Newsletter Leaf Journal CLXXXVIII 〜 Newsletter jelly
Newsletter Leaf Journal 188 features links to four new posts, 21 links from around the web, and other news and notes from the week that was. That aside, I am starting to see why Roman numerals fell out of favor.
Welcome to the 188th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of the perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal. This newsletter comes to you as always from the washable keyboard of the editor of The New Leaf Journal, Nicholas A. Ferrell. I have several new articles to share along with news, notes, and links from around the web. Without further ado, let's get to the newsletter proper.
Leaves from the week that was
I published three new Newsletter Leaf Journal 187.
- The Real Reason X Marks the Twitter: Wherein I suggest that Elon Musk is attempting to take control of the asterisk (note that I offered my real take on March 21).
- April and May at The New Leaf Journal: Our first-ever dual-month in review.
- Hair Color in Jellyfish Can't Swim in the Night: This article had been on my to-do list for a few weeks. It turned out that my having to put it off was for the best thanks to an important hair color reveal in last week's episode 9.
I also published one post at The Emu Café Social on the discontinuation of Qwant Maps. After publishing this news item, I returned to my 2021 review of "alternative" search engines to append a link to the update to my Qwant section.
Leaves from around the web
Let's check in on the world wide web...
Feeling blue
Elegant blue frescoes, work tools emerge at Pompeii
The History Blog. June 5, 2024.
Very aesthetic blues.
People Are Spotting Rare, Blue-Eyed Cicadas Around Illinois
Will Sullivan for Smithsonian Magazine. May 31, 2024.
None of them will live long enough to become 'Ol Blue Eyes.
Big birds
First-ever American flamingo to visit New York spotted in East Hampton pond
Angela Barbuti for New York Post. June 1, 2024.
Let us hope that it is better behaved than the emus.
Skull of prehistoric 'giant goose' discovered in Australia
Nia Price for BBC News. June 3, 2024.
Duck... duck... GOOOOOOOOOSE.
Big tech
PayPal Grows a New Ads Business
Isobel Asher Hamilton for The Daily Upside. May 28, 2024.
Absolutely no one praises PayPal for delivering exactly what its products -- I mean customers -- didn't need.
Ansel Adams Estate Condemns Adobe for Selling A.I.-Generated Images Mimicking the Photographer's Style
Ella Feldman for Smithsonian Magazine. June 6, 2024.
I think we can look forward to plenty of exciting stories from Adobe land in the next few months and years.
Snakes in a city
NYC driver crashes U-Haul after finding live snake under seat: ‘I hate snakes. I freaked out’
Khristina Narizhnaya and Haley Brown for New York Post. June 1, 2024.
The snake was in it for the long haul.
5-foot snake slithers out of kitchen sink in NYC apartment — and no one seems to know where it came from
Steven Vago for New York Post. June 5, 2024.
Did any U-Hauls drive by the apartment?
Early June history
What Ike Remembered When Returning to the Beaches of Normandy 20 Years After D-Day
Richard Sisk for Military.com. June 4, 2024.
Some fun notes on managing the very enthusiastic Prime Minister Churchill.
Tiananmen's legacy at 35: Protests spurred Communist Party toward total control
Bill Gertz for The Washington Times. June 4, 2024.
But on the bright side... at least Microsoft stayed out of trouble this year.
Preservation
Remnants of a legendary typeface have been rescued from the Thames
Holly Black for Artnet. May 5, 2024.
I am typing this using ia Writer Duospace but they can let me know when this "legendary font" is ready to download.
Games you own could become unplayable – a Japanese gamer’s fight to get an old RPG running highlights preservation issues
Verity Townsend for Automation West. May 31, 2024.
Plausible since I was barely able to play Midsummer Haze for a review last year.
Unlocking Antiquity
Nicholas Wade for City Journal. February 16, 2024.
Using technology to read old, very delicate scrolls.
Niche gaming devices
"We never really thought anyone was going to make a Playdate game"
Marie Dealessandri for Game Industry Biz. April 23, 2024.
I like the idea of the Playdate console but $200 is a bit steep.
This piece of Japanese PC gaming history is getting a mini revival
Verity Townsend for Automation West. May 20, 2024.
Call me when they revive the PC-98.
How-to guides (and other how's)
How To Search The Internet
Wouter Groeneveld at Brain Baking. January 25, 2024.
Tips for finding small sites on the internet.
How Games Move Us
Katherine Isbister for MIT Press Reader. December 18, 2023.
Interesting thoughts on game design.
How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
Luke at Unterminated. May 29, 2024.
