There's Never Been A Better Time To Become An Etsy Witch

The most popular link last time (all the way back in September!) was this abundance meme, with this confession from an AI hater second.

1. This is a lovely piece of writing about childhood memories and standing stones:

"People who were taken to ancient places as children often have fuzzy old photos of themselves at the sites. Such pictures increase in power as the years go by. The people who took us pass away, and we ourselves grow up and change, but the stones stay the same. So, when we return as adults, we can measure ourselves against them, see our little lives in relation to eternity. That was how I felt at Cragabus: bigger yet smaller, older yet no age at all."

2. I recently swapped Spotify for Qobuz and I'm having a very nice time with it. There are lots of ethical upsides to my new music streaming service (they pay artists more per stream and don't run ads for ICE) but I'm mostly been enjoying the practical benefits of higher quality sound and a weekly "discover" email that recommends new-to-me stuff with a very good hit rate. Which brings me to...
3. I am playing Iconoclasts, the new album from Swedish singer-songwriter and pipe organist (!) Anna von Hausswolff, on repeat at the moment. This was a Qobuz suggestion that sits precisely in the centre of my overlapping tastes for organ music, Gothic-inspired pop and weirdly catchy noises.
4. I love this type of head-to-head comparison between UK and US book covers. With a few exceptions (the Faber version of The Helm by Sarah Hall is clearly better), I tend to prefer the American takes. Which might just be a "grass is always greener" effect, I'm not sure.
5. A fun game that riffs on those "are you a robot" security checks.
6. A varied and occasionally unhinged selection of thoughts from professional book people about how they read. To whit:

"This year I made it a New Year's resolution to read less, because last year, I read 274 books (of which five were physical copies) and realized I was overdoing it."

This person also sometimes listens to audiobooks on 2.5x while playing speed chess. Each to their own! But I feel dizzy just contemplating that.

7. It's probably a good thing that I wasn't newslettering through the worst of the recent Taylor Swift Discourse. You couldn't pay me to air my The Life of a Showgirl opinions on the public internet! I liked this Pre-Raphaelite analysis, though.
8. Dial-A-Poem.
9. There was a moment during my abortive attempts at social media book marketing for A Body Made of Glass last year when I had the thought "maybe just printing flyers and leaving them in bookshops would work better". Turns out, somebody did this in LA and it worked surprisingly well. Let this be a lesson to authors everywhere!
10. Vasilis Marmatakis is a Greek graphic designer who does all of Yorgos Lanthimos’ film posters. He shares lots of his alternates and drafts during this interview about his process.
11. Which artists are being ripped off the most by people using AI tools like Midjourney? Wes Anderson, Zara Hadid and Alphonse Mucha top the list.
12. Have a little Friends nostalgia, why not.
13. There's never been a better time, financially speaking, to become an Etsy witch.