Malazan Empire: Mentalist - Viewing Profile - Malazan Empire

Hell is Us is sooo good.


I mean, the combat was a bit "meh" to start, but now I can channel my mana to heal at any time, and I also get health back each time I kill someone, so it's gotten much more manageable.

The subject matter is dark AF, but I seem to be mostly immune to it, for now. Guess following the war this closely for nearly 4 years made me more numb.

But anyway. Solving puzzles is fun, and un-earthing and exploring ancient ruins to piece together a weird fictional history is giving major Soul Reaver 2 vibes. So I'mdigging this.

I'm currently mulling over the following scenario in my head:

One of these gerbera/geran' drones falls on an Estonian (or Latvian) TDF bunker (those are typically 5-10 km away from the border). One (or several) volunteer servicemen are killed. The orcs claim "if you didn't try jamming it, this wouldn't have happened, so it's not our fault it crossed the border".

What do the NATO bigwigs in paris, Berlin, London, Rome and Brussels do?

Until I see columns of orc prisoners, I don't believe it.

last night's strikes apparently also hit a number of pumping stations.

Global markets are spooked at the possibility of the Baltic oil route being disrupted, so oil index started climbing again.

NATO secretaty Rutte is promising more defensive assets to the Eastern flank. We'll have to wait and see how that pans out. I'm guessing the orcs will keep probing NATO airspace with drones from time to time, because why not? Then they might start to "accidentally" fall on things like power substation or cell comms towers- small infrastructure damage, not really worth starting a war over.
Putler continues to plan to boil the NATO frog slowly.

almost 2 dozen orc drones that were *supposedly* attacking Western UA entered deep into Polish airspace yesterday.
So deep that Warsaw, Lublin and Rzeszow airports were closed down, and NATO Air Force got scrambled to shoot a bunch down, with Italy launching AWACS planes in the baltics, and Netherlands flying in F 35s and fuel jets to supply and support the Poles.

15 downed drones have been recovered so far.

Poland is closing its border with Belarus for the duration of the Zapad exercises. This is hurting China, b/c the bulk of its UE trade goes thru that border.

Prior to that, the orcs dropped a guided bomb on a crowd of retirees lined up next to a postal van to collect their pensions (b/c internet is iffy in frontline regions, so e-transfers don't work). 24 people were killed, 19 injured. Considering these are the outskirts of Kramatorsk, most of these elderly people were probably native Russian speakers.

DeepState hasn't updated its map since the 7th. This could mean good things in the ongoing attempt to isolate the Dobropillya salient, but we arent' seeing orc TG panic yet, its best to hold off any hype.

New Ramstein meeting has some European states making further pledges to support the UAF with equipment.

DeepState's map shows the edges of the grey zone at the base of the "dobropillya salient" to be 4 km apart.

There's some unconfirmed reporting that UAF has advanced as far as Fedorivka, which would put the distance to the Volodymirivka-Mayak-Novotorets'ke line at only 3 km. if that's what we're looking at, then its quite promising. But we need to wait and see, as we've been through this "Ukraine is about to pull of A MASSIVE ENCIRCLEMENT" song and dance often enough.


Slov'yan'sk-on-Kuban refinery in Krasnodar Krai reported halt of all operations.