The Haunted Bookshop
@thehauntedbookshop.com
Iowa City's home for 47,000 used/rare books, puzzles, games, and two famous cats. 😷 Masks required - 12-6 Central, Mon-Sat - https://www.thehauntedbookshop.com
Guys, I'm breaking the thread for a moment. This should be a regular reminder: Make somebody feel seen. A nurse, a teacher, the dish busser at your favorite coffee shop, somebody with whom you share a slender but real connection. There will come a time when those moments are precious to you.
Oh, I'm game! 1. Anne of Green Gables. You may only @ me if I can see you in a pane of glass. Second, Ulysses (Joyce, obvs), and third La Peste / The Plague (Camus), but for an embarrassing reason (as a teen I had a crush on Dr Rieux) (hang on, old regular just dropped by)
Mo 🌸📚@moplayspoke.bsky.social · 2d ago1 like = 1 book question 📚💙
I kept trying to think of a way to express this to my colleagues last week: Some days in an open bookshop are marches, some are waltzes, some are jigs, and today is a minuet. It's been a chain of pleasant meetings and reunions, each with a different character, all fitting a joyful pattern.
How I've felt all day. Backlit by formerly familiar scenery. I will be glad to be home (after I've set the shelves to rights and scrubbed the floors), but will anything ever look like it did when I left? 🎶post-conference blues🎶
Full disclosure: Our books are grouped by genre/topic. If you can't find something, you have to get to know me well enough to ask--or to surmise how I classify. This is not a bug. My favorite patrons are the ones who consider it a feature ("This shop is so well curated!")
Immigrant Punk@porcupunk.eurosky.social · last wk.Enough of the horrors and doom scrolling. Let's talk about something fun. How do you arrange your books?
Why do one's children always seem taller, more graceful, and more eloquent after short absences? J: Are there bees in Minecraft? M*: Oh, my goodness, yes. J: Are there camels? Do they have one hump or two? M: I'll show you next time I find their biome. *Muppet is 5. He really sounds like this.
I started getting followed by some "film festivals" and "writing festivals" and thought "oh, these are cool!" Then I looked a little closer. They're all part of a network that preys on writers, charging us for reviews, and feeding our stuff into slop generators. So I made a list.👋🏻🖕🏻😠
"The damage is not diffuse. It is regionally organized in a pattern that mirrors the functional architecture of the dopamine system" I don't talk about it, but one reason I remain rigorous about masking is because I experience this symptom set, and it hurts. tech-paper.com/scientists-f...
Scientists finally have a biological explanation for why long COVID patients lose motivation and can't think clearly. They scanned their brains and found the dopamine system was physically damaged - T...
Millions of people with long COVID report the same cluster of symptoms: a crushing lack of motivation, an inability to think clearly, memory that slips, movements that feel slower than they should. Fo...
tech-paper.com
A lot of this seminar has been about *doing cultural labor* and how to understand that in the context of a marketplace of cultural objects (ie, books). In case you wondered what a pack of booksellers ("a pleasant sanhedrin" in Morley's phrase) talks about when we're trapped in a ballroom together.
This article appears to have been written by AI. I'm not even just saying that because they featured a cat who has been deceased these three years familyvacationsus.com/these-iowa-b...
Iowa Bookstores Made Us Want to Stay Just One More Hour
From beloved bookstores in college towns to charming neighbourhood shops, Iowa has a real literary pulse you need to check out.
familyvacationsus.com
Why do all my conversations at this seminar end up including everyone's ghost sto... Oh yeah. That. 😅
I'm just saying: there is an abnormal rate of self-reported imposter syndrome in the rare books trade, though I suspect that rate has been influenced strongly by the open drinks bar 🙄
Yours truly will be away from the shop this week for educational reasons. PLEASE be nice to the substitute, kids. No running in the hall, no misfiling books in the wrong sections, and ABSOLUTELY NO trying to give him extra cats while I'm gone. TIA!
The fact that all these massive orders are for books with ISBNs kinda undercuts the "antique books" angle of the headline, but plenty disturbing nonetheless.
