November 12, 2022

Newsletter Leaf Journal CIX 〜 Newsletter ticket

The 109th Newsletter Leaf Journal features our newest articles about Nintendo history, remembering the days of the month, Veterans Day, and more.

Welcome to the 109th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of the perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal. This newsletter comes to you as always from the waterproof keyboard of the editor of The New Leaf Journal, Nicholas A. Ferrell. We have our usual assortment of New Leaf Journal news and links, links from around the web, and other notes of interest. Without further ado, let’s get to the content.

Table of contents

1. Leaves from the week that was
2. Leaves from around the web
3. The Old Leaf Journal
4. Most-turned leaves of the week
5. Notable leaf journal
6. News leaf journal
7. Taking leaf

1. Leaves from the week that was

I published four new regular articles since mailing the previous newsletter.

• History of the Mario Party Gloves
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 6, 2022.

  After offering a Mario Party veteran’s perspective on the return of some of the original Mario Party’s infamous joystick rotation mini games, I researched litigation from 2000 over injuries that children allegedly suffered playing those games back in 1999 and 2000.

• The Knuckle Method for Days of the Month
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 7, 2022.

  Inspired by a reader submission, I wrote about, and diagrammed, the knuckle mnemonic for remembering the days of the month. Consider this an art project.

• The Aborted Nintendo-Minnesota Lottery Scheme
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 8, 2022.

  I go over the history of an ill-fated 1991 plan to turn the Nintendo Entertainment System into a home lottery console (what could go wrong?).

• Eisenhower’s 1954 Veterans Day Proclamation
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 11, 2022.

  For Veterans Day, I quoted extensively from the first Veterans Day Proclamation – issued by then-President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954.

I also published four Leaflets since mailing the last newsletter. I will reserve two of the four for our around the web and notable sections and discuss the other two below.

• An Unpleasant Voting Odor
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 8, 2022.

  On picking up a scent resembling that of a skunk while leaving my polling location on Tuesday.

• Catching Starly in Pokémon Legends: Arceus
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 11, 2022.

  My early impressions of Pokémon Legends: Arceus (I am late to the party, however) are positive. Here, I reveal that the most satisfying part of the game is sneaking up on unsuspecting Starly and throwing Poké Balls at them.

2. Leaves from around the web

Let’s see what’s happening around the world wide web…

• KDE Welcomes Ghostwriter To Its Collection Of Apps
  Michael Larabel for Phronix. October 8, 2022.

  I only just now learned that the Ghostwriter markdown editor was acquired by KDE, one of the biggest projects in the Linux space. I use the Ghostwriter markdown editor for all of my drafting and I have reviewed it. I published a Leaflet on the news and updated my Ghostwriter review

• Bocchi the Rock! - The More Outrageous the Comedy Animation, the More Compelling the Loneliness and Growth
  kViN at Sakuga Blog. November 10, 2022.

  An in-depth look at the animation of Bocchi the Rock, a currently-running anime series that is at its half-way point. It is a good article and I generally agree with the author’s praise of the series thus far. The series will likely earn a mention in my anime year-in-review article which you should expect in late December or early January.

• Strange Bedfellows: Chiang and Stilwell
  Jennifer Wilding and Ralph Zuljan at onwar.com. March 1, 2002.

  A short history of the tumultuous relationship between General Joseph Stilwell and Chiang Kai-Shek.

• Inside the NYC backroom poker dens spotlighted in Eric Ulrich probe
  Michael Kaplan for the New York Post. November 9, 2022.

  After the New York City Buildings Commissioner resigned due to his being the subject of a probe involving backroom poker games, the New York Post published an interesting report on the types of backroom poker games at issue.

• Discovery of bronzes rewrites Italy’s Etruscan-Roman history
  Nicole Winfield for the Associated Press. November 8, 2022.

  As advertised.

• Animal Crossing: New Horizons Becomes Japan’s Best-Selling Game Of All Time
  Jim Norman for Nintendo Life. November 8, 2022.

  It passed the original Pokémon games to break a quarter-century record in Japan.

• Meet the men who built the only perfect video game: Tetris
  Adam Rosenberg for Digital Trends. February 12, 2015.

  Tetri’s interesting and surprisingly dramatic journey from the Soviet Union to Nintendo.

• Why journalists shouldn’t be on TikTok
  Stephen L. Miller for The Spectator. October 31, 2022.

  Let’s take this a few steps further.

• Language-decoding visual novel 7 Days to End with You is getting a Nintendo Switch version this winter
  Daiki Imazoto for Automation West. November 10, 2022.

  I am adding this one to my review list – although I will most likely get the computer version over the Switch version.

• Asahi now sells hot bottled water in Japan as an alternative to coffee or tea
  Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. November 6, 2022.

