The Newsletter of 300 Leaves

Welcome to the 300th 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”).

The Newsletter Leaf Journal has made it to issue 300. I thought about doing something special for this nice round number, but I instead opted to draft this newsletter ahead of time (on the evening of October 2 in this case) so I could make it a good issue. All things considered, I think I topped my more modest effort for Newsletter 200 just over two years to the day.

Leaves from the week that was

After several lean weeks, I worked to make sure that we would have a good selection of new articles for Newsletter 300. Below, I present the four articles I published since mailing Newsletter 299.

I began the week at NLJ, and ended September, with Myself; Yourself and Watchable Bad Anime. Myself; Yourself is a 12-episode 2007 anime series based on a contemporaneously released visual novel of the same name. I watched it in December 2014 – a fact I was reminded of in an email exchange. Myself; Yourself was not a good anime (in my humble opinion), but I had had an article idea based on it for years. Regardless of whether you saw Myself; Yourself (I will venture the percentage of my readers who check that box is small), you can follow my discourse on something being both bad and watchable.

I launched October with an article based on an end-of-September photograph, 86 Days Until Christmas: Seen in Carroll Gardens. I saw a Christmas countdown clock on September 29, 2026, and had to take a photo. If that sounds familiar, I published a similar article in 2025. Unbeknownst to me until I reviewed my new photos, my 2026 Christmas Countdown Clock photo was taken at the same residence as the 2025 photo, exactly one year to the day.

I published a pair of articles on October 2. First, in Trackback Spam on Iroha Isshiki Hair Color Study, I critically examined unsavory trackback spam that I received on my landmark (source?) 2021 light novel/anime hair color study, Iroha Isshiki’s Hair is Brown, as Expected?. The questionable nature of the trackback spam reminded me of an article I had planned to publish in 2025, so I published it as a companion piece: My Kaori After Story Review and Questionable Searches. Long-time newsletter subscribers may recall that my 2022 article Kaori After Story – Visual Novel Review unexpectedly stormed to the top of our Newsletter Week view-count rankings for two weeks in January 2025 (see Newsletter 214 and Newsletter 215). In mid-2025, I stumbled upon Google Search queries that turned up my review. An article topic was born.

Over on ECS, I published daily links posts for 09-29, 09-30, 10-01, and 10-02. Outside of daily links, I learned about Toys R Us Leaving Japan After 35 Years and shared my thoughts on A Townhouse For Sale in Brooklyn Heights.

Leaves from around the web

Below, I present 15 weeks from around the web. After going a couple of weeks without link topic-headings, I am bringing back the topic-headings this week. However, I decided to go with descriptive topic-headings instead of humorous ones (as had often been my course), saving the “humor” for my link commentary.

Articles somewhat following recent NLJ topics

1 | Anime isn’t like reality: Japanese police arrest man holding three knives, one in his mouth. Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. January 28, 2026.

Last Sunday morning a call came in to the emergency police 110 line from a woman in the town of Karatsu, who said she’d seen a man walking along the road carrying a knife in each hand. While the transportation of bladed instruments, in and of itself, isn’t illegal in Japan, the expectation is that knives are to be secured/stowed when in transit. Police officers were dispatched to the neighborhood where the man was seen, and at around 8:40 a.m. they found him, now not only holding knives in both hands, but with a third clenched between his teeth.

Nothing amazing ever happens here. (Will any readers get the reference?)

2 | How the NFL Grinch Stole the NBA’s Christmas. Neil Paine. December 23, 2025.

By contrast, the NBA has pulled in less than 20 percent of the NFL’s viewership numbers since the head-to-head began 5 years ago, with no individual NBA game scoring higher than 7.76 million viewers for LeBron James’ Lakers versus Steph Curry’s Warriors last year. After the game, James said, “I love the NFL, but Christmas is our day.” But unfortunately, the ratings numbers tell a different story…

It’s hard to avoid going head-to-head with the NFL when the NFL comes for you.

3 | What we lost when we lost comments. Matthew Guay for Buttondown. Oct. 2, 2026.

