Welcome to the internet, you're early | The Rewind Vol. 12

The first time I heard a modem connect I was sixteen, in my cousin Pete's basement in Akron, in the fall of 1995. Pete had a free trial disc, his dad's phone line and a plan. The plan was to look at a Lamborghini. We sat through the screeching, typed an address off the back of a magazine, and waited while a red Countach arrived from the top down, one stripe at a time. Somewhere around the windshield his mother picked up the kitchen phone to call my aunt, and the whole thing fell over.

We never saw the wheels. But I remember what was at the bottom of the page the second time we tried, because it was at the bottom of every page back then: a name, an email address, and a line saying when the guy had last updated it. A man named Gary, in Arizona, had built a Lamborghini shrine and signed it like a painting.

I bring this up because a record came out on Tuesday that's entirely about that basement, and because by Friday the rest of the week had turned into an argument about who signs what. I'll get to the argument. The record goes first.

Welcome to the internet

Miami Nights 1984 put out Lords Of Netscape on Tuesday. If the name's new to you: this is one of the people who built outrun, the neon, night-driving end of synth music, a producer out of Victoria, British Columbia, whose early records are on the short list everybody else learned from. The new one is 25 tracks, and it has a premise. "What if the internet had arrived ten years too early?" the page asks, and then it answers: this is "the soundtrack to a movie that never existed," set in an alternate 1980s where "computer geeks, hackers, dial-up dreamers and basement programmers" build the online world before anybody's ready for it. The description ends on two lines I'd have stolen for a headline even if the record were bad. "Welcome to the internet. You're early."

It isn't bad. The page calls it "part Synthwave album, part score, part lost piece of computer history," everything "filtered through the sound of an 80s film soundtrack," and that's a fair description of what comes out of the speakers: more score than dance floor, with the tags leaning chillwave and dreamwave as much as outrun. The track list reads like the table of contents of a manual somebody found in a desk: "Access Terminal," "Dot Matrix," "We're Online," "You Got Mail," "Cached Memories," "Firewall Security," "System Recovery," "Shutdown." In between the songs there are skits. Fake scenes from the fake movie, with names like "Data Master Interlude" and "Cheese Blasters Interlude," and I went in braced for those, because comedy skits on a record are how you find out a producer has friends who think he's funny. They work. They're short, and they give a 25-track album a place to breathe.

The guest list is a reunion. Lazerhawk, another name from this music's first wave, is on two tracks. Droid Bishop is on two more. W O L F C L U B, New Arcades, Phaserland, Power Rob and System Glow each get a song, and Michael Oakley, the Scottish singer who usually gets a whole chorus to himself, turns up in one of the skits. The credits are three lines long: written, produced, mixed and mastered by Miami Nights 1984, artwork and design by Miami Nights 1984, and then the list of friends.

The download is $13. On the physical end there's a translucent orange double LP at $50, a CD at $18 and a clear orange cassette at $18, with no edition sizes given. Read the dates before you click. The CD ships around October 27th and the tape around November 30th. The vinyl is flagged in capitals as a "PREORDER Campaign" and its date is January 31st, 2027. I'm not judging. I'm only telling you which year to expect it in.

The best thing I read about it all week was on Reddit, in the r/outrun thread, where the artist turned up in person and signed the comment "Michael/MN84." The worry, in the artist's own words: "I wasn't sure if the fake movie skits would click or be annoying, so I'm especially stoked to see you all enjoyed them." And then: "Fun fact: that's my wife's voice in the Data Master skit with me." So there's your credit for the Data Master skit, delivered in a comment thread, by the guy who made it. Further down, one commenter insisted the album was only five tracks long, and a stranger set them straight: it's 25, and "in what world is 17 minutes a full album?" That was the entire fight on r/outrun this week.

The rest of the pile

Friday was Bandcamp Friday, the day the site waives its cut and passes it to the artists, so the pile is tall. Timecop1983 first, because it's the one a lot of you have been asking for since the original came out. TimeSlave, the Cardiff label, released Night Drive as an "Instrumental Edition," and the label's whole description is one sentence: "The long awaited instrumental edition of Timecop1983's seminal album 'Night Drive'." Eleven tracks. Five of them were vocal features the first time around, with The Midnight, The Bad Dreamers, Josh Dally, LeBrock and Kinnie Lane, and they're all here with the singing taken out. I've defended The Midnight's sax at parties and I'll defend their singer, Tyler Lyle, in the same breath, so "Static" without that vocal is an odd thing to sit through. It's also the first time I've noticed how much is going on underneath it.

