Going back to August 2020, we traditionally publish a month-end review. I fell a little bit behind in late 2025 for reasons detailed in my review of the months- that -were in September and October, which I published on New Year’s Day, 2026. Today is the fourth day of 2026, and I deem it the best time to catch up fully with our month-end review posts. Below, I review the months that were in The New Leaf Journal in November and December, 2025.
New-ish New Leaf Journal Leaves
I published 11 articles in November and 12 articles in December. Below, I work through our combined 22 posts from those months while offering some background information about how the articles came to be.
November 2025
I began November with JP to EN Game Translation Mishaps (Nov. 5). Despite the headline, this article was prompted by the story of a strange English-to-Japanese translation mishap which had the happy effect of making a game more popular among Japanese Steam users. The headline derives from my using that story as a prompt to discuss a machine translation issue I ran into while writing a 2024 article about May Sky.
Continuing with the game theme, my second article of the month dealt with Troubleshooting AmberELEC Install on Anbernic RG351V (Nov. 6). The Anbernic RG351V is a retro game console which comes in a Game Boy form-factor. I wanted to replace the stock operating system with AmberELEC, which is a free and open source OS that works on the RG351V and other retro game consoles. I ran into several issues getting things working, but I was able to find the solution — which is now documented here for anyone else who may be interested.
I would publish one more video game-related article in November. Dragonair’s Catch Rate in Pokémon Yellow (Nov. 15) is the long-awaited [citation needed!!!] follow-up to one of my most popular articles to date, Dragonair Safari in Pokémon Yellow (Oct. 5, 2023). In my 2023 article, I dug into the odds I was up against in 2019 when I undertook a long and wholly unnecessary process to catch a Dragonair in the Pokémon Yellow Safari Zone. I speculated about why there was a level 15 Dragonair in the Safari Zone, not least because Dragonair is ordinarily only available when it evolves from Dratini (which, coincidentally, is available in the Safari Zone) at level 35. Subsequent to writing that article, I learned a little bit more about some unique circumstances surrounding the Safari Zone Dragonairs in Yellow, which I go through in my new piece.
I published four sports-related articles in November. In Kelly, Fisher, and College Football Coach Buyouts (Nov. 14), I examined Louisiana State’s large buyout of football coach Brian Kelly. One reason I was prompted to write this was because I had, in 2023, covered an even bigger college football coach buyout in On Coach Jimbo Fisher’s Buyout (Nov. 14, 2023). I genuinely did not know going into writing the article that there was a significant common figure in the Kelly and Fisher coaching situations. (I also did not know that things at Louisiana State would become more absurd when the school hired Lane Kiffin as Mr. Kelly’s replacement, but that is a story for another day.)
Investigating John Salley’s Return to Detroit (Nov. 9) was prompted by an article I read summarizing comments from former NBA player John Salley in a podcast interview. Mr. Salley discussed a game in 1993 when he returned to play against his former team, the Detroit Pistons, after being traded to the Miami Heat. Mr. Salley had specific recollections about his performance in that game and the conduct of a certain Dennis Rodman. Out of curiosity, I tried to find the game in question. I came away with reason to believe that Mr. Salley’s memories may have inadvertently conflated two different games, and I dug into contemporaneous news articles to try to piece things together.
Returning to the NBA theme, Best and Worst NBA Title Defenses Since 1983-84 (Nov. 20). By “title defenses,” I mean the performances of NBA teams in the season following winning a championship. This article was prompted by a story I read about the early dominance of the current defending champion, the Oklahoma City Thunder. In a companion article, I covered The 98-99 Bulls’ Championship Defense (Nov. 24). The 1998-99 Bulls were one of only two NBA defending champions to miss the playoffs, which was unsurprising in the wake of losing Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, and Coach Phil Jackson. But I would not have written the article just to note the obvious, namely that the 13-37 Bulls team of 1998-99 was not good. I was inspired after learning that, by one very specific metric, the 1998-99 Bulls were not the worst defending champion since 1983-84.
In Fighting Headlights With EBD Blue 360 Lenses, I wrote about my new glasses for blunting the impact of excessively bright car headlights, the successor to A Walker’s Review of BLUPOND’s Knight Vision Night Driving Glasses (Nov. 13, 2021).
Continuing with the successor trend, Norton Browser Search Referral (Nov. 19) was prompted by a referrer in my logs, but my investigation tied into An In-Depth Look at Norton Safe Search (Oct. 18, 2022), which is one of our more popular articles.