As did the moderation burden. You had to sift between legitimate comments, seemingly nice comments that were merely a sneaky way to add a link, well-intended linkbacks with mentions from other sites, and outright spam. Easier to turn off comments, or move to a blog that ran faster but didn’t support comments at all.

It’s 99.9% spam. Trust me on this one. But you can comment on this newsletter if you’re an email subscriber.

4 | AI Killed My Blog Traffic. Clint McMahon. Aug. 31, 2026.

90% of my blog traffic is now obsolete thanks to Google’s AI Summary and chat interfaces like ChatGPT.

NLJ has been steady in Google Search and is having its best year there to date (generally closer to McMahon’s 2022-23 stats than his current numbers), so we continue to stay the course. Of course, NLJ is not primarily a tech blog, so mileage may vary.

Wildlife news

5 | A Shark Was Spotted Swimming Through the Flooded Streets of New Jersey During the Nor’easter. Sarah Kuta for Smithsonian Magazine. Sep. 30, 2026.

The creature was spotted in Surf City, a borough located on Long Beach Island, an 18-mile-long barrier island on New Jersey’s coast. Resident Drew Procaccino caught the animal on video as it swam past his home around noon on September 26, heading up the driveway before making its way west toward Barnegat Bay.

New Jersey taking New York City’s tourists. I’m not complaining.

6 | Are We Knitting Too Many Tiny Sweaters for Animals?. Cara Giamo for Atlas Obscura. Feb. 27, 2017.

On January 7, 2015, after a rash of bushfires injured dozens of koalas in South Australia, the International Fund for Animal Welfare put out a call for cotton mittens to help the animals’ paws heal. Within two days, they were set for the entire season.

The end of the article tries to outsmart itself, but plenty of good animal clothes stories are on the way.

7 | New Pokémon book by actual doctor of animal behavior and ecology academically explains and illustrates behaviors of wild Pokémon. Carlos Zotomayor. April 21, 2025.

As fun as it is to capture monsters for a life of servitude, part of the appeal of Pokémon is that you can view them in their natural habitats. With the release of the new official Pokécology book on June 18, 2025, Pokémon fans will be able to learn about how different Pokémon cohabitate in the wild.

There was a great strategy guide for the original Pikmin for Nintendo GameCube which incorporated a similar idea. Future article topic?

Video game history

8 | Super Mario Kart & SimCity Composer Soyo Oka On Her Most Iconic Nintendo Soundtracks. Jack Yarwood for Time Extension. Oct. 8, 2024.

Over the years, there have been countless others who have contributed greatly to Nintendo’s amazing musical legacy, with one of our favourite musicians being the Pilotwings, SimCity, and Super Mario Kart composer Soyo Oka. Oka is another individual who has a legendary back catalogue behind them, having written the scores for the Famicom Disk System titles Ice Hockey and VS. Excitebike, as well as the aforementioned 16-bit classics.

I saw the headline and then immediately heard in my head the “Mario Circuit” music from Super Mario Kart (Mario Circuit on YouTube).

9 | Guest Feature: Sonic R. Kerry Brunskill for Retro XP. October 6, 2025.

The idea of seeing Sega’s blue blur sprinting through Saturn-generated polygonal zones at speed seemed to be an impossible dream, especially after so long and one protracted high profile failure. And then Sonic R turned up.

I played Sonic R a long time ago and recall having trouble acclimating to the slick controls. Maybe I need to give it another go.

10 | Shigeru Miyamoto x Satoshi Tajiri (1993). Shumplations. Sep. 7, 2026. (Translating and re-publishing 1993 interview.)

This delightful interview between Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoshi Tajiri was originally featured in the 4/93 issue of Hippon Super. Tajiri, who had begun his career as a game journalist, was juggling writing and game development…

What ever happened to Mr. Tajiri after this interview with the man behind Mario and Zelda?

Food and drink

11 | Lemon Zest Has Gotten Entirely Out of Hand; also, Are Crows Holding a Multi-Generational Grudge Against Ace?. Buck Throckmorton for Ace of Spades HQ. Sep. 28, 2026.

With that disclaimer, may I address a situation that has become epidemic in America’s restaurant kitchens…lemon abuse. My plea to American chefs: Please ease up on the use of lemon zest.

