It's all me | The Rewind Vol. 11

The nieces came back on Saturday. My sister Carol had another dentist thing, or possibly the same dentist thing continued, I didn't ask. The little one went straight for the couch and the TV remote. The fourteen-year-old walked in, put her bag on the one good chair, and before I'd found the coffee filters she said, "So? Did you figure it out?" She'd remembered the question. I'd been hoping she wouldn't.

I'd had a week to get the answer down to a sentence, and in the end a trade website did it for me. On Tuesday Music Business Worldwide printed a statement from Suno, the company whose ads she'd been seeing, and one line in it says its newest model was trained partly on "creations" from its own users. So I showed her that first. You type a mood into the box, you get a song back, and the song isn't only yours. Something from it goes back into the machine and teaches it. You didn't make it yourself. You made a little bit of it for them.

She read it twice and said "that's kind of gross," which is a tighter review than most of the ones I write. Then she asked what I'd been listening to instead, and I played her a record, and that's how this issue starts.

This week in music

I put on Thought Beings for her, because it was the brightest thing on my desk and I wanted to win. Ritual came out on Friday on NewRetroWave, ten tracks from a New York act the label's been teasing with singles and videos for most of the month. NRW's own pitch doesn't bother with modesty: "a neon drenched Dreampop masterpiece, and supreme vocal spectacle!" The tags are more use than the adjectives, and they point somewhere this genre doesn't go often enough. Dreampop, dreamwave, freestyle, Hi NRG, 80s pop. Freestyle and Hi NRG on a synthwave record means they're aiming at a roller rink in 1987 instead of a highway, and the lyric sheet agrees with me, it's all dance floors and records on the table. There's a line in "Last Fight" that goes "Dancing is the answer to the last fight," and at twenty I'd have rolled my eyes at it. At forty-seven I think it's sort of right.

It's $10 for the download. The physical side is where you have to pay attention. There's a pink "bubblegum" vinyl limited to 100 at $24.99, a pink cassette limited to 50 at $12.99, a CD digipak, and a 25-copy pastel vinyl that had sold out before I got there. The download comes free with every format. Now read the shipping lines, because I didn't at first: the tape goes out around December 1st, and the bubblegum vinyl says on or around March 7th, 2027. That's a pre-order you'll have forgotten about by the time it lands on your porch, which honestly is the best kind. If you're in the EU, NRW still won't take a physical order from you without a separate purchase order and the extra tax, and they say so in capital letters on every single format. Album art by Mizucat, mastered by Rob Murray, and the rest is Thought Beings. The page claims the top spot on three of Bandcamp's genre sales charts at once. I believe it.

Hipster Slaves came back on Friday after seven years. That's their own count: the page calls "Fine Young Hands" "the first new transmission from synthwave duo Hipster Slaves (Chris Pennie & Ron Scalzo) since 2019," and I'll take one song every seven years over a lot of the monthly singles that land in my inbox. It's a dollar on Bald Freak Music out of New York, backed with its own instrumental. The duo describes it as "driving electronic rhythms with a melodic synthpop hook, anchored by themes of nostalgia and longing," and tags it cold wave, darkwave and outrun, which is the more honest of the two descriptions. The credits are four lines. Pennie on synths, guitar and programming, Scalzo on vocals and synths, and Pennie also mixed it, mastered it and made the video.

I didn't see this next one coming. Mitch Murder, the Swedish producer who's been at this longer than most of the people currently doing it, scored a video game, and on Tuesday he put the soundtrack on Bandcamp for free. Two discs for Scrap Mechanic: Drilling Thunder, from Axolot Games, 21 tracks between them, the same music Steam has been selling as a $9.99 add-on since July. Disc one is the in-game score and its tags say ambient, BGM and VGM. The titles tell you where the game takes place, mostly underground: "Massive Caves," "Strange Tunnels," "The Mining Hub," with two cues called "Bank Jazz I" and "Bank Jazz II" parked in the middle like a man on his lunch break. Disc two is called Back Home Bangers and the tags flip to electro and electro bass, six tracks including "Tapebot Terror" and "Freak-A-Logic." Written, composed, mixed and mastered by Mitch Murder, artwork by the studio. Drilling Thunder isn't a separate game, it's the big 1.0 update to Scrap Mechanic, which is Windows only on Steam.

