if you want to coin-hop, check this out: coinchoose.com
if you want some alt-coin with future, the safest is to stick to LTC.

bbq  did not survive, it was killed and then revived
meme is a joke. premined

I use stratum at Slushs' and NMC is not working for me either. It's stopped working a few days ago.

So... this new altcoin ARG has pseudo-random block rewards supposedly to avoid difficulty hopping. But... since the reward (the seed for randomness) depends on the last block, it would allow "reward-hopping"! meaning you only mine if the next block will have the highest reward... so it doesn't make much sense to me. And you cannot make it random because you need the network to agree on the block reward.

my 2 cents
cheers