Malazan Empire: Mentalist - Viewing Profile - Malazan Empire

Wrapped up "City of Last Chances". Decently paced, "slice of life in occupied city"-type fantasy novel. Various factions all want revolution, but they want it less than they want power for themselves. And ultimately, the City claps down on those challenging the status quo. With the city and its unseen institutions being the real main character. Interesting take.
The preview for the sequel has me mildly interested, gonna have to look into it eventually.

Right now, Goodreads is telling me I'm behind my reading goal, so gonna be starting on Lawrence's "The Girl and the Stars" to play catch-up.

Been making my way through an indie game.
It's called Wicked Seed, and it's an RPG/horror mix, ala Parasite Eve.
It uses Active Time battle system, where the player moves in real time, but needs to build up stamina to shoot (basic bullets are infinite, high-damage are scarce) or use skills (and you learn more skills as as you level up). The enemies seem to move in turns. There's a lot of the ResI-y trappings (limited health items, stashes that morph between save points, save rooms, etc), and the design feels like a Resident Evil Best Hits playlist (there's a police station, a colonial manor with a lab under it, etc), and there's several million unlocks for speedruns, S-ranks, etc. The unlockable Despair difficulty actually reshuffles key items, collectibles, encounter design and puzzle solutions.

Despite veru clearly being a very derivative thing, this gam e(which seems to be mostly a solo dev endeavor) is very much more than merely the sum of its parts. It's very much an RPG at its core, as you have to spend a lot of times tinkering with gun upgrades, and figuring out which perks to slot into them. There's an in-game currency (scrap) which is used to upgrade your guns, and also for skills that let you craft items in combat. You can farm it by respawning monsters (when you rest at coffee machines), but more importantly, you can also bust your weapon down to level 0 to recoup all the scrap spent on it, to switch to a different gun. There's also a whole lot of armors you can equip, and each weapon and armor has 3-4 part slots, which let you play around with parts that convey stats bonuses or special benefits (like instantanoeus gun switching- including reloads, or regaining health when using a finisher on a Staggered enemy). The intent is to min-max and craft builds to maximize damage output to take on increasingly more ridiculous enemy types. It's a simple loop, but it manages to be pretty addicting.

Been playing for just over 20 hours (did a bit of grinding over the weekend) and I'm in the last chapter, and new enemy types just keep popping up. overall, it's a pretty neat gem, especially for its price point.

picked up the one Dark Tower book that was missing from my collection (Book 3, Waste Lands).

Getting thru Dark Tower is one of the goals for the year

Just finished "Archimedes Engine", the Exodus book by Peter F. Hamilton.

That's quite a convergence there at the end. A lot of creativity in the setting.
Book 2 is out in June, but might way for a paperback.

EDIT: started "City of Last Chances" by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

the broken, on 25 January 2026 - 11:43 PM, said:

The strategic goal, given hostile attitude from the US, is to force a ceasefire. Muscovites are demanding UA cede all of Donbas, and their basis is "we are on the offensive and we will grind it down eventually anyhow, so give it to us to stop further losses".


If there's a real opportunity to regain significant ground and reverse this offensive momentum, then it would make their demands more blatantly unreasonable.

The way things are going, UA is aiming for an attrition win. if their battlefield advantage becomes obvious, putler will be forced to start another mobilization. This could potentially be disastrous for his economy. Ultimately, Ukraine wants to force him to this move, but they need to increase enemy losses exponentially first, while keeping steady replenishment rates and reducing dependencies on weapon systems (and components) from allies and "neutral" 3rd parties (such as China)

It depends. They would need to get to the point where they completely stop an offensive in a sector b/c they are shifting forces to other frontlines to create a situational advantage that would allow for a counter-offensive operation of at least tactical-operational level. Right now, the orcs are still trying to push basically everywhere, so I find it unlikely; but I'm not part of the UAF HQ, so all I can do is speculate.