Malazan Empire: Mentalist - Viewing Profile - Malazan Empire

Ugh
The other team's forward tried his hardest to break me last night. Gave me a "shoulder to shoulder" shove when I got in front of him to intercept. So instead of pushing me off the ball, he shoved me towards it, but loosing my footing in the process. We got the foul call.

Landed on my right shoulder, and my whole body tried to roll over it. Thankfully, I avoided another dislocation, as my mom was flying out on vacation this morning and she'd have killed me herself if I messed that up for her.

Anyway, after a night's sleep, it feels all bruised up inside. I can go through the full ROM of my typical stretch routine, at least, so that's encouraging.

The guy was increasingly getting frustrated, b/c we were leading 6:2 at that point and I've been keeping him from doing anything meaningful for better part of the game at this point. Ended up wining 7:3, which wasn't bad, considering they got a 2:0 lead in the opening minutes until we got organized properly.

Still, it's gonna be a few painful days.

Some cool announcements at the PC Gamer's 25 Most Wanted of 2026

Among other things, an upcoming action adventure about space samurais with jetpacks.

It's called Sol Samurai.

The next round of the endless performance called "trump's business boys trying to make nice with putler" is over, without much results. As expected by everyone who isn't a Western newspaper editor looking at "scoops".

Turkish company that owned the tanker that caught fire off Senegal announced that it won't be doing business with Muscovy anymore. Kinetic sanctions in action.

UAF reporting that they've "almost cleared" Kup'yans'k from the infiltrating orc bands. Not implausible, since it seems that the orcs threw everything and the kitchen sink at the Pokrovs'k-Myrnohrad agglomeration, without a ton of people trickling into Kup'yans'k. But given the new nature of street fighting these days (which is radically different from what the war was like in 2023, during the siege of Bakhmut), we are unlikely to see any big map changes to reflect this.

Speaking of map changes: UAF did manage to clear the sizeable village of Ivanivka and push the orcs back beyond the Vovcha river on the border b/w Zaporizhya and Dnipropetrovs'k Oblast. A company was wiped, with 19 prisoners taken. .
UAF also seemiongly stabilized the frontline further SW, halting the orcs' drive towards Hulyaipole. This was their most successful oiffensive in months, and there were concerns that the units here lost cohesion, and the enemy might drive to the city, which was one of the linchpins of the southern front. But that seems to have been averted.

Otherwise, things seem to be fairly stable.

Been messing around with the backlog.

Wrapping up ReCore, one of Microsoft's most overlooked exclusives. it's a decent-ish metroidvania, where your traversal stuff comes from the various robo-toys that you have helping you out- and you can only have 2 (of max 5) active at once, so there's a bunch of swapping involved. The combat's kinda meh, b/c it's a third-person shooter with auto-lock, and you can do a QTE to fishih off weakened enemies by yanking out their cores-and you need those to upgrade your own robots' base stats. There's only 5 base enemy achetypes, with 6 colour variations that reflect different abilities.

Still, overall there's decent task variety, the platforming's fun (Joule start out with jet boosters, so you've got a double jump and an air-dash right off the bat), and the levels are fun enough to explore. Looking forward to wrapping it up this weekend.

The initial plan has been reduced to a 19-point framework that requires more work. The Thanksgiving deadline's been scrapped.

A few days ago, UAF hit one of the oldest geothermap plants in muscovy- the Shaturo DRES. It was built in the 20s, to run on peat. it's part of Moscow Oblast's electric grid. They had to bring in 10 mobile generation stations to cover for it.

The strike is significant, b/c this is Moscow oblast, where anti-air is supposed to be the tightest; yet, there's ample footage of drones flying in, with only machine gun fire trying to intercept them.

The see-saw of "negotiations" boosted the ruble. Which is good, b/c less petro dollars when the ruble is strong, meaning, bigger budget deficit.

The orcs continue to try to envelop Hulyaipole in SE Zaporizhya Oblast'. There's also been an increase in activity in NE Kharkiv, where they were able to connect their earlier breach towards Velyky Burluk to their bridgehead W of the Oskil. Altogether, the orcs now control a strip about 28 km wide from the Oskil along the border. It's only 4-6 km deep, but still worrisome.

In Pokrovs'k, the 7th Airborne corps is trying to keep the orcs behind the railway out of the northern part of the city, but it's a difficult process.