December 2025
I lead with my show-case article of December. 52 Things I Learned in 2025 (Dec. 23) comes as advertised, but unlike last year’s edition of the post (Dec. 16, 2024), every “thing I learned” in 2025 is tied to something I actually published during the year.
I published three articles about adding “.txt” files to The New Leaf Journal in Adding a carbon.txt File (Dec. 1), Adding Ads.txt to Website Without Ads (Dec. 4), and Adding a trust.txt File (Dec. 14). I had learned about carbon.txt and trust.txt a while ago when I saw that crawlers looked for them on The New Leaf Journal. In December, I finally got around to implementing them along with articles explaining what they are. I undertook the ads.txt project (which may be the most “useful” to my fellow webmasters) while I was “in the area.”
Speaking of investigations, I was excited to share news about Finally Solving My HDMI ARC Problems. All the way back in 2020, I wrote about my inability to get HDMI ARC working between my TV and soundbar (Oct. 10, 2020). Although the issue persisted, it did lead to one of my more practical and popular tutorial articles in Broken Optical Audio Cable Door “Fix” (Sep. 16, 2023). In early December, I had reason to test HDMI ARC again, and it works now. While I do not know the precise reason why it works now but did not work before, I offered theories in my new piece.
It had been some time since I published a Justin and Justina dialogue, so I rectified this short-coming with Democracy and Vodka in Kyrgyzstan (Dec. 4). I suspect I am the first person to have turned a story about the then-upcoming Kyrgysz elections into a humorous dialogue. Also falling under the humor category is On GPL-1s for Obese House Cats (Dec. 16), wherein, prompted by a news story, I offer my take on new trends in veterinary medicine.
News of Philip Rivers’ unexpected return to professional football after a five year retirement inspired Philip Rivers Comeback Takes Me Back (Dec. 13). Takes me back where you might ask? To stories of my first NFL and college football games and football debates back in my high school days.
On Christmas, I published an article about My Gingerbread Man Soap Dispenser (Dec. 25). This post comes as advertised. Continuing the holiday trend, New Year’s Eve brought Weathered “Snow King” Sculpture in Brooklyn (Dec. 31). A remarkably detailed and beautiful snow sculpture seen on Atlantic Avenue on December 28 had made the news. As I explained on our sister site in Seeing the “Snow King” on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue (Dec. 29, ECS), I had actually walked by the snow sculpture by pure chance before reading about it, but I failed to take a picture. I rectified my error one day later, but the sculpture had by then suffered a bit in the elements.
Finally, I set us up for early 2026 with Winter Season 2026 at The New Leaf Journal, wherein I offer a theme for our articles for the rest of the season. I explain my inspiration for the seasons idea in the post, and I look forward to using this winter to publish many long-pending projects in order to have a clean slate for the spring.
Non-NLJ Leaves
I published many short posts on The Emu Café Social in November and December (especially in November), many of which made it into my “52 Things I Learned” article on NLJ. There are too many to share here individually, so I encourage you to peruse our November and December archives for the full collection. I selected XYZ ???highlights from the bunch that I did not share on NLJ (e.g., not including posts I referenced in “52 Things I Learned in 2025” or other articles).
- Working on Christmas Tina VN Review for NLJ (Dec. 26)
This will be our first NLJ visual novel review of 2026 (we only had one in 2025, must do better in 2026). - Switching From XFCE to Cinnamon on EndeavourOS After Nvidia Issue (Dec. 24)
The issue still hasn’t been resolved so I am still using Cinnamon as my desktop environment (easy adjustment from XFCE). - Christmas Eve Colon Memories
Christmas Eve is always better when you’re not having colon surgery. - Bookmark: Rank and File
Sharing a very interesting essay I came across on organizing information. - Blogging as Mindset
My take on seeing things differently when you have somewhere to write about them. - Using Coaxial Cable In/Out on Belkin Surge Protector
I may turn my new coaxial cord organization strategy into a NLJ article at some point. - On the BlackBerry-Inspired Lotus Diplomat
Buried in this post is my learning from my Amazon search history that I spent less on my BlackBerry Classic in 2018 than I thought (I would have probably also guessed that I purchased it earlier than February 2018). - The So-Called AI Shopping Elves (Nov. 16)
I question a report asserting that everyone is using AI shopping assistants. - White Album Vibes in Tokyo Mirage Sessions (Nov. 18)
I have been chronicling my (now-delayed) play-through of Tokyo Mirage Sessions FE: Encore on ECS. In this post, I drew a specious connection (of sorts) between this game and the White Album visual novel. - Re: Firefox AI (Nov. 14)
Some thoughts on Firefox’s new “AI features” from a Firefox user who disables said “features.” - Copper Moon White Christmas Coffee Arrives (Nov. 13)
The coffee was good! - Cade Cunningham and Chris Webber (Nov. 13)
A story about Detroit Pistons guard Cade Cunningham scoring 46 points on 45 field goal attempts inspired me to dig up a similarly high volume scoring night by Chris Webber more than 20 years ago. - Re: The Thumbs Up Reaction (Nov. 10)
My thoughts on the “thumbs up” emoji reaction.
