November 19, 2022

Newsletter Leaf Journal CX 〜 Newsletter frame rate

The 110th edition The Newsletter Leaf Journal contains links to new visual novel reviews and video game history pieces along with links from around the web and other notes.

Welcome to the 110th 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 had a busy week in terms of the amount of new material published. In this newsletter, I review the week that was at The New Leaf Journal along with links from around the web and your usual assortment of news and notes.

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
5. News leaf journal
6. Notable leaf journal
7. Taking leaf

1. Leaves from the week that was

I published seven new articles since mailing the previous newsletter. With one exception, the articles were on the long side. Let no one say that we had a dearth of content, although I will note that we had a few trends in the subject matter.

• Running ONScripter-En in Linux Visual Novel Directory
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 13, 2022.

  Many of the visual novels that I am reviewing for my al|together project (more on that in the Leaflet review section) are written in ONScripter-EN. I previously wrote about how to run ONScripter-EN games on Linux. A technical issue required me to find a new method, which I wrote about in this post.

• Going from ONScripter Visual Novel .exe to Native Linux
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 14, 2022.

  One ONScripter-EN Linux guide led to another. In this post, I demonstrate how to extract the contents of a Windows .exe for an ONScripter-EN visual novel and then run the game natively on Linux. The steps in the guide should work (in theory) for MacOS and BSD, albeit with the correct versions of ONScripter-EN for those operating systems.

• The Misleading DRM E-Book Buy Button
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 15, 2022.

  I have written a number of articles about DRM and content ownership issues. My previous posts have focused primarily (but not exclusively) on games. In this post, I give digital books their due.

• Red Shift Visual Novel Review
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 16, 2022.

  My review of Red Shift is my ninth of the al|together visual novel review series (I need to pick up the pace since there are about 30). Readers will find that I enjoyed Red Shift on the whole, despite some minor flaws. It remains freely available, so you can go into the review to assess whether you are interested in reading Red Shift too.

Speaking of Red Shift…

• Hair Color and Albinism in Red Shift Visual Novel
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 16, 2022.

  I published a companion article alongside my Red Shift review. This is not an analysis of Red Shift’s story, but instead of the hair color of Mikoto Kujou, one of the visual novel’s two main characters. It is a unique entry in my anime/visual novel hair color analysis series because the white-haird Mikoto is portrayed as an albino character within the world of the game. I examine in great detail how the view-point character gradually gets to the bottom of the matter.

• Fallen Inflatable Thanksgiving Turkey
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 17, 2022.

  Consider this humorous photo post a breather between long essays…

• Imagination in Pokémon Red and Blue
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 18, 2022.

  The release of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, the ninth generation main-line Pokémon games, prompted me to look back at what made the original Pokémon Red and Blue special. To aid in my inquiry, I analyzed the account of an academic who had analyzed his 6.5 year old son’s interactions with the original Pokémon games in 1999.

I spent my New Leaf Journal time researching and writing long articles. Unsurprisingly, this led to a light week for Leaflets.

My first Leaflet post, published on November 14, 2022, noted that my 2020 Pixelfed review had set the mark for its best month as of November 13, 2022. I assumed going into 2022 that my now somewhat-outdated Pixelfed review’s best days were behind it, but little did I know that it would mark its two-year anniversary with its strongest month. It is now on pace to surpass its 2021 visitor count in 2022, perhaps by the end of the next week.

My more important Leaflet…

• Updates to al|together Review Introduction
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 16, 2022.

  I launched my al|together visual novel review project in April 2021. Since beginning the project, I have learned quite a bit about the al|together visual novels, how they are built, and how specifically to run them on Linux. As a result, I decided it was necessary to update my series introduction article – especially since all of my original reviews point to it. Much of the article remains unchanged, but I added several new sections and cleaned up other parts. You can see the changes in the updated introduction article.

2. Leaves from around the web

After all of the articles that I offered this last week, you may need a bookmarking service for the links from around the web (I presume everyone will be reading my articles first – maybe?).

• Going to the World Cup? Leave Your Phone at Home
  Luia Jarovsky. November 18, 2022.

  I would personally recommend not going to the World Cup, but if you insist on traveling to Qatar to take in some soccer, I recommend following Ms. Jarovsky’s advice to bring a burner phone due to Qatar’s requiring the installation of two apps.

