so, young mint rubber. you have returned. welcome back to the land of bright green mint where time appears to stand still and nothing ever gets accomplished. this is the place of tranquility that you have always sought and to which you always return in time of need.

please, please, make yourself comfortable. in a minute we'll commence our monthly show of the absurd.

so, let us introduce to you the latest fruits of our labor. finally we have managed to put our asses to work, if you would pardon my language, and produce a new layout for this month's journal issue. as you probably know, there was a time when layouts were changed monthly; this stopped happening sometime at the beginning of 2005.

"no more!", we cried (no actual crying was involved - this is just a figure of speech). so there. as for content? do we have yet another half-assed issue on our hands again? this is for you to decide, young reader.

on a side note, we were please to find that some of our readers do understand and appreciate the weirder updates of this site, i.e. the latest experimental issue (this was still a matter of debate). says adrian:

"The latest issue was... Let us just postpone this for later.
I felt as well informed and confident in myself as if I had just finished watching a peppy news journal or reading a thick pile of documentation printed in duplex for the configuration files in my main software here at the job. So that I felt human and natural in my human environment. I felt integrated and row citizen. Engaged in menial activities. Engaged in pointless meetings. Browsing for nothing. I felt somewhat like rubbing yet still I felt sad.
I just kept clicking for a while just to make sure it's the same feeling.

Yes, the latest issue was a good framing for rutine, cliches and boring stuff we try to cope with each single day in our lives. It sampled what it feels like to be employed in minimum wage intelectual jobs. And resenting whatever our social status forces us to. And probing the pool of stimuli spamming us each single second for something meaningful. Contemplating how frozen has the environment become. Knowing we'll keep playing our role tomorrow.

Yes I kind of liked the issue, to be honest. But next issue I'm craving for some plain fun."

thank you sir. yes, you are correct: it is what it is. but this month let us attempt to provide some enjoyment to our readers for a change. and now, this brief introduction pretentiously labelled "letter from the editors" has to end.

the following cannot be said in any gentle manner, so i will be pretty direct about it: we're no longer sending out rmra stickers. it was good while it lasted. now it's over. it's done.

a number of different reasons led to this unspectacular development. first of all, yours truely got sick of mailing out those stickers. i mean, sure, it was (a bit) fun at first, but then, just filling out addresses, going to the post office, dealing with bored-out-of-their-minds post office employees, waiting in line, getting stamps, sticking stamps, mailing letters, confirming emails and then repeat. not that fun after all.

then, we basically ran out of stickers. so, since ordering some more looked like a real hassle and, as mentioned earlier, the fun factor in mailing stickers dried out long ago, we decided to halt this initiative and log it into rmra history as a completed project. responsible and dedicated mint rubbers had their chance at a sticker. lazy, half-assed amateurs such as yourself missed it. it is what it is, time to move on.

we have been toying with the idea of giving up on the free sticker distribution for a while now, but a more recent development showed us we indeed have to stop.

what happened was that americans discovered they can get free stickers. now, i do have a great respect for the american people, but just not in its entirety. there's nothing more interesting or appealing for some segments of the american public than the possibility of getting free stuff. sure, it might be something completely useless and incomprehensible, such as a free sticker written in a language one doesn't understand and depicting a concept that one wouldn't understand even if the text was translated in english.

it doesn't matter. is it free? then bring it on. so this is what happened, dear rubber. our little free sticker distribution secret leaked out, probably on some board or forum, and then it was all downhill from there. in the words of one of the persons i am referring to: A buddy of mine told me that if I email my name and address, I could get a Romanian Mint Rubbing Association Sticker. That's my goal. If this is the case, please send. some people didn't even know what they were getting exactly - they just heard the word free and bang! they needed to have it. says one person in an email: i am requesting a sample sticker or whatever. well, we're no longer sending "sample" stickers, but you can get the whatever. check your mail.

mint rubbing impostors from the united states to south africa and from italy to india, people who had no connection to our site or our movement demanded free stickers. and, oh lord, there were many of them. their greed ruined the entire concept for us. so, long story short, no more stickers are sent by mail. that's it, we're done, it's time to leave the past behind and move on with our lives in this post-free-rmra-sticker-distribution environment.