George Smiley@mc2020.bsky.social · last wk.AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale futurism.com/artificial-i... #AiIsSatan
Look again. It's not part of the printed illustration 🐾 Kitty stepped in a coffee cup ring and walked right on across the book. No owners' marks, so I can't ask what kitty's name was, to attribute the added art properly 😸 Found on the cover of "KREE" by Bryan McMahon (New Voices Press, 1971)
Err... no. I'm not frightened by the imminent threat that is not, in fact, posed by there being a book bin at the newest discount store. (Why don't people ask bankers if they are going out of business now that big box stores offer their own lending? People just love to think bookshops are doomed 😕)
One of the dozens of excellent books on this topic is "The House of the Scorpion" by Nancy Farmer bookshop.org/a/868/978166...
The House of the Scorpion
A National Book Award winner A Newbery Honor Book A Printz Honor Book A clone grapples with his sense of self against the backdrop of the dangerous world of drug trafficking in this acclaimed and inte...
bookshop.org
worm@rfksbrainworm.bsky.social · 2w agoextremely normal guy voice: I cloned myself so I can become my own blood boy.
Sometimes our gregarious 5yo introduces himself to customers and talks about cats, or about pressing and salient issues in Minecraft strategy, or other silliness. Today I heard him distracting some visitors, so I went to intervene. Except the kid was explaining how to play a board game we carry.
Going through my boxes of economics books, I noticed that this annual supplement to a major journal had an author name I did not expect. Donald. Barthelme. It's a short story called "Game". So many boxes to go before I sleep, but had to share. The dismal and the absurd make great bedfellows.
New test of AI just dropped: Humility. I'll start. I do not have the slightest idea as to how many people own and/or have read the Mahabarata, and I'm embarrassed to admit that. Also, I've never read Lonesome Dove, so I'm sorry, I don't get the recent fervor for it thenextweb.com/news/ai-advi...
AI advice made people three times less accurate but twice as confident, researchers found
A study found that access to AI advice collapsed people's willingness to say "I don't know" from 44% to 3%, while accuracy dropped from 27% to 9%.
thenextweb.com
Amazon financially supports ICE. Do you financially support Amazon? The Amazon umbrella covers Kindle, Audible, ABE Books, and Goodreads.
Judd Legum@juddlegum.bsky.social · 2w agoI took a hard look at the financial donors to ICE’s biggest supporters in Congress. These are people who want to significantly expand ICE’s power and have sponsored or co-sponsored legislation to do so. Here are the top 25 consumer brands bankrolling the biggest ICE supporters in Congress:
Might as well admit it: Think you've been creeped out by Google results that refer specifically to things you were discussing vocally while in the same room as your phone? That was nothing. Buy your bookseller a drink and ask what we know about our regulars. You'll shush *yourself* next time.
About the ancient Greek: there's a lot. We are, of course, fresh out of Homer (haven't sold this much Homer since that one movie line about a "first edition Iliad" 😂). But we have Xenophon! Who needs some more dramatic battle sequences? Get 'em fast - these won't last long.
Legit gloaming out there tonight. I'm working on a couple of boxes of classic books on economics, and then I have three boxes of Greek Loebs, so... I'm allowing myself to be distracted by the cleaner air and golden light.
The politicos think Chris Jones can't win because he doesn't farm. I'm a fifth generation Iowan with family land in Cedar County, and I'm going to say it: Farmers need Jones to win. The big old boys who farm thousands of acres may have a lot to lose with regulation, but we have everything to gain.
Naomi Oreskes@naomioreskes.bsky.social · 2w agoWhy cancer rates are rising in Iowa: www.politico.com/news/magazin...
There I was, minding my own music station, when this violin tune started, and I thought, this is really fine. Like longing, but with a hoarse edge of desire. Then I went to copy the link for posting. I SWEAR I don't just post things with "Ghost" in the title. music.youtube.com/watch?v=OajA...
Lover's Ghost / Maud Miller
YouTube video by Oisín McAuley - Topic
music.youtube.com
A Roman scroll that should be ash has just been read without ever being opened.
An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
PHerc. 1667, sealed since the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, has been virtually unwrapped and read from beginning to end — without ever being opened.
scrollprize.org
