player…
Seems like it's the must… I might reach the ceiling of 27 clicks per minute, who knows…
The last straw to break me into upgrading my typing skills in earnest became the monthly $100 dangled out by proze.com as their traditional carrot. Yeah, I should train myself indeed!
There happened more than one crowd, actually, that I've tried joining to. Chat-rooms, online courses with spiffy pdf certificates, flash-mobs for fun and recreation, GitHub, Stackoverflow, forums of Linux music makers, wine-lovers, joint suckers, scuba divers… you name it.
It's only I could not hang on anywhere for longer than a month or so. And then I got bored or distracted by something else, and too lazy to come back later and shake it on.
However, MoM became the thing I stuck at and somehow did not feel like quitting. The force of habit, maybe.
Firstly, the site had an exquisite interface, and MoM meant business, you got it at once when signing up. No questions about your credit card and staff. But you had to tick "I agree to…" as by installing an MS program and add your digital signature at the bottom of a long form.
Do you read all their content? Ever?
Like, condition/rule#1: prove you're a monster and not a freak. Because MoM is Mob of Monsters.
Or else (rule#2) annulling your account will not get you off the hook and let walk away because (rule#3) member to the Mob has to prune freaks off.
Fine catch here.
That way, renegade MoMonsters did not last long.
They were taken care of differently. Wide specter of approaches. Starting from the suicide-prone fraction among MoM’s ready to eliminate the freak in a straightforward kamikaze style, up to master-mind multi-move combinations designed behind the stage.
The defector had no loopholes and not a slightest chance of escaping.
It was a self-governing community. Not a few dudes regretted their signing in on high, even more the absence of the habit by them to read all of the preamble.
All tries at finding a way-out ended in the like manner – DOA, and the notorious 2-color card, the ’black mark' (in honor of Billy Bones, Long John Silver et al, from The Treasure Island by Robert L. Stevenson) put in the body's hand or pocket, or shoved up… nah, yeah, it depended on the particular circumstances, you know.
The tastefully designed MoM logo on the dark side, the reprint of the stiff's digital signature on the card's back, that’s what was the constant attribute to all them grim cases.
Activities?
Get-togethers, sure thing, what else a mob is supposed to do?
Online weekly get-togethers, regional at the out-set, but later on, when pruning, deserter-effacing and natural death rate more than decimated the ranks affiliates, the get-togethers grew global retaining the same frequency.
3 missed meetings at a stretch indicated that you are not up to being an MoM, volunteers hit raw-bones-designed button to receive the ’black mark' with the weakling’s signature.
The proceedings at the online hanging out never changed: Mob members' reports indicating their monstrous worth, say, selfies at the backdrop of a kitten hanged by the MoM up to the land-mine planted in the neighbor's lawn, you name it.
The all-in ballot wound up the online meeting, the dude whose nick hit the bottom in the horrid deeds list knew it's time to put their matters in order and/or buy a lot in the cemetery of their choice or get drunk and laid-up for their last dollar. Whatever.
Of course, the outsider freaks tried to intervene. Parents, who had some ambitious plans for their scions, governments offended by the fact of somebody else messing around with their potential cannon fodder and egg-heads, federal investigating services because that's their job.
The MoM site would be run down, hacked, banned, replaced with the infamous '404'.
By the end of the week, the MoM members found a message in their email boxes, link to the freshly redesigned site with an added button "Report a possible infiltrator". Welcome back on track, guys.
That's how MoM dwindled and became an elite group of hundreds, then tens of participants, MoM's upscale Magisters.
The upstart dare-devil aficionados, who still got the nerve to sign up (really rarely) did not last long.
No selfies any more at the get-togethers.
When the Magisters count dropped (ascended?) to 9 the camera eyes in their notebooks were safely plastered. Some especially wary cats spoke thru the Voice Changer Device with that dumb robotic voice, you know. Still dropped in tracks, VCD or no VCD, with all their 9 lives each because right now there are just 2, Bart and me. The showdown of the Last of Mob Monsters.
No ballot is needed neither VCD. No one will anyway believe that my squeaks of a squeezed squirrel is my natural voice, as for Bart he gets too much relish in his opulent baritone.
