What's going on?

Sorry for the recent inconvenience! The power situation over here is worse than it's ever been, and the last 10 days have been an absolute disaster that has completely thrown me for a loop, and I'm currently trying to play catch up. I've got a bit of a back log to catch up on, but in the mean time, I've released the latest 2 weekly minis for you today. I still need to upload the alt versions of these two, and the Slime Elemental too. I'll have all three of those posts up by Monday, and hopefully we can return to business as usual after that.

What's actually going on with the power situation?
It's pretty complicated, but I'll do my best to explain.

Over here, everyone has an app loaded on their phones to keep track of "loadshedding" schedules. The above is a typical screenshot from that app. What is loadshedding? It's basically the term they use to describe the rolling blackouts that the government implements to make up for the shortfall in supply when generators at powerplants go down. The time periods indicated in the table above let you know when it's your turn to have your power turned off. At "Stage 1", your power will go off for about 2.5 hours every other day. At "Stage 4", it'll go off for 2.5 hours every 8 hours, meaning that your power's out for about 7.5 hours in a given day.

We've been averaging Stage 4 more-or-less constantly since September last year. There have been a few respites where it drops down to Stage 2, and occasionally we might have a few days where there's no loadshedding at all. There have been several extended periods of Stage 6, and that's truly awful because the power is out for more than 12 hours a day.

In the last 10 days, it has been Stage 6 all the way down, except for 2 nights where it went all the way up to Stage 7 for the first time in the history of this disaster!

Just to illustrate how dire the situation is... The second last bar is 2022's total loadshedding. We're not even 2 months into 2023 and we've already had more loadshedding than in the whole of 2021. You'll also notice that the we're only on day 54 of 2023, and we've had 53 days of loadshedding thus far.

I know you're going to want to ask why it's like this, but to be honest, I really don't want to get into it. The short version is that the government insists on being in charge of the power supply for ideological reasons, and they're completely unqualified to be in charge of it because those ideological motivations cause them to consistently make dangerously unwise decisions, and corruption is so deep-seated that any money that gets thrown at the problem lands up being gobbled up by the politically connected before it can even be used to alleviate the issues.

The more important point is the impact that this whole thing is having on me down here... Apart from the obvious impacts that having power outages is having on productivity, there are a lot of side-effects. Criminals have taken to using the schedules to plan the theft of underground transmission lines. We've already had 3 major incidents this year where main transmission lines were taken and we were left without any power at all for over 24 hours while the cables were replaced.  Of course, there are also other knock-on effects like interruptions to other services like water and internet access.

Anyway, this is what I'm dealing with at the moment. It's making it all very difficult to stay on top of things. Unfortunately it doesn't look like there will be any resolution to the problems any time soon. Please bear with me, and I'll do my best to keep this thing going, but it's going to be tough.