The game is a Steam sandbox where you build contraptions out of scrap with a robot, and I'd be terrible at it. I'm terrible at all of them. The soundtrack I can manage.

Jana Tyrrell put out her album on Friday through My Pet Flamingo, a small Welsh label, and it's called Was It Real Or Was It Just Me?, which is a question I've asked about most of my twenties. You've met her already, sort of: she's one of the guests on Virtua Interface, an album by the Cardiff producer Aeronexus on the UK label TimeSlave. This one's hers, and the page doesn't give you a word of description, only tags that go in every direction at once: synthwave, vaporwave, hyperpop, future funk, and a new one on me, "sparkling electronica." The credits make up for the silence. She wrote and produced it and handled the vocals, lyrics, guitars, synthesis and drum programming. Rick David executive produced, arranged, and co-wrote five of the eleven. The art and design are by J. Sabourin, the same name that mixed and mastered the Aeronexus album. £6 for the download, £10.99 for the cassette, £9.99 for the CD.

The record I've been saving is by an act that calls itself Agreed. Cathode Ray Worlds went up on Saturday, eleven tracks, free, and the whole description is four words long: "Soundtracks to imaginary places!" The tags say synthwave, experimental and guitars, and the titles wander from "Skyline City - Night Drive" to "Subterranean Text Blues" to "Lure Of The Wish Granter," so this isn't a record that stays in one lane. But it's the credits I want you to read, because they're a whole paragraph and one sentence in the middle of it answers my niece better than I did. "I did not use generative AI in any way in making anything on this album." And then the next line: "For better or worse, it's all me." I'll come back to it further down.

Blaze of Gunfire, a German act, put out a concept album on Friday through RetroSynth Records, the same LA label that had the Yazoo cover. Prime Operator runs 22 tracks, but about half of them are short chapters, "Chapter 0 - Legacy of 2191" all the way through "Chapter 10 - Encounter," each one setting up the song that follows. "Seven years after the corporate wars, the Mercenary is back," says the page, and the tags say outrun, chillwave and synthpop. It's free, with a subscription option if you like it. Album art by Freddy Arguello, named right there in the description. And then the credit I keep staring at: "Anonymous: Vocals." That's a person who sang on a record and didn't want their name on it, and the band wrote down that they'd agreed to that. I'd rather read that than a blank.

Vempire are out of Lincoln, Nebraska, and "Thank You For Upgrading My Day" is a maxi-single in the old sense: $9, twelve versions of one song. The tags say horrorsynth, goth and techno, which from Nebraska feels like a position. The remixers are the fun part, because the credits list where everybody's from: Omaha, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Lincoln. It's a map of the Midwest on one Bandcamp page, and one of the mixes is called "UpgrayeDD mXXX," which anyone who's seen Idiocracy will get and anyone who hasn't will survive. Artwork by Lindsey Yoneda, who's half the band. Speaking as a guy in Cleveland, I feel a real kinship with anyone making goth techno between Omaha and Kansas City.

FiXT's Neon roster had two small ones. 3FORCE put out "Borderline," a dollar, darksynth and retrowave on the tags, written and mixed by Aleksei and Dmitrii Goncharenko, cover art by Alex Ricochet. Seattle's Nouveau Arcade put out "Dead Hearts (Altered Cuts)," reworked versions of "Summer Is Over" and "Die on Me Now," $1.98, cover by Grey Soto. Neither page says one word about the sound, so the tags are all you've got, and the Seattle one only offers cyberpunk and retrowave.