£6 for the download. There's a double LP they're calling the Triple Splatter Edition, clear vinyl with pink, purple and black splatter, £32.99, pressed by DMS and "expected to ship by Monday 30th November 2026." Nobody put an edition size on it.

Dead Astronauts came back with Shallow Grave, which was a pre-order all the way back in August and landed on Friday. Their own paragraph is better than anything I'd write off the tags: "Dark, melodic and occasionally abrasive, Shallow Grave pulls from darkwave, synthwave and post-punk without settling comfortably into any one of them." Under what the band calls "the syrupy drone and distortion," it's a record about "the uncomfortable realization that none of us in our current state are getting out of it alive." Ten tracks, one of them called "Stuck (In a Modern Day Cult)," and the last one is a "Dark Club Version" of the second. €9 digital, €13 for a CD in a six-panel digipack with a lyrics booklet, and €24 for the gatefold vinyl in solid orange or solid white. The test pressing was €70 and it's gone. Mixed and mastered at Influx Studios, album art and design by JthreeConcepts.

It's October, so here come the vampires. Occams Laser, out of England, released Bite Club on Friday, and the pitch is a joke that commits: "First rule of Bite Club... We Suck." It's "the Soundtrack to the best Vampire Night Club," says the page, "with blood on tap, pulsating speakers and an infectious atmosphere." The tags pile up darksynth, horrorsynth, techno and techno-industrial, and there's a track called "Technosferatu," which I'm annoyed I didn't think of. £6. The CD is a jewel case at £11 in an edition of 20, and the transparent red cassette is the same price and the same count. When I looked there were 14 CDs left. Music and artwork by Tom Stuart, who is Occams Laser.

Two pre-orders I flagged a week ago both showed up on time. Polydata's Zero Crossing is out, and it's less of a synthwave record than the tag suggests, by the artist's own account: "the first Polydata album with acoustic drums, bass guitar and vocals," drawing on folk, post-punk and "above all - 70's prog-rock acts like Genesis and Yes." All of it written, performed and recorded by Shahruz Moshtael in Estonia, mixed and mastered by Beau Sorenson. Still $9, still $12 for the CD, which ships on the 15th. Electric Signals' Echoes of a Rebellion is out too, five tracks for €4, and the all-caps promise in square brackets, the one about no AI in the music or the artwork, survived the trip from pre-order to release. The last track is called "WE WILL FALL, BUT THEY WILL REGRET BEING BORN."

My Pet Flamingo, the Welsh label, reissued Eyeliner's LARP Of Luxury in a deluxe edition, and the box is rad. The album's from 2013, a vaporwave record whose track list is a shopping trip: "Nespresso," "iPod Touch," "Bose Lifestyle," "Toyota Prius," "Roomba." The new edition adds three bonus tracks the label calls "N64 style 'remixes'," made, in Eyeliner's words, "in tribute to the incredible timbres and inventiveness in Nintendo 64 soundtracks." One of them is called "iPod Touch Any% Speedrun." £4 digital. The physical version is a cassette in a glossy box built to look like an N64 game, with "cartridge style" printing on the tape, £20.99, an initial run of 150. Sleeve design and artwork by Fraser Austin, box layout by Glenn Jones.

Speaking of formats nobody asked for. Girlfriend Records in San Jose put out Vinyl Flux by Quantum Danger Field, fifteen tracks of "lush, tape-saturated analog pads" with "a steady, driving pulse beneath the haze," $6. The physical edition is a pair of 3.5 inch floppy disks, and the listing says so with its caps lock on: "(NOT VINYL)." You get three of the tracks "with an 8-16k variable bitrate across two disks" and some hidden ASCII art. You'll need a floppy drive. The last one I sold, back when I worked the floor at Circuit City, plugged in over USB, and the man buying it looked sad. Track six is called "Toledo." I'm choosing to believe it's ours and not the one in Spain.

Karl Casey put out White Bat 64 on Thursday. Six tracks, name your price, dark synthwave and cyberpunk on the tags, and yes, that's the sixty-fourth release in the series. The description isn't about the music at all. It's a licensing FAQ for people who want to use the tracks in videos, and item seven asks whether any AI is involved. The answer starts with "No." and doesn't get much longer. Some version of that answer has been on these pages since the summer, like the sign in a diner that says the pie is made here.

Closer to home, Sferro, the Akron producer whose remix record I spent a while on two issues back, put up 16 More Demos on Thursday, $5, and it's deep cuts by design: sixteen sketches, every one tagged "(demo)," house and breakbeat and downtempo, art by Neskimo. One of them is called "Playtime For David Vetter," and the page doesn't explain it. And NewRetroWave's single of the week pairs DROIDGLOW with New Arcades on "Together We Will Survive," $1.50, guitar solo by Droidglow, mixed and mastered by Adam Sullivan. Hang on to the last line of its credits, because I need it for the Art Desk.

