The Newsletter Leaf Journal LXXXII 〜 Nice newsletter
Welcome to the 82nd 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 from the waterproof keyboard of the editor of The New Leaf Journal, Nicholas A. Ferrell. Our newest newsletter comes packed with updates from the week that was at The New Leaf Journal and links and recommendations from around the web.
Table of Contents
- Leaves From The Week That Was
- Leaves From Around The Web
- The Old Leaf Journal
- Most-Turned Leaves Of The Newsletter Week
- Notable Leaf Journal
- News Leaf Journal
- Taking Leaf
1. Leaves From The Week That Was
We published seven regular articles since mailing last week’s newsletter. You will find the full list, with links, below.
| Published | Author | Article and Link |
|---|---|---|
| 4.30 | NAF | April 2022 at The New Leaf Journal |
| 5.1 | NAF | “Lines to a Mosquito” - 1895 Poem |
| 5.2 | NAF | Takaki’s Memories in 5 Centimeters Per Second |
| 5.3 | NAF | How Minds Social Gets Hashtags Right |
| 5.4 | NAF | The Barefoot Man on NYC Sidewalks |
| 5.5 | NAF | Black Squirrel in a Tree in Brooklyn |
| 5.6 | NAF | Searching for School Days’ Nice Boat |
One-Sentence Descriptions of Each Arcticle
- April 2022 at The New Leaf Journal: Our regular month-in-review post with all the content that fans of our month-in-review series would expect.
- “Lines to a Mosquito” - 1895 Poem: Covering a poem by a fictional character in a short story set in brownstone Brooklyn.
- Takaki’s Memories in 5 Centimeters Per Second: I analyze in detail one of my favorite scenes from my favorite movie while including many aesthetic screenshots.
- How Minds Social Gets Hashtags Right: A close look at the best way to handle hashtags (short of not having hashtags, of course).
- The Barefoot Man on NYC Sidewalks: I saw it, so you have to read about it.
- Black Squirrel in a Tree in Brooklyn: A photo-based article that serves as the spiritual follow-up to two pieces that I wrote in May 2020.
- Searching for School Days’ Nice Boat: I follow up last year’s comprehensive look at the anime that gave us one of anime’s most well-known memes by considering a different question about the meme.
Leaflets
I published ten Leaflet microposts since mailing our previous newsletter (Leaflet introduction). I will cover some of the Leaflets in other parts of this newsletter. Below, you will find links to a few of the Leaflets that I will not discuss elsewhere.
- “Why did the chicken cross the rails?”: A short Leaflet abouta humorous story that I covered in last week’s Around the Web section.
- A Marxist Better Homes Backlink: Backlinks are always welcome at The New Leaf Journal. Here, I take a look at a surprising backlink that we received from a self-described Marxist magazine called Cosmonaut (the link cited our article for the limited purpose of our re-printing a quote by Herbert Hoover).
- Finishing Sound! Euphonium 5 Years Late: On overcoming self-imposed blockers to watch the second season of Sound! Euphonium five years after it originally aired.
2. Leaves From Around The Web
Let’s see what’s going on around the world wide web…
- A Creepy, unplanned visit to a Japanese ghost town… with ice cream! | Casey Baseel at SoraNews 24 | May 1, 2022:
A reporter visits a Japanese boom town from the 1980s that subsequently went bust. - Reclusive Taliban supreme leader hails ‘victory’ in speech marking Muslim Eid holiday | Guy Taylor at The Washington Times | May 2, 2022:
“Mr. Akhundzada rarely appears in public. Sunday’s speech in Kandahar was his first before a large audience since the Taliban took control of cities across Afghanistan following the full withdrawal of American forces last August…” (He has a different style than his neighboring head of state, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who I noted almost two years ago to the day very much likes to talk in public). - NYC actor with speech impediment claims TSA agent ‘detained’ him for stuttering | Yaron Steinbuch at The New York Post| May 6, 2022:
My first thought upon reading this was that maybe news outlets ought to exercise discretion before publishing unverified claims by “TikTok stars” - especially when said claims segue perfectly into their TikTok personae. - Post on Minds About Childhood Friends | Paddy100 on Minds | May 4, 2022:
“At some point in your childhood, you and your friends went outside to play together for the last time, and nobody knew it.” I came across this post while posting a link to one of our articles on Minds. I thought that it was fitting since it is very much in line with 5 Centimeters Per Second, which I covered in my feature article of the week two days earlier. - Euler’s Identity: ‘The Most Beautiful Equation’ | Robert Coolman at Livescience | July 1, 2015:
“Euler’s identity is an equality found in mathematics that has been compared to a Shakespearean sonnet and described as ‘the most beautiful equation.’” - Wireless Ear Buds Powered by Open Source? Sounds Good To Me! | Joey Sneddon at OMG! Ubuntu! | April 29, 2022:
I do not personally have a use-case for earbuds, but one note in the article struck me as particularly interesting: “Pine64 notes that the audio chip inside the PineBuds is being evaluated by some regulatory bodies for use in over-the-counter hearing aids, opening up a potentially interesting use-case for the tech.” Over-the counter open source hearing aids would be a worthwhile project. - Administering Nextcloud as a Snap | David Clinton on Medium | April 17, 2019:
I looked this up after hearing someone in a video explain that he ran Nextcloud (think of it as a sort of self-hosted Dropbox) as a Snap package on a VPS. Maybe I need to study this idea more closely. - Ghostwriter Markdown Editor as Twitter Character Counter | Nicholas A. Ferrell on NAF Musings | May 6, 2022:
By calling my own number here, I can also link to my related Leaflet. Talk about efficiency!
