Newsletter Leaf Journal CXLIV 〜 54-hole week
Issue 244 of The Newsletter Leaf Journal includes links to five new NLJ and ECS posts, 27 links from around the web, and news and notes about The New Leaf Journal's change in page visit counting (still local and privacy-friendly, of course).
Welcome to the 244th 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.
My publishing output last week was sad. However, I did make a couple of notable changes to The New Leaf Journal which will affect this humble newsletter. All will be recapped and explained below...
Leaves from the week that was
I only managed to publish a single New Leaf Journal article since mailing Newsletter 243. I was the groomsman at a wedding on Sunday, August 31 (previewed on August 30). While walking to the venue in Roslyn, New York, I took a photo which formed the centerpiece of a short post titled Bird Crossing Sign By Swan Club on the Harbor.
I published four new posts on The Emu Café Social. In Salesforce Layoffs I wondered about Salesforce's 2025 H-1B visa petitioning. News about the upcoming global release of the remake of The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky caused me to revisit two articles I wrote referencing one of my all-time favorite games. I mused about drink-naming trends in Death Wish Coffee?. Finally, I noted a neat stat about the 2024-25 Miami Heat which ties into an article I wrote on NLJ back in April.
Leaves from around the web
My article output was admittedly week this past week. Moreover, for reasons I explain below, I do not have our regular most-visited article list for last week. How do I make up for this newsletter's shortcomings? How about 27 links from around the web instead of the usual 21?
Looking sharp
3,000-year-old funnel axe found on Borneo
The History Blog. August 30, 2025.
It looks nice. Probably not too practical, but snazzy.
The Japanese City Known for Making Knives That Are a Cut Above
Claire Turrell for Smithsonian Magazine. August 29, 2025.
I'll take the best one for cutting thoroughly cooked fish.
Returning to 1999
1999: Blogs Burst Onto the Scene, but RSS Is Slow To Settle
Richard MacManus for Cybercultural. August 29, 2025.
I read this article via Mr. MacManus' RSS feed.
What the Internet Was Like in 1999
Richard MacManus for Cybercultural. September 3, 2025.
I'm disappointed we don't address the old school Pokémon urban legends but we do learn that MSN had a much better home page in 1999 than it has in 2025.
Interview with Stuart Zagnit
Johto Times. December 26, 2024.
The interviewed the voice of Professor Oak but never asked why Professor Oak lied when he said there were only 150 Pokémon.
More 1999 and the Summer of George
His Year: Jeff George 1999
Robbie Marriage for Sports Passion Project. August 25, 2023.
I started following football one year after Jeff George's career was involuntarily ended. I recall that there was talk about how someone should sign Jeff George (often led by his high school teammate-turned-sportswriter, Jason Whitlock) in the years following his last season. It was fun reading the backstory but you'll need to settle in because this is a long backstory.
Who’s Responsible for the St. George Hotel Awning Collapse?
Matthew Sedacca for Curbed. August 5, 2025.
Probably the LLC responsible for maintaining it followed by the MTA which quickly disavows any responsibility for safety in its own Subway stations.
They go together but you have to think about it
Fighting Citizenship Discrimination in Employment
Kevin Lynn for Institute of Sound Public Policy. June 20, 2025.
Going to be a rough time to run an H-1B visa mill.
Trump: ‘No, I am not dead, it’s fake news’
Chris Nelson for Brussels Signal. September 3, 2025.
Indian bot farms inspire the 21st century version of Ego sum, Ego existo.
Russia trades
North Korea’s Economy Surges to 8-Year High — Thanks to Military Ties with Russia
John Hayward for Breitbart. August 29, 2025.
The wages of the men for flour and goats trade.
Hot mic picks up Putin and Xi discussing organ transplants and immortality
Reuters. September 5, 2023.
Russia has more than enough human rights issues without discussing "organ transplants" with China.
Making ereaders complicated
This DIY eReader has dual E Ink displays for a more book-like reading experience
Brad Linder for Liliputing. August 11, 2025.
I respect the ingenuity but we're losing the plot.
Jailbreaking my Kindle Paperwhite
Vida at broken.star. August 13, 2025.
It looks easy enough to do (provided you subsequently keep your Kindle from updating), but I suggest a PocketBook for those who want to customize their newer ereaders without their ereaders fighting back.
Acknowledging my limitations
Think You Can Dance? Check Out These Cockatoos. Research Finds the Parrots Have 30 Moves in Their Repertoire
Rudy Molinek for Smithsonian Magazine. August 7, 2025.
I don't think I can dance so I'll leave it to the cockatoos.
Link Love: Happy Lefthander Day – The Well-Appointed Desk
The Well-Apporited Desk. August 13, 2025.
Belated celebration of all of our left-handed friends. I'm not a lefty myself. I'm proudly nondextrous.
Japanese household cleaner maker releases survival horror scrubbing game on Steam
Master Blaster for SoraNews24. August 21, 2025.
I'd be tempted to review this masterpiece for Halloween but it looks very first person and I don't enjoy vertigo (sorry to those of you waiting for me to review Call of Duty).
O tempora! O mores!