Now the number. Bandcamp's front page carries a counter that says how many records fans bought "yesterday alone," and it rolls over around midnight UTC. I know that because the Internet Archive caught it either side of the line: late Friday evening UTC it still showed Thursday's figure, and an hour into Saturday it showed Friday's. Thursday was 81,122. Bandcamp Friday was 347,809. Saturday, which is the number sitting on the front page as I type, was 179,523. So the day is real, more than four times the Thursday before it. It's also the second month running that it's come in smaller. August's was 409,587 and September's was 356,237. That's a slide of about 2 percent since last month and 15 percent since August, in records, not dollars. There are two more this year, November 6th and December 4th, and I'd expect December to be the big one, because people buy tapes for Christmas whether a website asks them to or not.

My own damage was seven records and a little under sixty dollars, and for once I can account for all of it.

The counter list

Five that went back on more than once this week.

Miami Nights 1984, "You Got Mail." Track eleven, and the title alone made me miss a sound effect. I played it Wednesday night with the window open, which in Cleveland in October you only get to do a few more times.

Timecop1983, "Static (instrumental)." The one that used to have The Midnight on it. I thought I'd miss the vocal the whole way through and I only missed it for the first chorus.

Dead Astronauts, "Stuck (In a Modern Day Cult)." Best title of the week. This is the track where the drone and distortion they promised turn up in force.

Occams Laser, "Technosferatu." The techno half of the tags wins on this one. If I'm ever in a vampire nightclub, and at 47 the invitations have slowed, this is what I want playing.

Polydata, "Earth Mover." Real drums on a record filed under synthwave. The page said Genesis and Yes and I rolled my eyes, and then the drums came in and I stopped.

Out of the house

The Midnight's Time Machines tour is into its last two weeks. This week they played Nashville, Asheville, Raleigh and, last night, Richmond. There's a setlist up for Richmond, and it's a fan's entry on setlist.fm, so treat it as one person's notes: it opened with "Sanctuary," Bonnie McKee came out for "Runaways" and "Jason," the main set ended on "Days of Thunder," and the encore was "Summer's Ending Soon" and "Sunset." I haven't seen a proper review of any night since San Antonio in mid-September, which is strange for a band that fills rooms this size.

Here's what's left. Baltimore tomorrow, Philadelphia on Wednesday, New Haven on Thursday, Portland, Maine on Friday, Worcester on Saturday. Then the part I care about: Columbus on Monday the 12th, at KEMBA Live!, exclamation point theirs. After that it's Louisville, Milwaukee and Royal Oak, Michigan, and the whole thing ends in Monterrey, Mexico on the 19th. Columbus is two hours down I-71 from my driveway. The Civic and I are in talks.

And if you're in France, Carpenter Brut starts a run of eight dates on October 21st at Le Bikini, outside Toulouse, and finishes in Perpignan on the 30th. That's the loud end of this music playing rooms in the week before Halloween.

Pixels and polygons

They named a core after me. On Tuesday a new project appeared in the official MiSTer organization on GitHub under the name Marty, and I'd like to thank everyone involved. (MiSTer, for anyone new: a small FPGA board that rebuilds old machines in hardware instead of emulating them.) It's the FM Towns Marty, Fujitsu's 1993 attempt to turn its Japanese computer line into a console, and the author's own README is not sentimental about the original. It says the machine failed because the video output was poor and its memory and processor speed limited what it could run. The core fixes some of that with optional extras, more memory and a faster clock, and the author's name for the result is "a 'Marty Plus'." What you need: "The two BIOS files required are mrom.m36 and mrom.m37," plus your own CD images, and some games want a boot floppy image sitting next to the disc.

That was one of seven new cores to land there since Tuesday, and the one that got me out of my chair is Leland. If the name means nothing, the game will: Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off-Road, the cabinet with three steering wheels bolted across the front and a nitro button you were always out of. Six games run on it, including Indy Heat and Ataxx, and the README is as plain as you could want: "All six are playable with sound. Other Leland boards are not supported." It also tells you what it hasn't done: the core "was written from MAME's Leland drivers and the game ROMs, and has not been checked against an original PCB." You bring your own ROM sets. It takes a spinner for steering, and it'll put out a 15 kHz signal for a real CRT as well as HDMI.

