Leafy Intro

Welcome to the 290th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of the perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal (“NLJ”) and its short-form writing sister publication, The Emu Café Social (“ECS”).

I had a busy week last week in terms of publishing, but my “major” publication was not on NLJ or ECS. What does this mean? Read on to find out.

Leaves from the week that was

I only published one new NLJ article since mailing Newsletter 289, but that article ties into my big project of the week. In Releasing a New ONScripter-EN Visual Novel, I discussed creating a short visual novel from scratch in ONScripter-EN from July 17-19 for a 48-hour “game jam” on Itch.io. Speaking of Itch.io, my visual novel, Under the Alien Sky, is available to download and read for free. It is a short piece, taking only 3-5 minutes. Unfortunately for Mac users, ONScripter-EN is, at the moment, not properly supported for silicon Macs (most Macs released this decade), but the file is ready to run on both Windows and Linux (it is especially easy if you use the Itch.io app, but see my instructions). I plan to upload a video of the novel in the near future for people who do not have a device that can run it.

I published four new short posts on ECS. In Light Phone Continues to Fail QWERTY Test, I questioned why the new version of the minimalist light phone does not have a QWERTY keyboard. Next, in response to a blog post on AI featured images, I question, and answer, Were AI Blog Post Images Ever Cool? Upon learning that Tadej Pogacar shattered yet another 1990s-era climbing record in this edition of the Tour de France, I offered my thoughts in Tadej Pogacar Shatters Pantani’s 1995 Alpe d’Huez Record by 1:15. Finally, I replied to a post recommending ways to hit Hacker News page one in On Tactics to Hit the Hacker News Front Page, wherein I questioned whether one of the grounds should be quality.

Leaves from around the web

I trust that reading my visual novel and reading about my visual novel will make up for my otherwise low article-publishing output last week. But if that is not the case, I present 17 links with quotes and commentary from around the world wide web.

That sounds like…

(1) The Stunning Loss Daniel Ortega Never Forgot (Diego Ruiz for Americas Quarterly. April 1, 2025.)

We heard from contacts in the Sandinista bunker that Fidel Castro made an irate call to his protégé Ortega that night [of the 1990 election], berating him for fooling around with ‘bourgeois nonsense’ like elections.

“Bourgeois Nonsense” sounds like a good hipster band name.

(2) Japan has a new maid school, and it’s now accepting applicants for its first term (Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. July 4, 2026.)

‘Maid School Japan’ sounds like a pre-formed multimedia franchise. It’s extremely easy to imagine the trajectory of a 13-episode anime series … However, Maid School Japan is, in fact, not the latest ploy to pull otaku’s money from their wallets, and is instead an actual new educational institution that’s currently accepting applicants for its upcoming first term.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this anime before. Too many remakes these days.

Phone home

(3) VoIP Brings Back Old-Fashioned Payphones to Rural Vermont (Novid Parsi for IEEE Spectrum. November 17, 2025.)

Remember pay phones? Those relics of telecom’s distant past were once everywhere—on many busy street corners, in bars and restaurants, even built into airliners’ seatbacks.

They’re not that distant. Are we hiring 15 year olds to write articles now?

(4) Sidephone’s candybar-style phone with swappable keypads expected to ship in January (Brad Linder for Liliputing. November 20, 2025.)

But what really makes this phone unusual is that the number pad is a removable module that can be replaced with other input ‘tiles.’

I’d be open to incorporating modularity into my ideal phone concept.

Raptor issues

(5) The Owl Code Tearing Apart New York’s Birders (Ryan Goldberg for Defector. October 31, 2025.)

Yes, an owl code. This varies by borough. Brooklyn, my home, is the strictest. As an example, its eBird moderators (volunteers who are some of the best birders in the area) will write to people who have submitted an owl sighting and ask them to remove it. (eBird now automatically hides submissions of some highly sensitive owl species from public viewing.) We all want to see owls, but they’re nocturnal, and easily disturbed during their daytime slumber.

I would love to weigh in but I have never seen an owl in New York. I have, however, seen other raptors.

(6) Massive hawk miraculously survives 200 miles trapped in car grille before driver realized (Katie Jenkovich for the New York Post. July 2, 2026.)

The young hawk is now undergoing treatment at a wildlife rehabilitation facility, per the report.

This is a heartwarming story unless you are both (A) a bird and (B) smaller than the hawk.

(7) Vince Carter: Air Carter Takes Off in Toronto, 2000 (Bob Kuska at From Way Downtown. October 27, 2025. Reprinting article from January/February 2000 issue of Hangimes by Alan Marcovici.)

That would only disappoint the fans. And that, as Toronto and all the NBA has learned, is not Vince Carter’s way.

Ah, the halcyon days. This article was published early in Mr. Carter’s third season and his best individual season in what would turn out to be a historic 22-year career (second only to LeBron James in seasons played). The Raptors would come one last-second Vince Carter jumper away from the Eastern Conference Finals. Unfortunately, 2000-01 would be the last season Vince Carter played in a playoff game with Toronto. He was injured for the 2002 Playoffs and Toronto missed the playoffs the next two seasons before a malcontent Carter forced a trade to the then-“New Jersey” Nets early in the 2004-05 season.

Checking in on the diplomatic corps

(8) American Embassies: Ambassadors of Ugliness (Theodore Dalrymple for City Journal. Spring 2026 Issue.)

Designed by Allied Works Architecture in association with Yost Grube Hall, and completed in 2021, the new American embassy in Maputo (Mozambique), for example, shares a feature with its London counterpart: a facade that looks as if a giant Parmesan cheese is expected to fall from the sky at any moment and will need grating as it lands.

Someone needs to get the architects under control.

