October 25, 2025

Newsletter Leaf Journal CCLI 〜 Mahiru, Allen, and George

Newsletter Leaf Journal 251 features a link to the newest NLJ and ECS articles on everything from season two of The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten to OSS clients for NordVPN, 27 links from around the world wide web covering everything from NBA gambling scandals to Halloween history, and other news and notes from the week that was and the week to come at the NLJ.

Welcome to the 251st 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 did not publish much last week. But in my defense, what I did publish was long and I have a good selection of around the web links for your reading enjoyment in this last newsletter of October 2025.

Leaves from the week that was

I only published one New Leaf Journal article since mailing Newsletter 250, but it was a labor-intensive piece. Covering anime teaser trailers is not something I would ordinarily do, but given our humble online magazine's storied history with an anime called The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten, including my specious November 2023 article about the real announcement of a second season finishing in third place in our 2024 article ranking, I had to make an exception. The exception comes to you as Reviewing Teaser Trailers for Angel Next Door Season 2, wherein I tackle two teaser trailers for the upcoming second season of the anime, which is slated to begin airing in April 2026. It takes a while for me to actually get around to the trailers since I begin with the backstory of my coverage of the anime coupled with and a new spoiler-filled assessment of the first season. My generally spoiler-free original review of the first season comes as recommended prefatory reading.

Things were a little busier over on The Emu Café Social.

• Tokyo Mirage Sessions FE: Prologue Impressions: I am playing Tokyo Mirage Sessions FE along with a friend (not in person). Instead of sharing my impressions with him directly, I decided to post them on ECS. This set covers the prologue. Chapter one should be coming soon.
• Crediting NordVPN for OSS Client Announcement: While I do not use NordVPN, I took the time to credit the company for its announcement on making its Linux GUI client open source. Credit is due not only for open sourcing itself, but also because the announcement makes clear what is open source and what is not.
• Anime, Iverson, and Costanza: Wherein I praise myself for tying many disparate references together in my Angel Next Door trailer article on NLJ.
• Windows 10 to 11: Enter Linux For Old Computers?: I offer a recommendation for people with Windows 10 devices that cannot be upgraded to Windows 11.

Now for our next topic...

Leaves from around the web

While I did publish one new long article, I suspect it will not be of interest to all of our newsletter subscribers. But fear not, I make up for my failures with 27 links from around the web instead of our usual 21.

I had been sitting on this link since early February...

Terry Rozier Doesn’t Fit the Usual Profile of Sports Betting Scandals — And Leagues Should Be Worried
Neil Paine. February 5, 2025.

I almost used this link a number of times, including last week (I kid you not). You'd have thought I had insider information if I dropped it in Newsletter 250. Talk about a missed opportunity! In any event, my original draft comment from February was that separate from the now-criminal allegations against Mr. Rozier, it is not at all difficult for an NBA player who controls the ball regularly to engage in some very subtle manipulation (what Mr. Rozier is accused of having done would fall in the less subtle category).

More on basketball gambling stories

'Nightmare for the league': Gambling scandal roils the NBA
Andrew Greif and Rohan Nadkarni for NBC News. October 24, 2025.

The NBA leadership wishes it could turn back the clock to the days when it was able to hand-wave away the Tim Donaghy scandal. Speaking of turning back the clock, I previously covered Mr. Billups' greatest pre-controversy basketball triumph: Winning the NBA Finals MVP with the 2003-04 champion Detroit Pistons.

Four Stars the NBA Wouldn’t Touch, 1969
Bob Kusa at From Way Downtown. July 12, 2021. (Reprinting 1969 article by John Devaney.)

Connie Hawkins is one of the more interesting what could have been cases had he not been initially banned from the NBA.

Violent temper brings down Gambino Mafia family capo and his crew as it tried to dominate NYC carting and demolition industries
David Amoruso for Gangsters Inc. October 19, 2025.

This recent mob story is not about the NBA-adjacent gambling saga but...

Reputed mobster busted in NBA gambling scandal pleaded guilty last week in NYC trash biz racket case
Priscilla DeGregory and Ella Morrison for the New York Post. October 24, 2025.

...One of its dramatic personae was working on the gambling business while working in trash pickup, demolition, and threatening to burn down family restaurants on the side.

They say my middle name is "Elite Link Connections"

Married couples in Japan must have the same surname, so does Mr. Sato regret taking his wife’s?
Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. September 20, 2025.

Speaking of which...

‘Stealth Husband’ Pledges Support for Japan’s First Female Prime Minister
John Hayward for Breitbart. October 22, 2025.

