Newsletter Leaf Journal CXXVI 〜 Not on ice 〜
Welcome to the 126th 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. I did not have much New Leaf Journal content to share last week. While this week was not busy, we have a bit more to offer in the form of New Leaf Journal links to go with our links from around the web and other news and notes.
Table of contents
- Leaves from the week that was
- Leaves from around the web
- The Old Leaf Journal
- Most-turned leaves of the week
- News leaf journal
- Notable leaf journal
- Taking leaf
Leaves from the week that was
I published four regular articles since the previous newsletter…
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Boat playground seen from Brooklyn Bridge
N.A. Ferrell. March 4.One way to show off a luxury apartment building (in three pictures).
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MIDI sound for games on Arch-based distro
N.A. Ferrell. March 5.All it took was installing and configuring Fluidsynth, running Fluidsynth, and loading three kernel drivers…
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Dialogue: Dinosaur fight tier-lists
N.A. Ferrell. March 6.The return of Justin and Justina sees Justin offer his nostalgia-tinted take on a story about how dinosaurs fought.
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Keyboard shortcut typos: ICE vs ice
N.A. Ferrell. March 7.There are times when even a reporter who focuses on U.S. immigration law needs the plain old cold ice instead of the agency ICE.
I also shared a handful of short posts…
- Concept liquid cooling system for phones (Please no…)
- Dasung to release e-ink phone monitor (It’s an interesting idea…)
- Pakistan’s blasphemy law amendment (Where knowing what you’re dealing with allows you to see the punchline in advance…)
Leaves from around the web
Back into my around the web backlog…
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Archaeologists Unearth 3,000-Year-Old Wishing Well in Germany
Sarah Kuta for Smithsonian Magazine. January 18, 2023.None of their wishes will come true now that they told everyone about it.
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Impersonating Famous Musicians: A Two Thousand Year History
Ted Gioia at The Honest Broker. January 20, 2023.What if being Elvis is a state-of-mind thing?
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All the Hyphens & Dashes
Jeff Starr at Perishable Press. January 24, 2023.Good post but needs more respect for the wave dash.
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Former women’s world boxing champion confronts molester on bus in Japan
Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. January 26, 2023.The headline doesn’t leave much room for me to add commentary…
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James Dolan repeats threat to ban booze at Madison Square Garden amid face-tech fight
Zach Williams for the New York Post. January 27, 2023.This would be good. But I am more concerned about the mold at Madison Square Garden. I haven’t been to the Garden in a while, but the mold is bad.
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Handling an Immigration-Related issue, Child Marriage, in an Odd Way
David North for Center for Immigration Studies. January 27, 2023.I studied this issue a few years ago and came to the same conclusions. The U.S. immigration laws should define a minimum age for spouses in the immigration benefits context.
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‘I Water You, You Water Me’: High School Assistant Principal Under Fire for Raising Money to Pay Off Coyote
Jonathan Turley. January 28, 2023.I am confident that a non-insignificant number of students at the high school would have been smart enough to know that soliciting donations to pay off human traffickers is – to put it mildly – dumb.
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A Calculated Move: Calculators Now Emulated at Internet Archive
Jason Scott for Internet Archive Blogs. January 29, 2023.I was mildly tempted to get a Voyage 200 back in the day, but it wasn’t test-legal. Concluded my high school career with the TI-89 Titanium instead.
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Queen of clean Marie Kondo says she has ‘kind of given up’ on tidying at home
Mabel Banfield-Nwachi for The Guardian. January 30, 2023.It is going to be hard for Ms. Kondo to change her brand at this stage…
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Koei Tecmo won’t be accepting Valentine’s Day gifts from fans this year
Ayuo Kawase for Automation. January 31, 2023.Apparently some people like to send Valentine’s gifts to 2D game characters. Does this mean that they should not expect White Day return gifts from said fictional characters? (This segues to the next section of this newsletter…)
The Old Leaf Journal
Let’s dig into our archive…
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Justin & Justina 〜 White Day Reciprocity
N.A. Ferrell. February 17, 2021.A dialogue on borrowing a Japanese occasion for personal gain.
