Newsletter Leaf Journal CCXLIII 〜 Dr. Thinknewsletter
Issue 243 of The Newsletter Leaf Journal covers seven new posts from NLJ and ECS, 21 links from around the web, and our most-visited articles of the week and struggles with our long-time local analytics solution.
Welcome to the 243rd 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 was somewhat less than productive this past week, but I still have a full newsletter of news and notes and links from around the web. Let's get to it with our final newsletter of August 2025.
Leaves from the week that was
Let's check in on what I have been up to since mailing Newsletter 242.
It took until late August for me to publish July 2025 at The New Leaf Journal. While you may think something along the lines of oh great another late month-review, I will have you know that July was a good month so it is well-worth reviewing. As part of my efforts to make August a good month, I published Thinkbot Visits The New Leaf Journal. I had read a blog post complaining about a new web crawler named Thinkbot and its disingenuous blocking instructions. The post jumped out to me because Thinkbot is probably trying to scrape/ingest The New Leaf Journal as you are reading the instant newsletter.
Things were busier on The Emu Café Social, where I published five new posts. I offered some privacy-friendly book-linking recommendations in Re; Linking to books online. I revealed the first "anime" I ever watched in Samurai Pizza Cats Memories. Having previously written about flying Southwest Airlines and airport coffee and Southwest's new coffee provider, I covered the acquisition of Southwest's new coffee provider in Keurig Dr. Pepper Acquires Peet’s. An interesting video game preservation question caught my attention for Should Switch 2 Key Cards Be Preserved?. I discussed my new feed reading device in Debloating Fire Tablet. Finally, I offered some qualified praise for the packing tape on my rental tuxedo box in The Black Tux Box.
Leaves from around the web
If I already gave you enough to read in the form of new articles, you should probably read more. Here are 21 suggestions from around the web.
This day in history
MacArthur Lands at Atsugi Airfield: August 30, 1945
Francis P. Sempa for The American Spectator. August 29, 2025.
"Eighty years ago, on August 30, 1945, Gen. Douglas MacArthur landed unarmed at Atsugi airfield in preparation for the surrender ceremony, which was set to take place on the battleship Missouri on September 2. “Of all the amazing deeds in the war, I regard General MacArthur’s personal landing at Atsugi as the greatest of the lot,” said Winston Churchill. Was this merely hyperbole on Churchill’s part?"
TIGER WOODS / ... and then there's everybody else. What it looked like to a bystander at his peak.
Gare Joyce. August 4, 2024.
Revisiting what may have been the culmination of Tiger Woods' (or any golfer's) absolute peak. A good link for today since Woods clinched the 2000 Bell Canadian Open 25 years to the day.
Tiger Woods Reached the Apex of Golf Greatness — And That Was Just One of His Peaks
Neil Paine. July 30, 2025.
By one metric, Scottie Scheffler's 2024 was the 4th best season for a golfer since 1983. He is also the only golfer not named "Tiger Woods" in the top-seven.
Reading well
College English majors can't read
Kitten. May 20, 2025.
Demonstrated with quotes that would fit right in my collection of things overheard posts.
Is Our Kids Reading? (Plus Friday Essays)
Pascal-Emmanuel Gorby at PolicySphere. August 29, 2025.
Come for takes on why the kids can't read; stay for the extra links.
They walk through Japan so you don't have to
Landscapes of Uniqueness, Inner and Outer, on a Walk Through Japan.
Tomonori Tanaki for National Geographic. August 14, 2025.
"After an incredible trek of nearly 1,100 kilometers over 70 days from the southern city of Yamaguchi, I entered Tokyo chatting with a friend in the USA via FaceTime."
Thoughts on Japan
Joseph Petitti. August 14, 2019.
Now you know what you need to know.
Please note that I wrote the first caption below in April and waited four months for the perfect opportunity to use it
Bales of cocaine wash up on Texas beaches
Brad Matthews for The Washington Times. April 23, 2025.
Texas throws down the gauntlet. Will Florida take it up?
Coast Guard Offloads Record Drug Haul in Port Everglades
Mike Shuler for gCaptain. August 25, 2025.
The Coast Guard picked up the gauntlet and threw it down. Don't mess with Florida. Back to you, Texas.
Problem and solutions (the captions tell a story)
Still booting after all these years: The people stuck using ancient Windows computers
Thomas Germain for BBC. August 24, 2025.
Have they heard of Linux?
Microsoft surprises MS-DOS fans with remake of ancient text editor that works on Linux
Benji Edwards for ars technica. June 23, 2025.
We even have their favorite text editors now.
Linux's Floppy Disk Driver Code Sees Some Cleanups In 2025
Michael Larabel for Phoronix. August 25, 2025.
We're working on supporting their favorite hardware. It's time to switch from Windows 3.1 to Linux. Aside: I have a floppy disk story. I should add that to my article to-do list.
Time for some measured responses to the news of the day
Can Labubu Mania Last Forever?
Sean Craig for The Daily Upside. August 24, 2025.
It's probably a harbinger of the end times so I guess it depends on how you define forever.
Festival Noise Pollution Reach
Wouter Groeneveld at Brain Baking. August 24, 2025.
If I had a music festival near me that was loud enough to invade my home with 42-74 dB, I would be willing to give the de facto Afghan government's positions on music a fair hearing.
Checking in on both "Republics" of China
Chinese Police Beat Parents with Batons for Protesting School Bullying
Josh Hayward for Breitbart. August 7, 2025.
