The Newsletter Leaf Journal XC 〜 ACE Newsletter
"I voted!" stickers, long visual novel reviews, Independence Day content, and more.
Welcome to the 90th 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 (unlike last week, I did not spill anything on my keyboard this week). We happily welcome July and Independence Day weekend with our new newsletter. After two weeks with little new content, I published seven new articles since our previous newsletter. Without further ado, let us proceed to our new content, content 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 Newsletter Week
- Notable Leaf Journal
- News Leaf Journal
- Taking Leaf
1. Leaves From The Week That Was
I published one article every day of the last week. Let us jump right in to the new content.
- Another Hamilton Avenue Footbridge View | NAF | June 25, 2022 | Summary: A short follow-up to one of my feature articles of June 2022.
- Harry Wilson Wants My Vote For Governor | NAF | June 26, 2022 | Summary: The biblical amount of mail that Mr. Wilson sent to my mailbox did not win my vote. Moreover, judging from his distant fourth-place finish in the GOP gubernatorial primary, I think that he would have been wise to spread the deluge out just a bit.
- Running Linux Visual Novels With Onscripter | NAF | June 27, 2022 | Summary: An admittedly niche guide to running certain visual novels on Linux.
- One Man, One Vote, Two “I Voted!” Stickers | NAF | June 28, 2022 | Summary: This headline was my greatest writing accomplishment of the week.
- ACE Academy - Visual Novel Review | NAF | June 29, 2022 | Summary: My review of ACE Academy, a fun Japanese-inspired visual novel which can be purchased on Steam, turned into one of the longest New Leaf Journal articles (it is somewhere in the top-5). Also see my Leaflet post on Kendo Crush!, a 2014 demo which would turn into ACE Academy.
- June 2022 at The New Leaf Journal | NAF | June 30, 2022 | Summary: I was a bit pressed for time in writing this review thanks to ACE Academy.
- The New Leaf Journal 2022 Half-Year Review | NAF | July 1, 2022 | Summary: Includes a list of the 25 most-visited articles of the first six months of 2022.
I published six new Leaflets in addition to seven full articles. The show-case Leaflet of the week, linked above, was my post on Kendo Crush!, which complements my ACE Academy review. In another Leaflet, I covered the story of how Mr. Harry Wilson, the gubernatorial candidate who sent me nine full-color campaign mailings in 11-12 days, accidentally included his primary opponent (and eventual nominee), Mr. Lee Zeldin, in a group SMS message discussing his campaign strategy (Leaflet link). On the 28th, I covered a bit of video game news that should be of interest to fans of the Persona series - along with a take about Persona 3. One day later, I called into question a passage about using the yay AUR helper on a Linux distribution called EndeavourOS. Finally, I wrote short posts covering the Oscobo search engine and another ISP search wrapper (please do not use your ISP’s website to perform searches).
2. Leaves From Around The Web
It was a busy week at The New Leaf Journal, but we were not the only site producing content. Let us see what was happening around the world wide web.
- American Declaration of Independence | National Archives | Quote: “When in the course of human events…”
- Tammany at Gettysburg | Stephen Edie for City Journal | July 1, 2022 | Thoughts: Tammany Hall, best known for being a corrupt political machine that dominated New York politics for the better part of a century, had a more noble history during the American Civil War.
- TikTok: Yes, some staff in China can access US data | Thomas Claburn for The Register | July 2, 2022 | Comments: As serious as this problem is, it is not at the top of TikTok’s (which should be banished) problems.
- Kaguya-sama: Love is War Season 3 Production Notes: A Resourceful, Passionate Team’s Triumph Over Adversity | kVin at Sakuga Blog | June 30, 2022 | Thoughts: An in-depth look at the production challenges that faced the third season of the excellent Kaguya-sama: Love is War anime, which wrapped up last week. I featured the first two seasons in my article on recommended anime from 2011-2020, and you can expect to see season three featured at The New Leaf Journal in late 2022 or early 2023.
- Japan’s only blue old-school post box: Where is it and why is it there? | Oona McGee for SoraNews24 | June 22, 2022 | Thoughts: The questions you never thought to ask will be answered.
- A behind-the-scenes look at the bout that took boxing to a new level of crazy | Jason Bracelin for the Las Vegas Review-Journal | Quote from Evander Holyfield’s plastic surgeon: “I said to my buddies, ‘some dummy’s going to have to go and take care of this problem,’ … ‘Lo and behold, I get a phone call, like, about a minute later from people at Valley Hospital. They said, ‘You’ve got to get over here right away because Evander Holyfield gotta get his ear fixed.’“
- When three presidents died on Fourth of July, Americans saw the work of God | Melissa Etehad for the Los Angeles Times | July 4, 2017 | Notes: I noted the deaths in my article on Presidential birthdays: Adams and Jefferson in 1826 and Monroe in 1831.