Four more, fast. Robots In Love, from Dunedin, New Zealand, call "Cease and Desist" "a melodic industrial track about extreme obsession," which is a sentence doing its own job. It's the second single from an album called OVERRIDE, NZ$2 with two remixes. ROGUE85 from Belgium put out Second Chances with Claudia Michelutti singing, €5, and tucked a Kate Bush cover near the end, "Running Up That Hill," which takes nerve. Danger After Dark is a debut EP out of Banbury, England, darksynth and goth on the tags, and the track titles do the rest: "Night Of The Ripper," "The Prowler," "Escape From Castle Poenari." £5. And Thomas Barrandon, the French soundtrack guy, put up "The Child," the first track from a forthcoming album of the same name. It's €1.50 on its own, or €9 to pre-order the album it opens.

Bandcamp Friday is this Friday, October 2nd, the day Bandcamp waives its share and more of your money goes to the person who made the thing. Two records I know of are set to land that same morning as pre-orders. Polydata, from Estonia, has an LP called Zero Crossing, $9 digital and $12 on CD. Electric Signals, from Spain, has an EP called Echoes of a Rebellion for €4, and the page describes "a more aggressive, industrial sound fused with heavy guitars and tactical electronic beats." It also opens with a disclaimer in square brackets, grammar and all: "[NO AI IS USED TO MAKE THIS TRACKS OR ARTWORK]." That's two artists in one week putting some version of that sentence on their pages, and I don't think it's a coincidence.

The counter list

Five I kept putting back on this week.

Thought Beings, "Last Fight." The roller rink banger. The only song this week I caught myself singing in the kitchen, which the neighbors did not ask for.

Agreed, "Skyline City - Night Drive." Track one of a free record by somebody I'd never heard of before Saturday. The guitars the tags promise turn up inside the first minute, and the track opens a door into a record that then goes anywhere it likes, and I followed it.

Mitch Murder, "Bank Jazz II." Because a man scoring caves for a robot game stopped halfway to write lounge music for the bank. I love him for it.

Hipster Slaves, "Fine Young Hands (instrumental)." The page says the instrumental is for "late-night driving playlists," so I took them at their word, drove the Civic out past the airport at midnight, and they were right.

Vempire, "Thank You For Upgrading My Day (Psychic Wreck Mix)." Minneapolis doing goth techno to Nebraska. If I ever see this played out loud in a room, that's where my one beer goes.

Out of the house

Perturbator spent nine days in Australia supporting HEALTH, the LA noise-industrial band, with King Yosef opening, Brisbane on the 18th through Fremantle last night. Spotlight Report reviewed the Sydney night at the Roundhouse and called Perturbator a "French darksynth pioneer" whose set was "immersive and cinematic, with the Roundhouse's darkness becoming almost another part of the performance." I'll take a review that notices the lights were off. Perturbator is one of the two Frenchmen who turned loud nights into a genre, and the idea of that pairing in a room in Sydney on a Saturday makes me want to renew a passport that expired sometime during the Obama administration.

The Midnight are still out on the Time Machines tour, which runs through October 19th and ends in Monterrey, Mexico. Tulsa at Cain's Ballroom last night, St. Louis tonight, Omaha tomorrow, then Nashville on Wednesday. I haven't found a proper review from this week, only the dates getting ticked off on setlist.fm. Cain's Ballroom, though. If you've never heard of it, it's the old Tulsa hall where Bob Wills played western swing on the radio, and there's something right about the sax from "Sunset" going up into those rafters.

And for the kitchen-radio crowd, Nightride's Synth Owl Show has booked its fall guests: Memory Design on October 14th, All The Damn Vampires on the 21st, Marador on the 27th, Arcade High on November 3rd, BARx on the 11th. These are radio episodes, not gigs, and you'll notice I'm saying so up front this time.

