Montrandecs Neighbours

Alemputo announced several hours before resigning that when the movie night from the First Union Games would be over he would make a special announcement. He then surprised the people of Force by announcing, in a heartfelt letter, his resignation and becoming the second Acting PM to do so. Here is his resignation letter:

“To Force and Heart,

I owe you the gravest apology.

My actions have not only led to backlash from the people of Force, but to the people of Heart.

There are no words which I can say which can mend the wounds which have been scoured open, and there are no words which I can say to speak for my action, and lack of action in the past few months.

I ran on promises I have not been able to fulfill within my power, and have let you down in doing so. There are no moments within my eyes which I could consider successes. And I am not saying this to humble myself. I am saying it because this is true.

To Renegalle, I would like to state that I am sorry for the backlashes which I have set against you, and for the unreasonable statements I have made in your regard.

To the people of Force, I want you to know that even though I have your best interests at heart, we both were fazed by my empty promises and unseemly goals, things I could not complete as your Prime Minister. To the people of Heart, my words were not deserved, and the great region of Heart should live on as a place where the toxic statements which I have delivered can be torn down and upended by their roots. I lost an opportunity to make Force strong by making a fool of myself in the process.

Time and again I have failed to lead as I had promised and I had expected. People acted not how I expected to while leading, and I should have understood that my job is to bring people together, and not to divide and rule.

I stand now upon the edifice which I have regretfully worked so hard to chisel away at, but forgot that I was on top of. Now, it has reached the mount of instability which rocks me off, and most deservedly. I regret to inform you that I will be stepping down from Prime Minister, because I have consistently proven that I am not meant to lead. I don’t know who is. The job was more than I could handle on top of me being a student, a family member, and boyfriend.

Though this is not goodbye, I know that my credibility befalls you like the dying crows. I’d like to serve you, and I desperately want to make this home for me a home for you all as well. I found I lost myself on the way, and after reflection I know that Force can do better at choosing, and I can find better positions to serve you.
I am so sorry for wasting your time.”

The region’s leadership has now been assumed by The Democratic States of Lashnakia, the Deputy Prime Minister of Force, who will only remain the PM until the end of the emergency elections unless he gets elected. Debates for the next Prime Minister and one House seat have started. You can find them here.

Alemputo also sent an apology letter to Heart in the hope of restoring the relations with the region. The First Minister of Empire of Elysium, one of Heart’s most important pro-independence members, reacted to that letter saying: Thank you for your service to our region, and to our union. I wish you the best of luck, outside of office.

From NationStates to Discord, 9 citizens took to the polls on a website specially created for the event as the region delivered a close victory for the campaign to abandon the Union. This victory was achieved with a difference of only 1 vote, 5 in favor of the Yes and 4 against.

The referendum was held after two-third of the cabinet members of Heart voted to hold the referendum.

The result helped The Scottish Republic, the First Minister of Heart, pressure the government of Force into giving Heart more autonomy.

A deal was concluded a while after the vote with the results being that Heart stays in the Union while gaining more freedom in their diplomatic relationships like being able to send diplomats of Heart and not of the Union and creating embassies without the approval of the capital.

Firstly, Alemputo, the PM at the time, proposed the First Union Games to try and fight off that inactivity while The Holy Empire of Qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm 1234567890- decided to create the Force Comedy Improv Show. Sadly, they were not enough as even though Force became a little bit more active for while, the population was not rising at all. That’s when The Holy Generous Dystopia of Caduceo, the Minister of Internal Affairs, came up with the idea of daily questions on the Regional Message Board. The concept was to ask almost every day, simple questions like “What is your favourite music?” to get the RMB active and to encourage the people of Force to participate. Since then, the RMB has been more active than ever and people and the population is now near the 193 nations of last month.

After several days of daily questions, The Military State of Tigslarlowducken even reacted by saying: “What the hell why is the RMB active”

However, it was reported that the Prime Minister has been more active in the Citizens chat of Discord (Grand Plaza) sending 137 messages this month. This improvement shows that the Prime Minister has been more interactive with the citizenry; although it still raises concerns that the Prime Minister is more focused on general talk rather than interacting with government officials.

