August 16, 2025

Newsletter Leaf Journal CCXLI 〜 Boxed Newsbetter

Issue 241 of The Newsletter Leaf Journal features links to new NLJ and ECS posts covering everything from Liquid Death to Brooklyn trees, our most-visited posts, and other news and notes from the week that was.

Welcome to the 241st edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of the perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal and its short-form writing sister publication, The Emu Café Social. This newsletter comes to you as always from the administrator, editor, and writer of both publications, Nicholas A. Ferrell.

I produced a good word count this week between my two website projects, Below, you will find links to my newest articles and short posts, 21 links from around the web, and news, notes, and site updates from the week that was.

Leaves from the week that was

I did much better on the publishing front in the period covered by the instant newsletter than prior the week of Newsletter 240.

Let us begin with The New Leaf Journal.

I led the week with my first anime hair color article in several months, Kazuya's Hair Color in Rent-A-Girlfriend. It only took four seasons, but I managed to squeeze an article out of the perennially sub-mediocre anime series.

Four days later, I covered a story about the U.S. Air Force seeking Tesla Cybertrucks for target practice in U.S. Air Force Targets Cybertrucks. If you think I looked for and found an unconventional angle to tackle this important story, you would be correct.

I closed out the week with two articles about drinks. In Coca Cola Liquid Death Tag, I shared a humorous drink display mishap(?) at a local produce store. I also learned about this Liquid Death drink. Speaking of Liquid Death, you may expect a new article on the subject to be published in close proximity to this newsletter.

My Boxed Water Is Better Story is a unique article in that I had started working on this project in August 2023. I forgot about the project, but thanks to my feed reader, I was reminded of the idea and have published it just two years late.

I was also busy on The Emu Café Social.

Unanswered Question in amNY Shooting Report and NY Law On Dealing Drugs to Children cover recent New York City crime stories.Strange NYT “Snubbed” Headline comes as advertised.

I tackled Brooklyn nuisances in Protecting New Trees in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and On Efforts to Ban Gas-Powered Leaf Blowers, and both may be future NLJ article topics.

I covered things I learned in Autism and Prenatal Substance Exposure (referring to potential link in diagnoses as distinguished from causes) and Peet’s Coffee Now Provider for Southwest Airlines, both of which tie into relatively recent NLJ articles. Finally, I had some fun at Reddit's expense in Reddit vs Internet Archive and AI Scrapers.

Leaves from around the web

I gave you plenty to read in the last week. But maybe you have already read my new posts because you are an RSS/ATOM/JSON feed subscriber. Fortunately, I have 21 links from around the web. Aside -- I hope you appreciate how I organized the links and captions below. This is one of my better Around the Webs if I do say so myself. Let us start with some cheery feel-good links...

KILL it with FIRE

AI video tool that creates 'original series' in minutes sparks fear of replacing scriptwriters and creatives
Dana Alomar for The National. August 10, 2025.

This should be killed with fire. But while we are waiting for the fire, I recommend that "scriptwriters" and "creatives" engage in threat mitigation by working diligently my create works for human beings that can't be readily "replaced" by an AI tool.

$30,000 in stolen Labubu collectibles recovered by police in California
Brad Matthews for The Washington Times. August 13, 2025.

Wait! Let's hear him out before we prosecute him. Maybe the gentleman was doing something good like throwing them into a burn pit and then salting the Earth.

Digital resurrection: fascination and fear over the rise of the deathbot
Harriet Sherwood for The Guardian. August 10, 2025.

Fire may not be enough. Is there an off-switch for the internet?

Who's afraid of American contractors?

Analysis: Armenia–Azerbaijan deal worries Iran
Janatan Sayeh for FDD's Long War Journal. August 12, 2025.

While I understand why Iran does not like the prospect of having American contractors on its border, there is reason to believe I[t]srael problems (from its perspective, of course) are deep inside its borders. I'm not sorry. I will never apologize for Middle East puns.

Exclusive: Trump ally Erik Prince plans to keep personnel in Haiti for 10 years to fight gangs and collect taxes
Anna Hirtenstein, Sarah Morland, and Harold Isaac for Reuters. August 14, 2025.

Having devoted a couple of newsletter Around the Web selections (see Newsletters 156, 172, and 212) to gently warning our readers that Operation Send Kenyan Police to Haiti wasn't going to fix the problem, I am sure you are all waiting for my assessment of the new Send Blackwater to Haiti Plan. Well, it's better than the Kenyan police idea.

