December 10, 2022

Newsletter Leaf Journal CXIII 〜 "News letter"

The 103rd issue of The Newsletter Leaf Journal features basketball history, visual novel reviews, links from around the web, and more.

Welcome to the 113th 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. Below, we will recap our latest content, provide links to interesting content from around the web, and post other 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 of the week
5. News leaf journal
6. Notable leaf journal
7. Taking leaf

1. Leaves from the week that was

While I only published three articles and three leaflets during the past week, the three articles were fairly long – so I will give myself points for productivity.

• 1892 Reports on the First Year of Basketball
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. December 6, 2022.

  The first basketball game was played in December 1891. I used the Elephind newspaper search engine to collect articles published in 1892 about the then-new sport. (Note: The News letter title for the instant newsletter was inspired by by basket ball research.)

• 1892 Report on a Women’s Basketball Game
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. December 7, 2022.

  A follow-up companion article to my more general collection of 1892 newspaper articles about basketball.

• Until We Meet Again Visual Novel Review
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. December 9, 2022.

  This is the newest of my al|together visual novel translation reviews. Until We Meet Again is one of the better ones that I have looked at thus far and it is notable for its creative and well-implemented visuals.

• Adventures installing Soremata on Linux
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. December 8, 2022.

  While I enjoyed Until We Meet Again (see above), getting it running properly was a bit of a pain – for reasons I explain in this leaflet.

• Steam Deck Creates New Linux Gamers
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. December 5, 2022.

  Back in January, I noted the potential of the Steam Deck console to benefit gaming on Linux generally. Now that Steam Deck has been out for the better part of 2022, I took a look at where things stand.

• Umineko When They Cry Red Truth Guide
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. December 7, 2022.

  I am currently reading through the Umineko When They Cry visual novel series (through chapter 5/8). I will probably write about it in early 2023 – although I have not decided what angle I will take (Umineko was released more than one decade ago and it is one of the best-known visual novels of all time, so it hardly needs another generic review.) Although Umineko has no game-play, it does present the player with mysteries to ponder. I linked to a valuable resource for refreshing one’s memory on mysteries from prior chapters without spoiling future chapters.

2. Leaves from around the web

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

• The Music Gig from Hell
  Ted Gioia at The Honest Broker. December 8, 2022.

  A look into a troubling offer to a musician to play at a New York City venue.

• China using porn to hide protest videos
  John Sexton for Hotair. November 28, 2022.

  The Chinese Communist Party takes an indirect approach to social media censorship.

• Getting Nostalgic With the Historical Coherent Operating System
  Bill Dyer for It’s FOSS. December 1, 2022.

  The post includes a link with instructions on how to run Coherent on a virtual machine.

• Meta’s private messaging app for couples is shutting down
  Emma Roth for The Verge. July 26, 2022.

  I know that I am late to this story, but Meta’s what kind of app?

• Japanese conveyor belt restaurant delivers food by boat in Tokyo
  Oona McGee for SoraNews24. October 4, 2022.

  An intriguing delivery method.

• Expert warns NYC’s new ‘rat czar’: ‘The rats are going to win’
  Michael Kaplan for the New York Post. December 9, 2022.

  One of the rare news headlines where the word “expert” is used correctly. Come for the headline, stay for the interesting rat facts.

• Egypt: New Law Allows Egyptian Expats to Import Personal Cars with No Customs Duties
  George Sadek for the Law Library of Congress. December 7, 2022.

  Good news for (some) Egyptian ex-pats returning home.

• Random: Pokémon Trading Cards Will No Longer Feature Iconic Yellow Border
  Ollie Reynolds for Nintendo Life. December 9, 2022.

  This is all well and good, but can someone explain the crazy hit point and attack power inflation with Pokémon cards? Back in my day, being able to deal 30 damage with one electric energy on an Electabuzz was a big deal.

• A little overview of WebTV
  Tuan at tsuki. September 29, 2022.

  The history of a strange mid-90s way to bring the internet to television (my solution for this today is an HDMI cable from my video card to my TV).

