Restored graphics to “Ketchup and the Two-Party Problem“ from 2016, one of my personal favorite posts. I’m not counting this towards my restored content count, as it has always been up, but the graphics went away in one of the numerous rebuilds of the site.
Two posts in and I’m noticing that the word minimum isn’t a problem. It’s the desire to fill out a blog post into a longer essay that really starts to suck up the time. I’m caught between the goal of “just post”, but don’t want to have a post be a fleeting tweet.
Technichally a blog post can be anything. Even a short tweet like post of just a few words. But I do enough of that on Twitter, and other social media. I guess that’s part of this excercise in blogging is doing, finding out what I want to do with my blog. I have a special media project down the road tha I’m building up this posting discipline for, but even then its focus will be narrow enough that I’ll be stil posting here, so I guess that’ll be something I focus on as the month goes on.
Of special note: I just clipped this post off here, as what would have been the next few paragraphs would be better served as a separate post.
Is it just me or is there a tendency to make November a month with a lot of dedicated month-long projects associated with it? I’m not talking about the slew of National “X” Months that are promotional in nature or seek to expand awareness of something or other. I’m talking about something encouraging people to do “X” or not do “Y” for the month. I guess I’d call it a month-long challenge event, for the lack of a better term.
There’s National Novel Writing Month and its various spinoffs, such as the National Blog Posting Month that I’m taking part in.
There is Movember/No Shave November, in which men are encouraged not to shave (or at least not shave off a mustache in the specific case of Movember), though it has been attached to various men’s health issues, probably as a sort of “yes, and…” to October being dedicated to breast cancer awareness.
Then there’s No-Nut November… which I think is a parody of such month-long events. (You don’t know what that is? Either do your own googling, or be satified that you’re probably better off not knowing)
Heck, I seem to have come up with my own personal dietary/financial challenge: No drive through food for the entirety of November (though I have made the exception for McDonald’s coffee when on the road)
So, assuming its not just my imagination, why Novembmer? Maybe it’s being away from summer, and getting into colder days with less daylight, lends itself to some challenges that are more indoor in nature, or seeking to improve ones self that isn’t about physical activites.
The big holiday kick-off of Thanksgiving weekend certainly adds a degree of difficulty to the creative challenges, even more so to dietary challenges.
Are there any months long challenges you are participating in, or have taken part of in prior Novembers (or any other month of the year)?
In 2011, I announced an attempt at participating in the National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) , a sort of alternative to National Novel Writing Month, which traditionaly has been held in November.
I’m running to be the Libertarian National Committee’s Secretary to:
Build back the professionalism that we once had in the national party.
Build back the trust of the membership.
Promote transparency and civility in the LNC.
As to the former question, I…
…have been a member of the LP for over three decades.
…have run for the Maine legislature three times
…have served on the Knox County Budget Committee for over a decade, reelected twice.
…have been a delegate to 11 prior national conventions.
…have served in the Libertarian Party of Maine’s state committee as
Secretary
Treasurer
Chair
Regional Rep.
…am a co-owner and president of my family’s business, a manufacturing company with a dozen employees
Leading up to the Libertarian Party National Convention, I’ll be posting more details about my background and hopes for the future of the Libertarian Party.
So, for the umpteenth* time, I’m redesigning my blog.
This time, however, I’m dropping the “ComicsPundit” brand. It was created at a time when I thought I could focus on the intersection of two of my passions. But I was all over the place, sometimes comics, sometimes politics, sometimes both, sometimes something completely different.
So, where the domain still brings you here, and I’ll continue to use it for my e-mail, I will be eventually start using ShawnLevasseur.com to be the blog here.
To start with, I’ve put all prior posts into review. I’ll gradually post them back. Some trivial posts won’t make the cut, but most of them will get back on here.
Also, a project that I’ll be announcing soon will be taking up a lot of the posts for the next couple of months.
Update: July 15, 2024
That aforementioned project was my campaign to run for the position of Secretary on the Libertarian National Committee. That has passed, but long troubles in trying to get a new feature to work as I expected it to (custom uploaded fonts being part of the WordPress system) caused me to bounce around a variety of web hosting options.
I did consider a fully static blog, but CMSes to support it are not user-friendly, and hand coding, though possible, would be too much work and not include a critical part of a website: its RSS feed. (It’s important for me to read other websites; it’s only fair that I return the courtesy.)
But I’ve gotten fonts to work right and settled on a web host (I’d better have, I paid up for three years of discounted service). So the design work and blog post updating begin.
*_Apparently, “umpteenth” is now an actual word in the dictionary. I discovered this when spellcheck corrected a typo in the word. Language is indeed a virus.
Now, most such pleas for this change usually are rooted in some thought that the court is too much of an activist court in a liberal or conservative direction.
This article is focused more on the fairness on how the opportunities for Presidents and Senates to nominate and approve Justices occur randomly. Nixon appointed five Justices in five years. Carter in his four years, none.
In the article Andrew proposes expanding the court to eleven members with terms of 22 years each, staggered so that one term will expire every two years.
