The Newsletter Leaf Journal XCI 〜 The Newsletter Doctrine
Life and death masks, President Monroe, Hotel Mario, tech guides, and more in our latest newsletter.
Welcome to the 91st edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of the perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal. This newsletter, like all of the newsletters before it, comes to you from the waterproof keyboard of the editor of The New Leaf Journal, Nicholas A. Ferrell. In this newsletter, I will review our content from Independence Day week, refer you to interesting content from around the web, and go through news and notes about The New Leaf Journal.
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 four new full articles since mailing the previous newsletter. Before I get to the list, I must note that the featured content from this week was about American history, while the featured content from the previous week was an English-language visual novel review. Where else will you find such variety?
- The July 4 Death of James Monroe | N.A. Ferrell | July 4, 2022 | Summary: On July 4, 1831, James Monroe became the the third president of the first five presidents to pass away on Independence Day. This post is not only about his death, but also his extraordinary life.
- The Life Masks of John Henri Isaac Browere | N.A. Ferrell | July 5, 2022 | Summary: John Browere was a 19th century artist who produced life masks of many great figures of the Founding era and the early Republic, including Lafayette, both presidents Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Van Buren. This post provides a history of Browere's work along with images of a few busts produced from his life masks.
- John Browere's Death Mask of James Monroe | N.A. Ferrell | July 6, 2022 | Summary: Browere was known for life masks, not death masks. But his artistic corpus included a single death mask, that of the 5th President of the United States, James Monroe.
- School Days' Sekai Becomes a VTuber? | N.A. Ferrell | July 7, 2022 | Quote: "But that aside, it appears that notwithstanding some of the life-ending events involving Sekai at the end of the School Days anime, she managed to make a new career for herself."
I published four short Leaflet posts since our previous newsletter, including a couple that were more substantive than your ordinary Leaflet. I will list three below while reserving one for the Around the Web section of the instant newsletter.
- Configuring Cookies in Steam Account Settings: A short guide to managing cookies in Steam accounts.
- Chinese Domain Name Phishing Scam: How I avoided paying large amounts of money to a purported Chinese domain name registrar.
- A Look at Lilo Search: Examining a charity-centric French search engine (or wrapper) that appeared in our referrer logs.
2. Leaves From Around the Web
Let's see what's going on around the web (and our fourth leaflet)...
- Stephen Radosh: A Q&A With the Creator of Hotel Mario | Samuel Clemens for Games Reviews | July 4, 2022 | Summary: An interview with the producer of what may be the most peculiar Mario game, having beem created for the Philips CD-i in 1993 instead of for a Nintendo console. I offered my thoughts in a Leaflet.
- What's it like to attend an idol concert where they're singing lyrics that you wrote? Complicated | Casey Baseel for SoraNews24 | July 7, 2022 | Summary: A SoraNews24 writer who recently gave up on his own career as a musician nevertheless saw lyrics he wrote performed from a big stage in Tokyo.
- The Georgia Guidestones | Sumit Khanna at BattlePenguin | February 1, 2022 | Summary: The Georgia Guidestones were in the news for having a bad week. This post is an account of a visit to the strange erstwhile monument in early 2022.
- By law, the actions of accused NYC bodega worker Jose Alba are justified | Michael S. Disciorarro for the New York Post | July 7, 2022 | Thoughts: Speaking for myself as a resident of New York City, I concur entirely.
- this is my last post ...on wordpress | Raymond Hines at Along the Ray | July 5, 2022 | Thoughts: While I will not be joining Mr. Hines in taking The New Leaf Journal from WordPress to Blot, this is an interesting post on an accessible way to run a blog or personal website.
- PlayStation Store will remove customers' purchased movies | Rasmus Larsen for flatpanelshd | July 5, 2022 | Thoughts: This is a good advertisement for my articles on DRM-free games on Steam and the perks of physical media... maybe it is time for a follow-up.
- Japanese banana importer teaches us how to enjoy bananas and fight heatstroke at the same time | Shannon for SoraNews24 | July 4, 2022 | Summary: Good banana tips.
3. The Old Leaf Journal
Let's check in on our archive...
- An Unclear and Indistinct Idea of a Truth Tree | N.A. Ferrell | July 9, 2020 | Summary: While far from our most-read post, this is one of my better pieces of headline writing (and art).
- A Miniature Portrait of Laura Coombs Hills | N.A. Ferrell | January 15, 2021 | Thoughts: My article on Browere noted that he first worked under the tutelage of a prominent miniature painter. This post is a history of one of the most accomplished American miniature painters of the turn of the twentieth century, Laura Coombs Hills.
- Reviewing Elephind: A Powerful Newspaper Search Engine | N.A. Ferrell | July 18, 2021 | Thoughts: Elephind not only featured in my research for two of my articles in the past week, it also had its best week (in terms of views) thanks to a Hacker News share. Alas, the success did not place it in our top-five most-visited articles, but it was more than enough to earn an Old Leaf Journal appearance.
- Review of the Original Persona 4 Artbook | N.A. Ferrell | July 5, 2020 | Thoughts: While my second Persona 4 artbook review has been far more successful in terms of page views, this first review was a more interesting project.
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 July 2-8 was the 27th Newsletter Week of 2022.
| # | Article | Auth | Pub | 22Top5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Recommended F-Droid FOSS Apps For Android-Based Devices (2021) | NAF | 11.27.21 | 27 (7) |
| 2 | The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei | NAF | 3.14.21 | 27 (19) |
| 3 | Calvin Coolidge On Why We Celebrate Independence Day | NAF | 7.2.21 | NEW |
| 4 | Biden, Lincoln, and Counting Back From the President's Birth | NAF | 4.29.22 | 4 |
| 5 | How to Find Substack RSS Feeds and Other Notes | NAF | 6.19.21 | 10 |
The surprise of this week's listis my 2021 article on then-President Calvin Coolidge's Independence Day speech on July 4, 1926 (that also happened to be his 54th birthday). It accrued a large number of visits on Independence Day (I believe most came from DuckDuckGo/Bing) to not only post its first-ever top-five, but also nearly take the second spot in the ranking from my tsuki ga kirei post. The list was rounded out by two articles making their first top-five appearances in several weeks. One notable absence was my post on installing Ubuntu Touch, which missed the top five for only the third week out of 27 in 2022 (it came in sixth).
5. Notable Leaf Journal
I came across a terrific resource for improving personal security online and in personal computing generally that I thought was worth sharing with newsletter readers. Ms. Alicia Sykes' Personal Security Checklist walks users through improving their security and privacy profiles in twelve different categories. It has useful information for beginners and tech-savvy users alike.
Ms. Sykes carefully explains each recommendation and assigns it a priority level. Ms. Sykes also produced a shorter, bullet-point version of the list. You will also find links to additional lists (e.g., recommended alternatives to popular platforms) in the resource.
6. News Leaf Journal
While I made no notable changes to The New Leaf Journal proper in the last week, I did take some time to try to clean up some issues that we may be having with Google search. While it will take a few weeks for the changes to fully pay off (assuming I correctly diagnosed the issues), we did have a few relatively strong search days in the last week. With hope, this will help The New Leaf Journal return to the search numbers it saw in March 2022, which remains our strongest month in terms of search engine impressions and conversions.
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 subscribe to this weekly newsletter by email or add its RSS feed to your favorite feed reader. I also syndicate the newsletter to Bearblog.
Until next Saturday and newsletter 92,
Cura ut valeas.