Day: March 26, 2014

GIF Rescue - Angelo Plessas

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angelo-plessas-animation

Above is the final GIF we'll be rescuing from this GIF-off ladder competition: the humanitarian impulse has flagged along with pageviews, RSS subscribers, and twitter followers as this series has progressed.
Angelo Plessas' Op Art clouds with blinking rainbow "lost" horrifically in the first round after his opponent rallied friends and grandparents to ramp up the vote (OK, likely not true, but we'll never actually know what happened - no hanging chads will be counted). Such an elegant, happy little GIF did not deserve the obscurity. What a lift if this underdog had made it to the final four.

a kickstarter sucker born every minute

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Barry Ritholtz on the Facebook purchase of Oculus VR (maker of virtual reality headsets or something equally '90s-retro stupid):

What did the KickStarter funders of Oculus get? Note I use "funder" and not "investor," because investors have a potential for an investment return. These funders, who backed the company three months after the JOBS Act passed, did not. As the Journal noted, they were promised “a sincere thank you from the Oculus team.” And, for $25, a T-shirt. For $300, the dangle of “an early developer kit” including a prototype headset. Total money raised: $2.4 million from 9,500 contributors.

Talking people out of $2.4 million dollars in exchange for zero percent equity is a perfectly legal scam. Then selling the company for $2 billion dollars is simply how this particular crowdfunding works.