Newsletter Leaf Journal CCXXIV 〜 Ageless donut
Newsletter Leaf Journal 225 features links to the four newest New Leaf Journal articles, which include Dunkin' Donuts thoughts and Moon photos, 21 links from around the web, and other news and notes from the week that was and the weeks to come.
Welcome to the 224th 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 FILCO Majestitouch V3 keyboard of the administrator, editor, and principal writer of The New Leaf Journal and its short-form writing sister-site, The Emu Café Social, Nicholas A. Ferrell. While I would not go so far as to say it was a busy week at The New Leaf Journal (non New Leaf Journal work, et al.), I did manage to publish four new articles and I have a couple of upcoming posts just about ready to go. Below, I present news from the week that was at The New Leaf Journal and links from around the web.
Leaves from the week that was
On March 12, I finally published February 2025 at The New Leaf Journal. You will find links to all of my February articles and the ranking of our most-visited posts of that month. Consider this a good way to catch up on any interesting posts you may have missed.
On March 9, I published Dunkin’ Donuts Are Not All The Same. I discuss my favorite Dunkin' Donuts location, the one I frequented in my senior year of high school, and compare it to the serviceable but less impressive Dunkin' Donuts near where I went to college. You will also find yourself treated to stories about my high school calculus class, graphing calculators, and the "Junction" just off the CUNY Brooklyn College campus.
On March 13, I published Brooklyn “Ageless Men’s Health” BRT. While this could be loosely classified as some on-the-ground Brooklyn business reporting, I wrote this so I could deliver a pun in the form of a headline.
On March 14, I commemorated the fourth anniversary of the publication of my The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei article with a photo post titled The Moon’s Reflection in Downtown Brooklyn. To avoid any false advertising, I note that this article is not about the total lunar eclipse which occurred on the morning of March 14. It is instead based on a photo I took on March 12 before I knew about the then-upcoming lunar eclipse. While I have no "blood Moon" photos, I did link to an article about the event in my less dramatic Moon photo post.
Leaves from around the web
I delivered a decent word count for the first time in a couple of weeks. With that being said, perhaps you want more. Fear not, I present 21 links from around the world wide web with my award-winning link commentary.
Submitted without comment in the this can only end well category
NYC moves to allow mopeds on Brooklyn, Queensboro bridges
Ramsay Khalifeh for Gothamist. March 13, 2025.
Submitted without comment: "The speed limits on the bridges’ roadways range from 30 to 35 mph — faster than many mopeds can travel — but the DOT proposal notes traffic rarely moves that fast."
Putin's Police State Increasingly a State Without Enough Police
Paul Goble for The Jamestown Foundation. March 11, 2025.
"Moscow has brought in whole police units from Central Asia, even though the Russian people are no more positively disposed to Central Asians in uniform than those who are not."
Time for a snack
Japanese cafe serves up fruit sandwiches like nowhere else
Oona McGee for SoraNews24. February 19, 2025.
The fruit sandwiches are aesthetic but the concept is not working for me. The only fruit I want in a sandwich is a banana to accompany the peanut butter.
Mister Donut blooms with sakura doughnuts for cherry blossom season 2025
Oona McGee for SoraNews24. March 1, 2025.
Those donuts are more aesthetic than my regular Dunkin Donuts picks in high school. I would try them but (A) Mister Donut does not exist in the United States; and (B) even if Mister Donut existed in the United States, it would probably not offer the cool sakura donuts.
Elephant in the room
Sonic Adventure – 1999 Developer Interview
Shumplations. February 26, 2025.
I am a fan of Sonic Adventure (Sega Dreamcast, 1999) and included it as an honorable mention on my list of games that left the biggest impressions on me. Unsurprisingly, I enjoyed this 1999 developer interview. However, the interview failed to address the biggest challenge in Sonic Adventure (DEATH-causing CAMERA).
Hims & Hers Struggles After the FDA Puts a Ticking Clock on its Weight-loss Drug
Jamie Wilde for The Daily Upside. February 24, 2025.
There's no ticking clock on no thank you, I'm full, however.
Elephants Aren't People and Can't Sue to Leave a Zoo, Colorado's Top Court Rules
Sara Hashemi for Smithsonian Magazine. January 24, 2025.
The legal bar may need a higher bar to entry.
Shops of my childhood
Tatton's Pokémon Center New York Memories
Johto Times. January 23, 2025.
I went to the New York City Pokémon Center at least twice, once to get the Pokémon Mini (sadly I don't think I have mine anymore) and another time to get Pokémon Leaf Green (I still have that copy).
Downtown Brooklyn Macy’s to Close Soon, Retailer Confirms
Adam Daly for Brooklyn Paper. January 10, 2025.
Many of my school-days clothes came from the Fulton Street Macy's, and a few live on in my closet to this day, well over a decade after they were purchased.
The Moon is beautiful
Moon Pine Tree in Tokyo, Japan
Fred Cherrygarden for Atlas Obscura. December 16, 2024.
That'd make a neat Christmas tree.
Saturn gains 128 moons, giving it more than the other planets combined
Matthew Parkes for NewScientist. March 11, 2025.
That's neat and all but I'm still nostalgic for the 16-bit Moon era.
What is a blood moon?
Daisy Dobrijevic and Scott Dutfield for Space.com. March 14, 2025.
Catch up on things that already happened (and remember to capitalize "Moon" when you are writing about our Moon).
Nice boats
Random Tugs 445
tugster: a waterblog. March 2, 2025.
The blue tugboat in the first photos reminds me of one I covered.
SS President Coolidge in Luganville, Vanuatu
Atlas Obscura. November 13, 2024.
