Friday Cat Blogging – 1 April 2016

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For the last few weeks I’ve been on a mission to upgrade my working environment—the very hub of my blogging empire. As these things so often do, it all started with something trivial: a new lamp. Then I got a new monitor, a new monitor stand, a new keyboard, and new cable management to clean everything up. It’s all lovely.

Naturally, I had to upgrade the cats’ snoozing environment too, so I bought a new cat bed to replace the old red blanket. It’s a hit with both critters, but especially Hilbert. And the nice thing about it is that it has side pillows, which keeps Hilbert within the boundaries of the bed when he rolls and stretches. I have created a bounded Hilbert space, which turns out to be excellent for human blog productivity.

And with that, I’ve finally gotten my Hilbert space joke off my chest. It’s been a long time coming.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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