Hello. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably wondering what the hell this is doing in your inbox. And then you’re probably getting angry. Another goddamn email. On Friday evening, no less. And for that, I’m sorry. But…

…in the spirit that you once signed up for another iteration of my newsletter, I automatically moved you over to this one. As it’s my new newsletter. Yes, for some of you, it’s the third or fourth or fifth version of this newsletter. It’s a bit like The Matrix. The first versions were just too perfect, so I had to blow them up and make them more imperfect so your inbox wouldn’t reject them.

Anyway, this is the latest version of my newsletter, and honestly, it’s the first one I’m feeling good enough about. Exactly five years ago this coming Monday, I started sending out newsletters as a stated experiment. Along the way, I’ve gathered some 6,500+ of you and lost a few hundred more. I was perhaps a bit early to the new newsletter game, and also incredibly late compared with the original newsletter game.

I actually started writing this five years ago on a service called Revue, and I’m back here now. The difference is that Twitter swooped in to acquire the company along the way, and I find that compelling as it perhaps means I don’t have to do as much self-promotion to gain readers, as it will be right there in my Twitter bio. And there just seems to be some good, natural overlap between Twitter content and this. That’s the hope, anyway.

So yes, “500ish Notes” morphed into “Cold Takes” morphed into “First Draught” and after 177 issues, two years ago, I moved some of you over to Substack, where I experimented further with 5ish. I’m not even sure how many issues of that I published, but it was a lot. At one point, I actually called this newsletter “The Happy Hour” and it always stuck with me. So I opted to go back to it, with a snazzy new domain. And here we are.

The idea here is nothing too crazy. Once a week, likely at the end of the week, Friday (but perhaps sometimes Thursday) around happy hour time on the west coast of the US, I’ll send out some links that I’ve read that week, that I think may be worth your time, and/or are worth saying a little something about. And some links to stuff I’ve written recently on the various other places I write things that no one can keep track of. (At some point, I’ll consolidate all of this, I swear. But today is not that day.)

Like any good happy hour, we can enjoy drinks while writing and/or reading. You can respond if you’d like! Perhaps it will give you some good stuff to read and/or think about over the weekend. Or perhaps it won’t. In which case you can just close your email and go about living life.

Anyway, the preambles up here will not be this long going forward. Perhaps just a quick blurb to recap the week, or something else. We’ll see. I just wanted to explain my intrusion into your inbox this one time. If you’d like to unsubscribe, as I suspect many might, no hard feelings, obviously.

For the rest of you, welcome. Again.

Drinking: a Fort Point Yuzu KSA Radler 🍻

I’ll also just note here that I have a ton of random links saved to share as it has been a couple months since I pulled the curtain down on my last newsletter… so, some are timely, some less so. The format will come more into focus in the coming weeks.

– Charles Barkley slams it home…