That’s why, in full conformance to MoM rules, here am I on a 3-week vacation and no longer, hiking in this wild mountainous backcountry. Not alone I am, a mob old-timer feels better in a company. My girlfriend Mahra makes me it.
She's a cute-looking chick though not too bright which makes her even better. It was not falling at first sight by us. But then it somehow turned into a stable relationship. Something about a year or so. Anyways, she keeps a more precise track of time.
And the year back I just though, "What the hell? Would do for a security blanket, huh?" A beauty is a beauty for 3 days at most if she stays at your home. For which reason we live separately thanks to the wise advice of that Irishman who knew a thing or two about beauties and stuff.
And I do need an additional blanket on this here trek, the mountains are cold at night.
I decided to walk up this river valley to watch those waterfalls traced in the Google satellite map. Not too big to attract swarms of tourist, which is a blessing.
But I couldn't hire a guide in the couple of farmsteads we visited on the way. Halfway thru the summer, the hicks are busy making hay in the tilted fields of nearby slopes. No one available, they only explained to follow the cow path along the left riverside.
The path got lost in the woods pretty soon and we just walked on. Path or no path, the left side stays the left.
So we went, me, the fucking pathfinder, and Mahra breathing heavily yet stomping bravely behind my back. Atagirl, sweetie!
The riverside had cliffs at some places jutting to close to the stream, those you had to skirt about by climbing up the slope, thick-wooded and steep. The river stayed down there roaring along, unseen thru the treetops in the descending wood.
And then there started the second tier of cliffs. Climbing father up the slope to bypass them as well seemed like too much of an uphill job. So I went on, keeping close to the bottom in their row rooted in the, like, way-over-50-degree slant that kept growing steeper with the progress.
The most deterring was the gritty layer blanketing the ground. A kinda fine scaly slug spilled down with hissing rustle from under your boots. Real nasty sound and scary sight, them those tiny rivulets of bitty dry grit rolling downward. And only inertia of moving on did not allow to stop and think, until the slant became too abrupt.
I stopped and turned about. Mahra stood in a couple of meters off me. Then the hiss increased and I slid down standing midst one more dry grit rivulet, wider than those before.
The downward sliding got momentum, my boots submerged into the grit-current.
I took the left tuck in this slug slalom so as to reach for the tree trunk stuck up from the almost sheer drop in the slope covered over with those gray scales too slippery to even stand on.
The trunk withstood the impact of my desperate clutch. There was no time to take a breather.
One more grit-fall whooshed by. I looked up thru the sweat pouring down my face.
Mahra was rushing past seated on her bottom. My left arm shoot out, our hands clasped. She stopped hanging on the tie of our hands over the dry grit stream tumbling down the wall.
She did not scream. The tense lips in the pallid face gave out no sound. The hiss was dying away down there. The half-dry trunk of the dead tree creaked and quivered.
She never screamed, but her mad eyes! What deafening freaked-out look stood in them!
Our hand-clasp was giving in slowly, slackening. The sweat-moist fingers slipping thru, past, away.
No screaming. All I could hear was that hollow clump, and the non-stop roar of the mountainous river rolling on.
After a while, I let my backpack drop down too, but kept by me the 10-meter length of a light sturdy rope…
She lay face-down in a meter-wide stretch of backwater rimmed with current-smoothed rocks, placid spot, no deeper than a couple of inches. The hump of her backpack stayed above the water, safely dry.
I scooped out it her iPhone to leave the body anonymous. Before the hicks’ labors be over—if ever—the woods gulpers would care about making her one with Nature.
Then I collected my backpack a couple meters off. Thoroughly drenched…
A week later, I raised the lid of my notebook. And put her iPhone next to it.
Unbelievable, yet hacking her password took 3 days. It was neither her name nor the birth date, nor the name of her Prince Charming she played mamas-and-papas at high school but some hard nut to crack.
Well, not much of interesting stuff in that iPhone, except for Passwords file in the Documents folder…
To log in MoM I typed her user-name and password."Hi, Bart!" affably greeted me MoM interface.
I attached Squid and scribbled in half-broken spaghetti:
"Hi, my name is V and I am a murderer."
A minute later there popped up capitalized response,"GOT IT".
Whatever future awaits this here squirrel, it would be free of boredom.
Bet your farm…”