Over 500 supporters responded to Diplopundit’s GFM fundraising last year.  We reached our funding goal hours before our self-imposed deadline of August 5, 2019 and that allowed us to blog for a year. Our funds ran out this month.  So we’re back in our old cycle of anxiety about how to make ends meet for the remainder of the year and into next year. Asking for donations as you may already know is the least enjoyable part of running this blog.

We’ve tried various ways to keep this blog open since 2008. The fact is while we have over 11,000 subscribers, we have a more limited number of blog supporters who pitched in when we ask for help once a year. About 500 donors have kept this blog going year after year. An overwhelming majority of them, we hear from only once a year during our fundraising.

We did our first fundraising in 2014 with minimal success.  After that, we were closed to calling it quits but OneFSO, TwoFSO, and 373 donors made sure this blog made it to its 7th birthday in 2015.  They (and more) came back to help in 2016, 2017, and 2019 (2018 was a darn mess so we were in a hole that year).

You folks kept this blog alive and we remember, and are grateful.

This year, as we consider the blog’s future and our next adventure, you will clearly be in our thoughts.  This blog will be on hiatus for the month of September. There will be no updates for at least four weeks. Sometime in October, we hope to fly the blog again, perhaps in a different medium. But for now, your blogger will be off to Mars on a mental health break!

You can continue to reach us via this blog: https://diplopundit.net/contact-us/ and via email at contactblog[at]diplopundit[dot]net. Response may be slow for the next several weeks. Be kind to each other and stay healthy.

Update: We’ve received emails asking about a new fundraiser.  At this time, we do not anticipate launching a new fundraiser for the remainder of the year. Apologies for the confusion.