i'm not a gamer, but i'll pretend
August 24, 2004 by Eric Richardson
So I have a class on Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games this semester, which I mentioned yesterday. Today is the first class period. One of the "texts" is the game Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided. We get a free copy of the game and a 3-month free subscription, which is cool and all, but the hardware requirements are pretty intense. It requires a graphics card capable of hardware texture and lighting, which my GeForce4 is, but it's in a machine with a PII 400, and oh... It's running Linux. My laptop meets all requirements except the graphics card. I guess Annenberg is going to set up some lab computers for us, though, which should make it ok.
Update: For those of you who might be interested, here's a bit of the breakdown of the people in the class: * 6 male, 2 female * a few real gamers, but not all * one cinema-television PhD student
Downtown: the fun of politics
August 24, 2004 by Eric Richardson
So assuming I get out of class a little early today I think I'm going to be making my way down to City Hall to sit in on the meeting on the new LAPD headquarters. The LA Times also has an article today. Now, I don't have a lot invested in the debate so I'm really going more to sit and listen than I am to push any particular agenda. I do feel like it's a bit of a shame that the headquarters can't be rebuilt on the site of the current Parker Center, but I understand the economics of trying to fit a temporary headquarters while construction occurred. I am curious to see the plans for the new space, particularly to see if they do address the neighborhood's desire for a park in anything more than a token way. I don't think the whole space needs to be made into a park: the Civic Center doesn't do all that poorly for green space right now. It would be nice, though, to see the city hold true to what the neighborhood thinks it was promised.
At the very bottom of the LA Times article you get this quote, which doesn't really make any sense to me:
Three years ago, the City Council did approve a plan to make the entire block into "open space" as part of a land swap with the state.
But Perry said Monday the city never committed to a park.
"Open space does not mean park," the councilwoman said.
Well, ok, but I'm pretty sure open space doesn't mean police headquarters either.
ah, classic cinema
August 24, 2004 by Eric Richardson
So in the first installment of my censorship class we watched two films: Baby Face and Belle of the Nineties. Now before today I was only vaguely familiar with Mae West. I knew who she was, and I knew a bit of her reputation. That is what it is, but here's what I couldn't get over:
Mae West is a female Rodney Dangerfield. Their acts are exactly the same. Mae West here is Rodney Dangerfield from Caddy Shack. Think about it. If you watch for it it's pretty eerie.
senior living in downtown
August 24, 2004 by Eric Richardson
The LA Times today has an article on Angelus Plaza, the senior housing project right in the middle of downtown. I've wondered about how such a large project can survive in the midst of the renewed development taking place right now, and this article gets a little into its history. I had no idea that Angelus Plaza was 24 years old. The articles quotes a lady who's lived there since the project opened:
"Nothing was built here. I saw all these buildings grow," Medina said, recalling that when she arrived, workers hadn't even finished the sidewalks.
Downtown, including the skyscraper developments of the 80s, have grown around Angelus Plaza. The new development and the resurgence of downtown as a destination have happened around Angelus Plaza. Though I don't like the sprawling footprint or the somewhat blank look of the Plaza, I'm perfectly ok with having such a project downtown... how could I not be? They're people who came to downtown when no one else was coming. We came later. We can't try to drive them out, they want what we want. They want the best for the neighborhood. They want revival, they want people on the streets.
When I moved away from USC and moved downtown, I became excited about living out in the real world. What makes it the real world? A mix of ages and social classes. I don't want to live in a downtown comprised entirely of young loft-dwellers. Yes, there's a lot of downtown that needs to change, but this isn't one of those parts.
from the neighborhood
August 23, 2004 by Eric Richardson
One of the things I've been meaning to do since I moved downtown is to put some effort into looking around for cool historic pictures from my neighborhood that I could get prints of to hang in the apartment. Today I noticed that USC has a Digital Archives that includes a bunch of pictures taken by AAA (or the Auto Club of Southern California, if you prefer to be technical). The collection includes some good candidates for making it to the wall.
This 1930 image was taken from almost directly in front of my building facing north. Of course my building was built until a year or two after that, so I'm not sure what was there at the time. The intersection in the image is 6th and Spring. The Hotel Hayward still has that same neon. It's amazing to note the pedestrian traffic in the area. The 1932 guide film I saw at the Natural History Museum named either Broadway and 7th or Spring and 7th (can't remember which) as the busiest pedestrian intersection in the country.