talking games

August 31, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I'm sitting in my MMORPG class right now. I don't really talk a lot about video games. Who does, really, outside of the people who make them? I mean you say, "Yeah, it's cool." and that's about the end of it.

I mentioned before that we're supposed to be playing Star Wars Galaxies, but that I don't have a machine that could play it. Well, turns out Annenberg really doesn't either at the moment. This is thanks to a number of things, large among them the fact that all Annenberg machines are remotely managed by ISD. ISD rolls out software to all machines at once, and local access is locked down pretty much completely. So even if ISD kicked the game out to machines, when run the game wouldn't even have the appropriate rights to install the patches it likes to download every week. I also doubt these machines have capable video cards, but that issue's farther down the road.

Our professor brought a machine from his office into the classroom today to show the character creation, only to find his network card getting disabled. ISD says his machine has a virus, even though the approved ISD virus protection software is indeed running. It's good to see that professors struggle with the same institutional issues you hear about students having all the time.

where do you live? "Crack Alley"

August 30, 2004 by Eric Richardson

From a 1987 LA Times article titled, "You can walk outside. It's incredible."

The result, for example, in notorious "Crack Alley"--a trash-strewn walkway between 6th and 7th streets linking Broadway and Spring Street--is that "the selling (of narcotics in the alley) is about gone," said Ronald Rubacher, an officer on patrol there.

Hey... That's my alley. The one they're loudly power-washing as I type this.

A different article says that these drug-dealing problems are what led to the alley being fenced in. Now the only pests down there are the film crews that appear poised to be shining lights outside my window tonight.

premiere towers

August 30, 2004 by Eric Richardson

There's not a lot online about the downtown building I call home, so I've sort of pooled the different info I have on the building together to make a page on Premiere Towers. I'll add to it as I get more material, especially material on the history of the buildings.

Right now I'm reading a really interesting piece from the April 1, 1991, LA Times. The piece, titled "Condo Pioneers Bitter as Spring Street Rebirth Fails," was written right in the midst of the dark times the Premiere conversion project went through. The CRA though there was going to be a condo market downtown, so they converted two old buildings into one condo project. Only about a quarter of the units sold and the CRA lost a lot of money in the resulting buy-back and resale.

It's interesting to look at what pricing was like back then.

Pierson, Tanasaphaisal and the other residents plunked down from $70,000 to $135,000 to buy condominiums at Premiere Towers, located at 6th and Spring streets. The 12-story, $12-million redevelopment project, which opened seven years ago, was described by the CRA as "a unique alternative for middle-income households desiring downtown living."

Look around at the current downtown condo market and you'll see lofts going for a half million dollars or more. Every unit that makes it to market is getting snapped up. But the CRA jumped the gun by a decade or two and lost its shirt on it.

Interestingly, the article mentions the Stock Exchange as being a failed nightclub.

Both the Stock Exchange nightclub, which opened in 1987 in the architecturally imposing former home of the Pacific Stock Exchange, and Irwin's, an upscale restaurant that had been aimed at the City Hall crowd, closed within the last two years.

Today the Stock Exchange is again a nightclub, and one that seems to be doing pretty well to judge by the traffic I see going in and out.

From a different Times article from 1986...

The artists who live in downtown Los Angeles' northeast industrial district have been predicting for years that as soon as word got out that something hip was happening in their reconstituted neighborhood, the yuppies would buy up all their funky lofts and spoil the fun.

You can check that one off as done.

downtown comedy

August 30, 2004 by Eric Richardson

This week's issue of the Downtown News has an article on Perry Kurtz and his attempts to launch comedy nights downtown. The piece, entitled "The Unsinkable Perry Kurtz: Local Funnyman Tries, Again, to Bring Comedy Downtown," includes this little snippet:

But even the Redwood audience beat Kurtz's next outing. A resident of Spring Street's Premiere Towers, Kurtz held his third comedy night in a community room at his condo building. Four tenants turned out. "How sad is that? People next door wouldn't walk down the hall!" he says.

Now, let's consider for a moment that three of those people were me. Well, me, Kathy, and Charlie, but you get the idea. There were a few others, bringing the count closer to double the four they list, but it was definitely still a sad turnout.

The real problem, though, is it wasn't really that funny. I don't know, maybe it was the room or the lack of crowd, but the acts just weren't all that comedic. Perry may kill at the Comedy Store, but after the night at Premiere Towers we just sort of left saying "Well, that was weird." Nothing against him, it just wasn't the kind of night set up for success. I do like his drive to get stuff going downtown, so I'd love to see the night take off. I just hope there are a few more laughs of the less nervous variety.

Friday questions?

August 30, 2004 by Eric Richardson

So I know I skipped out on the normal routine of answering the LA Blogs Friday questions. But, seriously, look at the assignment. That's not a fifteen minute project; that's a travel essay. I looked at them Friday morning, went "whoah... that might take a while", and then just never made it back to them. It's a good task, just one that I've dealt with many times before.