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I published the list of the 12 video games that left the biggest impression on me in close to 30 years of gaming over at The New Leaf Journal (see article). My New Leaf Journal article contains my reasoning for each selection. Here, I will re-post the list without the essay.

  1. Pokémon Red
  2. Harvest Moon: Back to Nature
  3. Pokémon Gold
  4. Animal Crossing
  5. SMT Persona 3 FES
  6. SMT Persona 4/Persona 4 Golden
  7. Sonic the Hedgehog 2
  8. Paper Mario
  9. Super Mario 64
  10. Pokémon Ruby
  11. The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky
  12. Pokémon Trading Card Game

There is no strict criteria for the list. I interpreted my prompt subjectively and considered which games made the biggest impression on me for one reason or another. The list is not a ranking of the best games I have played or necessarily my absolute favorites (I do, however, very much like all of the games on the list). For example, I prefer most of the classic Mario 2D platform games to Sonic 2 today, but Sonic 2 was the reason why my first console was a Sega Genesis.

If you have your own list, feel free to write your own article linking to this one (or to my New Leaf Journal essay) and using the form below the post (unless your site automatically sends Webmentions). You can also respond to the Fediverse version of this post.

I am moving toward finishing my al|together visual novel review project. I just finished reading A Dream of Summer (which had been pending for a while) and one of two translations of Narcissu (I did not realize that the al|together Narcissu was two translations in one package).  This leaves just three novels to read. With Narcissu completed, I am almost entirely sure of what the top of my ranking, which will be published in three parts in November, will look like.  I leave no comment at this time on where precisely Narcissu will rank, I only note that it was the last remaining novel that, based on my pre-reading knowledge, could threaten the top spot.

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I was walking in Brooklyn Heights (I think it was Brooklyn Heights, but it could have been Cobble Hill) when I saw a pear on the sidewalk. This was unusual. You do not see too many pears on sidewalks in New York City. I looked up and found the source of the pear.

Photo taken in Brooklyn Heights. We see a tree with a the Sun coming through the leaves. The tree is growing a decent number of pears.
I apologize profusely for the pun.

But what is important here is not the pear. It is the pun.

(I am assuming that this is a pear tree. It would be neat if it was quince tree given my prior writings on the subject of quinces in New York City.)

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I saw a copy of Tom Cantor’s Changed, a self-published religion conversion story that makes the rounds through an unsolicited direct mail campaign, sitting on a step in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. Why might I care? Over at The New Leaf Journal, I published what I hope was a humorous article on the cover design of the book after receiving a short-lived copy in July 2022. To my surprise, the article performed very strongly in terms of page visits in December 2022 and January 2023, which I inferred was a result of the direct mail campaign, before becoming a proverbial non-entity shortly thereafter. While I know that many people were weirded out about receiving Mr. Cantor’s strange book, The New Leaf Journal would benefit from his resuming his strange pastime with abandon.

I spent more of my life than I would like to admit figuring out how to add my own footer text to our theme, which is a child theme of SemPress. But mission accomplished. With our child theme and my initial style tweaks done, I published version 1.0 of the newly-named Emusem Press to my personal Gitea repository. My last tasks before really getting the ball rolling on this project are to publish the rest of our informational pages and resolve one plugin-related issue. “Getting the ball rolling” is defined as posts about things other than designing the site.

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The 9.9.99 Computer Bug That Wasn’t by Nicholas A. Ferrell (The New Leaf Journal)
I look back at the “9/9/99 bug” - an issue that some computer experts and reporters feared would affect older systems on September 9, 1999.

I have learned about many new topics while looking for New Leaf Journal content. For example, as I noted in the above quote, I distinctly remember some of the “Y2K” computer glitch fears from 1999. But I do not recall having heard about the 9.9.99 fears. Fortunately, the internet preserved a number of contemporaneous articles to facilitate my exploration of the issue.

I had a long day of working on the site. On the down side, I am having some technical issues with a couple of our key plugins that I want to resolve before starting in earnest. At the moment, it seems like Post Kinds is a hard dependency for certain post types working when I have Friends installed. While I am inclined to use Post Kinds, I do not want to be in a situation where I have a hard dependency on a plugin. The issue could be something that I did on set-up, but I am investigating. On the good side, however, I refined the format of the site. We may still have some readability issues (I am trying to find where to slightly increase the font size), but i think I found a nice color scheme to complement our system font stack (the font stack was not my first choice going in, but it reads better than my first choice with the layout). I would like to widen the post blocks down the line. File that issue away.

WordPress pages (as opposed to posts) do not have pingback and trackback support by default. I had a need to enable it on The New Leaf Journal in order to allow certain pages to accept incoming Webmentions. In that case, I added the PHP snippet to my child theme’s functions.php file. But with multiple sites and the possibility that I may not always use the same theme, I decided to convert the snippet into a site-specific plugin. The code is available in my personal Gitea repository. Feel free to use and extend (instructions for extending are in the code comments).

Emu Café Social Intro by N.A. Ferrell (Admin)N.A. Ferrell (Admin) (The Emu Café Social)
Welcome to The Emu Café Social, a new social publishing project built on top of WordPress. I (N.A. Ferrell) am writing this post from my administrator account, but you will usually see me posting from my user account at social.emucafe.org/author/naferrell.

Thank you administrator version of me for the site intro.

I confirmed that the first post from the administrator version of my account is visible from my Mastodon profile. Very good. For early readers, my regular posts will come from this account (/naferrell).  I will usually post site news and updates from my /nafaugustus account. As always, you will find my articles and other long-form content on The New Leaf Journal.