• Mass. health officials worked with Google to covertly install COVID ‘spyware’ into 1M phones, lawsuit claims
  Brianna Herlihy for Fox Business. November 16, 2022.

  Even Qatar doesn’t automatically install its tracking apps on people’s phones (I don’t think it does – but I may be wrong). I will add that this write-up of the story is unduly charitable because, despite some hyperbole in the lawsuit, it is not in disute that Google worked with Massachusetts to install the MassNotify without consent.

• Finding The Darkest Pencil
  Unsharpen. October 29, 2022.

  For those of you looking for a dark pencil…

• Hand of Irulegi: ancient bronze artefact could help trace origins of Basque language
  Sam Jones for The Guardian. November 15, 2022.

  “Experts studying the hand and its inscriptions now believe it to be both the oldest written example of Proto-Basque and a find that “upends” much of what was previously known about the Vascones, a late iron age tribe who inhabited parts of northern Spain before the arrival of the Romans, and whose language is thought to have been an ancestor of modern-day Basque, or euskera.”

• Hundreds of mummies and pyramid of an unknown queen unearthed near King Tut’s tomb
  Jennifer Nalewicki for LiveScience. November 16, 2022.

  “Just a stone’s throw from King Tut’s tomb, archaeologists have unearthed the pyramid of a never-before known ancient Egyptian queen; a cache of coffins, mummies and artifacts; and a series of interconnected tunnels.”

• How the Famous “Comfy Shorts” Quote Worked in Japanese Pokémon
  Clyde Mandelin for Legends of Localization. August 20, 2018.

  I referenced the greatest quote from the original Pokémon games, “Hi! I like shorts! They’re comfy and easy to wear!” in yesterday’s article. Here, we learn that it made a little more sense in context in the original Japanese games.

• Cloud Catcher is a real Japanese crane game with real prizes that you play through your phone
  SoraNews24. November 18, 2022.

  On one hand I admire the creativity and attention to detail. On the other hand, I have an uncomfortable feeling that this is more potentially detrimental to society than the aborted 1991 plan to turn the original Nintendo Entertainment System into a home lottery system.

• Manhattan woman whose dog plunged three stories to its death gets her animals back
  Kathiranne Boniello for the New York Post. November 19, 2022.

  It’s as if New York City authorities read my complaints about bad dog owners being public nuisances and decided to one-up themselves.

• Feedle: Blog Search with RSS Feeds
  Brent Simmons at NetNewsWire Blog. November 17, 2022.

  I have been using Feedle and have found that it works well thus far. You can learn about it in this blog post and (probably) look forward to my review in a few weeks.

• How to Install and Use htop in Linux
  Sagar Sharma for It’s FOSS. November 17, 2022.

  A useful guide to making use of htop, a popular Linux system monitor. It neglected Arch-based distributions in listing install commands, so my fellow Arch-based distro-users can install it with sudo pacman -S htop.

3. The Old Leaf Journal

Let’s dig into our archive (we have five articles instead of four this week)…

• The al|together and Insani Visual Novel Translations
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 11, 2021.

  As I noted in my Leaflet, I made significant updates and revisions to my introduction to a big visual novel review project. I was hoping to make more progress but…

• Old Games, MIDI, and EndeavourOS
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. September 7, 2022.

  …I am no longer getting sound from my MIDI games on my main desktop. My attempts to figure out what changed between September 7 and now have thus far been unavailing, but I will figure something out since a good number of the visual novels use MIDI for their music.

• Please Ring the Doorbell - A Delivery Story
  Victor V. Gurbo. July 15, 2020.

  I thought of Victor’s delivery story the other day when I saw that the mailman had thrown all of my apartment building’s mail on a table in the lobby instead of using the individual mailboxes..

• “Pumpkin Pie” - A Children’s Poem By Mary Mapes Dodge
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 22, 2021.

  A fitting article for our pre-Thanksgiving newsletter.

• When President Coolidge Spared a Raccoon From Thanksgiving Dinner
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 24, 2021.

  Two of my Calvin Coolidge articles have made a combined three weekly top-five appearances in 2022, and both sit within our top-50 most-read articles of the year. Moreover, the sequel to my heartwarming story about then-President Coolidge adopting a raccoon that had been sent to the White House for the purpose of being Thanksgiving dinner, a feature piece about Herbert Hoover’s successor White House pet, Billy Possum the Opossum, outranks those two Coolidge articles. But few people have found my history of Rebecca Raccoon. Please celebrate Thanksgiving by changing that.

