I can’t really speak for what it is like in Europe, but there’s basically three big buckets that US Christian religion falls into.

• Catholic, was (might still be) the plurality of Christians in the US. Not terribly different than the European version. Some may focus a bit more on different points, but the high level is the same. Gay is a sin, no birth control, male priests only, drinking is acceptable, forgiveness tends to be prominent.
• Protestant, this would be the Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, etc. The only thing they really have in common is that they are Catholic BUT one or two major differences. It depends on the specific organization, some take more hard line approaches, some are far more accepting. National bodies are a bit more loose than Catholicism, but still consistent. There’s a mix of reasonable and crazy people in this bucket.
• Evangelicals are the totally unhinged group. Churches in this group are non-denominational, though some may have started as a Protestant sect. They may have loose ties to other churches, or be a mega church. While there is variation here as well, it tends in the more extreme direction. Biblical interpretation tends towards the more literal and cherry picked stories instead of the relative interpretation that traditional branches have reformed to use. Grift is super common in this section. Condemnation of non followers is also common instead of outreach and forgiveness. Young earth creationism is a common belief. This group started growing rapidly with the advent of televangelism in the 70s.

No it’s like praising a dealer that will buy back some drugs as well as sell them.

The casino is honest about what they do compared to say Genshin Impact.

Valve has one for the few lootbox systems that you can actually get value back out of outside the game. While they deserve all the same criticism of every lootbox game, they probably also deserve some praise for that.

They could have deals with rental companies that make the rental cheaper to them. It could be a way to save money as people won’t bother with the rental and since it’s violating company procedure, they don’t have to pay mileage reimbursement. It could be a way to funnel money to a rental company rather than directly reimbursing employees.

Ads are extremely effective in aggregate though it’s difficult to impossible to assign value to any individual ad. Targeted ads are popular because they are more directly attributable to purchases, but it’s also likely that other ads led you towards that decision as well.

It flopped hard for me too. The gameplay was clunky, especially on console. It also felt like you needed meta knowledge depending on the character you picked in order to build a functional party, the game gave you choices, but didn’t tell you enough about them to make correct choices.

Generative AI is by definition non deterministic.

Procedural generation is theoretically deterministic, but it’s a fairly minor distinction.

I don’t think AI code generation is going to be a revolution anytime soon, but AI voice and AI image generation is likely going to stay.

GoG doesn’t have a lot of new games for one. It’s still copyright violation to distribute the game to others as well. It’s generally easier to just buy the game from GoG than find a link to download the game. You could get the files from a friend and that could work for a few games, but paying gets more convenient if your library is bigger than your hard drive.

There’s levels to it. True quality isn’t worth it, absolute garbage costs a lot though. Some level that mostly works is the sweet spot.

There’s nothing quite like today. There’s things that are similar, but social media has really made things worse.

Populism is rising because things haven’t been great for a lot of people for a long time, and it’s too hard to ignore anymore. Globalism and free trade were massively oversold to the masses, it hurt wide swaths of people that have been ignored for decades. People that feel disenfranchised will vote for change regardless of the change proposed.

Social media has escalated everything as well. The echo chambers are enormous and essentially impossible to avoid. Many traditional institutions are also extremely weak now that would have forced more interaction between people with differing views and limited extremism. Social media also does a great job in conflating the size of various groups and beliefs, a few dozen people can make a community seem as large and impactful as a few thousand .

Healthy is relative. A handful of fruit is generally fine. Eating a few pounds of grapes in a day is probably a bad choice. There’s also a lot of people that conflate fruit with things that have fruit in them as about the same.

Fable 1 was the best one in the series.

A tonneau cover still lets you load a pallet of something or a scoop of something in the back.

Indie games are overrated, it’s still mostly crap. I don’t blame people for waiting for absurd popularity to bring actually good titles to the surface. It’s still the same general problem, I have a the time for maybe 5 games per year, and that has to compete with my existing backlog, favorites and new titles. I’m not risking that time on Indie or AAA titles without some good evidence it’s worth it.

It is to a very high standard. There’s been 14k games released this year alone which would be a .01% miss rate for malware games. If you compare against all games to account for updates that add malware after submission it’s basically 0 at .000001%

Malware creation and detection are billion dollar industries playing an eternal cat and mouse game with each other. These programs don’t just instantly try to steal every file the second they run.

Steam does scan for malware, which is why this is news. It’s notable that a game got through that was malware. You haven’t heard about other stores because it’s not worth the effort in targeting them. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that most stores use the same vendor for malware scanning.