I have opined in several anime review articles that writing interesting anime stories about bullying requires a deft touch. Tackling bullying (by which we mean tacking people who complain about their children being bullied) in China seems more like a brute force affair.
Taiwan's denial of communist role in World War Two is 'blasphemy', China says
Reuters. August 27, 2025.
If it would please the Chinese government, we could talk about how it took Chairman Mao managed to expeditiously run up a bigger body count of his own countrymen and women than the invading Japanese Empire managed in an eight-year war.
Baby steps to giant strides
What we really need is an open smartphone
Cybrkyd. October 18, 2022.
That is one part of my concept for the ideal phone, so it goes without saying that I agree. But GrapheneOS will have to suffice for the time being.
“Streamers earn more money from playing games than devs do from making them.” Japanese indie devs voice need for revenue-sharing with content creators
Dorde P for Automation West. August 26, 2025.
There is a real problem and some good ideas here, but we can start small by insisting that the streamers at least include links to the games they're streaming.
Fraud alert!
Fake college websites surge amid AI enhancements, bilking students with bogus fees
Sean Salai for The Washington Times. August 27, 2025.
I admit to laughing when I read "Western University of Miami" and refuse to apologize.
How an electric scooter sharing scam fleeced millions of dollars from Americans
Erik Ortiz, Bracey Harris, and Kevin Collier for NBC News. August 26, 2025.
This is bad, yes. But speaking for myself, I am most concerned about the "non-scam" electric scooter ride share programs that are threatening to invade New York City.
A life well-lived
PHOTOS: Decorated WWII Veteran Considered America's Last Surviving 'Ace' Pilot Dies at 103
Amy Furr for Breitbart. August 24, 2025.
Interview videos included.
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 XXXVI (August 23-29) along with their 2025 and historic (going back 2021) weekly ranking statistics.
-
Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search
Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 17, 2025.
2025: 10 appearances and 5 top placements. -
Amazon "Cargo Bikes" in Brooklyn
Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 9, 2025.
2025: 18 appearances and 7 top placements. -
Dragonair Safari in Pokémon Yellow
Nicholas A. Ferrell. October 5, 2023.
2025: 12 appearances.
Cumulative: 14 appearances. -
Victory Chimes Schooner in Brooklyn Bridge Park
Nicholas A. Ferrell. December 5, 2024.
2025 & Cumulative: 4 appearances and 1 top placement. -
Height differences in anime romances
Nicholas A. Ferrell. March 22, 2023.
2025: 3 appearances.
Cumulative: 18 appearances and 7 top placements.
Analysis
We had a minor hiccup in this week's rankings in that we are missing about 5 hours of statistics Wednesday (discussed below). It is possible that may have affected the fifth spot in the ranking, but not the top four.
Our top three from last week returns in the same order from the previous week, with the top two again separating themselves from the rest of the pack. Amazon Cargo Bikes had a small lead going into Friday, but my article on Google Search's former Pokémon catching mini-game over-took it on Friday with its best day of the week. Speaking of those two articles, they are currently separated by a single visit for the top-spot in August, with Amazon Cargo Bikes clinging to an increasingly shaky lead. The battle recalls our August 2023 race wherein The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei had a late surge to take the top position from The Pokémon Special Split in Generation 2 – Statistics and Analysis by a single visit (coincidentally, those two articles were 7th and 8th in the current week).
News leaf journal
Koko Analytics, the local page counting solution I have employed since July 2020, had a major update this week. The major update required migrating data from old database tables to new database tables. This update did not go well -- and a cursory review of the plugin forum reveals it did not go well for many sites. Between Wednesday and Friday, 12 versions of the plugin were released to deal with migration issues or other issues, some of which raised new issues. I tried at least five of the versions and was unable to successfully migrate all of my analytics data on The New Leaf Journal, with the best covering only articles published through part of 2023 and the worst seemingly assigning views to very old articles at random. It was only thanks to my backup plugin (UpdraftPlus) that I did not lose all of our statistics. (Note: I did appear to have successfully migrated on the much smaller The Emu Café Social).
At this stage, it does not look like I will be able to upgrade to the new version of Koko Analytics while being assured of keeping all of data. Moreover, I have suffered something of a loss of confidence in how the updates were handled this week in that they turned production sites into testing grounds (the support fora suggests some sites with more limited server resources had more pressing issues than incomplete data migration).
(Of course, Koko Analytics is a free and open source plugin with a premium version I did not buy, so it is not as if I expect or demand no issues, but for my purposes what happened this week introduces way too much instability into my project. A big part of why I have been a happy Koko Analytics user for five years is because it serves (or served?) my limited "analytics" needs with very little fuss.)
While testing is needed, I am strongly considering running my own instance Umami Analytics (note my own instance as opposed to using the paid developer-hosted service) and using that for my projects going forward, but I will only make the final decision after (1) testing it on Emu Café Social and (2) seeing if a new Koko Analytics release fixes my migration issues in the interim. (One advantage of the switch would be that I could use Umami on non-WordPress projects and have all of the information in a single place.) In the event I switch, I will save the Koko Analytics data I have so that I will still be able to calculate our most-visited articles of 2025 or our most-visited articles of all time.
I will discuss any changes on The New Leaf Journal if and when they occur.
Taking leaf
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 expect to be a little busy next week, but I will see if I can be more productive on the article publishing front than I was in the previous week.
Until September 6,
Cura ut valeas -- Nicholas A. Ferrell.