Defining the Indie Web Positively I shared an excellent quote on defining the independent web from a February 1, 2026 article by Khürt Williams titled The Indie Web Is Not Defined by Its Enemies: The indie web is stronger when it is defined by what it does: people owning their publishing, people controlling their...

I subscribe to many sites in my feed reader. Some sites tend to use descriptive headlines, which help me decide whether to open the feed item, swipe it away, or adjust my feed filters. One example of a descriptive headline came in the form of January 30, 2026 report by Alex Forbes-Calvin for Games Industry.biz...

The first month of 2026 is in the books. With January 2026 completed, it is time to review the month that was in a tradition which goes all the way back to August 2020. Below, I share links to our new articles, short posts, and newsletters from January and other news and notes from the month that was. New Leaf...

On February 1, 2026, I set up second-factor authentication for the new Itch.io account that I created to publish my first original visual novel, Little White Lies (a collaboration between me and our own Victor V. Gurbo). Itch allows for a single form of second-factor authentication: TOTP. I have set up TOTP for many...

This article is about the first New Leaf Journal original visual novel, Little White Lies. As I note below, I recommend reading the novel in your web browser (it is short, even with all six endings) before reading about how I worked with Victor V. Gurbo to bring it to life. Introduction: Nick and Victor Make and...

Back on October 30, 2020, I published an anecdotal article about my rescuing a fallen public trash can in Gowanus. In that article, I posited a profound question: “If you do something heroic but don’t tell every person you know, did you do anything at all?” You may be able to infer from the fact I wrote an entire...

The Oklahoma City Thunder won the 2024-25 NBA Championship. This title, the franchise’s first since 1978-79 when it was the Seattle SuperSonics, prompted me to write an article on NBA franchise championship droughts. The Thunder’s championship gave rise to another article idea. Back in November 2023, I wrote an...

While I was working on mailing the 262nd edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, I noticed for the first time that our newsletter host, Buttondown, provides a QR code for our newsletter. I decided to add that QR code to the new version of our Newsletter sign-up page. But then a thought came to me: Why stop there?...

DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused alternative generalist search engine which relies on Bing for its traditional search results, offers an alternative “no AI” version of DuckDuckGo at https://noai.duckduckgo.com/. I turn to the About noai.duckduckgo.com page for a feature (or non-feature) summary: If you’d prefer an...

I have reviewed two original English-language visual novels by PixelFade Studio, a Canadian-based visual novel circle. The first of these was PixelFade’s first complete commercial visual novel, ACE Academy (see my ACE Academy review), which had been re-worked from an earlier demo called Kendo Crush (which I had...

I read a January 16, 2026 article in Sixth Tone titled Chilean Cherries: Why Prices in China Plunge Every Winter. I am admittedly not an expert on fruit prices in China, but I have observed similar phenomena in my home and native Brooklyn, New York City. I have sometimes had the good fortune of picking up “cheap”...

I previously published an article about seeing a working Christmas countdown clock in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, on September 29, 2025. That was not the only early sign of Christmas I saw in the early autumn. On October 10, 2025, I ordered an Usaburo snowman kokeshi doll on Ebay. I had looked at it a few days prior...