We asked for a statement from the Prime Minister citing this question: Mr. Prime Minister could you give me a statement of your thoughts on what Activity Stats report says about your activity?

The Prime Minister stated: “I like that the government tries to do an attempt on providing activity on the Prime Minister and Speaker of the House, and I definitely think that it is a necessary method on transparency. I think that having the activity committee primarily based on messages sent on the discord server is inherently flawed and does not provide the big picture, however. I think that in order to provide the big picture the Activity Statistics report is to not only provide the number of text messages sent but also accomplishments during that week or month or however, the period is for the set stat report. The primary thing is to provide data, but I think the data collecting method is inherently flawed and thereby not an accurate statement for the people. Now that it is in the Ministry of Internal Affairs I can discuss with Caduceo how to better the accuracy of these reports.”

We also asked the chief of the Bureau of Statistics, Tigslarlowducken, this question: Could you give me a statement on the Activity Stats report and what it says about Alemputo?

He stated: “Alemputo’s activity schedule is random at best. Certain ministries are sometimes neglected in favour of others. Which of the ministries are neglected and how many are afflicted varies rapidly. He also tends to get really touchy when someone mentions it. Even though most of the time he’s online when it’s mentioned. For example, the announcement he just made. Right after that, you [Salibaic] asked him to make a region-wide telegram he said: ‘I have a life.’ This wasn’t just out of the blue, it was immediately after Sali had taken the time to make a post he easily could have copied and pasted into a telegram. I have also just learned that in his statement he attacked the methods I use to collect my data as ‘inherently flawed’ without actually going into detail as to why they are so. I include a margin of error in every release, and every user's post count is taken directly from Discord.”

These two statements show a drastic contrast between each other. Alemputo appears to dodge the question about his activity by instead attacking the current system for message tracking. Tigslarlowducken meanwhile attacks Alemputo for getting ‘touchy’ when the issue of inactivity is mentioned. The question now is; how do we improve this situation?

P.S.: This article was written before Alemputo's resignation.

This has been one of the most major achievements following the reinstatement of Heart government with The Scottish Republic being appointed as First Minister. The passage of the new amendment is sure to bring a bigger change to the union as with Heart being upgraded to state it brings up the question of whether we should invest in our other territories.

An official statement from the First Minister on the matter of the passage of statehood was “I believe this is the beginning of a change in our union. I am glad that the region has managed to achieve this high, outperforming all expectations and reaching a state in which Heart has become a political force in the Union. I believe this could not have been done without the help of others such as Empire of Elysium, Hua, and surprising Libertatis Regalis who proposed amendment ten.”

Amendment ten as mentioned in the First Ministers statement was proposed by the Speaker of the House of Representatives Libertatis Regalis. The amendment put Heart on the same ranking as RGBN. The amendment passed the House of which it was then put to a citizen's vote which passed with 100% for with a total of five votes. This is a disappointing number of votes but the amendment passed and with that Heart became a state.

For those who do not know; the roleplay was reset after an abrupt stop due to several fights between RP nations, mostly Greatest Elysium, Salibaic, Alemputo, and Renegalle to name a few.

Anyway, the reason why the roleplay was reset was due to the rage quitting Of sgrub, Jam lung, and Alemputo. Greatest Elysium was also later banned from the Union RP.

Nevertheless, the outrage came from aggressive action from nations and what some called ‘unfair’ war. This time a war against Of sgrub by Sumeka, Salibaic, and Renegalle went too far for certain nations. The war was claimed to be started by Salibaic to reduce Elysium’s ‘allies’. This culminated in outrage from Greatest Elysium who tried to form a coalition to help Sgrub. A massive fight broke out and the war was blamed on Greatest Elysium by Alemputo. This caused as previously mentioned nations to quit the Roleplay which sent the RP committee into disarray.

So what happened next? Well, the RP committee headed by Sumeka decided on a Roleplay reset. This involved the creation of a new map and a reset of everyone’s stats in the RP system. This was shunned by Salibaic who completely opposed an RP reset and later criticized the map. However, a new map was chosen and an archipelago formation was chosen. Also, new resources were added to the map such as silicon and tungsten. Also, a new application was created which can be found here.