Pixels and polygons

The biggest thing on this beat is a Star Fox port, and it belongs in the same conversation as my niece. Star Fox Enhanced shipped version 0.0.8 on Friday night, and it's a big one: ray-traced shadows and reflections, FSR and DLSS options, dozens of visual styles, and first experimental builds for Quest 3 and PC VR. The platform list is absurd. Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS, Switch homebrew, Vita, Xbox in developer mode. Somebody on GitHub has turned a 1993 SNES game into something you can play on almost anything with a screen.

And the README says this, in capitals, near the top: "THIS PROJECT WAS PORTED AND CODED BY AI/CODEX." Codex being OpenAI's coding tool. The project said it was built with Codex back in its early notes, and when I covered the 0.0.6.7 update I didn't mention it, in an issue that was all about credits. That one's on me.

Where I've landed, and you're welcome to disagree: I'm not mad at this one. The author says what the tool was, in the biggest letters available, and the thing still doesn't work unless you bring your own game. The rule is the same as it's been all along, and the 0.0.8 release notes put it this way: "supply your own supported retail ROM and game assets. No cartridge ROM or user save is included." You need a dump of your own cartridge, and the README lists which ones it takes: Japanese 1.0 and 1.1, US 1.0 through 1.2, and the European and German Starwing releases. It runs on your computer or your phone or your headset, not on the SNES. The README also says the AI tools were used for "programming, testing, documentation and some visual assets," and that last part is the one the painters I write about will like least. I'd rather the art were somebody's. But nobody's record collection got fed into this, and the author told you what the tool was. That's a different thing from a company telling you, a week after the fact, what it trained on.

The Neo Geo AES+ got its first public hands-on. Plaion, the German publisher that owns the Neo Geo license now, had it playable at Tokyo Game Show, which lost its final day on the 21st to a typhoon, and RetroRGB's writeup came out Tuesday. The useful details: it works with Furrtek's adapter for MVS arcade cartridges, which is a third-party add-on you buy separately, the analog output uses the same MiniDIN port as a Mega Drive 2 (so, no S-Video), HDMI goes out at 720p or 1080p, and there are DIP switches for 59.6 or 60Hz, overclocking and 16:9. RetroRGB reads the switches as picking analog or HDMI rather than running both at once, which is the first thing a CRT owner will want confirmed. RetroRGB was loud about Plaion saying nothing public about the delay, which moved the thing to September 16th, 2027. The maker's line on carts is worth reading exactly: "Compatible with new NEOGEO AES game cartridges and backward-compatible with original NEOGEO AES game cartridges." It's real hardware on new chips, no emulation. If you kept your AES carts, this is the machine for them. $249.99 for the standard edition.

Polymega is raising its prices on October 5th. The base unit goes from $549 to $599, the Remix from $199 to $229, the RC controllers from $29 to $35, and the Element module sets go to $99. The company announced it on the 18th, and its own blog says "absorbing them is no longer sustainable for us," about rising costs. I saw that number floating around a week ago and couldn't get the company's own page to load, so I left it out. It loads now. Orders placed before the 5th keep the old price. At least it came with a date and a warning instead of a quiet change on the store page. For the record, the base unit works on your original discs by itself, and cartridges need the swappable modules, which is why the module price matters as much as the box.

Analogue pushed firmware 1.5.1 to the Analogue 3D on Wednesday. You can now change the overclock and the "Force Original Hardware" setting from inside a game instead of backing out, overclock gets an actual Off option, and you can edit the library info for cartridges it doesn't recognize, which for anyone with a shelf of weird N64 carts is the real news. It's an update for a box you already own, real N64 cartridges on FPGA, HDMI out, and Analogue's own instruction is to read their firmware update guide before you start.

