brkl

This is how that sentence structure plays out: 1) The funds raised through Kickstarter will enable us to continue AND 2) The funds raised through Kickstarter will enable us to complete shooting and edit the great footage we have.

What the fuck.

Yeah, that's not great. Looks like they retconned the original Kickstarter to be for a rough cut, but the original states it's for completion.

I haven't actually played any of them

I hope they stopped making CoD games and made movies instead.

Agreed. To Tanu's line way earlier because I was looking at an old version of this page.

Huh, first you say sociocultural theory is "fringe" (though I don't claim every bit of how I applied it in this thread would be uncontroversial), then you refer to Bandura's way outdated theories from the same field. SLT is way too simple to describe human activity in a meaningful way -- which is why it leads to the argument you mentioned. Bandura's theory was useful in showing that human behaviour can be changed in other ways than the behaviourist conditioning, but doesn't go very much further than "people also learn my mimicry". "Gay influences" are not what make people gay. There's an interplay between human biology and contact with the surrounding culture (life history) that leads to the development of human personality in an unpredictable fashion. Human personality is emergent, hah. That's actually a word that comes up often in these theories and it's used very similarly to how we use it when discussing video games. Nurture implies predictability and direction, so I wouldn't really use it here. As for de-programming, I think it's possible after a fashion. Basically you can cause severe emotional trauma to a person in order to deaden his original instincts. There's no point to it and it would just wreck the subject's (more like object's...) emotional well-being. I don't think it's a controversial claim that it's possible to manipulate people through indoctrination and other manipulative techniques.

Very needless. That's not what I said. It's late, I'll try to reply to the rest tomorrow. Although I will say that we very recently had a What Science Is discussion in another thread and I don't think it would benefit this thread if we reiterated it.

It wasn't really the surface I was wondering about, it was how one would dress for extended periods in -20 to -30 degrees Celsius and whatever the windchill is at 100 km/h.

Well, so to speak, I am actually suggesting that. The most primitive form of human culture that we know of is stone tools and that predates our species. Later, when Homo Sapiens started to spread from Africa it's likely they already had what we recognize as culture, at least the technology (tools) they needed to survive and spread and language (symbolic tools) to direct others and themselves. This means that there is some cultural common ground, though I'm not suggesting that it would be possible to separate those elements from modern cultures. But the main point is that you cannot reduce human behaviour to its biological and cultural components. From the very beginning, we live in culture and it changes us. We literally couldn't think in a directed manner without first being directed through language and later learning to direct ourselves (this is getting pretty deep into sociocultural theory). We couldn't think about what we are like in relation to others without language and thus culture. The interplay between our biological and cultural qualities is chaotic. Both play into everything we do and are. Sexuality is a cultural construct. If we attribute terms of human sexuality to animals (hetero-, homosexual etc.) that's a human distinction and smacks of undue anthropomorphism. Animals cannot control or think about who or what they copulate with, they just do it whenever they get the impulse. Penguins apparently regularly copulate with corpses of other penguins because the position of the corpse sometimes triggers the impulse. That doesn't make them necrophiliacs. But we make names for our sexuality and tell ourselves what it's okay for us to do or not. Again, I don't mean that we have free reign to choose our sexuality, I mean that our sexuality emerges in an environment where we cannot tell the difference between biological and cultural influences. So, yes, gay people are gay because of cultural influence and because of biological influence as well, but that applies for all categories for sexuality we have invented. There is no clear causality we can point to (gay gene) or a choice in the matter.

When there are trends across cultures, it's impossible to tell to what degree they are cultural or biological because culture has been there since the beginning. I thought the examples I used were pretty common.

I don't think I will ever install something that makes this more complicated than it is.

Damn, I want to play as some crazy proto-Finn! If you click the religions tab, there's a huge swath of land marked as SUOMIUSKO that cannot be historically accurate, but still gives me a warm national romantic feeling. What I'm actually hoping from this game is playing as some pretty small dynasty and enjoying that. We'll see how it goes.

That's not what I mean by mediation. Whenever we fulfill biological needs, we do it through cultural tools (including language which influences how we think). We grow up in culture and it pervades us -- we couldn't be us any other way. The earliest aspects of human culture literally predates Homo Sapiens, since stone tools are cultural artifacts. When I eat, I use utensils. Different cultures use different ones, and even I use hands there is some reason I give myself to step outside of the usual constraint. I sleep on a bed and I am near enough nocturnal because I work nights. Who I find attractive is partly formed by culture and if I get to the copulation stage, how we do it affected by culture. The point isn't that biology doesn't have any effect, but that biology and culture are intertwined in all human activity in a way that makes them impossible to tell apart. We are perfectly capable of acting in ways that do not make any sense from the point of view of natural selection. And for your genes to survive, you need to do that through culture as well. However, you you act as a human being isn't just your genes, it's to a large degree whatever happened in your life to make you the way you are. There's also a cultural selection process that selects genes in a somewhat random manner. Your argument reads like gay people are supposed to revert to some kind of natural state. However, even if gay people can step outside of mainstream culture's norms of what is acceptable sexuality, in practicing their sexuality they are still informed by their rejection of those norms and other tidbits of cultural influence. We cannot trace their behaviour to its long-forgotten biologic roots anymore than the heterosexual part of the population.

TP, you can't really deduce natural (biologically determined) human sexual behaviour from how people behave because you can't ever take culture out of the equation. How we eat, sleep and copulate are all mediated by culture and thus can change if the culture is changed. It's not really possible to get at how we would act outside of culture, because any Homo Sapiens somehow outside of culture isn't (recognizably) human, only an ape that shares our DNA. I'm referring to the argument regarding gay/lesbian behaviour.

I didn't know she was a female personality in gaming.

Huh. I deleted the files the game downloads for the new episode, downloaded it again and played it through without closing the game. Now, if I start the game, it crashes again. But at least I got to play the episode and it was a good one! Making these choices is hard. I constantly second guessing myself and trying to figure out what I should do. It's like a completely different game from any out there. No game has this choice making as pretty much the primary gameplay mechanic.

I installed the new episode yesterday, today when I try to play the dang game crashes everytime right after or during it connects to the Telltale server. Dangit.

I wonder how a riding a motorcycle would work in the Finnish winter. I'm guessing it doesn't.

Is the new episode supposed to be out? Because it isn't for me.

But what Sin actually said was this!

Oh, man, that's excellent!

Why would you want to?

Those cannons are pretty sweet.