NTC3'S PROFILE

author=Addit
But it looks like I have much more to worry about now than just him:

author=NTC3
I went up four spots to rank 14, and at the rate I'm going, I aim to enter the top 10 this time next month.

Uh oh. It looks like we have a new challenger approaching.

Well, I was hoping my rise would finally motivate some of you to get more active and work on that Unreviewed gap. Not that I don't enjoy the glory of being the first and definitive opinion on an increasing number of games, of course...

Still, you have some clear opportunities to expand your lead for now. For instance, you were going to review Heroine's Quest, right? Amazing game, though I was nowhere near finishing it, so you can have it all to yourself! Another example is Psychotronik. A game with lots of custom art, painstakingly animated, realistic computer interfaces, and which actually shows you locker's doors fling open in first person when you interact with them totally can't be bad, right? Perhaps, but I don't want to find out anymore.

Can you please consider hosting your download on some other place? My browser simply can't see the website you're using.

author=SgtMettool

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RMN Storefront: 1

RMN is saved

Is the Store still running at a loss as it apparently did two years ago?

author=NeverSilent
Funny thing: If you go to kentona's profile and look at his latest posts, you actually can see the OP of this thread. Why it seems to be invisible in the thread itself is beyond me.

Well, at least we know this info is still present now. Among other things, I noted that the unreviewed game count didn't budge from where it was last month (1085), which is a little disheartening, but at least it didn't grow again, I guess? The overall ratio is 1860/1085 = 63% reviewed vs. 36% unreviewed. A hundred more reviews, and the reviewed games will officially make up two thirds of the games with working downloads.

Either way, Kylaila has finally beaten nhubi's record, being at 176 to the latter's 175! Congratulations! I have more than a fair way to go till I get anywhere close, but I went up four spots to rank 14, and at the rate I'm going, I aim to enter the top 10 this time next month.

Edit: Also, we now have exactly 600 scripts, which is pretty cool, I guess.

author=NeverSilent
I, too, am one of those people that are strongly in favour of letting "everyone and anyone" in. But it seems that you struggle to imagine anyone would ever want to admit foreigners simply because they deserve a chance at a good life as well. Regardless, perhaps you should consider the possibility that for many people who are in favour of open borders, it is not about a "fanatical dedication to the out group," but about treating everyone well regardless of where they come from. And - to push it a little bit further - if the national way of life you seem so afraid of losing is what drives people to reject and exclude their fellow humans because of their origins or religion, then you should ask yourself if it is even worth preserving in this form to begin with.

I get where these ideas are coming from NeverSilent, but have you considered the flipside? Far be it from me to argue against immigration in general, of course, having spent my teen years in Australia. (My family was approved under their points system, though, so I obviously have no qualms with Brexited Britain or any other country adopting its equivalent in the future.) However, I have to say that the idea, implicitly contained in the bolded statement, that the only kind of a "good life" is one that fully correlates to the current Western standards of living, is not a sustainable one.

Simply put, the current level of consumption in the Western countries needs to be brought down already (even if mainly be targeting the wealthiest minority), as the world cannot sustain it even with others in their current states. Until that happens, more people coming into the West and joining its high-consumption economy is far from beneficial for us all, and a "chance for a good life" for one person eventually adds up to greater drought for the place they left behind, to give just one example.

Large-scale immigration bans are not really the solution I advocate, of course: empowering the source states is. Your approach is that whenever there's conflict and desolation, the West simply needs to be able to take in however managed to get there (which often excludes the truly poorest, but that is a somewhat different matter.) My belief is that globally, more work needs to be done on strengthening each and every state, so that it is able to lift their citizens up at home, and prevent them from going through the traumas of displacement and such in the first place. That obviously includes not invading them, or encouraging revolt through various means. We admittedly don't have a clean record on the last one, but I think I can still say that Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and even DNR/LNR are better off today, and have far superior long-term prospects, to modern Libya.

Beyond that, though, it also means curbing the "free trade" in its EU/TTIP sense, and placing greater oversight on NGOs. The former is opposed to strong states through its very nature; it needs pliant ones to grease the wheels for corporations. Yet, the real success stories of 90's trade liberalization were the countries that kept a significant protectionist state role in their economies, such as China and Vietnam, and not those that truly abandoned them all, such as Mexico. If every country in the world treated free trade more like China/Vietnam does it, there wouldn't be a problem. As it is, EU's rules against state aid are the main reason why I was in favour of a (left-wing) Brexit.

Meanwhile, it's difficult to talk about the latter, since they do provide notable degrees of assistance. However, it's also true that practically all of them are ultimately most interested in reshaping the country they work in into their chosen image, rather then letting its state evolve in its own manner. Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, for instance, is well-known for rarely entrusting the local people and officials with any command duties, and instead bringing in their personnel elsewhere. Once they rid the places they still work in from polio, they're not interested in them becoming strong states, no longer needing their influence. This suits the liberal EU-led West fine (unless it's the wrong "NGOs" such as the radical anti-gay Christian groups doing it, of course), but can become increasingly counterproductive for stability in the long run.