Silent Cal deserves an aircraft carrier.
Student visa programs
Educate Americans First
Jay P. Greene for Tablet. September 17, 2024.
"If OPT students are counted, Columbia University now has almost two-thirds of its total enrollment from abroad—a remarkable figure that makes it hard to imagine why U.S. taxpayers are massively supporting the educations of students who aren’t Americans. If OPT students are excluded, international students at Columbia still constitute 40% of its student body."
The U.S. Foreign Student Program Is Becoming a Foreign Worker Program
John Feere for INIR. December 18, 2024.
The result of regulatory schemes deviating from the statutes they implement. See the OPT (optional practical training) reference in the previous link.
Not to brag but
A strong sense of self-continuity can improve health and well-being
Katherine Ellison for Knowable Magazine. December 11, 2024.
I will think of this every time I see one of my old articles and think "wow, whoever wrote that was pretty sharp."
Do weekends really affect surgical outcomes?
Justin Jackson for Medical Xpress. March 5, 2025.
Amateurs. I had colon surgery on Christmas Eve in 2018.
Miscellaneous history lessons
A Brief History of Teleportation
Al Williams for Hackaday. December 5, 2024.
I once heard someone explain the offensive and defensive qualities of teleportation.
A Swiss-born author’s dangerous game
Beat Kuhn for Swiss History Blog. January 14, 2025.
Unexpectedly about Russian Roulette.
Weblogs: A History And Perspective
Rebecca Blood at rebecca's pocket. September 7, 2000.
Let's learn about what's hip'n'happenin' around the world wide web (as we predict whether Governor Bush or Vice President Gore will win the upcoming election).
Most-turned leaves of the newsletter week
I use a privacy-friendly and entirely local tool called Koko Analytics (see my 2022 review) 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 2025 Newsletter Week XI (March 8-14) along with their 2025 and historic (going back 2021) weekly ranking statistics.
(1.) Calvin Coolidge Describes His Mother, Victoria
N.A. Ferrell. March 13, 2021.
2025: 4 appearances and 1 top placement.
Historic: 6 appearances and 1 top placement.
(2.) Examining Whether Defense Wins NBA Championships
N.A. Ferrell. July 9, 2024.
2025: 9 appearances and 5 top placements.
Historic: 13 appearances and 6 top placements.
(3.) Kaori After Story – Visual Novel Review
N.A. Ferrell. December 31, 2022.
2025: 9 appearances and 2 top placements.
Historic: 10 appearances and 2 top placements.
(4.) January 2025 Look at Pixelfed Social
N.A. Ferrell. January 29, 2025.
2025: 7 appearances.
(5.) Planning and Angel Next Door Season 2
N.A. Ferrell. November 5, 2023.
2025: 3 appearances.
Historic: 31 appearances and 11 top placements.
Analysis
Newsletter Week 11 was, according to Koko Analytics, our best non-Hacker News week of all time, posting 9X-10X more views on Thursday than we do in our typical 2025 week (the other six days were in the range of "typical 2025 week"). Did we have a break-through? I suspect not. There was no obvious source for the views and no individual article posted dramatic view numbers. Moreover, our most-visited articles of the day were weighted toward the articles that have been doing well in 2025. We did however have a huge number of articles receiving hits. I suspect some crawler or something to that effect was picked up by Koko Analytics -- for example I recall in the past that Internet Archive's Wayback Machine sometimes gets counted as a visitor. It could also be some LLM crawler. In any event, because no single article posted remarkable numbers, I do not think whatever happened in the early hours of Thursday morning taints our week 11 ranking.
My 2021 article about Calvin Coolidge's anecdote about his mother has already had its best-ever year in terms of visitors. Now, for the first time, it leads a weekly ranking, ending the five-week streak of Examining Whether Defense Wins NBA Championships. (I suppose it was fitting for it to do so in the newsletter week covering the article's fourth birthday). My NBA article had its second weakest week of the last six, and that was enough for Coolidge to secure the top spot. Spots 2-4 on our weekly ranking are occupied by the top-three articles of 2025 thus far (in the order they appear on the weekly ranking). Fifth place saw the return of Planning and Angel Next Door Season 2, which continues to be a strong performer despite not matching its early January numbers. Sixth place was my March 7 article Pacman (Linux) Update Issue which started the week very strong thanks to being shared on Tux Machines and held a ranking position into Friday before being over-taken. It is currently in our top-24 most visited articles of the month so we will see if it can do enough to hold its position in the second half of March.
News leaf journal
I had planned to finish reading and then review a visual novel titled When Winter Comes Again for March 14, but I did not get far into reading the novel, much less reviewing it. I may work on that this week, but if not perhaps I will when winter does in fact come again. Speaking of winter, I will need to think of a spring-themed article with spring officially beginning for me on March 20. Let no one say life is easy for a New Leaf Journal administrator/editor/writer. In the meantime, you can enjoy my visual novel review of Christmas Rose, which presented an interesting look at the relationships between Summer, Winter, and Spring.
I have two nearly-completed drafts just about ready to go next week and a number of other in-progress articles and still-pending projects, so I hope to be able to keep up a decent publishing pace even though I have several work assignments due in the next two weeks.
Taking leaf
Thank you as always for reading The Newsletter Leaf Journal. If you are not already a regular reader, I invite you to subscribe to our weekly email, add our newsletter's RSS feed to your favorite feed reader (see explanation), or browse our full newsletter archive at your leisure (note it also has a very nice full-text search bar).
This is our final hibernal newsletter of 2024-25. I look forward to mailing our first vernal newsletter next week.
Waiting for the crocuses to crocus,
Cura ut valeas -- Nicholas A. Ferrell.