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 12 to 18 was the 46th Newsletter Week of 2022.

#	Title	By	Date	22Top5
1	Cross-posting from Mastodon to Twitter	NAF	4.18.22	4 (3)
2	Nintendo Power’s 1999 Yoshi in Pokémon April Fools Prank	NAF	4.1.21	NEW
3	Reviewing the Mastodon Twitter Crossposter	NAF	5.10.22	3
4	The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei	NAF	3.14.21	46 (27)
5	An Early Review of Pixelfed - Instagram Alternative	NAF	11.13.20	7

Our one surprise of the week was my April Fools 2021 article on a 1999 joke in Nintendo Power falsely informing impressionable youngsters that Yoshi was obtainable in Pokémon Red and Blue. It had a very strong middle of the week, briefly leading the weekly ranking before falling to second on Thursday and Friday. That it made a to weekly top five is not a shock. I recall that there was at least one occasion a few months ago where it had a top-five spot until late in the newsletter week. Its newfound strength appears to have come from Google, so to the best of my knowledge, it was not tied to being shared externally or necessarily to the release of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet.

The rest of the top five was similar to previous weeks, with the one note being the rare finish outside the top-3 for my tsuki ga kirei study, which extended its consecutive appearance streak (dating back to 2021) to 82. There was a decent gap between Pixelfed and sixth place, but articles six, seven, and eight would have ranked in most of our 2022 weeks.

5. News leaf journal

I decided to swap our news leaf journal and notable leaf journal sections in this newsletter. I suppose that is news. Other than that, it should go without saying that I spent my New Leaf Journal time last week writing and publishing articles instead of fiddling with the site.

6. Notable leaf journal

My article on Pokémon Red and Blue was prompted in part by the release of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. I received my copy of Violet a few hours before I published the Red and Blue article. Going in, I had read that Scarlet and Violet both have some unfortunate performance issues having to do with inconsistent frame rates and an apparent memory leak. I was curious how it would hold up because I had read complaints about Pokémon Legends: Arceus, but I have found that Arceus runs well. Were the complaints about Scarlet and Violet exaggerated?

No. Unfortunately not.

I played about three hours of Violet in docked mode (I almost never take advantage of the fact that Swith’s handheld functionality since I do not take it anywhere and my TV is in my room), and the performance/graphical issues were apparent. It was perhaps a bad sign when I was temporarily stuck in my own in-game house in the very first sequence of the game due to a bad in-game camera. There is obvious slow-down when there are too many things happening on screen and this can occasionally be a practical issue in addition to an annoyance. It was tolerable for the most part, and it runs well in stretches – until I made it to the first major City.

What is perhaps a bit ominous is that I did not experience many of the most serious issues that have thus far been documented.

The state of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet on a technical level at launch is not great, not the best. I do not think that the Switch’s hardware limitations fully explain it either. Switch has a good number of open world games which run quite a bit smoother than Scarlet and Violet, including Legends: Arceus.

One of the most unfortunate things about the technical problems is that, aside from those problems, I thus far like the direction that Violet is going. The world feels alive with Pokémon and the open-world controls are fairly well done, just a step short of Legends: Arceus (note, however, that Scarlet and Violet have significantly more depth in terms of Pokémon training and battle mechanics than does Arceus). That is, technical issues aside, I am optimistic about the game’s direction.

I hope that Nintendo and the primary culprit in the current situation, Game Freak, work to patch some of the serious issues expeditiously, lest they permanently mar what should otherwise be an exciting and much-needed step forward for the series.

(Note: If anyone reading is interested in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, but did not pre-order one of the games, I would recommend at least waiting a couple of weeks for some of the issues to be fixed with patches.)

7. Taking leaf

Thank you as always for reading and following The Newsletter Leaf Journal. If you have not done so already, you can sign up via email or add our newsletter’s RSS feed to your favorite reader to stay on top of our Saturday issues. I will also be introducing some new ways to follow the newsletter in the near future.

I hope that everyone has a happy and healthy Thanksgiving with much to be grateful for. You can expect our next newsletter on November 26.