  I think I will stick with coffee and tea,

3. The Old Leaf Journal

Let us dig into our archives…

• Hot Coffee on Summer Walks
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. August 14, 2021.

  Consider this my preemptive reply to the idea of selling hot water as a beverage.

• A Fogy’s Take on New Video Game Accessories
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. June 29, 2020.

  Wherein I questioned why someone would want to attach their phone to a video game controller.

• Veterans Day and World War I Double Quarantines
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 11, 2020.

  A first-hand account of sickness on World War I’s Western Front.

• Justin & Justina 〜 On Robin Hood and GameStop
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. February 2, 2021.

  A dialogue wherein Justin tried to very seriously explain the peculiar Game Stop stock situation of early 2021.

4. Most-turned leaves of the week

I list our most-visited articles of the previous week in each newsletter. In keeping with our newsletter schedule, these “Newsletter Weeks” begin with Saturday and end on Friday. The statistics come courtesy of our local and privacy-friendly analytics solution, Koko Analytics – which I reviewed on The New Leaf Journal. The week of November 5 to 11 was the 45th Newsletter Week of 2022.

#	Title	By	Date	22Top5
1	Cross-posting from Mastodon to Twitter	NAF	4.18.22	3 (2)
2	Reviewing the Mastodon Twitter Crossposter	NAF	5.10.22	2
3	The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei	NAF	3.14.21	45 (27)
4	An Early Review of Pixelfed - Instagram Alternative	NAF	11.13.20	6
5	Abraham Lincoln’s 1851 Letters on Work to John D. Johnston	NAF	11.4.21	4 (1)

We had our strongest non-Hacker News influenced week of 2022, thanks in large part to the continued strong performance of my two Mastodon-Twitter Crossposter articles, which took the top two spots on our ranking for the second consecutive week. They peaked early in the week and slowed a little bit in the second half – albeit not so much as to not dominate the weekly ranking by a wide margin.

Spots 2-6 on our ranking were interesting. My 2020 Pixelfed review held the third spot for most of the week, only narrowly losing it to my tsuki ga kirei review, which made its 81st consecutive weekly top five, on the last day. My short article on a couple of 1851 letters from Abraham Lincoln, which has been mostly quiet after being our third most-read article in September, had a couple of big days in the middle of the week to make its fourth weekly top five. It narrowly edged out my 2020 article on the last stand of Constantine XI, which had one of the best weeks (in terms of visits) for any article that missed our top five. This marks two weeks of somewhat bad luck for the Constantine XI article in having a strong week but still failing to take a top five spot.

Although it was not close to this week’s top five due to the strength of the article, I give an honorable mention to our 7th place article, my 2021 Halloween review of the Night of the Forget-Me-Nots visual novel, which had its best week by a wide margin and would have had enough views to make the top five if it had better timing.

5. Notable leaf journal

A regular New Leaf Journal reader recommended the BananaSlug search tool to me in an email (see our Contact Page). I wrote a short review of BananaSlug in a Leaflet published on November 6, 2022. BananaSlug adds a random word to your search query from one of 15 categories. As I note in the review, it uses Bing’s search index. Thus fun tool does not have much practical use, albeit I may try it to see if it inadvertently recommends an interesting article topic or two – but it is a fun idea. I would be curious to see something similar done with one of the search engines that has an independent index.

6. News leaf journal

I did not make any changes to the site over the last week, but I have been making progress on a couple of article projects that you should see in the coming days (this partially explains the somewhat low output in the last week).

I will at some point in the near future begin syndicating all of our newsletters from The New Leaf Journal (meaning I will publish them in a special New Leaf Journal) section, but that will likely be a late November-early December project. Finally, one project that I am closer to completing is a new section of the site called Collections.

Long-time readers may recall that we implemented Series for a time and we still have a Series Directory. After I had some issues with our Series plugin, I began implementing Series with categories and tags. However, I never much liked the system I came up with – which is why our Series Directory is not featured. Now that I can make custom post types, I will create one for “Collections.” The Collections concept is that I will bring articles on topics together in individual hub pages. Thus, this may include series (e.g., the Justin and Justina project), but it can also contemplate broader groups of articles that cover similar topics but are not strictly connected in the same way. I will write more about this when it is ready to go live.

7. Taking leaf

Thank you as always for reading The Newsletter Leaf Journal. If you enjoyed the content and are not already a subscriber, you can sign up to receive our weekly newsletter via email or add the newsletter’s RSS feed to your favorite feed reader.

November 2020 and 2021 featured some of our most-read articles of all time, and I also look forward to continuing that publishing trend as we move into the second half of November 2022. I look forward to sending Newsletter 110 on November 19.

Until then,

Cura ut valeas.