He then wrestles with thoughts on how to go about handling vacancies that occur mid-term by death, resignation, or impeachment. Here he’s trying too hard to limit a president to two appointments per term.
Just allow the President one such appointment to fill one such vacancy per term. Any more, and the seat will remain vacant until a President reelected to another term, a new President is elected, or that Justice’s term expires naturally.
At first blush, I was confused why he’d expand the size of the Court. He gives no reason that I could find. Presumably, so that he could make the terms 22 years long. I prefer the idea of the longer term, as the shorter terms of other Supreme Court term limit proposals of 10 or 12 years to be too short to preserve the independence of the court.
Twenty-two years is longer than the historical average span of the lifetime terms of the past Supreme Court Justices, and longer than three of the currently serving Justices have served.
My proposal to have replacement appointments to complete a Justice’s term, limited to one per Presidential term would mean that the court would often be at less than full membership. To my thinking, this then justifies the expansion of the Court to eleven, as it won’t always be full.
I’d even suggest that vacancies that occur with less than four years remaining in that Justice’s term remain vacant until their natural expiration date. Such vacancies would be only two members, at most.
It could happen that by some tragedy, or other circumstances, the Supreme Court is substantially depleted. There then should be a provision for a President to be allowed a second vacancy appointment per term if the court membership drops below a certain level (say, six).
If enacted, these proposals would mean that in any term, a President would appoint no less than two, potentially three (or four in unusual circumstances) Justices. Even at that only two of them would be for a full term.
Presuming any constitutional amendment authorizing this codifies the maximum number of Justices, this would prevent any court packing plans, or it’s opposite number, the contracting of the size of the court to block a President from appointing any Justices (which has happened in our history).
I think there should be a proviso that the change would take effect only after an intervening Presidential election and inauguration. That should make passage a more practical matter.
With all that in mind, here’s the amendment I crafted to fit all those ideas:
Seth Godin: ketchup enthusiast & political choice detractor
A defense of third-party politics.
Seth Godin wrote about third parties in a blog post titled “Ketchup and the third-party problem.” He says that those of us supporting third parties or their candidates are doomed to failure and miss our chance to influence the political field.
I find the argument lacking and merely a more passive-aggressive method of saying that we should all vote for Hillary because otherwise, we’ll be doomed with Trump. I’ve snarked about it on Twitter, but I feel this deserves a bit more detailed rebuttal.
Thousands of people will be taking part in what has become an annual tradition every November, the National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo).
I’m not taking part. I considered creating a blog writing equivalent. But after a search, I discovered there was one, NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month)
The goal for NaBloPoMo is a post a day for the month, as opposed to the NaNoWriMo goal for a 50,000 word minimum first draft of a novel.
The “one post” part of this seems a bit too easy. (Oh yeah? How many months have you managed that? -ed.)
Okay, I’ll rephrase that. The one post per day goal isn’t ambitious enough. It serves as my primary goal, however.
So what are my secondary goals? Certainly not 50,000 words. I don’t have that in me. Not to mention that it would encourage bloviating. Also, I don’t want to just have token posts with a single sentence to fill out a quota. So my personal ground rules will be:
One post per day minimum.
Items republished from twitter don’t count.
Items that are just excerpts from, or links to other sources don’t count.
Qualifying blog posts should have a minimum of 100 words of original content.
A secondary goal of a minimum of 50 posts for the month.
A secondary goal of a total of 10,000 words.
“Tote Board” posts showing my posting progress for the month will not count, unless accompanied by further commentary on NaBloPoMo
???
PROFIT! (I don’t think so -ed.)
Here we go.
Saturday, November 1, 2025 addendum
So, that didn’t go so well. (story of amateur blogging in a nutshell)
But I’m going to have a crack at it again
Originally, this had a link to a website that was hosting as sort of ‘official’ NaBloPoMo HQ. It’s no longer there, but there are others picking up the baton.
To say this portends major disaster is an understatement. Diamond is already in precarious financial straits, and they can no longer hide the fact that they have an account that’s millions behind which they may never collect. And their losses will ripple through to publishers, many of whom have no slack to survive the sudden hit to the bottom line.
Stay tuned. This is not going to be pretty.
Fasten your seat belts.
Digital publishing may be the future sooner than we think, if for no other reason that traditional book sales will be dead as the dominoes fall.
For publishers that aren’t owned by conglomerates, There will likely be moves to minimize whatever risk they have on the physical publishing side and hope to maximize revenue from the digital side of the business to ride out this crisis.
If I was a fledgling publisher, I wouldn’t even think of traditional publishing. There already was too much up front costs to begin with in an uncertain market, never mind the risk of never getting paid for the books you’ve shipped.
Addendum: Monday, November 3, 2025
Diamond Distribution didn’t fall due to this. The comics distribution model didn’t collapse.
But about a decade and a half later, Diamond itself went bankrupt. There were a lot of causes and a lot of fallout.
The best reporting on the fallout is at Comics Beat.