"According to the first First Gentleman in Japan’s history, he adopted her surname for their second marriage because she defeated him in a game of rock-paper-scissors."

Indict a ham sandwich

Beyond fruit sandwiches — Japan has cake sandwiches too!【Taste test】
Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. October 20, 2025.

They're running out of ideas.

Oy Vey! United Flight to Tel Aviv Announces Its Only In-Flight Meal Is a Ham Sandwich
Jon Levine for The Washington Free Beacon. October 21, 2025.

I wonder if they ever make this mistake on flights to majority Muslim countries.

America’s Favorite Sandwich is Officially the Grilled Cheese
Vending Connection. October 22, 2025.

Try telling that to United Airlines.

Duck and cover: Halloween is coming

The Halloween trick mischief-making city kids at the turn of the century played on hapless adults
Ephemeral New York. October 20, 2025.

Halloween in Brooklyn was awful last year but I suppose I should be thankful that I was not assaulted by children wielding socks full of flower.

When Halloween Was All Tricks and No Treats
Lesley Bannatyne for Zocalo Public Square. October 26, 2017. (HT previous link.)

My study of Halloween in Japan suggests that Japan is speed-running the American Halloween experience.

Tokyo’s Shibuya gets into Halloween spirit with warnings against public drinking and rowdiness
Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. October 6, 2025.

Looks like it still doesn't want to be Shibooya like it was in the first episode of Jellyfish Can't Swim in the Night.

Pumpkin races draw large crowds to annual event in Oregon
Claire Rush for AP. October 20, 2025.

The headline omits the fact that the race involves kayaking.

Solution and solution

The Best Proposal We've Seen For Rural Hospitals
Pascal-Emmanuel Gorby at PolicySphere. October 15, 2025.

Interesting proposal. Here's another idea...

Nurse D'Brickashaw Ferguson Ready For His New Career
NFL Alumni. June 12, 2025.

"The Jets’ former 11-year veteran last month graduated from Thomas Jefferson University’s (PA) nursing program. He proudly follows in the footsteps of his mother and grandmother who themselves were nurses."

AI perfects education, entertainment, journalism, and law

South Korea’s AI textbooks fail after rushed rollout
Junhyup Kwon for Rest of World. October 15, 2025.

"The government spent more than 1.2 trillion won ($850 million) on the AI textbook program, including on equipment and teacher training. The publishing companies invested around 800 billion won ($567 million) to develop the textbooks."

Indonesia’s film industry embraces AI to make Hollywood-style movies for cheap
Linda Yulisman for Rest of World. October 10, 2025.

I don't see any superhero movies or sequels so I'm not sure how Hollywood-style this is.

Business Insider yanked 40 essays with suspect bylines. Are they related?
Scott Nover and Aaron Schaffer for The Washington Post (via MSN). September 6, 2025.

I don't know if we confirmed that they use the same large language model.

Judge slams NYCHA tenants for 'garbage' AI lawsuit
Hannah Fierick for the New York Post. October 20, 2025.

Before AI, pro se litigants would have had a harder time supporting their quasi-legal arguments with fictitious cases.

Sporting titans

Can Wemby make the MVP leap? (HT Neil Paine)
Joseph George at Silver Bulletin. October 7, 2025.

Some greats made an "MVP caliber" leap in year three, with LeBron James and Dwyane Wade being two examples from recent memory (recent for me, at least... can't speak for the "kids") Of course the greatest Spur of them all, Tim Duncan, made All NBA First Team as a rookie and won the NBA Finals MVP after finishing third in MVP voting in his second season, but he was, to be fair, quite a bit older on entry than Mr. Wembanyama.

Pogačar Shatters Records on Passo di Ganda | Il Lombardia 2025
Karlas Ozols for Lanterne Rouge. October 11, 2025.

Many cyclists would be content to call it a year after winning their 4th Tour de France, shattering some decades-old climbing records in the process. After some brief R&R, Mr. Pogačar successfully defended his title in the World Championship road race before winning his 5th consecutive Il Lobardia, posting his best-ever performance in the race.

Was Shohei Ohtani’s NLCS Game 4 the greatest baseball performance ever? Who wins the World Series? A conversation
Harry Enten for CNN. October 24, 2025.

I am not qualified to opine on this specific question, but you're in good territory if the question needs to be raised at all.

Struggle and persevere

Ed Latimore Memoir: a Remarkable Look at How He Faced Struggle With Courage
Rob Henderson for City Journal. September 12, 2025.