I like lemon zest. What Mr. Throckmorton describes does sound excessive, however. I don’t eat out. Is this the trend these days?

12 | Tech Time Capsule: Early 1990s Clip Art Captured an Era. Benj Edwards at Vintage Computing and Gaming. April 14, 2025.

This vintage food art has a distinctive aesthetic that hearkens back to a more delicious age. It’s not every day that a 30 year-old cheeseburger makes you hungry.

I’m not big on the cheeseburger there but the bananas look ready-to-eat.

13 | China’s coffee war isn’t just about chains — here’s the bigger brew. Sam Tang at Momentum. May 18, 2025.

Consider this — small cafés accounted for 70% of the coffee market in 2023, according to the CIC’s report. While each independent café may appear small individually, their collective economic impact rivals that of chain stores — making them worthy of serious attention.

I listened and am delivering the market analysis of coffee chains and shops in China that you all have been demanding.

Long history reads

14 | The Making of an Elite: Japanese Christians (HT PolicySphere). Cremieux Recueil. November 7, 2025.

It’s probably surprising to hear that 20% of the post-World War II Prime Ministers of Japan before the newly-elected Sanae Takaichi have been Christian. Out of those 35 Prime Ministers since 1945, Shigeru Yoshida and Tarō Asō were Catholic, and Tetsu Katayama, Ichirō Hatoyama, Masayoshi Ōhira, Shigeru Ishiba, and Yukio Hatoyama were various flavors of Protestant. How this happens in a country that’s less than 1% Christian and in which there’s significant anti-Christian discrimination is perplexing, but I think it makes sense given how today’s Japanese Christians came to be.

Fact of Newsletter 300?

15 | Let the Games Begin. Tolga İldun. October 10, 2024.

Gladiatorial games are believed to find their origins in the burial rituals of the Etruscans, who inhabited the Italian peninsula from about the eighth to third century b.c. Frescoes in tombs dating to the fourth century b.c. in the regions of Lucania and Campania in southern Italy depict funeral games held to honor fallen warriors in which captured enemies were forced to fight. Since the beginning, then, these contests were as much ritual as spectacle.

Great long article but we needed a specific Honorius reference.

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 September 26-October 2 with notes on their cumulative ranking statistics going back to 2021.

1. Adding noai.duckduckgo.com as Custom Search Engine (NAF. Jan. 21, 2026.) 37 appearances and 18 top-placements.

2. Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search (NAF. April 17, 2025.) 40 appearances and 22 top-placements in 2026; 67 appearances and 43 top-placements overall.

3. How the Forget-Me-Not Flower Found Its Name (NAF. March 11, 2021.) 22 appearances in 2026; 32 appearances overall.

4. Hair Color in Raven of the Inner Palace (NAF. Nov. 15, 2023.) 3 appearances in 2026; 7 appearances overall.

5. Honey Lemon Soda – Anime Review (NAF. April 4, 2025.) 2 appearances in 2026 and overall.

Analysis

Our top-three returns in the same order for the third consecutive week. Coincidentally, our week’s top-three is also the 2026 top-three in the same order (albeit there is a big gap between “2” and “3”). This week’s runner-up, Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search, became the second article to begin a year with 40 consecutive weekly ranking appearances, joining The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei in 2022, and it is just the 3rd to hit 40 appearances in a single year (The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei had 52 in 2022 and 44 in 2023). It will almost be certainly joined in the 40-appearance club by Adding noai.duckduckgo.com as Custom Search Engine in Newsletter 303. 4th and 5th were weak, with many articles in the mix. Hair Color in Raven of the Inner Palace is cementing its position as the weekly ranking over-performer of 2026. It is one of just 11 articles with at least three weekly ranking appearances this year despite sitting in 33rd in the overall 2026 ranking.

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.

The Newsletter Leaf Journal has come a long way over 300 issues. While it is closely tied to my main project, The New Leaf Journal, as well as The Emu Café Social, I like to think it has developed its own identity as a publication unto itself since I launched it back in July 2020. If you are new to the newsletter, I would encourage you to peruse our archives. Even old issues like Newsletter 100 (syndicated version) have evergreen links and quips.

For Sparta!
Nicholas A. Ferrell.