Category: Uncategorized

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Anti-Israel Statements After the Massacre Trigger Free Speech Fights in Higher Education by Jonathan Turley (Jonathan Turley)

Universities and colleges across the country have become embroiled in a debate over free speech in the aftermath of the…

Jonathan Turley’s blog is part of my RSS feed collection. One reason I enjoy his work is because he is consistent in his views and articulates his position well. However, his recent piece on free speech issues related to the response to pro-Hamas demonstrations on college campuses in the last week was a bit sloppy. That some high-powered law firms rescinded offers of employment to Harvard law students on account of their views has received a good amount of publicity. After Mr. Turley touched on that issue (granting private law firms have discretion in hiring), he made a claim that I am less familiar with.

However, some have gone further to discuss these views as unprotected free speech and suggested that law students holding such views should be prevented from joining the bar.

I have not seen examples of people arguing that law students who support Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, or more charitably justify their atrocities, should be prevented from sitting for the bar. At a minimum, these arguments are far less common than the broader debate about the views being expressed on college campuses. I agree with Mr. Turley’s position that abhorrent views should not prevent one from becoming a lawyer, but he provides no source for examples of people making this argument. While this is not the sort of disingenuous claim I examined in my critique of experts say headlines, it does read like trying to squeeze a side argument where it does not fit. The omission of a source is notable because he provides many sources for other issues raised in the article. For whatever it is worth, I think what we are seeing raises questions about U.S. immigration policy and the efforts to subsidize college tuition through federally backed loans, not admittance to the bar.

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Hackaday published an article titled Spuds Lend A Hand In The Darkroom. I have no experiences with darkrooms, much less potatoes in darkrooms. Thus, I cannot comment on the utility of the potato-darkroom recipes referenced in the article. However, if your potato has reached the stage where it is growing hands, it is much more amenable to darkroom usage than to kitchen usage.

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Live-Action Teasing Master Takagi-san Series Unveils Cast, Staff, March Netflix Debut by Egan Loo (Anime News Network)
The staff for the live-action adaptation of Sōichirō Yamamoto's Teasing Master Takagi-san (Karakai Jōzu no Takagi-san) manga unveiled its main cast, production team, and March 2024 premiere on Netflix globally (before its Japanese television premiere) on Wednesday.

I am on the record as being a fan of the Teasing Master Takagi-san anime. I selected the first season as one of my honorable mention recommended series for general audiences from the 2011-2020 decade. Last year, I picked the third season of Takagi-san as my 2022 anime series of the year and described it as the best anime comedy since 2012’s Humanity Has Declined. But with that being said, I never understood the appeal of live action adaptations of manga and anime? I suppose by manga/anime standards, Takagi is a plausible live action candidate and the actress and actor playing Takagi and Nishikata do not look too old for their 8th/9th roles (they are 16 and 15 respectively). While I am not interested, I hope the live action Takagi-san does the series justice.

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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.

A rare admin update. I am still having some issues with one or two of the plugins I hope to rely on for this project. I am seeing if I can resolve those issues before launching the site proper and bringing more posters on board. I hope to have it resolved one way or another within a few days (worst comes to worst, we will go without one planned feature to start).

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.

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. If you want to learn more about the project, see our new About Page. I will be posting more information about the project over the next couple of weeks. You will still find my long-form writing at The New Leaf Journal.