3. The Old Leaf Journal
Because we are two days away from Independence Day, I will link to a selection of my Fourth of July articles for this issue of The Old Leaf Journal.
- An 1882 Children’s Independence Day Poem | NAF | June 28, 2021 | Thoughts: Poetic scenes from a youth parade for Independence Day.
- “The American Mind” 〜 A 1923 July 4th Oration by Rev. Charles W. Lyons | NAF | June 29, 2021 | Thoughts: An Independence Day speech by the Reverend Charles W. Lyons, S.J.
- Calvin Coolidge On Why We Celebrate Independence Day | NAF | July 2, 2021 | Thoughts: Then-President Calvin Coolidge delivered a speech for the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
- Benjamin Harrison’s Memorable July 4, 1888 | NAF | July 2, 2020 | Thoughts: Benjamin Harrison informally accepted the Republican nomination for President on July 4, 1888 - and delivered two speeches from his home to mark the occasion. He would go on to win the election several months later and become the 23rd President of the United States.
- Justin & Justina 〜 4th of July Grill Sacrifices to the Spirits of the Founders | NAF | June 27, 2021 | Thoughts: My fictional dialogue duo, Justin and Justina, considered whether there is a deeper meaning to all of the Fourth of July grilling.
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 June 25 to July 1 was the 26th Newsletter Week of 2022.
| # | Article | Author | Published | 22Top5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Recommended F-Droid FOSS Apps For Android-Based Devices (2021) | NAF | 11.27.21 | 26 (6) |
| 2 | The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei | NAF | 3.14.21 | 26 (19) |
| 3 | Persona 4 Golden Digital Artbook Review (Steam) | NAF | 11.15.20 | 2 |
| 4 | Installing Ubuntu Touch on an Asus Nexus 7 (2013) | NAF | 7.5.21 | 24 |
| 5 | Peekier Search Engine Review | NAF | 2.26.22 | 4 |
Newsletter Week 26 was a soft week in terms of total visits after a strong Week 25, especially at the top of the ranking. This allowed my 2020 Persona 4 Golden artbook review, which topped the weekly ranking on six occasions in 2021 but had no appearances until last week, to lead the weekly ranking until mid-Wednesday (thanks to a Steam sale) before being overtaken first by my F-Droid app review, which notched its sixth first-place appearance of the year, and then by my post on tsuki ga kirei (which picked up in the second-half of the week) on Thursday. Our top-five was rounded out by my Peekier search engine review, which has had good luck in having solid weeks at the right times to make four weekly top-five appearances since going live in late February.
5. Notable Leaf Journal
I have noted in a number of New Leaf Journal articles that I draft all of my content in markdown. My favorite markdown editor is Ghostwriter, which I reviewed here. While Ghostwriter provides what is, in my view, the best writing experience, I note while drafting the instant newsletter in Ghostwriter that other markdown editors may be better for certain purposes. Moreover, Ghostwriter is built primarily for Linux, although there are builds for Windows and MacOS.
Today I will take a quick look at Zettlr, which describes itself as a “markdown editor for the 21st century.” Zettlr is an Electron app that is available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux (although note that I have only used it on Linux). It provides an uncluttered UI that, while very much a markdown editor, may look a little bit more familiar to people who are used to working in rich text editors and word processors rather than in some of the more minimal markdown editors. Zettlr has a number of features to make it amenable to academic writing, but the reason that I am using it is because of how it handles directories (or folders, in Windows parlance) and because it allows linking to documents within the same directory. I like the idea of using Zettlr to keep a personal database-less Wiki - but I will see how it pans out.
For those of you who may be interested in trying Zettlr - it is fully free and open source and available to download for your platform of choice free of cost.
6. News Leaf Journal
I have no additional New Leaf Journal news to report from the last week. Our Google search impressions and conversions are still down from the numbers we were seeing through mid-May (we peaked during March in terms of raw search impressions and conversions). The hit does seem to dovetail with our Hacker News success in May, but I think that it may be related to an indexing issue that involved our new page caching set up and a bad bot prevention measure. I have made some adjustments, so we will see if they lead to the restoration of our prior search numbers as we proceed into July.
I plan to migrate two of our Resource articles that are currently published as Pages on The New Leaf Journal to our new (and still unused) Resource custom post type. In addition to moving and refining preexisting resources, I will use the Resource post type to create collections of New Leaf Journal articles (e.g., visual novel reviews, Justin & Justina dialogues, New York City bridges, etc.) to make it even easier for new readers to find interesting content in their areas of interest.
7. Taking Leaf
Thank you, as always, for joining us for another issue of The Newsletter Leaf Journal. If you enjoyed the content and have not done so already, you can sign up for future issues via email or add our newsletter’s RSS feed to your favorite feed reader. I hope everyone who is reading this before July 4 has a good long weekend.
Until July 11,
Cura ut valeas.