Welcome to the 260th 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 hope Newsletter Leaf Journal readers and subscribers had a merry Christmas. Newsletter 260 is the final edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal in 2025. While it was unsurprisingly not my busiest week, I have plenty to share below before we briefly look ahead to 2026.

Leaves from the week that was

I published two new New Leaf Journal articles since mailing Newsletter 259.

I led the week with 52 Things I Learned in 2025, continuing a tradition I began last year. I changed things up this year by only using things I learned that I discussed on one of my two websites or in this humble newsletter. I followed that up with lighter-fare: A short Christmas-day post on My Gingerbread Man Soap Dispenser.

I published three short posts on The Emu Café Social. First, Christmas Eve reminded me of my past colon surgery, which occurred on December 24, 2018. Also on Christmas Eve, I wrote about switching my workstation desktop environment from XFCE to Cinnamon to ameliorate Nvidia driver issues. Finally, I wrote Working on Christmas Tina VN Review for NLJ, which is obviously a NLJ article preview.

Leaves from around the web

I decided to do something special for our final collection of links from around the web in 2025. I usually sort our regular collection of 21 links from around the web into topical categories. For this newsletter, I present--uncategorized--21 of the best essays/long-form pieces that were (A) on my to-use list when I drafted this newsletter and (B) were actually published in 2025. I will also limit myself to one post per author.

Serious Music
Liam Shaw for London Review of Books. January 31, 2025.

Serious music can cause serious hand cramps.

Palau deports Chinese criminals, reinforces Indo-Pacific security
Cleo Paskal for The Sunday Guardian. April 6, 2025.

"Palau achieved this mini-miracle on its own, now it needs help."

I Played Venus Vacation Prism: Dead or Alive Xtreme
Takafumi at Please no Hate. May 4, 2025.

An unexpectedly photography-centric game review.

What's Not to Like about "Unlikeable Characters"?
Lincoln Michel at Counter Craft. June 13, 2025.

I was glad to see the article contemplate what constitutes an "unlikable character."

The Story of Fretwork
Suzanne Spellen for Brownstoner. June 11, 2025.

"This included fretwork, which gets its name from the French word “freter,” or lattice. It’s an expanse of decorative and often delicate open woodwork held together by a wood border. Its mass production and widespread use in the late 19th century was made possible by machines."

What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images
Yasemin Saplakoglu for Quanta Magazine. August 1, 2024.

Hard to picture what happens.

Choose Your Own Adventure The Digital Antiquarian
Jimmy at The Digital Antiquarian. September 5, 2025.

I had a Pokémon choose-your-adventure book in 1999. Very easy to turn to the wrong page and catch a different "route" or spoiler.

IKEA’s web fonts
Robin Whittleton. April 23, 2025.

NLJ and ECS rely on fonts installed on your devices, courtesy of Modern Font Stacks (some of the NLJ icons are part of the theme, however).

On being human
Bojidar Marinov. June 27, 2025.

Something worth reading for human webmasters in today's internet environment.

Architects of Our Own Destruction
Theodore Dalrymple for Taki's Magazine. August 8, 2025.

"But the desire for beauty is something that has almost to be beaten out of people. It is all but instinctive. One way to do it is to ensure that they never have any access to beauty from an early age and therefore cannot miss it."

Technology for the American Family (HT Corbin K. Barthold)
Jon Askonas and Michael Toscano for National Affairs. Winter 2025 Issue.

Articulating the case for family-centric technology.

The Curious Case of Dragonfree's Glitched Jolteon
Dragonfree for Johto Times. December 11, 2025.

This is some remarkable generation 1 Pokémon glitch detective-work.

The Bob Dylan Concert for Just One Person
Ray Padgett at Falling Down the Double E's. December 13, 2025.

Sadly the "one person" was not our own Victor V. Gurbo.

The Lost Generation
Jacob Savage for Compact. December 15, 2025.

A thought-provoking, statistics-filled essay on post-2014 employment discrimination trends. For further reading, see a critical response by Jeremy Carl in Why “The Lost Generation” is a Lost Opportunity (December 16, 2025).

The Return of the Jewish Question
David Azerrad for Compact. December 22, 2025.

"The JQ is ultimately yet another species of victimhood politics. By teaching that we are victims of Jewish plots, it denies us agency and promotes the mental habits of servitude: impotence and resentment. The JQ isn’t just a stupid conspiracy theory, it’s an affront to the American spirit."

AI chatbots are becoming lifelines for China’s sick and lonely
Viola Zhou for Rest of World. September 2, 2025.

Life in lifeline may be operative.

The Streak That Made the Patriots a Dynasty
Robbie Marriage and Sports Passion Project. July 7, 2025.

I was a Panthers fan so that Super Bowl -- while a great game -- is just a bit bittersweet.

1893: A Crazy Cat Tale From Hart Street, Brooklyn
Peggy Gavan at The Hatching Cat of Gotham. October 10, 2025.

"The tale begins on May 18, 1893, when Justice Adolph H. Goetting of the Lee Avenue Police Court received a visit from Mrs. Theodore Loeffler and her daughter. Miss Loeffler told the judge that a few days earlier, her father had hired a plumber and a carpenter to fix some leaking pipes above their dining room ceiling."