Two new games for old machines, one of them free and one of them a killer. Somebody called rester159 put out Black Tiger MD, a free fan port of Capcom's 1987 arcade game to the Mega Drive, all eight stages plus a boss rush, on itch.io on Monday and updated to 1.4 this weekend with high score saving, which on a game this fast is the feature you want. The author is careful about what it is: "The game runs native Mega Drive code... The cartridge does not run an arcade emulator or execute the original arcade program." The install note is plain: "Use on original hardware with an Everdrive or similar carts, any Genesis emulator or MiSTer FPGA." One commenter says it won't run in the BlastEm emulator, so if that's your emulator of choice, try another.

And Thalamus Digital, which is a name that made my teenage self sit up, released Binky: Frozen in Time for the Commodore 64 on Thursday, $8.99, knocked to $7.19 for launch week, with a physical version promised and undated. "Binky: Frozen in Time is presented as a .D64 file, compatible with C64 emulators and hardware devices such as the C64 Ultimate and C64 Mini." That's a disk image, not a cartridge, and the page wants your joystick in port 2. I never owned a C64. I owned an Amiga that drowned. I'll be buying this anyway, mostly to hear a new SID tune in 2026, even if it's coming out of an emulator on my laptop.

Evercade announced two carts on Thursday for December 4th: The Last Ninja and IK Collection, 14 games across the C64, Atari ST and ZX Spectrum, and a four-game James Pond Collection, both $29.99. Each one works on any Evercade, including the new Nexus handheld and the HyperMegaTech Super Pocket, according to Blaze, the company behind Evercade. December 4th is getting crowded, because that's also the date the THEA1200, the full-size Amiga 1200 remake, ships.

For the MiSTer people (it's an FPGA board that rebuilds old computers in hardware instead of emulating them), an experimental Macintosh Quadra 800 core showed up on Friday in the official MiSTer-devel organization. The author calls it an "Experimental artifact, not a timing-clean release." The first commit put its speed at about 85 percent of a real Quadra, and the README's own benchmark a few hours later has it much closer, 1.828 against a real machine's 1.897. It boots System 7, Mac OS 8.1 and A/UX 3.1. The boot ROM ships in the release folder, so you don't hunt for that. What you do need is the 128 MB memory module on your MiSTer and your own disk images, plus a separate MiSTer main binary from the same release if you want CD audio. Nobody I know has asked for a Quadra 800 core. I'm glad it exists anyway.

Now a correction on a price. Last issue I told you DoDonPachi Resurrection Reignite had dropped from $24.99 to $12.49 and that Steam's data showed it as the new price, not a discount. It's $24.99 again tonight, zero percent off, so whatever that was, it wasn't permanent, and I shouldn't have told you it was. The review count is still 170, now 78 up and 92 down, still Mixed. There's been no patch since early September. One thing I can confirm this time: it's Steam Deck Verified. Windows only, Deck included, no board or cabinet needed.

The ingredients list

Back to the sentence I showed my niece, because it's worth the long version.

When Suno launched v6 on September 9th, the company's chief product officer told Music Business Worldwide the models were trained "entirely from scratch, from the ground up," using licensed data from partners, "user data," and the team's own learnings. At the time, Suno told MBW the user data was preference data, meaning which of two versions you clicked, not audio uploaded by users.

Then Universal and Sony sued them a second time, and Suno's statement in response says this: "v6 was trained on content licensed from our partners, interactions including creations and preference signals from our community, and the accumulated learnings from our team." MBW, which has been reading these statements more closely than anyone, points out that it's the first time Suno has publicly put user "creations" in the training account. Creations. The songs people made with the old models. Which is exactly what the labels' complaint claims, the part about v6 being trained on the outputs of earlier models that were themselves trained on recordings nobody licensed. The company's answer to the lawsuit reads a lot like the lawsuit.

A song you make in that box doesn't stay in your pocket. It goes back upstream with no name on it and ends up inside the next version.

What I can tell you, instead of a legal prediction, is the calendar. Fact discovery in the original 2024 case closes this Wednesday, September 30th, though the two sides have jointly asked to push discovery on the stream-ripping claims out to November 20th. The labels are also asking for up to $2,500 per recording on that separate claim, for getting around YouTube's download protection, on top of the up-to-$150,000 per work that got everybody using the word billion.