Yo bro let's talk AI

Just a Little More Context Bro, I Promise, and It’ll Fix Everything
Jim Nielsen. August 15, 2025.

A sharp take on LLMs and complexity.

LLMs aren’t world models
Yossi Kreinin. August 10, 2025.

Paraphrasing my high school classmate: "Yo, you're the world model and they're the model maker!"

Dunking on kids

XP Arcade: Super Basketball
Mark Normadin at Retro XP. August 11, 2025.

"The setup is a bit funny, as you’re a team trying to move up the ranks against tougher and tougher opponents in a larger tournament. So, you start by facing off against JHS, which you will learn stands for Junior High School. You are a team of, presumably, adults, playing against a team of junior high kids. Which makes it that much funnier that (1) you begin down by 15 points with one minute to go, and (2) the player who sinks the winning basket rips their shirt off and jumps up and down in celebration."

As ban hangs over TikTok in U.S., Kyrgyzstan’s block isn’t going as planned
Alexander Thompson for Eurasianet. August 15, 2025.

They're trying to discourage us. Don't let them. We must be strong like Kyrgyzstan.

Only someone with an elite feed collection and an eye for links can do what I'm about to do

Mali arrests dozens of soldiers over alleged bid to topple junta
RFI. August 8, 2025.

I junta. You junta. Everybody junta.

Timbuktu's famed manuscripts return home after 13 years in Mali's capital
Baba Ahmed for AP. August 12, 2025.

This is a great idea now that the ruling junta in Mali has secured its own position and totally eradicated the Islamist terrorist threat in the north, working with their very reliable and always-sober Russian allies.

Life choices

Adult sites trick users into Liking Facebook posts using a clickjack Trojan
Pieter Arntz for Malwarebytes Labs. August 7, 2025.

Are the adult site users being tricked or are they dousing themselves in gasoline and lighting a blunt?

Ukraine: Beachgoers killed in sea mine explosions while swimming in cordoned-off waters
Dan McDonald for GB News. November 8, 2025.

I'm not here to tell anyone how to live their life, but if you're swimming in Ukraine and local authorities say don't swim there, bombs, you should probably not swim there.

Feeling blue

Blueberry Hill
Kieran Healy. August 7, 2025.

I went through my whole life thinking that the word "blueberry" had two b's. But AI has arrived to disabuse me of my misconception. The scales have fallen from my eyes. Blueberry has always had three b's. We have always been at war with Eurasia.

Bigelow Butterfly Pea Flower Teas now expanding across the US
Tea & Coffee Trade Journal. August 13, 2025.

That blue vanilla midnight tea looks interesting.

Let's check in on U.S. CBP

More than 3,000 fake Gibson guitars seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at L.A. port
Associated Press (via The Washington Times). November 29, 2024.

You can see Victor V. Gurbo's authentic 1917 and 1920 Gibsons in his article Why Vintage Guitars Sound Better.

Chinese national in NYC tries to smuggle turtles to Hong Kong
David Propper for the New York Post. August 12, 2025.

At least he wrapped the turtle shells neatly to keep the turtles safe while they were being trafficked.

Pinkos being pinkos

WHO ‘withdrew critical Covid report at request of China and Italian government
Carl Deconinck for Brussels Signal. August 12, 2025.

It's always heartwarming to be reminded how well my May 24, 2020 Against Chinese Government Propaganda essay has aged.

Exclusive – State Department Restricts Visas of Foreign Officials Tied to Cuban Slave Doctor Programs
Frances Martel for Breitbart. August 13, 2025.

The Cuban government is just running an endless residency program.

French travails, French triumphs

Lice and Pickled Beets: Pathogens That Decimated Napoleon’s Army During His Disastrous 1812 Retreat from Russia Identified
Guillermo Carvajal for LBV. August 6, 2025.

New research on how the Russians beet Napoleon.

Why Did God Favor France and Joan of Arc? (archived)
Ross Douthat for The New York Times. August 5, 2025.

"But if Joan challenges skeptics to explain how a career like hers could be possible without supernatural aid, she also challenges Christians and her other religiously inclined fans to explain why, exactly, God sent her to save France."

Most-turned leaves of the newsletter week

I use a privacy-friendly and entirely local tool called Koko Analytics (see my 2025 article) to track page visits. 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 XXXIV (August 9-15) along with their 2025 and historic (going back 2021) weekly ranking statistics.

1. Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 17, 2025.
   2025: 8 appearances and 3 top placements.

2. Amazon "Cargo Bikes" in Brooklyn
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 9, 2025.
   2025: 16 appearances and 7 top placements.

3. Garbage and Free Stuff in Red Hook, Brooklyn
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. August 7, 2025.
   2025: 2 appearances.

4. Coca Cola Liquid Death Tag
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. August 14, 2025.
   2025: NEW

5. Dragonair Safari in Pokémon Yellow
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. October 5, 2023.
   2025: 10 appearances.
   Cumulative: 12 appearances.

Analysis

All three of the previous week's top three articles make up this week's top three, albeit in different positions. My article on the now-former Google Search Pokémon catching game returns to the top spot for its third top placement. It won the week comfortably, trailed by my expose on Amazon Cargo Bikes (which received a small boost from Reddit after I made fun of Reddit on ECS) and my Red Hook photo post. I am reasonably confident that we will not see the Garbage and Free Stuff article in the top five next week -- for as far as I can tell almost all of its traffic came from the NewsBreak App and that attention trailed off. But NewsBreak App came through a second time this week, boosting my new Coca Cola Liquid Death Tag article into a top five in its debut week. Unlike the Red Hook photo post, this new NewsBreak beneficiary appears to have also received visitors from other sources, so there is a chance its early success may be sustainable. Rounding out the week is Dragonair Safari in Pokémon Yellow, which becomes the fifth article this year to notch 10 weekly top fives.

News Leaf Journal

I have some small site upgrades to share.

Feed Links in NLJ Header

I published Finding the Best RSS/ATOM Feed on August 6. In that article, I explained how many RSS/ATOM/JSON feed readers and other tools can automatically "discover" feed links. This discovery works if the feed link appears in the page source code with the correct tag. It had bothered me for some time that despite the fact I offer just about every conceivable feed format, the only feed link in our header was the default RSS feed. Consider this problem resolved!

• The reason our JSON feed link was not appearing in the header was 100% my fault. I use a WordPress plugin to deactivate plugins on pages where they are unneeded. I had deactivated the JSON feed plugin on pages. After removing the deactivation, the JSON feed link appears in our headers and can now be discovered. Our more niche feed formats are also discoverable (discussed in our Feed Directory, but most people do not use tools to make use of them).
• I added a small amount of custom code to add ATOM and RDF feed discovery links to our header. Every modern feed reader I know of supports ATOM feeds, so consider this a good universal alternative to RSS. RDF is an older feed format, but some people may have a use for it.

These changes will not make any real practical difference. If you are using a feed reader, our default RSS feed will always work and for most practical intents and purposes, it will work the same as our ATOM and JSON feeds (not all feed readers support JSON yet). But the options are now more readily available if you prefer one feed format to another.

Headers and Footers

I made two changes to our footer on The New Leaf Journal. Firstly, above the copyright notice, we previously had links to our Feed Directory, RSS Feed, ATOM Feed, JSON Feed, TWTXT Feed, and Newsletter. I removed the TWTXT link from the footer and added "Feed" to the RSS, ATOM, and JSON link text. I then re-organized the header items and replaced what had been a link to our XML Sitemap with a link to our TWTXT feed page.

I also changed our copyright notice. The copyright notice for NLJ previously read: "Copyright © 2020 The New Leaf Journal All Rights Reserved." It now reads: "Copyright © 2020-2025 The New Leaf Journal. All Rights Reserved." I simply inserted the "2020-" and "." into the notice. The pre-existing code from our theme ensures that the current year date updates automatically. So come January 1, 2026, that "2025" will automatically turn into "2026" and everything else will stay the same.

I also changed our footer on The Emu Café Social. The first line of the footer tells visitors about the theme we are using. I moved the code for my theme modifications from GitLab to Codeberg, so I ensured that the hyperlink to the repository was updated. I also modified the copyright line of our footer so that it pulls the site name and current year automatically and I added "2023-" before the current year.

Taking Leaf

This turned into a long newsletter, so I will leave things off here.

Thank you as always for reading The Newsletter Leaf Journal. If you enjoyed this issue and have not done so already, you can follow this newsletter by signing up for our weekly email, adding our RSS feed to your favorite feed reader, or checking in on our archive page.

I plan to publish two very late month-in-review post covering the previous three months. I have some real work in the next week, but I expect to be able to publish a few new substantive articles.

Until August 23,
Cura ut valeas -- Nicholas A. Ferrell.