Terry Ball: The snail farmer, his mafia friends, and a £20m vendetta against the taxman (HT Tom Whitwell)
Jim Waterson for London Centric. October 18, 2025.

Everything you need to know about farming snails for tax evasion in London.

I Used to Know How to Write in Japanese
Marco Giancotti for Aether Mug. August 15, 2025.

While this sounds great I think I'll stick with the Latin alphabet.

How Arabidopsis thaliana, a humble weed, became a superstar of plant biology
Rachel Eherenberg for Knowable Magazine. November 3, 2025.

It's heartening to read about the subject of a rags-to-riches story staying true to its roots.

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 for the period covering December 20-26 along with their 2025 and historic (going back to 2021) weekly ranking statistics.

1. Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 17, 2025.
   2025: 27 appearances and 21 top placements.

2. Misleading ARRIS Modem Login Instructions
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. June 12, 2024.
   2025 & Cumulative: 13 appearances and 1 top placement.

3. Amazon "Cargo Bikes" in Brooklyn
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 9, 2025.
   2025: 35 appearances and 8 top placements.

4. The Pokémon Special Split in Generation 2
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. January 18, 2022.
   2025: 8 appearances.
   Cumulative: 63 appearances and 4 top placements.

5. Examining Whether Defense Wins NBA Championships
   Nicholas A. Ferrell. July 9, 2024.
   2025: 29 appearances and 10 top placements.
   Cumulative: 33 appearances and 11 top placements.

Analysis

We wrap up 2026 in the Newsletter Week Ranking with many familiar favorites. Four of the six articles with double-didgit placements during the year make our final ranking, including the top three. Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search posted another dominant performance, lapping the field for its 19th top placement in 21 weeks and 21st overall, continuing what has been the most dominant stint since The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei led the ranking for 25 consecutive weeks from 2021-22.

Weekly Ranking Leaders

To bring the year to a close, I present our year-end weekly ranking leaders.

Most Total Top-Five Placements in 2025

A record 53 articles appeared in at least one weekly top-five in 2025, with 27 of those 53 articles making multiple appearances. But of all of our articles, the six listed above were the only articles to land in double-digit top fives. This year's list is led by my study of Amazon eCargo "bikes" in Brooklyn led the way with 35 top-five placements in 2025.

Year-End Leaders (Most Top-5s)

• 2025: Amazon "Cargo Bikes" in Brooklyn (35 appearances)
• 2024: An In-Depth Look at Norton Safe Search (34 appearances)
• 2023: The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei (44 appearances)
• 2022: The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei (52 appearances) [RECORD]
• 2021: HALOmask and är Mask Review · The New Leaf Journal (37 appearances)

My Amazon eCargo bike survey, which I published on April 9, 2025, is the first article going back to 2021 to post the most weekly top-five finishes in the same year it was published. It was online at the end of 38 Newsletter Weeks and 37 full newsletter weeks (April 9 was a Wednesday). It made the top five in 94.6% of the full weeks it was online (35/37), placing it behind only The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei's 2022 campaign (52/52, 100%) in percentage terms.

Now for the most first-place finishes of 2025...

Most Total Top Placements in 2025

These six articles were the only ones to post multiple first-place finishes. The latter three articles were non-factors in the weekly ranking in the second half of the year, but the Kaori After Story review should still be in line for a strong position in the year-end overall ranking.

And now for the year-end leaders...

Year-End Leaders (Top Placements)

• 2025: Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search (21 top placements)
• 2024: An In-Depth Look at Norton Safe Search (14 top placements)
• 2023: The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei (14 top placements)
• 2022: The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei (30 top placements) [RECORD]
• 2021: The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei (25 top placements)

Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search posted the third-most top-placements in a single year behind The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei in 2021 and 2022. It is the first article since The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei to lead the year-end top placements ranking in the same year it was published.

News Leaf Journal

I have some proverbial house-cleaning to do as we approach the end of 2025. See some of the article projects on my immediate to-do list:

• Winter season introduction.
• Month-end reviews for October, November, and December.
• Year-end review with list of our most-visited articles.
• Review of Christmas Tina (visual novel).
• Article about how my Christmas started in October.

My winter-season article will formally begin a new tradition on The New Leaf Journal, and the theme is inspired by everything on my to-do list. I delayed my month-end review posts due to difficulties collecting our most-visited article stats, but I will produce stream-lined versions of our last three since they are prerequisites for our annual year-end review article. In prior years, I published our year-end review article on January 1 or 2, but it will probably be delayed a few days this year while I cobble together stats for our most-visited article ranking. The last two items are normal article projects that I will try to get out the door before the end of the year. Another project that will be delayed is my annual review of the year that was in anime -- if for no other reason than the fact that I have yet to catch up with the shows of the summer and autumn 2025 seasons (I will aim for February-March for that article).

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

Newsletter Leaf Journal 260 caps off a fun year here on the newsletter (I dare say I took our links from around the web to the next level). If you enjoyed this newsletter and other recent mailings, I hope you look forward to our forthcoming first edition of 2026.

Wishing all of our readers a happy New Year,
Until January 3, 2026,
Cura ut valeas -- Nicholas A. Ferrell.