• When the Stagnation Goes Virtual
  Ginevra Davis for Palladium. January 21, 2022.

  Let’s learn about the NFT community in the best way possible (from a great distance).

3. The Old Leaf Journal

Let’s check in on our archives…

• Working to Save The Bitter End
  Victor V. Gurbo. September 27, 2020.

  Our own reflections from a working New York City musician.

• hBlock and My Attempt to Purchase Health Insurance in New York
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. December 16, 2021.

  Thanks to this article, I will remember to temporarily disable hBlock when I purchase insurance in a few days.

• Kaga no Chiyo Autumn Haiku on Unrequited Love
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. December 14, 2020.

  A beautiful and seasonal piece.

• Whyever Do The Cicadas Cry - A Study of a Word
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. October 24, 2020.

  On the appearance of the word whyever in the official localization of chapter 7 of Higurashi When They Cry.

4. Leaves from around the web

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 December 3 to December 9 was the 49th Newsletter Week of 2022.

#	Title	By	Pub	22Top5
1	The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei	NAF	3.14.21	49 (28)
2	Usagi Drop 〜 A Complicated Anime Pick	NAF	1.19.21	NEW
3	A Look at ProxiTok, a TikTok Frontend	NAF	5.14.22	4
4	Cross-posting from Mastodon to Twitter	NAF	4.18.22	7 (5)
5	Installing Ubuntu Touch on an Asus Nexus 7 (2013)	NAF	7.5.21	35

The five-week reign of my leaflet on the Mastodon Twitter Crossposter atop our weekly ranking ended, and my tsuki ga kirei post, which is now three weeks away from completing a perfect 52/52 in 2022 top-fives, took the top spot for the 28th time (albeit – it was a mediocre week by its standards).

After the top spot, our rank saw a couple of notables in second and third. My January 2021 commentary the Usagi Drop anime (as well as Sweetness and Lighting) made its first 2022 weekly top five, debuting in second place. This is its first appearance in the top five since the 18th newsletter week of 2021. Its making a top five – especially in second – is a bit of a surprise, but I recall that the Usagi Drop review came close to making a top five one week in July and it is currently our 32nd most-read article of the year. Joining it in the top five was my review of the ProxiTok TikTok front-end (which I must note I have not used once since reviewing it back in May), which made its 4th appearance overall and first appearance since September.

5. News leaf journal

We had a minor Koko Analytics issue this week (see previous section for a link to my review). There was a Koko Analytics update on Tuesday or Wednesday. The only change was that the update shrunk the small Koko Analytics script slightly on sites using GZIP compression (this covers our’s). I discovered that the update prevented Koko Analytics from tracking total visitors while continuing to track pageviews. Fortunately, for purposes of my weekly and annual rankings, I rely on pageviews – we do not track total visitors reliably anyway because I do not, as of now, enable cookies for Koko Analytics. The team behind the free and open source local analytics plugin recognized the issue and released a new update within 24 hours, restoring the tool to perfect working order.

6. Notable leaf journal

Last week’s review of Until We Meet Again is part of my al|together visual novel translation review project. With the publication of Until We Meet Again, the project is just over 1/3 complete. I put a few reviews on my schedule to publish in December. One of these is At Summer’s End, an al|together 2006 festival translation of Milkcat’s December 17, 2003 visual novel, Natsu no Owari ni. While reading, I wondered why it seemed to be much longer than the 39-minute estimate I saw based on Visual Novel Database, which is based on five reader views (note: I am a relatively fast reader for visual novel purposes). I then realized that I had inadvertently started A Dream of Summer, another al|together 2006 translation – this one of a different Milkcat visual novel. I plan to publish a review of A Dream of Summer in July 2023, so we can consider my early misdirected efforts something akin to a downpayment.

I will publish a more detailed article on this story – so be sure to look forward to it.

7. Taking leaf

Thank you as always for joining me for another edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal. If you enjoyed the content and do not already follow the newsletter, you can join our email list or simply add the newsletter’s RSS feed to your favorite feed reader (see our sign-up page).

Until December 17,

Cura ut valeas.