So why is the roleplay not active again after all this effort was put in to change it to prevent another situation as mentioned above? Well, this can be attributed to many issues. First off, nobody that left has joined back; leaving the roleplay with very little active roleplayers. Second of all, the RP committee has very little activity with no current prompt from the Roleplay chairman to create activity as well as one of the most active RPers Greatest Elysium was removed and banned from the committee. Third, the new stats have not been updated at all causing apathy to take part in the roleplay.

Where do we go next with roleplay? Now, the solution to the problem is one that is not easily explainable as nobody knows what to do. But one thing is certain that the current status quo has to change for the Union Roleplay to survive. Many government officials may give solutions but it’s only under our guise will we manage to change the roleplay into something enjoyable for all.

The House was completely inactive during the first half of this short month with only 85 messages which even though it may seem a lot it’s actually extremely low compared to usual, and we also have to consider that most of it was unimportant stuff. Only one bill and one amendment were voted on during that time and sometimes there was a streak of 5 days without one message.

But why was it like that? Well, there’s more than one answer. First, there was the infamous House Bill 27. This bill that was intentionally created as a joke became one of the prime examples of how much power the House has. Here it is:
House Bill 27: Salibaic Grammar Act
Purpose: Salibaic must know grammar.

Article 1: Salibaic’s Education
1. Salibaic must take grammar courses on the provided website: https://alison.com/tag/english-grammar
2. Salibaic must provide proof via screenshot of completion.
3. If Salibaic doesn’t take part in these grammar courses, he will be muted in all channels in Force and its territories.
Article 2: Salibaic’s Completion
1. Once Salibaic has completed and provided proof of the grammar course’s completion, this bill is null.

As you can see it was not at all serious but then the House started accepting it which by the law at the time meant that they only needed the PM’s approval to get it. Alemputo vetoed it meaning it couldn’t become law but the House reacted by trying to override the veto. Seeing it had gone too far the Representatives decided to not override it and to abandon the bill. During the vote for the bill, The Kingdom of Salibaic also declared:
“I am so MAD. This is a violation of my human rights.”

After this, the Speaker of the House, The Republic of Libertatis Regalis, decided to put the House on recess for 48 hours which is one of the things that gravely impacted the activity of the House.

The other thing that affected the House activity was the fact that at the same time,The Free People of Loomburg and Libertatis Regalis had private issues that stopped them from being active. There was also the fact that one representative, Carropia, was just inactive and even ceased to exist. They tried to give him 3 days to refound but he was too late and got kicked out of his seat. He is going to be replaced by the person who wins the next emergency election in the category of the representatives.

But, you may ask what is the House now since I said that it was inactive only during the first half of the month. Well, it’s back to being active again. In fact, in the last 9 days, it recorded 196 messages!

On February 16th, the First Union Games were officially started with the talent show. As one of the judges, I could say that the event was a success. Even though the show started badly with no competitors arriving, it was rapidly changed with many contestants stopping by to show their talents. We had many talents shown such as singing, playing an instrument, guessing country flags, etc. Sadly, we had to choose a winner and after each judge gave his note privately the ranking was:
3rd place: Klan pets with a rap on an anime character.
2nd place: Jam lung singing a song while playing on the ukulele.
1rst place: The Will of The Chariot with two piano pieces

The prize for winning the talent show was a custom role that The Chariot decided to be ‘‘chicken’’.

Then right after the end of the talent show, the contest submissions opened. During one week, citizens showed their submissions such as memes, drawings, poems, stories, etc. The winner was decided by our Minister of Culture, The Holy Empire of Qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm 1234567890-, and the winner was Loomburg with his short story. You can see the resultshere.

During that period, there was also the debate night and the movie night. Debate night was a failure due to nobody showing up since there was already a big debate in the grand plaza. In contrast to the debate night, movie night was successful! There were some little problems at the start but after a while, everyone could watch Napoleon Dynamite without any issues. I would like to personally thank Alemputo for renting the movie so everyone could watch it.