3. The Old Leaf Journal
I have begun posting daily This Day in New Leaf Journal History articles on my Hubzilla profile. For The Old Leaf Journal section, I refer you to yesterday’s entry for May 6. My May 6 post this year was a follow-up to my May 6 post last year on the train-wreck that is the School Days anime and the infamous Nice Boat meme that sailed from the controversy surrounding its final episode. The first School Days article in 2021 was the successor to Victor V. Gurbo’s May 6, 2020 article about Love Henry, a classic folk ballad covering love and madness.
This week also featured another article that served as a follow-up to May 2020 content. I published an article on a photo I took of a black squirrel in Brooklyn this past week. On May 5, 2020, I told the story of an unusual black squirrel sighting in Boerum Hill in 2000 or 2001. I turned the story into a haiku on May 13, 2020.
4. Most-Turned Leaves Of The Newsletter 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 site.
The week of April 30-May 5 was the eighteenth newsletter week of 2022.
| # | Article Title and Link | Author | Date | 22Top5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei | NAF | 3.14.21 | 18 (15) |
| 2 | Recommended F-Droid FOSS Apps For Android-Based Devices | NAF | 11.27.21 | 18 (3) |
| 3 | Installing Ubuntu Touch on an Asus Nexus 7 | NAF | 7.5.21 | 18 |
| 4 | An Early Review of Pixelfed - Instagram Alternative | NAF | 11.13.20 | 2 |
| 5 | Review of the Teracube 2e Smartphone | NAF | 11.19.21 | 2 |
Analysis
Four of the top-five articles from newsletter week 17 returned to the top five in week 18 in the same positions. The newcomer was an old-standby, my 2020 review of Pixelfed came in at fourth place, making its second top-five appearance of 2022. Maybe I need to find something new to write about Pixelfed for a 2022 update.
5. Notable Leaf Journal
Today I will cover a project born from the Useless Web Project - Mondrian and Me. You start with a blank canvas. As you click the screen, you begin to compose your very own Mondrian painting. You can learn more about the creator, Tim Holman, and why he created Mondrian And Me, here. I may cover this strange project in more detail on The New Leaf Journal in the future.
6. News Leaf Journal
The only change that I made to The New Leaf Journal proper this week was to our main Archive Page. I decided to streamline our menu for performance reasons. As a result, itis important that the items that are included on the streamlined menu help guide visitors around the site. Our new Archive page now features links to all of our sub-archive pages. I explained my thought-process in a new Leaflet micropost.
I added a new project outside The New Leaf Journal that I referenced in our Old Leaf Journal section above. I am now posting daily This Day in New Leaf Journal history pieces on my Hubzilla profile. I explained the program in a Leaflet micropost. If you want to see what was going on at The New Leaf Journal in 2020 and 2021, you can subscribe to my Hubzilla RSS feed.
7. Taking Leaf
Thank you for joining us for the 82nd edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal. If you already subscribe to the newsletter through email or RSS, I thank you for subscribing. If you found this newsletter through other means such as by traversing our archive, The Sample, social media, or other means, I hope that the content was interesting enough to convince you to consider signing up via email or RSS. We send our newsletters every Saturday.
My early May articles covered a number of subjects, and I look forward to continuing to publish content in what has been, and promises to be, a busy end to the first half of 2022. I look forward to mailing a new newsletter full of updates next Saturday.
Until May 14,
Cura ut valeas.