A lady passing by the shop of Mr. John, milliner to the stars, is attracted by an extravagant model in the window. 57th Street, ca. 1950.

Photo: Al Barry via Three Lions/Getty Images

“Imagine a version of the contemporary web laid out before us, like Gibson’s cyberspace or Stephenson’s Metaverse. Picture an endless plateau, planed flat, with aloof skyscrapers: a gleaming city in draft, a Dubai dispersed. That giant #1 on the horizon is YouTube, that tower of shipping boxes, Amazon. Smaller structures suggest modest websites: businesses, blogs, and more. The buildings roll away, as regular as dominoes, around the horizon. Occasional fissures, venting steam, allude to the catacombs of the dark web.

In this vision, your browser is a pod. You punch in coordinates and zip around at light-speed, passing smoothly through other browsers, whose hulls turn transparent at your approach, as in the Metaverse. Hyperlinks are wormholes: tunnels of swirling light.

One wormhole wings your pod across a digital Atlantic and deposits you in front of a quaint green building on the banks of a pixelated river. Other quaint buildings surround it but are spaced apart to accommodate pods. (It’s as if someone clicked on the edge of a city and dragged it, distending space itself.) You are now at the online shop for Shakespeare and Company, on the banks of the Seine in Paris. It’s never closed, and the door is decoration: you float cleanly through it.”

As social media becomes an increasingly fraught landscape, Jason Guriel’s ode to the bookstore reminds us of an older form of browsing—one rooted in a sense of place. “I Remember the Bookstore” is an excerpt from Jason’s new book On Browsing, which will be published on November 15, 2022, by Biblioasis Publishing.

“The world was hers for the reading”- Betty Smith

ig: coffeeandbookss

The Portobello Print and Map Shop, Notting Hill

I originally posted this photo to English Shops, so please visit if you like shops...in England

Reason to Live #9241

  Going to a thrift store just to browse. – Guest Submission

(Please don't add negative comments to these posts.)

Peek-a-boo!

コンシャスTHOUGHTS - Browsing

I’m pro do whatever the fuck u want to do because it’s ur life🫡

Boaty In Art Pixel Animation! (Piskel)

Sprinkles: Bark! Bark! (Well, the next supporting character and also the one who was a former member of the committee-univitational is called Boaty, despite being a real object like a car to bring those participants to the invitational island, he revealed himself at iiiep18 and I already we knew from an early stage when the walkie talkie and Springy had said that Boaty would show up on their cereal ships to join too, that's about Boaty, however in the first episode we can see Boaty flipped over, then being burned and then being blown up out of nowhere and when he speaks, he gives us a big honk when he communicates, at least that, in the gif about the summary that Boaty was there to represent himself, he just hit an iceberg that cracked and then he sank that nor Titanic , it seems that Boaty is very sensitive when he breaks into something, I've never seen that film but I've always known from the memes that the internet mentions it when something is similar to finding it funny!)

home sweet home

credit: aogj

@ kate_gliz

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Inktober 11 & 12!

New surveillance capitalism feature unlocked

Texts encouraging me to buy things I was looking at already.

Sarah has my contact info because I gave it to The Blanket Company so I could get tasty deals on Blankets. I don’t have an account at this website, but it seems my number is stored with my browsing history, because Sarah knows I was looking off and on and this blanket. I tried to be nice because who knows, maybe there’s some poor soul out there whose job it is to text people to spend their money. I’m sure it doesn’t pay well. So in case she’s not a bot, I replied cordially.

The interesting feature I seem to have unlocked is that after she learned I purchased the initial product, she sent me another product, encouraging me to consider buying it “next time”. The uncomfortable part is the other product was the other blanket I had been considering buying. I decided in favor of the first link. A very unusual experience to have been browsing, to think “Hm, which one do I want,” make my decision, and then get a text from someone at the company saying Hey, we know you looked at this. You should buy this.

If anyone knows more about how the internet works than I do, I would be fascinated to learn how they did this without me having an account. Was the cookies assumption correct?

Browsing a goodwill site seeing interesting things.