I published our weekly newsletter on every Saturday in November and December. Due to the way the calendar worked out, that led to nine editions of The Newsletter Leaf Journal. While every newsletter comes with a recap of our new articles in the previous week, they also come with original writing and commentary, most notably a collection of links from around the web, making The Newsletter Leaf Journal its own publication. See our November-December issues below:
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CCLII 〜 Dinogourd OS (Nov. 1)
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CCLIII 〜 NewsELEC (Nov. 8)
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CCLIV 〜 Blue light buyout (Nov. 15)
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CCLV 〜 Net catch rating (Nov. 22)
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CCLVI 〜 Thankful Bulls (Nov. 29) (Note: This newsletter was published on The New Leaf Journal due to technical issues)
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CCLVII 〜 In moderation (Dec. 6)
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CCLVIII 〜 Compensating (Dec. 13)
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CCLIX 〜 Christmas Rivers (Dec. 20)
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CCLX 〜 The Gingerbread Letter (Dec. 27)
Most-visited articles in November and December 2025
I list our 24-most visited articles of the month for each month-end review post. Our November statistics come from Statify, a free and open source WordPress plugin which locally tracks page hits. In December, I returned to Koko Analytics, so our stats from December 2-31 come from Koko (our December 1 stats are largely Statify). See my August and September-October reviews for discussions about Statify and Koko Analytics.
Most-visited articles of October and November 2025
November Analysis
Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search ran away with the top spot for the fourth consecutive month, but the runner-up from the three prior months, Amazon “Cargo Bikes” in Brooklyn, was replaced in second by Examining Whether Defense Wins NBA Championships, which was the leader of our February, March, and April rankings. The “surprise” of the month was “Uncle Susan is a Wolf” – A Graffiti Photo and Research Project, which not only made its first monthly ranking of 2025, but also did so in fourth place (its views appear to derive from being shared on Facebook). Other notables were Japanese Environment in PoL, Lutris, and Bottles and Futaba Igarashi’s Hair Is Naturally Green?, which posted their best-ever months in terms of both rankings and page hits after being online for 3 and 4 years respectively. Missing from the ranking for the first time was The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei, which remains our all-time monthly ranking king in terms of top placements going back to when it was first published in March 2021.
December Analysis
Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search made it five monthly top-placements in a row in December, improving on its already impressive November numbers, while Amazon “Cargo Bikes” in Brooklyn regained the (very distant) runner-up spot. December had what I would describe as a very conventional top five, with all five positions being occupied by some of our best-performing articles of 2025. We had a slight surprise in sixth place in The Story of Billy Possum, President Hoover’s Pet Opossum, which closed the month strong in posting its best performance in 2025 (it has had similarly strong spurts in prior years). We had notable articles at 10th and 11th in How the Forget-Me-Not Flower Found Its Name, which came close to matching its best numbers from the spring, and Adding a carbon.txt File, which benefited from a small amount of Hacker News attention. Finally Solving My HDMI ARC Problems joined carbon.txt in also making the ranking in its debut month, checking in at 21. It was followed by The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei returning to the monthly ranking at 22 and Honey Lemon Soda – Anime Review making its first appearance since its debut month in April at 23. Our final notable is The Last Nintendo Wii Games, which was a strong performer in 2024 but surprisingly had no prior monthly top-24s in 2025.
Taking Leaf
It is already the New Year, but with this post, we are now caught up on month-end review posts and ready to publish our full review and most-visited article ranking for 2025, which will include references to our November/December rankings. I hope everyone looks forward to what promises to be an interesting 2026 and a full January 2026 review in a few weeks.
