September 30, 2023

Newsletter Leaf Journal CLV 〜 Shades of your newsletter await! 〜

Newsletter Leaf Journal 155 features visual novel reviews, video game anecdotes, links from around the web, and a look forward to October 2023.

Today we end September with the 155th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of The New Leaf Journal. The final week of September brought with it three fairly long articles. Below, I will recap those articles along with our usual assortment of links around the web and other news and notes about The New Leaf Journal.

Leaves from the week that was

While I only published three articles since mailing newsletter 154, all three articles were long. Word count over article quantity?

• A Dream of Summer - Visual Novel Review (I entered the final section of al|together visual novel reviews with one of my longest reviews. A Dream of Summer has some of the best production values of the al|together visual novels, but as my review reveals, some aspects of the story left me wanting.)
• Ranking My Big Impression Video Games (I struggled with finding a title for this post. The title is bad. But the content is interesting, I think. I chose the 12 video games that left the biggest impression on me over the last 30 years. Note that this is not the same as what I think are the best games. I invite readers to send their own selections. Also see the Emu Social version of the post.)
• Town Slogans In Pokémon's Kanto (Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the American release of the original Pokémon games with a walking tour through the town slogans.)

Although not a New Leaf Journal article, our own Victor V. Gurbo was busy playing at a couple of live shows and posting his new music video, his rendition of A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody. I learned about this through our feed aggregator, which you can see (in pure feed form) beneath posts on The Emu Café Social.

Leaves from around the web

Let's check in on the world wide web...

• A Dangerous Hybrid: Speeding up the Super Game Boy
  Nicole Brantigan at Nicole Express. July 16, 2023.

  Tangentially relevant to the screenshots in my third article of the week.

• The Wisdom of the Bankers Box
  CJ Chilvers. September 19, 2023.

  The case for cardboard boxes over plastic bins.

• Why Do Cats Love Boxes So Much?
  Avery Hurt for Discover Magazine. September 15, 2023.

  Second life for all of those banker's boxes you stocked up on after reading the previous link.

• Why self-storage is turning into hot property
  The Economist. June 15, 2023.

  Some people have never heard of standard-sized cardboard boxes.

• Don’t record your social life on an append-only social network
  Daniel Aleksandersen at Ctrl.blog. November 8, 2022.

  I like the idea of Secure Scuttlebutt... but in practice...

• Fax on the beach: The story of the audacious, totally calamitous iPad of the '90s
  Ernie Smith for Retro Tech. January 3, 2020.

  "The EO, which itself cost $3,598 for the $2,799 base unit and $799 cellular add-on (a combined $6,409 with inflation today), was destined to remain an obscure curiosity — priced even beyond contemporaries like the Newton and Tandy Zoomer ($699 each, or $1,245 each with inflation)." (Here I thought the ill-fated 3DO video game console was expensive...)

• How to Keep a Medieval Ghost Town Ghostly
  Vittoria Traverso for Atlas Obscura. May 3, 2023.

  I have done my part by not publishing a tour guide at The New Leaf Journal.

• Iceland: Government Issues New Requirements for Whale Hunt
  Elin Hofverberg for the Global Legal Monitor. September 27, 2023.

  I'd rather not.

• Watch Whales Exfoliate Their Skin on the Ocean Floor
  Sarah Kuta for Smithsonian Magazine. May 3, 2023.

  I can suggest one place to avoid surfacing.

• Rice spirit 'wins' in sumo ritual as good harvest predicted on Japan island
  The Mainichi. June 26, 2023.

  If you think the rice spirit is tough, just wait until you go up against the buckwheat spirit.

• Notebook Review: Pen + Gear Gameboy Notebook
  Ana Reinhart at The Well-Apportioned Desk. August 4, 2023.

  Where else will you find a link to a review of the paper quality in a quirky game-themed notebook?

• As summer comes to an end, it’s time to get ready for a plague of mosquitoes in Japan
  Master Blaster for SoraNews24. Sepetmber 23, 2023.

  Did someone say something about summer ending? (Segue...)

The Old Leaf Journal

Let's dig into our archive...

• At Summer's End - Visual Novel Review
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. December 17, 2022.

  This visual novel was made by the same developer who made A Dream of Summer. A Dream of Summer has a more intricate (and longer) script and better production values, but the final quality assessment is closer than I would have expected going in (partially a complement to At Summer's End).

• At Summer's End vs A Dream of Summer
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. December 11, 2022.

  Remembering the time I began reviewing the wrong visual novel...

• The NYC Outdoor Dining Standing Water Crisis
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. May 20, 2021.

  There is probably a good amount of standing water pooling under some of the more offensive New York City dining sheds as you read this.

• Farming Gold Roses for Money in Animal Crossing
  Victor V. Gurbo. October 13, 2020.

  Is anyone still looking for Animal Crossing money tips?

• Justin & Justina 〜 The Pumpkin Taker
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 14, 2020.

  I saw some pumpkins out in Brooklyn. It is not even October yet (as of my writing this). We are in for a squishy few months.

• “Caught in a Shower” by Margaret E. Sangster
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. September 13, 2021.

  Would not have been a fun place to be in New York City yesterday.

Most-turned leaves of the newsletter week

I list our most-read articles from the previous newsletter week (Friday to Saturday) in each edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal. These statistics come courtesy of Koko Analytics, our local, privacy friendly page-counting solution (see my review). Below, I present the 5 most-visited articles for 2023 newsletter week 39. (Note: All stats are for 2023 only.)

