February 2025 came to a close 10 days ago. The end of the month means that it is time for our regularly-scheduled month-in-review. February was not a busy month in terms of new articles – I only managed to publish 10 and one was our January review. But it was a busy month for visitors. January had been our best-ever non-Hacker News page 1 aided month, and we had close to the same number of visitors per day in February. Below, I will recap the month that was.
New Leaves in February
Setting aside my January 2025 at The New Leaf Journal recap article, I published nine original new articles in February.
I will lead off our recap with Inflatable Valentine’s Bears in Brooklyn. This very timely post came exactly as advertised by the title.
Shortly after midnight on February 1, 2025, I published 2024 TV Anime Category Awards. This is a companion article to The Best TV Anime of 2024, which I had published just before midnight. Both were supposed to be published in January, but the second article snuck itself into February. I published two additional anime articles. First, we have my newest anime hair color study: Blondes in “I’m Getting Married to a Girl I Hate in My Class”. This piece studies the hair color of a secondary character in the ongoing I’m Getting Married to a Girl I Hate in My Class. One day later, I published Tsuki ga Kirei in Shangri-La Frontier, which covers the appearance of the apocryphal Natsume Soseki-tsuki ga kirei story (I covered it back in 2021) in the ongoing second season of Shangri-La Frontier.
In video game news, I reviewed two related visual novels in 40 Days and 40 Nights of Rain – VN Review. One of the two novels is unsurprisingly 40 Days and 40 Nights of Rain. The second is A Happy Valentine, which is a side-story to the main novel. Both of these pieces are unofficial English-language localizations of freeware Japanese visual novels released in 2007.
In the commentary category, I offered my critique of a new NBC-Universal marketing strategy, as stated in On Peacock’s Plan, to “feed them content” – wherein I went into detail on why I try to avoid describing good writing and media as content.
In Amazon Appstore and Android, I discussed Amazon’s decision to discontinue the Amazon Appstore on regular Android devices and how I had not realized that it was ever available on regular Android. From there, I reminisced about using Amazon Appstore on my old Kindle Fire HDX 7 and my BlackBerry Classic. and I offered some open source app suggestions for people using modern Amazon Fire devices.
I upgraded my home networking set-up and wrote about it in My OpenWrt NETGEAR WAX 202 Access Point.
Finally, I took a stroll down memory lane in Emojam and Emoji Story-Telling Memories wherein I recall how my high school friend tried to convince me over AIM to watch the TV show 24 by using emojis to illustrate an interrogation scene from the show.
Off-Site Leaves
I published a few posts on our short-form writing sister site, The Emu Café Social. I wrote about learning about a Higurashi When They Cry phone game, a candy company’s domination of the U.S. corporate vet market, Ozempic’s reptilian origins, why Brooklyn City Hall survived, and IMDB being 35 years old.
I also published and mailed four new editions (218-21) of The Newsletter Leaf Journal:
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CCXVIII 〜 Best in-box
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CCXIX 〜 ) story
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CCXX 〜 Bearly
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CCXXI 〜 221 days of newsletter
Most-Visited Leaves of February 2025
I use a WordPress plugin called Koko Analytics to count page views (Koko Analytics works entirely locally – you can read my 2021 review, although it has changed a bit while still maintaining the same basic functionality). Each month, I list our most-visited articles according to Koko Analytics. Below, you will find our 24 most-visited articles of February 2025 and for the three month December 2024-February 2025 period.
My Examining Whether Defense Wins NBA Championships article had the best month not aided by a Hacker News page 1 since November 2022. This reflected high Google Search traffic which seemed to correspond to the announcement of the Luka Doncic trade – despite my article not having anything to do with the trade. Its ascent may have also been aided by its being cited to in an article in The Athletic in January. Rounding out the top three was my January 26 second review of Pixelfed and the top-article of January, my 2022 review of Kaori After Story.
While the January ranking featured several surprises, February proved to be largely similar to January, with most of the February-surprise articles continuing to perform well. One notable and pleasant surprise in my book was my The Best TV Anime of 2024 post, which is for practical intents and purposes a February article since I published it late in the evening on January 31. None of my 2021-2023 year-end anime reviews featured on any weekly or monthly rankings, but my 2024 review checked both boxes with a top-five finish in its first week online and a top-12 finish for the month. It does not look like it will repeat the feat in March, but one monthly ranking is certainly better than none.
Looking Ahead
We have already completed the first third of March, so I suppose that it is a little late for a March preview. I did not publish as many articles in February as I would have liked due to being busy with work and other projects, but I was glad to see that the my slower publishing pace did not seem to have any effect on the number of new site visitors. With that being said, I look forward to trying to publish more in the latter two-thirds of March so that I will have more to share in next month’s month-end review.