Something else ends Wednesday. Songtradr's Marketplace for Artists shuts on September 30th. Back in August I told you that was happening September 1st, and it didn't; the date slipped, and the support page was updated this week with the final one. Your releases get moved automatically to MassiveMusic, and Songtradr points artists at Bandcamp, which Songtradr also owns. What doesn't move is your audio library, your playlists and your profile, which you have to download yourself. The page contradicts itself on how long you've got: dashboard access ends Wednesday, and a paragraph further down it says to download your files "within the next 90 days." I'd treat Wednesday as the deadline and the 90 days as a hope.

And Spotify's AI badge, the one promised for mid-September and then moved to "this fall." I still can't find one live anywhere.

So here's what I told my niece, standing in my kitchen, and it's a lot shorter than this section. Agreed wrote "for better or worse, it's all me" at the bottom of a free record, and meant both halves of that. The worse is real. It took years, by the artist's own account, and some of it probably sounds like a guy alone with a DAW. The better is that when it's good, you know exactly who to thank. When you type a mood into a box, there's nobody to thank, and it turns out the box is taking notes on you.

She thought about it and said, "OK, but John Carpenter didn't have a band either." Which, fine. That's the next section.

The Art Desk

A follow-up I owe. When I opened this desk I pointed you at Coki Greenway, the illustrator credited on the DROIDGLOW and Droid Bishop track "Danse Macabre," and a portfolio I could point at. This week I read the portfolio properly. The about line is short and to the point: "Hi, I'm Coki I create artwork for bands, fashion brands, musical events and creative projects around the world." One odd thing: the portfolio lists the "Legacy of Terror" cover and doesn't list "Danse Macabre" yet, even though the label's credit is right there on the release. Portfolios run behind. I've sent a note. Nothing back yet, and people who draw for a living have better things to do on a Tuesday than answer a magazine in Ohio.

Credit where it's printed this week: the Thought Beings cover is by Mizucat, and NRW put it in the credits block. That's two Fridays running the same label has named the artist.

And a fight worth having. Reddit is still blocking my usual routes in, but I found a way around the wall this week through a public archive of posts, so here's the first scene argument I've been able to bring you in a while. The top post on r/outrun was an acrylic painting on canvas called "Calm 1987," posted Thursday by a user called Illuminati_Flamingo and labeled as "in the style of Hiroshi Nagai," the Japanese illustrator whose swimming pools and palm trees are basically the city-pop cover. 403 upvotes, 46 comments, and a split. One commenter: "This is less in the style and more of a general rip off." The painter: "Being inspired by a style is not stealing."

I can't find a public portfolio for this painter, so they don't get the desk, only the argument. My end of it is that they did one thing right no matter which side you're on: they wrote Nagai's name in the title. The rip-off version of that painting doesn't mention him at all.

Rewind culture

My niece was right about John Carpenter. He scored most of his own films on synthesizers, and he's said for decades that he did it because he was the fastest and cheapest composer he could hire. Every one of those pulsing, stubborn little themes exists because a director couldn't afford somebody else and did it himself.

Which makes this a very good week to be in Los Angeles, and I'm not. The Academy Museum opened a retrospective on Saturday called John Carpenter: Prince of Darkness, running through October 25th, and the museum's own description mentions "his own pulsing synthesizer scores" in the very first sentence, which is where they belong. Carpenter appears in person on four nights. Halloween with him on stage was Saturday. They Live screens in 4K. The Thing, The Fog, In the Mouth of Madness, Big Trouble in Little China, the whole shelf. If you're anywhere near Wilshire, go, and then write to me and describe the room, because I'll be in the attic listening to the Assault on Precinct 13 theme on a loop and pretending.