It's hard when the device is too old for KDE Connect (see my BlackBerry 10 rescue story).
Looking back as we look ahead
The greatest golf ever played: Tiger Woods and the 2000 U.S. Open
Steve DiMeglio for Golfweek. June 9, 2019.
While headlines sometimes get ahead of themselves, Tiger Woods was the only player under par at the 2000 U.S. Open, and by "under par" I mean he was 12 shots under par and won the U.S. Open by a record 15 strokes. In so doing, he set the (still standing) record margin in a major, breaking Old Tom Morris' record from the 1862 Open Championship by 2. The dramatic headline is probably accurate, but we must note that Mr. Woods opined that he played better at the 2000 British Open a few weeks later, where he won by eight strokes.
I'll let myself out
“60% to the developer, 40% to the publisher.” We asked a solo dev about their bold public pitch to game publishers
Ayuo Kawase for Automation West. May 28, 2024.
Here I was about to offer 70/30 before negotiations were short-circuited.
Stride of New Zealand: ancient ‘walking tree’ wins tree of the year
Eva Corlett for The Guardian. June 5, 2024.
This tree should be the front-walker for the Tree Universe competition.
Most-turned leaves of the newsletter week
I snuck a good number of links to my older articles in the around the web selection, so I will skip The Old Leaf Journal this week and move on to our most-visited article ranking.
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-hit counting solution. Below, you will find the most-visited articles of Newsletter Week 23 (June 1-7) along with stats for 2024 and going back to the first week of 2021.
- #1. Planning and Angel Next Door Season 2 (N.A.F. November 5, 2023)
2024 & History: 5 appearances and 1 top placement.
- #2. Installing LineageOS on a 2013 Nexus 7 (Wi-Fi) (N.A.F. July 28, 2021)
2024: 6 appearances.
History: 7 appearances.
- #3. Installing Ubuntu Touch on a Google Nexus 7 (2013) (N.A.F. July 5, 2021)
2024: 9 appearances and 2 top placements.
History: 86 appearances and 4 top placements.
- #4. The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei (N.A.F. March 14, 2021)
2024: 6 appearances and 4 top placements.
History: 138 appearances and 73 top placements.
- #5. Recommended F-Droid FOSS Apps For Android-Based Devices (2021) (N.A.F. November 28, 2021).
2024: 16 appearances and 1 top placement.
History: 73 appearances and 9 top placements.
Analysis
I did not expect to see my November 5, 2023 article on having had a hunch that an anime I reviewed last year would receive a then-unannounced second season when I published it to ever make a weekly top five. I certainly did not expect it to lead a weekly ranking. But here we are with Planning and Angel Next Door scoring its first first-place ranking and its fifth consecutive top-five appearance. I dare say it was the only article in the top five of one of our weaker 2024 weeks to have had a strong performance from the beginning of the week through the end. One unfortunate point, however, is that my decision to use The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten as the prompt for that article may have cannibalized my actual review of the anime, which led the last weekly ranking of 2023 and notched a third-place finish overall in January 2024. With that being said, the real anime review is still performing solidly and I hope to see it bounce back when we get closer to the release of season two.
Notable leaf journal
I spilled water on my primary laptop. While the laptop still works, it would be hard to describe it as a laptop since the one part that does not work is the built-in screen. I ordered a cheap refurbished 2018 Dell Latitude 5290 to serve as my primary laptop (I also have a cheap 2013 Acer notebook with Bodhi Linux which works but has some obvious limitations). The 5290 was advertised by the seller as having 16 GB of RAM. I discovered that this listing was wrong.
It has 24.
Even granting this is a 2018 model with a 8th generation Intel i5 CPU (note we are on generation 14 now), 24 GB RAM for $129 is a good deal. My workstation, which I built in 2020, now has 32 GB of RAM, so the laptop is not too far off on that metric.
Now if only I can figure out why it doesn't wake up from sleep...
News leaf journal
I continued adding related posts (see last week's News leaf journal). While I did not keep track, I would estimate that I covered somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-40 articles throughout the week including some relatively obscure short form posts that I may or may not remember writing.
Taking leaf
Thank you as always for reading The New Leaf Journal. If you enjoyed the newsletter and are not already a regular reader, you can sign up for our Saturday mailing via email, add our newsletter's RSS feed to your favorite news reader, or simply check in on our archive once per week. See all of our options here or on this page (if you are reading in a web browser).
I have several articles in the pipeline for the upcoming week, so I hope you look forward to them and to our next newsletter on June 16.
Until June 16, Cura ut valeas -- Nicholas A. Ferrell.