Welcome to the 257th 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 had a fairly productive week of publishing. Below, I share my newest posts along with 21 links from around the web and other news and notes.

Leaves from the week that was

I published four new New Leaf Journal articles since mailing Newsletter 256.

My first and third articles dealt with adding text files to The New Leaf Journal for bot and human visitors: Adding a carbon.txt File and Adding Ads.txt to Website Without Ads. Both articles explain where these text files and their formatting specification come from. To be sure, we do not need either of these articles (the only .txt file I would say we need is robots.txt), but I am working on collecting all of the most common .txt files on our site (we should have more articles in this series in the next few weeks).

I turned a news report about Kyrgyzstan's recent parliamentary election into our newest Justin and Justina dialogue, Democracy and Vodka in Kyrgyzstan. I am loath to spoil the punchline here.

Finally, I wrote about Finally Solving My HDMI ARC Problems, finally concluding a saga that I first covered in an article published in October 2020.

Things were also exciting on The Emu Café Social side of things, with a good number of new posts.

• I wrote about my technical issues mailing last week's newsletter in What do you do when you can’t mail your newsletter? and Buttondown Canonical URLs,
• I turned a 2025 soda survey from The Vending Company into two posts: Things I Learned: Pepsi Over Coke? and Things I Learned: Diet Coke over Coke Zero?.
• I also learned about lacrosse in the Olympics and the true original Wizard of Oz movies.
• I offered my two cents On the BlackBerry-Inspired Lotus Diplomat (I suspect it will cost quite a bit more than two cents).
• In Our Ads.txt File, I note that The New Leaf Journal is not the only site with a shiny new Ads.txt.
• In Accountability for the 2020 Beirut Port Blast I suggest that many of the individuals ultimately responsible for the explosion have already brought to justice, albeit not for other reasons.
• Finally, I linked to a good article on ESPN explaining the concept of Negative Trade Value in the NBA (also applicable to other sports leagues with salary caps/luxury taxes).

With my new posts accounted for, let us proceed to the around the web section of this newsletter.

Leaves from around the web

Unlike last week, no one can say that I did leave you with plenty to read. But I am not content to stop there. Let us take a look at what is happening around the world wide web.

Under the influence

Washington state woman arrested for laughing gas-related DUIs
Brad Matthews for The Washington Times. November 29, 2025.

While this is no "laughing matter" I must note that we are discussing four laughing gas driving offenses in 12 days (where was this woman getting all of that laughing gas?).

Raccoon goes on drunken rampage at liquor store in Virginia and passes out on bathroom floor
AP (via The Washington Times). December 3, 2025.

This report highlights a difference between people and raccoons. You would expect a person to fall through a ceiling after drinking. But here the raccoon fell through the ceiling before drinking.

On a ro[ll]blox

Roblox CEO Makes A Fool Of Himself In Car-Crash Interview (HT Pixy Misa)
John Walker for Kotaku. November 21, 2025.

Pro tip: Never answer a question about child predators on your game platform by talking about great opportunities. This is a fair summary of what was a subpar interview performance by the Roblox CEO (see the full interview). I offered a take on one Roblox problem in the Around the Web section of Newsletter 248.

Russia blocks Roblox, Apple's FaceTime amid growing rebuke of foreign tech platforms (HT Ambient Irony).
Reuters (via CBC). December 3, 2025.

I was surprised to learn that the Russian government has been following this humble newsletter. Maybe they would be interested in also taking note of other issues?

Like clockwork

Any Old TV Can Be A Clock With Arduino
Lewin Day for Hackaday. November 27, 2025.

It's a cool clock. Probably not an energy-friendly clock. But cool nevertheless.

You can now buy a Japanese train station clock in Japan
Oona McGee for SoraNews24. November 30, 2025.

I suppose that I could but (1) it would be very expensive once you factor in travel, (2) Denver to New York City was already pushing it for me, and (3) they would probably be sold out by the time I made it to Japan.

A Stylish Moon And Tide Clock For The Mantlepiece
Lewin Day for Hackaday. December 2, 2025.

That is a cool clock. Alas, I don't have a 3D printer. I also do not know how to use 3D printers.