Japanese bank’s founders blood-signed promise to commit samurai-style suicide if they committed fraud
Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. November 27, 2024.
There was a time we could trust the banks.
Temptations of smartphones, high-calorie foods mean no new horse racing jockeys for Japan next year
Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. September 3, 2025.
I wonder if any of them combined illicit phone usage with snacks.
Time for our big tech round-up
Google Photos now lets you turn images into short videos & remix them in different styles
Paul for AlternativeTo. July 24, 2025.
They killed Picasa to develop one-click AI slop capabilities in Google Photos.
The new Instagram Map is creeping everyone out
Molly Libergall for Morning Brew. August 9, 2025.
There's a good way to avoid being personally creeped out by changes to the Instagram app.
Anti-Israel Microsoft Employees Arrested for Storming President's Office Partner With Bail Fund Led By Murderer Who Bashed Man's Skull With Hammer
Jessica Schwalb and Jessica Costescu for The Washington Free Beacon. September 2, 2025.
This level of descriptiveness in the headline constrains my ability to add additional commentary.
The Old Leaf Journal
Inside the 'Leading Scholars' Association' That Declared a Genocide in Gaza. It Includes Human Rights Activists, Psychologists, Museum Professionals, and Lots of Iraqis.
Collin Anderson for The Washington Free Beacon. September 3, 2025.
This story is the Platonic ideal of my 2023 critique of experts.
The defense against slop and brainrot
Paul Jun at Kimchi & Garbagool. August 9, 2025.
I recommend reading publications such as this one and websites such as that one.
Yes, I Texted the Number on the Sign
Kate Bingman-Burn for KBBBLOG. July 20, 2025.
Better than scanning the QR code on a sign.
In Defence of Pigeons
Naarm at Thinkings Space. August 26, 2025.
We're passionate about defending pigeons here at The New Leaf Journal. (Aside: This site has the best "home button" I have come across.)
Meet the miniaturist who painted exquisite portraits of the Gilded Age’s best-known characters
Ephemeral New York. August 18, 2025.
After learning about Amalia Küssner, return to The New Leaf Journal to learn about Laura Coombs Hills and John Henry Brown.
These Lizards Have So Much Lead in Their Blood, They Should Be Dead. Instead, They're Thriving
Sarah Kuta for Smithsonian Magazine. August 22, 2025.
We tried to tell you that lead is an essential character-building mineral.
Deferring most-turned leaves of the newsletter week
You may be wondering where our regular most-turned leaves of the newsletter week section is. I will have a ranking for this past week, but it is not ready yet. Allow me to explain.
Last week, I indicated that I was planning to drop Koko Analytics, the local page-counting solution that we had used since July 2020. I in fact dropped Koko Analytics on August 30, 2025, not long after I sent the newsletter, discarding our collected stats for a fresh start. I had suggested in that newsletter that I would switch to using a local instance of Umami Analytics. However, I decided that while Umami worked, it collects more data than I am comfortable with, so I abandoned that idea.
We went through the week without any analytics solution. After doing some testing later in the week on The Emu Café Social, I decided to install Statify on The New Leaf Journal yesterday (being September 5, 2025) in the late afternoon. (Fun fact for very long-time readers: I chose Koko Analytics over Statify back in July 2020 (that choice was probably correct at the time)). Statify, like Koko Analytics, is a WordPress plugin which works entirely locally and counts page views. Unlike Koko Analytics, Statify has no option for trying to track visitors -- it simply tracks page views and referrers. It seems to be working well in my early testing, so if all continues going well I will use Statify to produce our most-visited article ranking for the week of September 6-12.
But what about the week of August 30-September 5?
While I did not have any analytics plugin installed for the previous week, I do have webmaster stats for Google, Bing, and Yandex. These stats track clicks in those respective search engines (note this has nothing to do with Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarify, or Yandex Metrica). While these stats only show New Leaf Journal link clicks in search engines, they are good enough for one newsletter week ranking. By "they," I mean Google, which typically made up somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-60% of our daily traffic according to Koko Analytics. Bing and Yandex are far less significant, but we can consider them extra data points. We will not have DuckDuckGo (our second-biggest search referrer, far behind Google) or Brave Search (usually our fourth biggest search referrer behind Google/DuckDuckGo/Bing, but it occasionally moves into the top three or drops to fifth behind Yandex), or other sources of visits, but again, Google makes up enough of our traffic for a credible ranking. I will spoil one result: Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search is having our best-run of Google success in 2025.
Why, you may ask, do we not have the ranking today? Google usually takes a few days to post complete statistics, so I will give our big tech search friend time to finalize the results for August 30-September 5 and post them next week. I will fold in Bing and Yandex stats, although they are unlikely to move the needle much.
(Note: I will discuss the whole "analytics" change in an article in the near future.)
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.
While I made some behind-the-scenes changes at The New Leaf Journal, August ended and September began with a whimper as far as new articles go. I should be a little bit less busy this upcoming week, so I look forward to finishing some of my in-progress projects and having more new posts to share in next week's newsletter.
Until September 13,
Cura ut valeas -- Nicholas A. Ferrell.