often now. They have a small but appreciable selection of gaming books, and a huge selection of used and new SF. It tends to be a little hard to find things -- there are many, many different piles and shelves -- but there really is an immense amount there.

• The Source is basically a geek's Mecca. They have pretty much every gaming thing you could possibly ever want, all in stock; they have a great selection of comics; they have a huge selection of manga; they have every cool DVD on the planet; they even have tons of gaming space. If you're a gamer, SF fan or pretty much anything related, you pretty much have to go.



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Media

These are various sources of general info in or about Minnesota -- radio stations, newspapers, etc.

• The standard newspaper in Muplis is the Strib (also known by some as the Star-Tribune).

• The main local weekly newspaper (Village Voice-style, in other words) is City Pages.

• One of my favorite radio stations in Muplis is KFAI, which has lots of good programs, including an evening of Queer stuff on Sunday nights (local time, of course).

• The U of M's (University of Minnesota, that is) station, run by students, is called Radio K.

• It's a bit too much for the soccer-mom crowd for my tastes, but Minnesota Public Radio is still far better than anything I can get here in Taiwan.

• It's not strictly Minnesota, but Michael Feldman's Whad'Ya Know radio show is a very funny bit of cool Midwesternism, and it's worth checking out.



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This page (http://www.jiawen.net/ muplis.html) designed and ©2000-2006 by Rachel Kronick. Last updated September 6, 2006.