Revisiting newsletters past

Immigration officers arrest Harvard professor who fired BB gun outside synagogue
Stephen Dinan for The Washington Times. December 4, 2025.

(See ATW story in Newsletter 250). The signs were probably there when Harvard filed a petition on his behalf.

Q&A: How Data Golf Became the Go-To Site for Modern Golf Analytics
Neil Paine. September 5, 2025.

The backstory behind a golf statistics site that we indirectly referenced in the Around the Web section of Newsletter 243.

Putting differences aside

Four EU countries pull out of Eurovision as Israel’s place confirmed
Chris Nelson for Brussels Signal. December 5, 2025.

It is genuinely heartwarming to see these four countries set their hostility toward Israel aside and credit it with inspiring them to escape Eurovision.

PRC–Russia–DPRK Relations Grow Closer
Seong-hyon Lee for Jamestown. November 25, 2025.

Very charitable of the People's Republic of China and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to engage in harmonious relations with the the Russian Federation, which leaves "People" and "Republic" out of its official name.

Oldest animals

Oldest resident of San Diego Zoo, a Galapagos tortoise, dies at about 141 years old
Jaimie Ding for AP (via The Washington Times). November 25, 2025.

"As the world changed around her, she delighted visitors with her sweet, shy personality. She lived through two World Wars and 20 U.S. presidents." (Born during the administration of the honorable Chester A. Arthur.)

The Oldest Mule in Europe Found in Barcelona, Sacrificed and Buried With a Woman 2,700 Years Ago in the Early Iron Age
Guillermo Carvajal for LBV. November 25, 2025.

"The discovery and correct identification of this animal push back by several centuries the evidence of mule breeding in the far western Mediterranean, and paint a more complex and rich picture of the relationships between the indigenous peoples of the Iron Age, their most valuable animals, and the external influences that shaped their world."

The latest in bird research

Birds Are Beeping and Booping like R2-D2. Their Mimicked Sounds Are Helping Unlock the Secrets of Avian Communication
Sarah Kuta for Smithsonian Magazine. November 24, 2025.

Buried lede: They turned watching hours of YouTube videos of birds making robot noises into a research paper (well done).

Pigeons Rely on the Earth’s Magnetic Field to Navigate. Now, Researchers May Have Uncovered How They Do It
Sara Hashemi for Smithsonian Magazine. December 1, 2025.

Or why the 1895 French homing pigeon experiment succeeded.

Monk Parakeets Are Highly Social Birds, but They Slowly ‘Test the Waters’ When Making New Friends
Sarah Kuta for Smithsomian Magazine. December 2, 2025.

I wonder if the original dinosaurs were this well-adjusted.

Troubleshooting

Japanese indie developer shares insight on common programming “trap” that can occur when localizing games
Sayoko Narita for Automation West. August 14, 2023.

A decimal separator struggle.

Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
Reuters. February 13, 2025.

Everyone knows you have to monkey-proof your transformers.

Kuwait turns down the watt
B Izzak for Kuwait Times. April 17, 2025.

Something seems off about Kuwait of all places being unable to keep the lights on.

We're this close to the solution

Analysis: There are no shortcuts in Africa’s battle for productivity
Joël Té-Léssia Assoko for Semafor. March 31, 2025.

Maybe not but air conditioning is a shortcut to finding the shortcut.

Tiny storage container hotels become the latest craze in Japan, thanks to Hotel R9 The Yard
Oona McGee for SoraNews24. February 1, 2025.

They're so close to creating a very integrated travel experience.

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 is a bit confusing.

• Our stats for November 29-30 come from Statify.
• Our stats for December 1 come from a combination of my recollection of our Statify stats and hard data from Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Portal (note we do not use Google or Microsoft analytics, these stats are solely what is recorded by Google Search and Bing).
• Our stats for December 2-5 come courtesy of Koko Analytics, which I re-implemented after having dropped it at the end of August due to an update issue (we had been using it since July 2020). You can learn more about Koko Analytics, which works entirely locally, here.

Below, you will find the five most-visited articles of 2025 November 29-December 5 with their 2025 and historic (dating back to 2021) weekly ranking information.

1. Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 17, 2025.
   2025: 24 appearances and 18 top placements.

2. Uncle Susan is a Wolf Graffiti in Brooklyn
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. December 29, 2021.
   2025: 2 appearances.
   Cumulative: 4 appearances.