(9) State Department adds formal dress code to policy manual for first time (Morgan Phillips for Fox News. April 3, 2026.)

The State Department has added business formal dress code guidance to its internal policy manual for the first time, establishing department-wide standards for employee attire.

Old topic: Japanese school dress codes. New topic: United States Department of State dress codes.

Not unforeseeable

(10) Hackers took over robovacs to chase pets and yell slurs (Wes Davis for The Verge. October 12, 2024.)

Someone gained access to Ecovacs Deebot X2 Omni robotic vacuums across several US cities earlier this year and used them to chase pets and yell racist slurs at their owners, reported ABC News in Australia this week.

I’ll stick with my robot vacuum, which attacks me only because it moves around randomly.

(11) ‘Pokémon Go’ players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30 billion images (Mark Degeurin for Popular Science. March 13, 2026.)

In other words, all that time users spent wandering around playing Pokémon Go will now help determine how well a courier robot can deliver your take out. It’s a stark example of how crowdsourced data, seemingly collected for one purpose, can be quietly repurposed years later for something quite different.

Belarus was on top of it.

(12) Watch Out: The Hidden Dangers of Kids’ Wearable Tech (Jiefang Daily (via Sixth Tone). July 17, 2025.) & (13) The Underground Economy Behind Children’s Smartwatches in China (Li Xin for Sixth Tone. November 17, 2025.)

The incident highlights the growing concerns many parents have about smartwatches, which for several years have been promoted in China as a safer alternative to smartphones for pre-adolescent youths. Originally designed to handle limited calls and for location tracking, the technology now introduces children to a complex, and sometimes dark, digital ecosystem.

“Hidden” does not sound like the correct word-choice for the first headline. I am glad these things haven’t made it stateside. TikTok is a bad enough import.

The search continues

(14) Search Engines in 1998, Before Google Takes the Spotlight (Richard MacManus at Cybercultural. July 8, 2025.)

1998 was the last year of the web before Google began setting the agenda in search. During that year, there were hints that Google was emerging — even before it officially incorporated in September, it was gaining credence among industry insiders as a search technology to watch. But for all of 1998, the leading names in search were either portals (Yahoo, Netscape, Excite) or search engines trying to turn themselves into portals (AltaVista, Infoseek, Lycos).

Some of the 1998 methods look appealing these days…

(15) A Mysterious Children’s Search Engine Is Misleading Kids (Andy Rindsberg for City Journal. May 21, 2026.)

A 2016 investigation by EdSurge suggested that Russian-born entrepreneur Vladislav Golunov—previously associated with the search engine Lukol—may be the site’s creator. But a decade later, we still don’t know who owns, operates, or oversees the site.

I didn’t know anything about Lukol’s background when I wrote a short post on it back in 2022 (which, to my surprise, made Hacker News page one), but I will submit that my surface-level assessment appears to have been over the target.

The last two saved links from July 2025…

(16) 100 years of Art Deco: a movement comes of age (Matt Alagiah for The Observer. July 31, 2025.)

This summer [2025] marks the 100th anniversary of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts), a colossal fair that took over 57 acres in central Paris and which gave the Art Deco movement its name.

Manhattan still has some classy Art Deco. If only it weren’t in Manhattan.

(17) There are 4.9 times more web browser games than in 2023 (Vic Hood for Games Industry.biz. July 29, 2025.)

A new report has revealed that the number of web browser games has grown 4.9 times over the past two years, with more than 15,000 new games released in Q2 2025 alone.

While my newest visual novel, Under the Alien Sky, is not playable in browser (granted I think there are some projects to interpret ONScripter visual novels in browser), my first piece, Little White Lies, is waiting for your visit. Come to think of it though… maybe I should make a browser-playable version of Under the Alien Sky. Add that to the ’ole to-do list!

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 our most-visited articles for the week of July 18-July 24 with notes on their cumulative ranking statistics going back to 2021.

1. Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search (NAF. April 17, 2025.) 30 appearances and 20 top placements in 2026; 57 appearances and 41 top placements overall.

2. Adding noai.duckduckgo.com as Custom Search Engine (NAF. Jan. 21, 2026.) 27 appearances and 10 top placements.

3. Misleading ARRIS Modem Login Instructions (NAF. June 12, 2024.) 6 appearances in 2026; 19 appearances and 1 top placement overall.

4. Releasing a New ONScripter-EN Visual Novel (NAF. July 19, 2026.) Debut.

5. Broken Bench in Red Hook, Brooklyn (NAF. July 17, 2026.) Debut.

Analysis

We had our first change in the top of the ranking in eight weeks, with Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search returning to its earlier 2026 form, and with Adding noai.duckduckgo.com as Custom Search Engine falling off slightly. The former is now just the second article to achieve 20 top-placements in a single year, following The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei, which did so in 2021 (25 appearances) and 2022 (30 appearances). It would need 10 more top placements in the remaining 22 newsletter weeks of 2026 to tie the record. I would be reluctant to bet on it reaching 30 top-placements (despite having 20 in 30 weeks thus far), but I would strongly favor it to join The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei as just the second article to make all 52 newsletter week rankings in a single year.

We had debut articles in 4th and 5th, albeit with a slight asterisk. On Thursday, I noticed that my newer articles appeared to be accruing an unusual number of views not obviously connected to any referrer. The impact was small and 4-5 were relatively weak this week in terms of total views, but it is possible both of those articles made the ranking because of some non-human visitors, although Releasing a New ONScripter-EN Visual Novel did well enough in the first couple of days after publication that I am inclined to think it would have hit the threshold absent a few bonus views on Thursday (I am, however, less confident about the bench).

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 have a few interesting in-progress projects that I hope to publish this coming week, pending work.

Until July 31,
Independence forever! Nicholas A. Ferrell.