On the shelf at home: Kino Lorber put out Johnny Handsome on Tuesday, the 1989 Walter Hill picture with Mickey Rourke as a disfigured crook who gets a new face and can't get a new life. It's a 4K UHD plus a Blu-ray in the same case, from a new "HDR/Dolby Vision Master" off a 4K scan of the original camera negative, with 5.1 and lossless 2.0 audio, two commentaries, and interviews with Walter Hill, producer Ken Friedman, makeup man Michael Westmore and stunt coordinator Allan Graf. Around $28 at the specialty shops. The score is Ry Cooder, all slide guitar, not a synthesizer in sight, and I love it anyway. One snag: an early announcement I found had it dated for August 25th, and it didn't come out then. The 22nd is the date on the review copies and the release lists, so that's the one to trust. You need a UHD player for the 4K disc, and Dolby Vision only kicks in if your player and TV both do it. Otherwise you get HDR10.

Severin has two Joe D'Amato pictures coming this Tuesday, the 29th, both on 4K. Anthropophagous, from 1980, is a three-disc set with the original Italian cut, the extended Italian cut and the US version they called The Grim Reaper, all scanned from the camera negative, $36 on sale off a $49.95 list. Absurd, from 1981, is two discs, $31. Both are HDR10 only, no Dolby Vision, and the Anthropophagous set is mixed region: the 4K disc plays anywhere, but both of its Blu-rays are Region A, which matters if you're reading this in Sheffield. I rented The Grim Reaper exactly once in 1996 to a kid who returned it the next morning without making eye contact.

Netflix put out the A Different World revival on Thursday, 39 years to the day after the original premiered on NBC, with Jasmine Guy and Kadeem Hardison back as Whitley and Dwayne. Variety liked it and TVLine said it was "far too light on the magic." I watched the original in my parents' living room in 1987 because it came on after The Cosby Show and nobody touched the dial. I'll get to the new one.

And two anniversaries this week, because the dates line up and I can't help it. ALF turned 40 on Tuesday: September 22nd, 1986. Knight Rider turned 44 on Saturday. I was three when KITT showed up and I've wanted a car that talks back ever since. The Civic talks back, but only in the form of a check engine light.

Last one, Miami Vice, because I can't let it go by. Ten days ago Deadline reported that John Leguizamo is joining Joseph Kosinski's Miami Vice '85 as the villain, with Michael B. Jordan and Austin Butler starring. Sources say he'd play a cartel boss. The part that got me: Leguizamo was in the original show, a skinny kid in a few episodes in the 1980s, and now he's coming back to the same city as the man in charge. Deadline has the film down for May 19th, 2028, shot for Imax. That's a long time to wait for a pastel jacket.

Static

The stock counters aren't gone, they're hiding. Michael Oakley's Prologue page shows me "14 remaining" on the CD and a plain "available" on everything else. My guess, and it's only a guess from watching a handful of pages, is that Bandcamp only shows the count once a format gets low. If that's right, then "available" means there's still a decent pile, and the day you see a number is the day to stop thinking about it.

Vehlinggo has now been dark since August 17th, six weeks. That's the scene's one real news site, and there's still no explanation and no new post.

The Sega Model 1 core had a quiet week. The last commit is still from September 16th. Virtua Fighter's arena is still the wrong size, Star Wars Arcade still has no music, and the README still says so in bold. After the week it had before that, quiet is allowed.

Konami put the original NES Castlevania on phones for free, a 40th anniversary edition, for a limited time. I tried it on my lunch break with my thumbs, which is not how God or Konami intended. I died on the bats.

That's the week. My niece went home with a free Mitch Murder album on her phone and a question she says she's going to ask her friends.

She'll be back. They always come back to the uncle with the tapes, even when they call them vintage. Next time she asks, I'll skip the lawsuit and play her the Assault on Precinct 13 theme, which a broke director wrote himself because he couldn't pay anybody else, and let that be the answer.

Be kind. Rewind something.

Marty