The Newsletter Leaf Journal LXXXIX 〜 Summer, Cicadas, and The Newsletter

Welcome to the 89th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of the perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal. As always, this newsletter comes to you from the waterproof keyboard of the editor of The New Leaf Journal, Nicholas A. Ferrell. I spilled a full cup of coffee on my keyboard yesterday. Don't let anyone tell you that having a waterproof keyboard does not matter.

I only published three new articles since the last newsletter. Work and sinus headaches intervened. We will recap those articles along with our usual assortment of links from around the web and news about The New Leaf Journal as we look forward to a much busier week to bring June and the first half of 2022 to a close.

Table of Contents

1. Leaves (and Leaflets) From The Week That Was
2. Leaves From Around The Web
3. The Old Leaf Journal
4. Most-Turned Leaves Of The Newsletter Week
5. Notable Leaf Journal
6. News Leaf Journal
7. Taking Leaf

1. Leaves (and Leaflets) From The Week That Was

It was a slow week, but I did publish one labor-intensive visual novel review project.

• Dialogue: Car Horn Honkers Want To Be Seen | N.A. Ferrell | June 18, 2022 | Summary: Justin and Justina explore the modest desires of people who honk their car horns unnecessarily.
• Visual Novel Review: "Summer, Cicadas, and the Girl" | N.A. Ferrell | June 19, 2022 | Summary: I continued by altogether visual novel review project with a look at one of the shortest and most creative visual novel translations from the 2005, 2006, and 2008 festivals.
• Upside-Down Stop Sign in Brooklyn Heights | N.A. Ferrell | June 21, 2022 | Summary: Not fallen, but not right-side-up.

I also published three Leaflet microposts last week. I will note two in this section. Firstly, I expressed my concern that geese swimming in the Gowanus Canal may grow toes. Secondly, I described having difficulty in the penultimate battle in my third Fire Emblem: Three Houses run because I failed to see two shoals connecting land masses across a river.

2. Leaves From Around The Web

While The New Leaf Journal was light on content last week, there was plenty of content from around the world wide web...

• We spend 24 hours trying to keep a Tamagotchi alive, it ends up doing something weirder | Katie Pask for SoraNews24 | June 23, 2022 | Thoughts: They apparently make Tamagotchi smart watches now... they grow up so fast.
• Brave Search leaves beta, offers Goggles for filtering, personalizing results | Thomas Claburn for The Register | June 23, 2022 | Thoughts: Brave Search itself is fairly good from my limited tests. When I have some time, I'll look into how to configure Goggles to personalize my results.
• A great day for non-robots: iOS 16 will bypass CAPTCHAs | Laura Dobberstein for The Register | June 21, 2023 | Thoughts: While I have no iOS devices and no plans to change that, I am all for Apple's decision to help its users avoid inhumane CAPTCHAs.
• Making the Master System a Master of Speech | Nicole Branagan at Nicole Express | June 18, 2022 | Thoughts: Sega Master System was Sega's first major console in the United States. In this post, Ms. Branagan takes a technical look at how Master System games implemented (very limited) speech and then worked on improving it.
• Tribeca's $10 million 'half bean' sculpture nearly ready for viewing | Maddie Panzer and Melissa Klein for the New York Post | June 25, 2022 | Thoughts: Some people and groups have more money than they know what to do with.
• Personal information of everyone in Amagaski City lost by a person who passed out drunk on street | Master Blaster for SoraNews24 | June 24, 2022 | Thoughts: That the headline is entirely in context raises a multitude of questions.
• Daily News Stuff 25 June 2022 | Pixy Misa at Ambient Irony | June 25, 2022 (shocker) | Thoughts: Musings on Ikea bookshelves and Android tablets.
• World War II As It Happened: Tuesday June 25, 1940 Day 299 | Maritime Quest | Thoughts: A collection of June 25, 1940 newspaper covers.

3. The Old Leaf Journal

Let's dig into The New Leaf Journal archives.

• Teaching the Art of the Video Game Snafu | N.A. Ferrell | July 29, 2020 | Thoughts: Having just finished my third play-through of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, I look back at an article I wrote about a certain mistake in my second play-through.
• A Necessary Compensatory Ideology | N.A. Ferrell | June 26, 2020 | Thoughts: The anatomy of an interesting phrase that I read in a column.
• A Miniature Article About a Miniature Stop Sign in Brooklyn | N.A. Ferrell | June 24, 2021 | Thoughts: This article was, and remains, the most peculiar New Leaf Journal post to be shared on Hacker News.
• Justin and Justina 〜 Blinded by Headlights | N.A. Ferrell | September 12, 2021 | Thoughts: Justin and Justina complained about car horns in my post from this week. Last September, they dealt with excessively bright headlights.

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 18-24 was the twenty-fifth newsletter week of 2022.

We had an unusual top five behind the perennial top two - with three articles making their 2022 top five debuts. My May review of ProxiTok, which had a strong first month, made its first top five after being shared on a link aggregator site that I never heard of. My 2020 review of the Persona 4 Golden digital art book made 37 weekly top fives in 2021, but had no appearances in 2022 until coming in 4th for Newsletter Week 25. Finally, my post on setting up a Japanese language environment in three Wine front-ends was shared on Hacker News. While it did not gain much traction there, it had enough of a spike to make its first top five appearance in its first full week online.

Among the notable absences was my post on installing Ubuntu Touch, which fell outside of the top five for only the second time in 2022.

5. Notable Leaf Journal

MarkDownload is a free and open source extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. The Chrome and Firefox versions are free of cost while the Safari version has a small price to cover Apple's developer fee. I have been using the extension on Firefox. It allows users to clip the content of a webpage as markdown and save it as a markdown file or just allow the user to select which parts of the page to save. I have found the extension useful thus far both for note-taking and for converting New Leaf Journal articles for syndication purposes. If you use markdown regularly, it is well-worth a look.

6. News Leaf Journal

After only publishing a few articles over the last two weeks, I will work on getting back to a better publication pace for the last week of June as we look forward to July. Other than more content, I do not have any major changes to The New Leaf Journal in mind in the immediate future.

7. Taking Leaf

Thank you as always for reading The Newsletter Leaf Journal. If you enjoyed the content and are not already a subscriber, you can sign up via email or add our newsletter RSS feed to your favorite feed reader. I also syndicate our newsletter to Bearblog.

Until next week and our first newsletter of July,

Cura ut valeas.