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A Pigeon on a Step in Sunset Park
N.A. Ferrell. January 20, 2021.This pigeon is brown. The pigeon that Victor and I rescued in January 2023 was brown. This is not that pigeon. It is still a cool pigeon, however.
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The Heroic Fallen Trash Can Rescue in Gowanus
N.A. Ferrell. October 30, 2020.Let no good deed go un-mentioned.
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Takaki’s Memories in 5 Centimeters Per Second
N.A. Ferrell. May 2, 2022.This movie analysis piece made a significant appearance in Justin’s commentary on dinosaur fight tier-lists.
Most-turned leaves of the newsletter week
I list our most-read articles from the previous newsletter week (Friday to Saturday) in each edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal. These statistics come courtesy of Koko Analytics, our local, privacy friendly page-counting solution (see my review). Below, I present the 5 most-visited articles of the 10th newsletter week of 2023.
- Tiki paralogue trick in Fire Emblem Engage (NAF: 2.3.23)
2023 appearances: 5. Top placements: 4. - The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei (NAF: 3.14.21)
2023 appearances: 10. Top placements: 5. - Peekier Search Engine Review (NAF: 2.26.22)
2023 appearances: 3. - Installing Ubuntu Touch on a Google Nexus 7 (2013) (NAF: 7.5.21)
2023 appearances: 8. Top placements: 1. - Review of /e/ - An Android Alternative For Mobile Phones (NAF: 11.21.21)
2023 appearances: First 23 appearance.
We continue to be blacklisted by Bing, and this continues to have an effect on our overall pageview numbers. I have noticed that Google visitors, who now make up the main part of our traffic, tend to be one-and-done visitors. This is all well and good for articles that receive direct traffic from Google Search, but it is sub-optimal for articles that require people to spend more time browsing The New Leaf Journal.
Our top-three articles separated themselves from the pack for the second consecutive week, with my Fire Emblem quasi strategy guide becoming only the fourth article to notch four consecutive first-place appearances since I started keeping track in January 2021. My tsuki ga kirei post, which will see its second anniversary online on Tuesday the 14th, notched its 98th consecutive top five. Our ranking was rounded out by the first 2023 appearance of our all-time most-read article, my 2021 review of /e/ OS (see 2022 ranking).
News leaf journal
I made one somewhat notable change in the last week in deleting our related posts plugin. I had three reasons for removing this functionality from our site:
- While I did not notice any negative speed impacts, I am a bit concerned with the number of posts we have that it would be an issue down the line.
- I noted some issues with the recommendations.
- It became clear to me while looking at our page view counts in a post-Bing world that not many people were following related post recommendations chosen by the plugin.
None of the alternative algorithmic related post plugins quite work for me. I tried one manual solution but had some issues with it. I am considering some alternative related post solutions, but for the time being the way to find related content is through category archives, tag archives, and related links. I will post updates if I try something new.
Notable leaf journal
I have been using the paid Wallabag service to as a read-it-later solution and also to save articles for inclusion in the instant newsletter. However, I have begun having connectivity issues with the Android app (I download it from F-Droid), which has not been updated in a year. The actual site is not a good alternative since it is slow. I am looking at transitioning to a different solution (the lack of updates to the app and lack of reader options on desktop make me reluctant to roll my own Wallabag instance). My search for a new solution may be the subject of a future article…
Taking leaf
Thank you as always for reading and following The New(sletter) Leaf Journal. If you have not done so already, consider signing up for our weekly newsletter via email or adding its RSS feed to your preferred feed reader. I also syndicate the Saturday newsletter to The New Leaf Journal on Mondays. You can find all of the newsletter-information and links here. All of our New Leaf Journal feeds are available here.
Until March 18,
Cura ut valeas.