PAX: Enlark announces first project...
PAX 2007 was huge and very enjoyable personally. There were quite a few highlights and major announcements that came out of PAX and are better publicized elsewhere. I spent much of the time I was there officially introducing people to Enlark and trying to network, or at least get early feedback. It was the first time it was publicly announced that Enlark's first project is in working with Pink Godzilla to bring the Pink Godzilla Dev Kit to the PC for online multiplayer action.
For the non-PAX attendees in my readership: Pink Godzilla is a unique video games emporium in Seattle's international district specializing in retro and import gaming. The Pink Godzilla Dev Kit is a uniquely themed rummy-style card game in which the player uses the Pink Godzilla mascot character (and friends) to create videogames.
The response I got from just about everyone I talked to was overwhelmingly positive and encouraging. At PAX this year the Dev Kit game itself was purchasable from Pink Godzilla's rather sizable booth tucked away in the corner near a few high traffic booths. The game was playable in one of the table-top rooms that was just about dedicated to the game. Just about everyone I talked to at least noticed the game and the majority of those had actual tried their hand at it, and I didn't hear a single bad word about the game from anyone that had played it.
More to come, probably, as I continue to decompress and shake off the remaining jet lag.
Amazon Flexible Payment Service: The Most Powerful Payment Engine on the Web
Admittedly, Amazon is late to the game: Paypal, most of the classic Credit Card processing companies, and even Google all have released usable payment processing engines. Google's appears fabulous for out the box functionality, one-upping Paypal's work. I wasn't expecting Amazon to blow my mind, but they have. Amazon's new Flexible Payments Service isn't an out-of-the-box affair, but instead is something of the equivalent of a low level payment API. When Amazon says "flexible", they seem to mean it. The system allows some extremely complex payment negotiations with Amazon's systems playing the happily neutral mediator, which provides some very interesting development possibilities. For instance a simple "eBay competitor" I was joking about creating looks like most of the actual auction logic could be handled just about solely in Amazon FPS' GateKeeper logic. I'm even more tempted to build such a monstrosity just to prove that it could be done.
At the very least, the other really exciting thing about FPS, Amazon, in the many years of discussion and "wouldn't it be cool if"s, has created the first general purpose Micropayments framework. I've thought of ideas for Micropayments but rarely were they feasible. Now Amazon has finally opened the flood gates and FPS supports just about all one needs to build any sort of kick-ass micropayment service including pre-aggregation and post-aggregation (pre-aggregation is the major model to date where people prepay for points/credits, post-aggregation reverses this by only charging people when micropayments add up to levels where converting them makes sense), not to mention the ability to control service agreements from both sides with GateKeeper so that broker applications can be built to watch the payee's back as well.
I'm definitely considering Amazon FPS for several of my ...
Film of the Moment: Babylon 5: The Lost Tales
It's been a few years since the last foray into the B5 universe (Sci-Fi's The Legend of the Rangers film that was a ratings disaster since it was against a major sporting event), and it feels good to have even just a couple more stories. The straight-to-DVD Lost Tales makes use of modern updates in computer graphics technology and looks gorgeous in 480p. The stories even manage to feel like classic Babylon 5 tales, if unfortunately a bit more sparsely populated.
The first tale involving Colonel Lockley manages to resonate with quite a few major B5 episodes prior (and some of the telefilms). It's simple and quiet and a decent opener. I felt it lacked a bit in subtlety and didn't seem much more than a "one-off episode", but as such it worked.
The second involving Sheridan and a young Centauri prince on the other hand made up for some of the depth that I thought the first tale lacked. It mentioned the passing of two of the series' brighter stars (Richard Biggs and Andreas Katsulas), and the great tragedy of Londo Mollari. It celebrated the rise of the Interstellar Alliance and the foretold death of Sheridan. It had a great scene with Teryl Rothery (the Stargate compound's greatest doctor). It even had Galen doing his psuedo-mystical thing.
There was a quick passing reference to Sheridan's son David that had me curious if there was a very deep connection there. (There are rumors in Babylon 5 that David goes on to some sort of trouble...)
Hopefully the proposed follow up film on Garibaldi will be just as good.
I'm still hoping for a little closure to Crusade, though. Not on the Drakh plague (it's having a solution was pretty much a given ...
