The hope was to get the letter out today before 5:00 PM and name it Happy Hour Prompts.  As it pushed 8:00 PM, happy hour has come and gone.  Today we touched on TV and what to watch; we did a little deeper on AI again and found out what's up with Daniel Ash from Bauhaus and Love And Rockets.  Now it's 5 minutes to finish your day; here's to you, Work Slayer.

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The way that the NYT breaks down what to watch is like a sophisticated version of the old TV Guide.  Without the matrix layout, you could fall asleep with times on the X-Axis and channels on the Y.  The joys of reading a guide with all those possibilities, now the NYT gives us a newsletter section called Watching and will break out many popular streaming services and some of their popular shows and movies.  No need for times and dates in our new on-demand world, but there is something beneficial about reading about shows you might want to watch that we like to see versus the auto-preview roll of the streaming service algorithms we get now.

Questions like, ”I have a half-hour…” are an exciting way to determine a watch recommendation, and when you are a newsletter, it's a great place to lay it out.  This week the NYTs Margaret Lyons recommends; Couples Therapy on Showtime for a quick half-hour, The Dog House UK for an hour, and Rough Diamonds on Netflix if you want to get lost for several hours.  Recommendations with some commentary can be helpful with so much content now available at any time; the newsletter also links to all the content providers and sites that will show you everything from the best movies to when a movie or show is scheduled to leave a specific streaming provider.

Top Gun Maverick is currently available on Amazon Prime, and a new adaptation of Peter Pan called Peter Pan & Wendy is on Disney+.

A great article in The Atlantic today, written by Derek Thompson in his newsletter, called This is Work in Progress.  We have highlighted Thompson and his work before; this article is a good dive into the hype and the help AI might one day provide people.  In this early review, Thompson leans more toward hype than help, but in our research over the last several months, AI will replace how we currently search for things online.  In the 90s, the personal use of the Internet was in its infancy, some of us had Internet accounts before AOL started, and you could count the number of commercially available websites with three digits.  The early Internet was throttled by the speed and prevalence of personal computers and websites that sucked.  Search Engines were created at the same time the Internet launched to help you find stuff online; it didn't take long for us to move from a big yellow and white paged book to a PC to find things.

Next up, websites like Alta Vista, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves helped us find stuff.  Some used more of a category system, like a book, while others looked for keywords based on prompts.  This was all the first version of help me find you, and like many version 1s, it was slow, buggy, and ready for change.  It was also better than a big book, which usually gave you a phone number and another set of steps you would have to take to get what you wanted.

Google came out in the early 2000s, and what seemed to be magic gave us what we wanted.  Later we learned about algorithms and backlinks from one website to another that would increase the rank of the website it linked to.  From a user's perspective, we were just getting what we wanted, and there were fewer steps we would have to take after we got what we wanted.  Google has been the dominant player in online search for almost 20 years, and this surprised many SEO consultants who gave the new digital service a shelf life of 5 to 10 years.

In the article, Thompson talks about the distraction many current AI tools can provide us throughout a typical day.  To that, remember AOL Messenger?  At the time, that seemed to be the dumbest app we'd ever wasted our time with, but then someone figured out how to use it for business and called it Slack.  Time will tell.

Stereogum interviewed Daniel Ash, a founding Bauhaus, and Love And Rockets member.  Bauhaus is often cited as the Godfather of Goth, a title they carry with reluctance.  They weren't trying to be anything other than artists and musicians.  The article goes deep into Ashe's process and what the band is up to, including a possible Bauhaus reunion with Peter Murphy.

That image burns.

Click on the Apple Music image to listen to the song on Apple Music or on the Spotify Image to listen to Spotify.

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Thank you for spending a few minutes with us. Here’s one for the road!

With A Shout newsletter is written by Johnny Christian with the support of a thousand idea bits and the help of many people.

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