"I first encountered Latimore in 2019 through his posts on Twitter (now X), where he had carved out a niche as an astute observer of struggle, discipline, and self-mastery. His writing was unusually sharp, and when I learned about his background—an impoverished childhood in Pittsburgh’s public housing projects, battles with addiction, a professional boxing career, service in the Army National Guard, and eventual graduation from college—his insights clicked into place. My own life bears some resemblance to his: I grew up in foster homes, joined the military at 17, struggled with alcohol, didn’t begin college until my mid-twenties, and also wrote a memoir at a relatively young age."

Rob Henderson, Ed Latimore: Suffering, Discipline, and Self-Mastery
Rob Henderson and Ed Latimore at City Journal. October 15, 2025.

"I enlisted at 28, doing basic training with teenagers. For them, it was life-changing. For me, it wasn’t that tough—run fast, do the drills, eat when they tell you. I’d already lived harder than that."

How I bring you beautiful images in NLJ articles

My Complete AI Content Process for Ahrefs
Ryan Law for Ahrefs Blog. August 5, 2025.

Yet here I am still writing alt text descriptions for images by hand.

Is It Worth It To Optimize Images For Your Site?
Wouter Groeneveld at Brain Baking. October 23, 2025.

I not only vote "yes," but I also showed off my method.

Most-turned leaves of the newsletter week

In each edition of the newsletter, I share our five most-visited articles of the week. This week's list comes courtesy of Statify, an entirely local and cookieless page visit counting solution for WordPress. Below, you will find the five most-visited articles of 2025 Newsletter Week XLIV (October 18-24) with their 2025 and historic (dating back to 2021) weekly ranking information.

Top-five articles of October 18-24

1. Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 17, 2025.
   2025: 18 appearances and 12 top placements.

2. Amazon "Cargo Bikes" in Brooklyn
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 9, 2025.
   2025: 26 appearances and 8 top placements.

3. Height differences in anime romances
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 22, 2023.
   2025: 7 appearances
   Cumulative: 22 appearances and 7 top placements.

4. Installing Ubuntu Touch on a Google Nexus 7 (2013)
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. July 5, 2021.
   2025: 4 appearances.
   Cumulative: 101 appearances and 4 top placements.

5. The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. March 14, 2021.
   2025: 6 appearances.
   Cumulative: 159 appearances and 75 top placements.

Analysis

Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search continued its recent dominant streak with its 11th top-placement in 12 weeks, trailed by the most-common runner-up, Amazon "Cargo Bikes" in Brooklyn. However, it continues to slowly come back to Earth in terms of Google traffic, so there is a chance we may see more dynamism at the top of the ranking in the waning weeks of 2025. Spots 3-5 were not terribly impressive this week in terms of their actual visitor count, but we had a bit of a throw-back with the only two articles to have at least 100 weekly ranking appearances holding down positions four and five.

News leaf journal

I removed ActivityPub functionality from The New Leaf Journal. This will most likely mean very little to most (if not all) newsletter subscribers, but I explained how it worked when I first implemented it back in 2023. In short, it turned The New Leaf Journal into an ActivityPub instance, which made it possible to follow the site directly from Mastodon and similar ActivityPub-based clients (I only tested with Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Bluesky via a bridge). The issue was that NLJ seemed to stop updating on October 8. I suspect it had to do with the fact that I used a blog profile for NLJ instead of the default author profiles (where each author has an account), something necessitated by the dual fact that (A) ActivityPub uses the author username for profiles and (B) on NLJ the username you see (e.g., https://thenewleafjournal.com/author/naferrell is not the actual username). I use author profiles on The Emu Café Social and ActivityPub continues to work as expected there (you can follow @naferrell@social.emucafe.org from your favorite ActivityPub server). I expect that I will re-implement ActivityPub on NLJ at some point, but my limited time at the moment is better spent working on new articles than trying to figure out why ActivityPub was not behaving as expected.

If you happen to use Mastodon or another ActivityPub-based social media server, I will now have all new NLJ articles posted automatically to my personal Mastodon account: https://linuxrocks.online/@nafnlj. If you use Bluesky (wouldn't be my first recommendation...), you can follow me via a bridge at https://bsky.app/profile/nafnlj.linuxrocks.online.ap.brid.gy (you can also follow my ECS profile via a bridge at https://bsky.app/profile/naferrell.social.emucafe.org.ap.brid.gy). I will post an update if and when I re-implement ActivityPub on NLJ directly.

Taking leaf

This newsletter is running long with the extra links from around the web, so I will cut it short here. While I make no specific promises, I do expect to have a few time-sensitive articles ready to go for your reading enjoyment before the end of October.

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. You can also sign up for a separate newsletter which sends daily digests of our new posts here.

Until November 1,
Cura ut valeas -- Nicholas A. Ferrell.