Newsletter Leaf Journal CC 〜 Glowing edition
Our milestone 200th issue of The Newsletter Leaf Journal includes links to five new articles and posts at NLJ and ECS, links from around the web, and notes on what you can expect as we move into autumn (or fall, whichever you prefer).
Welcome to the 200th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal (nice round number), the official newsletter of the perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal. This newsletter comes to you as always from the administrator-editor of The New Leaf Journal, Nicholas A. Ferrell. While I would have liked to have an action-packed newsletter for issue 200, much of the action will be deferred to issue 201 because I was putting the finishing touches on a big project. But in the interim, I did publish a couple of new articles and have our usual assortment of links from around the web and other news and notes. So without further ado, let us send summer 2024 off in style with Newsletter Leaf Journal 200.
Leaves from the week that was
I finalized drafts of about six articles since mailing Newsletter 199. Unfortunately, I only published two of them.
In Pokémon GO or Pokémon GLOW?, I used a story about the Belarusian Defense Ministry harboring suspicions about Pokémon GO to make a punny article. Because I do not play Pokémon GO, I obtained screenshots from my distinguished New Leaf Journal colleague, Victor V. Gurbo. One day later, I published a photo report on a dramatic mushroom growing in a Brooklyn tree-pit.
Things were not too much busier at The Emu Café Social. I wrote about tools I use to write articles, a prophetic Reuters report from July about Hezbollah's communications strategies, and knocking over one of my plants with my corded vacuum cleaner.
Leaves from around the web
Let's check in on what is happening around the World Wide Web.
Shhh... don't tell anyone...
Plato’s Cave and the Stubborn Persistence of Ignorance
Daniel R. DeNicola for The MIT Press Reader. September 12, 2024.
Hoping no one realizes that this newsletter is the cave.
New import rule targets Chinese retailers Temu and Shein
Matty Merritt for Morning Brew. September 14, 2024.
We wouldn't have to worry about these junk sellers at all if more people followed my internet example.
I'll obey the headline of my own free will
See 11 Winning Images From the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Contest That Showcase the Wonder of Space / Smithsonian
Samuel Sanders for Smithsonian Magazine. September 13, 2024.
There are worse things to see.
‘Shake Hands with Lima-chan’ in Yokohama, Japan
Fred Cherrygarden for Atlas Obscura. September 19, 2024.
(Extends hand.)
Off by that much...
Japanese mom says she kicked wild bear while holding baby in her arms after sudden scary encounter
Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. September 17, 2024.
I am pretty sure she kicked the wild bear during the scary encounter.
Mexican president blames the U.S. for bloodshed in Sinaloa as cartel violence surges
Eduardo Verdugo for AP (via The Washington Times). September 20, 2024.
It's definitely that and not the person to whom the Mexican military answers.
Securing security clearances
'Significant Confusion,' 'Lack of Supervision,' and 'Delayed Notification': IG Report Skewers State Department's Handling of Robert Malley Suspension
Adam Kredo for The Washington Free Beacon. September 18, 2024.
Far more concerning than the handling of the suspension of Robert Malley's security clearance is the fact that Robert Malley had a security clearance to handle.
Security Clearance Denied for Watching Furry Porn Depicting Animated 16-Year-Olds
Eugene Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy. September 20, 2024.
I thought there was no such thing as a perfect headline.
Banning stuff in Ukraine
UKRAINE: Law banning Ukrainian Orthodox Church about to enter force
Dmytro Vovk and Elizabeth A. Clark for Forum 18. September 17, 2024.
I have worked on a few asylum claims brought by Ukrainian Baptists being targeted by ROC and UOC members but no ROC or UOC members... yet.
Ukraine bans Telegram messenger app on state-issued devices because of Russian security threat
AP (via The Washington Times). September 20, 2024.
Look at Ukraine taking initiative when Belarus can't even ban Pokémon GLOW. (Sounds like a wise decision.)
The scales have fallen from my eyes
Abkhazia: It’s Not All Laughs as a Russian Colony
Emil Avdaliani for CEPA. September 13, 2024.
Well there goes all my prior assumptions about what life must be like in a Russian colony.
Domesticating horses had a huge impact on human society − new science rewrites where and when it first happened
William Taylor for The Conversation. September 3, 2024.
Pretty shocking it was in the steppes.
Future article previews?
The Only Time a Major Party Embraced a Third-Party Candidate for President / Smithsonian
T.A. Frail for Smithsonian Magazine. July 26, 2016.
A Horace Greeley presidential campaign article is on my distant to-do list but don't hold your breath.
Animating The Stage And The Passion Behind It: Oshi no Ko S2 Production Notes
kViN for SakugaBlog. September 4, 2024.
An unsurprisingly excellent Sakuga Blog post about the protection of the ongoing second season of Oshi no Ko. The first season was my 2023 anime of the year runner-up. Will this season be on the 2024 list? Well, as I said in my recent Sound! Euphonium article, no spoilers but I would expect Oshi no Ko to be a topic of discussion.