3. Adding a carbon.txt File
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. December 1, 2025.
   2025: First appearance.

4. Amazon "Cargo Bikes" in Brooklyn
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 9, 2025.
   2025: 32 appearances and 8 top placements.

5. Kazuya’s Hair Color in Rent-A-Girlfriend
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. August 9, 2025.
   2025: 4 appearances.

Analysis

• While there was some drama in putting this week's top five together, there was no drama in the top spot -- which went to Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search for the 17th time in 18 weeks (and by a wide margin at that). In terms of consistent week-to-week dominance, no article has performed as well since The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei in late 2021 and early 2022.
• With 18 top-placements, Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search has tied An In-Depth Look at Norton Safe Search for the second most all-time top-placements with 18. It will almost certainly break that tie in 2025 (I dare say far more likely than not next Saturday). Next up: The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei with 75 top-placements.
• Uncle Susan is a Wolf Graffiti in Brooklyn repeated its second-place finish from the previous week, making this the first year it has posted multiple weekly top-five finishes. The "Facebook surge" which pushed it into last week's ranking continued into Saturday, and it performed well enough late in the week to hold off Adding a carbon.txt File, which made a debut-week ranking placement thanks to being shared on Hacker News.
• Adding a carbon.txt File is the 52nd article to appear in a weekly ranking in 2025, extending our record.
• Because Amazon "Cargo Bikes" in Brooklyn made this week's ranking while Examining Whether Defense Wins NBA Championships did not, my cargo bike study has secured the distinction of posting the most weekly ranking appearances in 2025. There are not enough weeks left in the year for any other article to reach 32 placements. This will be the first time since 2021 where the article with the most weekly ranking appearances does not have the most top-placements (Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search has already secured the most top placements distinction).

News leaf journal

I had dropped Koko Analytics in late August after I had issues with a version upgrade. In the interim (from September 5 through December 1), I used Statify. Both Koko Analytics and Statify are entirely local open source page counting plugins for WordPress. I liked more aspects of Statify than not, although I ultimately decided to return to Koko Analytics on NLJ.

Statify Advantages

• Staify matches referrers to page views meaning that I could see, for example, which articles were receiving hits from DuckDuckGo and Brave Search.
• With a helper-plugin, it is easier to export Statify data in a readily readable way than Koko Analytics data.

Statify Disadvantages

• Statify's single database grows in size very quickly, dramatically outgrowing the size of Koko Analytics' multiple databases.
• I had more concerns regarding Statify's accuracy than Koko Analytics'. While the top articles recorded view totals were reasonable, I did find that Statify consistently showed 12-15% more Google referrals than Google Search Console, even after accounting for country-specific Google domains and Google image results. Because Statify records each hit as a line on the table, I noticed a consistent issue where a single article would receive 4-7 consecutive views, sometimes with a referrer. Statify also picked up more implausible visits than does Koko, for example page four of a tag archive when no other page from the tag archive had a recorded hit (Koko picks up some implausible visits to but far fewer than Statify).

I had been inclined to use Statify for the rest of 2025 before deciding between Statify and Koko Analytics for 2026. Two points "forced my hand" to change the plan (so to speak). Firstly, Statify's stats went a bit "bonkers" for some articles on December 1. I am reasonably confident my article on My Black Cat did not rack up 22 visits that morning (I did see a number of "consecutive hits"). Secondly, it stopped recording any hits around midnight despite the Statify tracking script returning the correct response header. I decided it was best to just switch to Koko instead of spending time diagnosing the Statify issue.

(I suspect the Statify issue had something to do with my using the JavaScript tracking script with a nonce and my browser cache settings for JavaScript, which I had lengthened over the weekend, which I have also suspected may have been behind the occasional over-counting issues, but that is just a hunch).

In any event, I am back with Koko Analytics for now and probably for the foreseeable future. I am however sticking with Statify on The Emu Café Social for the rest of 2025 at least so I will continue to monitor new developments in both plugins.

Taking leaf

This has been a long newsletter and I have places to be, 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. You can also sign up for a separate newsletter which sends daily digests of our new posts here.

Until December 13,
Cura ut valeas -- Nicholas A. Ferrell.