Category: Useless knowledge

Information you have no need for. Ever. Usually about me, but possibly about other trivial crap in the world.

Infinium gets $5 million funding?

In the “How in the world did that happen?” section today, we have news that Infinium, the company claiming to be making the Phantom game console, has secured an additional $5 million in funding to continue developing the system. There have been announcements for years of the soon-to-be released Phantom console. So far, the phantom identifier appears about right. From the article:

However, with a recent financial statement revealing that Infinium Labs still “has recurring losses from inception of $57,570,723, has a working capital deficiency of $10,085,662, a stockholders deficiency of $9,470,271 and has a negative cash flow from operations of $14,888,265 from inception”, and will need to pay significant cash amounts to game licensors and Phantom hardware contractors, the Game Service itself may have to wait a little longer before getting officially under way.

[tags]Phantom, Infinium, Vaporware, Gaming[/tags]

Talking politics? Parts of the brain shut down…

Next time you’re having a political argument with someone and you start thinking “How in the world could they believe that?” you’ll be happy to know the answer has been found.  It turns out that the part of the brain responsible for reasoning pretty much shuts down when comments are made that threaten their preferred political candidate.  This makes it easier for one to stick to claimed beliefs, even when obvious facts show those beliefs to be invalid.

From the article:

Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows.

And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that’s contrary to their point of view.

[. . .]

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

[tags]Politics, reasoning, logic, brain[/tags]

Bush presidency as an adventure game

Sure to offend some, I looked at it as not to serious a post.  Over at DefectiveYeti, there is a fun post covering some highlights of the Bush presidency as an old Infocom-style adventure game.  The comments reflect both sides of the political spectrum, but no one seems to get too upset by the post.

[tags]Bush, Infocom, adventure, game[/tags]

Oblivion nearly ready

Nice write-up from Bethesda on what’s going to be in the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion packaging.  The important part for fans is to note that whether you get the regular or collector’s edition, you are getting the game on DVD.  That’s right – it’s only available on DVD.  Almost everyone I know has a DVD drive, so I doubt that people who have a computer capable of playing Oblivion will have an issue with this requirement, but it needs to be pointed out, just in case someone wants the game and hasn’t gotten a DVD drive yet.