Huge life-size Porygon plushie is a way to reconcile with the most maligned Pokémon of all
Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. September 16, 2024.
Expensive, but cheaper than buying one at the Celadon City Game Corner.
Happy upcoming season!
Why Does the Season Before Winter Have Two Names?
Dan Noswowitz for Atlas Obscura. November 3, 2017.
I can't fallt you if you don't know the answer. (Waits to see if anyone sees what I just did there.)
This Italian City Is Obsessed With Squash
Elena Valeriote for Atlas Obscura. October 25, 2023.
Seems to me someone is obsessed with other people liking squash.
But once we were a country
China in the Atlantic
George Friedman for Geopolitical Futures. September 10, 2024.
Pretty sure John Quincy Adams wrote something for precisely this sort of scenario, albeit he probably wasn't thinking of China.
How social media became a storefront for deadly fake pills
Barbara Ortutay for Associated Press. September 12, 2024.
Fair. But more base-line problem: How are the fake pills getting into the country?
America Has Made Americans Less Safe to Travel the World
Mario Duarte for RealClear World. September 16, 2024.
"At the height of the Roman Empire, a Roman citizen could travel anywhere in the known world armed only with the phrase 'civis Romanus sum,' or 'I am a Roman citizen.' Today, as a citizen of the most powerful country in the world, any American should be able to travel the entire globe armed only with the phrase 'I am an American citizen,' and know they will be safe, but that simply isn't the case."
Let's talk about me
Among the Moss Piglets: The First Image of a Tardigrade (1773)
Natalie Lawrence for Public Domain Review. September 10, 2024.
Imagine how much it would have blown their mind to see the tardigrade on my TV.
Living In A Lucid Dream
Claire L. Evans for Noema. July 1, 2024.
I don't think I'd want to fly in my dreams. Possible dream motion sickness.
Most-turned leaves of the newsletter week
I use a privacy-friendly and entirely local tool called Koko Analytics to track page hits. In each issue of the newsletter, I list our five most-visited articles, according to Koko Analytics, for the one-week period beginning with Saturday and ending with Friday. Below, you will find the most-visited articles of 2024 Newsletter Week 38 (September 14 through 20). I will include 2024 and historic (which runs through the first week of 2021) ranking information for each article.
(1) The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei
Nicholas A. Ferrell. March 14, 2021.
14 appearances and 5 top placements in 2024; 146 and 74 overall.
(2) Broken Optical Audio Cable Door "Fix"
Nicholas A. Ferrell. September 16, 2023.
4 appearances in 2024 & overall.
(3) An In-Depth Look at Norton Safe Search
Nicholas A. Ferrell. October 18, 2022.
20 appearances and 5 top placements in 2024; 32 and 10 overall.
(4) Surviving Megidolaon Spam in Persona 3 FES
Nicholas A. Ferrell. September 4, 2023.
First appearance.
(5) Planning and Angel Next Door Season 2
Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 5, 2023.
18 appearances and 9 top placements in 2024 & overall.
My 2021 article on the history of tsuki ga kirei had its second best week of 2024 en route to notching its 5th first-place finish of the year and 74th(!?) overall. This may be the first week that we have two September articles in a top five (September has not been an article hit-making month) with my guide to compensating for a broken optical audio cable door finishing second and my anecdote about playing Persona 3 FES about 15 years ago making its first appearance. I suspect the Persona 3 article was boosted by Persona 3 Reload, a remake of the game I played 15 years ago, just having had released a DLC including the stages covered by my story.
This past week was our best week in September thanks to our Google hits seemingly randomly returning to their late August level. However, we have also seemingly randomly had a drop in Bing/DuckDuckGo hits, so we did not quite reach the overall numbers we saw a few weeks ago.
News leaf journal
I have been working on a series of articles analyzing May Sky, my favorite of the 31 visual novels I looked at for my al|together visual novel review project and my second favorite of all visual novels I have reviewed at The New Leaf Journal thus far (the favorite honor goes to True Remembrance). The project has taken me longer than I thought, both because my analysis articles are long and also because they require an unusual amount of formatting. I considered publishing them bit by bit, but I ultimately decided to dump them all at once. The dump will happen today (being September 21, 2024), so there is a good chance that the articles will already be live whenever you read this. However, their newsletter debut will have to wait until September 28.
I am working on several big (by our humble standards) projects simultaneously, including one that I think some of the search engines may end up approving of -- but I will keep them secret for the time being.
Taking leaf
Thank you as always for reading The Newsletter Leaf Journal. If you have not done so already, you can sign up for our weekly Saturday email, add our newsletter's RSS feed to your favorite feed reader, or simply check our archive page when you feel like catching up (see your options).
We will almost certainly have more words to cover next week than in any previous week -- primarily because I decided to dump my entire May Sky analysis series all at once. There will also be articles about topics other than obscure 2008 visual novel localizations, so I hope you look forward to the next newsletter.
Happy fall or autumn,
Cura ut valeas -- Nicholas A. Ferrell.