1. The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei (NAF. March 14, 2021)
   38 appearances. 14 top placements.
2. Height differences in anime romances (NAF. March 22, 2023)
   13 appearances. 6 top placements.
3. The Last Stand of Constantine XI (NAF. May 30, 2020)
   4 appearances. 1 top placement.
4. The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten - Anime Review (NAF. March 30, 2023)
   First appearance.
5. Peekier Search Engine Review (NAF. February 26, 2022)
   23 appearances. 3 top placements.

We had another week with a weak top five but plenty of articles outside of the top five putting up solid numbers. This is one of the few weeks where articles from all four years of The New Leaf Journal (2020-2023) are present.

My tsuki ga kirei post won the week by a comfortable margin and (very likely) secured the top spot in September over this week's runner-up, my essay on height in anime romances. The series which prompted my heights in anime romances article just concluded (I ended up not watching it), so I suspect it may continue to fade. But the recent bar for entry into the top five is low enough that it may stick around. See, for example, my review of the Peekier search engine, which has been defunct since February, sneaking into its fourth weekly top five in five weeks.

Spots three and four were somewhat interesting this week. My post on the last stand of Constantine XI made its first appearance since a first-place finish in Newsletter Week 22 (which was back in May) thanks to what I think were Facebook shares. This week also saw the top-five debut of my lengthy review of The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten, an anime which aired in the first quarter of 2023. A previous article on the series' opening theme song made a sole weekly top five appearance in Newsletter Week 13. My full series review has performed solidly, notching top 20 finishes in every month since it was first published (September is its best month thus far) and having been on the edge of weekly top fives previously. I think the review may have some staying power, especially if the anime gets a second season down the line.

News leaf journal

I did not make any changes to The New Leaf Journal, but I have a few reports on what you can look forward to in October.

I have been working on reviewing nearly 31 visual novels that were translated from Japanese to English as part of the 2005, 2006, and 2008 al|together festivals.

• Series Intro
• Post Collection

My review of A Dream of Summer was the 26th review. In October, I will publish my final reviews (I expect that I will end up reviewing 28 or 29 of the 31 novels) to complete that part of the project. I offer newsletter readers an exclusive: The final review, that of My Black Cat, will be this year's honorary Halloween video game review, albeit I may opt to publish it a couple days before Halloween like did with Night of the Forget-Me-Nots in 2021 (2020 and 2022 saw game reviews published on Halloween).

Then, in early November, I will publish a final assessment wherein I rank all 31 of the novels (including the ones I am not writing full reviews of) and single out several for particular merit in different categories. That will, in effect, complete my project to play and review all of the al|together novels -- a project which I began planning back in 2020 and officially launched in April 2021.

While November will mark the technical end of my al|together review project, I will write more about some of the novels after that. For example, I plan to write a detailed assessment of May Sky, a piece on what went wrong in the scripts of several novels, and a comparison of Shooting Star Hill and Flood of Tears. I may come up with some other ideas as well, including comparing some of the novels to non-al|together pieces. I also plan to write about some of the articles on translating novels from the Insani website (Insani was the most prolific translation circle).

I have enjoyed the al|together project and despite the fact that none of my reviews have attracted significant reader attention to this point (perhaps my upcoming review will remedy that), I hope that I have brought some more awareness to some interesting, lesser-known novels, and to the English language translation community of the early-to-mid 2000s. But with that being said, I look forward to moving on to some new game and visual novel review projects beyond al|together, including two non-al|together pieces translated by Insani, some commercial works, and even a few more original English language visual novels.

Notable leaf journal

In addition to my upcoming al|together ranking, I will publish my third annual anime of the year list at the end of the year (see 2021 and 2022). Now choosing an anime series of the year necessarily limits the universe of potential choices to series that air in a specific year. This can yield very strong series that stand with my all time favorites, for example my 2021 choice of SSSS.Dynanzenon or my 2018 choice, which I rated as the best of the 2011-2020 decade, the second season of March Comes in like a Lion. However, there are weak years, such as 2019 where my series of the year choice, the perfectly pleasant first season of the second Fruits Basket adaptation, is not really the sort of series I would think of as a best of (note: there is one 2019 series that I will watch so I can catch up on its 2023 second season, so perhaps some old rankings will shift).

Through three seasons, 2023 has been a bit closer to 2019 than 2021 and 2022 (2022 had two series I considered to be of series of the year quality). I do have a clear front-runner (that will not be spoiled here, but it is not one of the series I have written about in any detail thus far), but it would be a better fit in the solid runner-up or strong third-place category. Fall is likely our last chance to remedy the situation. While the jury is out until we see how things develop, the first four episodes of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, which were all made available on September 29, 2023, were quite pretty with big budget production values and a thoughtful script and scenario. There is hope that the best of 2023 has not yet aired to completion.

Taking Leaf

Thank you as always for reading and following The Newsletter Leaf Journal, (probably) the only newsletter where you will find links to reviews of 17-year old visual novels, links to articles about the wisdom of banking boxes and Icelandic whaling laws, and ongoing anime recommendations. If you enjoyed the content and have not done so already, you can subscribe to this Saturday newsletter via email or add its RSS feed to your favorite feed reader (see options). This will also finally be the week where in which I catch up on a 4-5 newsletter syndication backlog and resume syndicating our issues to The New Leaf Journal.

I think September turned out to be a good month of publishing at The New Leaf Journal with long-form articles on visual novels, WordPress plugins, strange school memories, baseball stats, and long-forgotten 19th century sports. I look forward to continuing the trend in October with the final al|together visual novel reviews and many other interesting articles. Moreover, now that I have landed on a stable set-up for The Emu Café Social, I look forward to pushing some more of my short content there instead of on The New Leaf Journal (I am still working on revising our Leaflet and Leaf Bud sections, but I do not know if that will be finished in October).

Until October 7,
Cura ut valeas