[Tl;Dr: These are just random musings. Not really about entrepreneurism, although Link 2 may be useful for creative artists.]

Sunday, January 31, 2021

Haven’t posted in a bit over a week looking for fascinating items you don’t normally see in the news or is a bit offbeat.

This week I found a few interesting links to get lost in and do research on. Not too much info to post here and will let the links mostly do the talking. But, the first link we’ll mention came about from going down the rabbit on a social media site known for microblogging in 140 characters or less. This may be the mainstream version on The Bird site. Or it might be a federated version using an ancient precursor to the elephant as an icon. Either way, we were looking up probably some item that talked about theories, often fantastical or conspiratory in nature because those are often the most curiosity piquing ones by human nature. And somehow we came across an alternate wiki.

Link 1:

• Rational Wiki is an interesting site that models itself off the wiki concept formed from Wikipedia in that it allows a sort of encyclopedic type entry from any user. However what differentiates itself is that it tries to analyze and refute pseudoscience and in a sense debunk mythological theories and how those are handled by the media. However it also adds a slight biased modern take with opinions and slang integrated into its platform. Sort of a odd millenial take on the world and its events with bits of personal commentary. We didn’t evaluate the entries deeply but it sounds like an interesting place to get lost in for a half an hour to read. It talks about articles from bloggers, fringe theories, and even handles current events like the Coronavirus and elections. This seems to be particularly relevant in the post 2020 era.
  • Some fascinating topics covered were: conspiracies, denialism, paranormal,politics, logic, science, religion and lack thereof.
  • We saw that it was actually cited by modern mainstream media outlets from The Federalist to Gawker to AlterNet to Salon and Slate to NBC News and MSN.com, Wired, and Huffington Post as well as The Guardian.
  • It says it often is compared to skeptic sites like “Quackwatch, Skeptoid Freethought Blogs, PolitiFact and Snopes.

Check it out. Fun stuff to look at for a bit.

Link 2: regarding movie incentives
(See description below)

Are you a movie maker, film buff, theater and art person? Perhaps one day you want to make your own independent film but not sure how to get financed? Well one great way is to talk to others in the industry. The other day I was talking to someone about a film they had worked on in the past and they were talking about with it being a new year that they wanted to take deductions and depreciation and credits on their investment they put into their production this year on their taxes. They were talking about a particular area of motion picture credits and it was rather confusing. We talked a bit more and then recommended getting a good entertainment lawyer or accountant for this particular purpose. But I did find some useful information when looking up the keywords for “motion pictures tax credit federal”. And then came across a link that mentioned keyword “production incentives”. This led to finding a useful site that explained film incentives and percentages geographically by each state. You could mouse over each state as well as do a three way comparison of different states and also download a working pdf guide for regions not only in the United States but around the world.
So basically look up these keywords found in this paragraph and you’ll find some links at the top of your search. Hope that helps you budding film makers and indie ones too.

Topic 1:
3D printing with light or Computed Axial Lithography (CAL)

This isn’t so much a link as a topic. Check out these 3D printers that use resin to print objects. They are being compared to Star Trek technology or replicators from Resident Evil. This is contrasted against Additive Manufacturing that prints in plastic material layer by layer. Older technologies also may have used UV light to cure photoreactive resins. CAL uses similar techniques as photoreactive resin based 3D manufacturing but more transmissive materials and oxygen more evenly distributed in the material. It rotates the object while using light to cure the object. This topic is based on an article in a July 30, 2019 publishing from “The Additive Report by Kip Hanson. You can find more on Technopedia and the Techeblog.

Topic 2 (trending):

Gamification of investing
With what’s been happening in the news many investing platforms have seen pump and dumps and people flooding message boards, social media and other messengers to gather and either pump cryptocurrencies including the joke-meme-canine based digital currencies, commodities like silver, and a video game / entertainment based outlet. You will likely be seeing more of these pumps and gamification and more high frequency trading happening as people get into investing.

That’s it for now. Perhaps we might expand these into full or longer articles later on.

Random thoughts for the day:

• “2019/2020 didn’t have a Naruto style raid on Area 51 but a raid on the free world.”

• Are memes becoming reality or is reality becoming a meme. And why are cartoons like The Simpsons and Rick & Morty sometimes hitting so close to reality.
  
• Could it be possible more people also are more likely to make anonymous digital purposes or be more confrontational especially with mask mandates especially since it obscures more readily? That could be an interesting trend.