The strangest of the seven is a core for two early Sega games, the racer Turbo from 1981 and the shooter Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom from 1982. Those boards made their noise with analog circuits, not chips playing samples, and the README says the author rebuilt the sound boards from the schematics: "Neither game's sound is sampled or approximated with WAV playback." Then comes a section I wish every project had, titled "What is schematic, and what is not," which lists the guesses and the gaps. One custom Sega part "has no datasheet." Some values were measured off a recording of a single cabinet, and "another cabinet will warble differently." It wants your own copy of the MAME 0288 ROM sets, and for Buck Rogers that means the unencrypted one. The encrypted set is listed as not implemented.

Three fan ports made the rounds this week, and I'm going to give you the facts here and the argument further down. First, Daytona USA. A developer who goes by alphanu1, the same person behind the Sega Model 1 core, has a project that rebuilds Sega's Model 2 arcade racer as a native program for Windows, Mac and Linux. The README says "No interpreter, no emulation core," and "No game data is in this repository. You need your own ROM set." It names the two sets it'll take and says "other Daytona sets are rejected." There's no download to double-click yet. You build it yourself with the setup scripts.

Second, MediEvil. A group called BlackLabelHQ released an open beta of a native PC version of the 1998 PlayStation game on Thursday, with a second build on Saturday, for Windows, Mac and Linux. The build instructions ask for "a legally owned copy of the North American PSX (PlayStation) version of MediEvil to rip your game from," in bin/cue or CHD format, and the release notes say you need the .NET 10 runtime installed or it won't open. They also say "Please save your game often," which is the most honest sentence in software.

Third, Out Run on the Amstrad CPC 6128. A hobbyist named Michel Louvet posted a port of the Master System version of the game for the 128K Amstrad, on a single disk, free, with all three tunes converted for the Amstrad's sound chip. Magical Sound Shower on an AY chip is reason enough to mention it in a synthwave magazine. "You need a CPC 6128 or an emulator set to 128K," says the page.

Star Fox Enhanced, the port I've been following, changed addresses. The GitHub account it lived on is gone, and the project reappeared on Monday under a new account with the same 0.0.8 release re-posted. I don't know why the old one vanished and the README doesn't say. I did read GitHub's public log of takedown notices for the week, and this project isn't in it. The terms haven't moved. It still won't start without your own ROM, dumped from a retail cartridge, and the README is specific about what doesn't count: "Hacks, betas, competition cartridges, Star Fox 2 and unknown revisions are not supported." Android owners should read the README closely: the original signing key is gone, and it says test builds signed with temporary keys "are not included in release downloads, and cannot update an existing installation." The banner about being ported and coded by AI is still at the top.

Blaze, the company behind Evercade, pushed back two handhelds. THEC64 Handheld and The Spectrum Handheld were due on October 15th and are now due April 22nd, 2027, both the standard and collector's editions. The reason given: "During production, we identified areas where the product construction was not meeting our high standards." Six months is a long delay to announce two weeks before launch. The same statement says the Evercade Nexus "is not affected by this change and remains on track for release on 30th October 2026."

CAVE kept a promise. The roadmap for DoDonPachi Resurrection Reignite said a training mode would arrive in October, and version 1.1.0 landed on October 2nd with exactly that: "Added Training Mode to Arcade Mode." The price tonight is $22.49, which Steam does show as 10 percent off $24.99 this time. Reviews are still at 170, now 80 up and 90 down, still Mixed. Windows only, Verified on the Steam Deck.

Defender of the Crown got patch 1.0.10 on Thursday, and the notes read like a list of the complaints in its Steam reviews. "Classic mode Jousting rebalanced to favor players more." The rival lords "no longer endlessly kidnap maidens and call for tournaments" late in the game. The siege aiming was reworked "to reduce the feeling of randomness." It's at 229 reviews, 155 of them positive, which keeps it at Mixed, and it's $15.99 on sale. Windows only, Playable on the Deck.

Last call on Polymega. The price increase takes effect tomorrow, October 5th, with the base unit going to $599. The company's line is that "every order placed before October 5th will be honored at current prices," so if you've been circling one, tonight's the night.

The ingredients list

I owe you a correction before anything else. Last issue I told you both sides in the labels' original case against Suno had asked the judge to extend part of the discovery schedule. They had. What I missed is that Judge Saylor had already said yes, on September 22nd, five days before I wrote that. So the calendar is settled: general fact discovery closed on Wednesday, September 30th, and the part about stream-ripping stays open until November 20th.

There was a status conference that same Wednesday, and the docket entry is worth reading. The magistrate judge ordered the labels to "produce the AI output testing reports." The same entry tells them to "re-review the AI task force meeting minutes" and look again at which ones they're holding back as privileged. So the record companies suing an AI company have an AI task force, it keeps minutes, and there are testing reports on what these machines put out. Suno's lawyers get the reports. Whether anybody outside the labels sees the minutes is still being argued.

Suno, if you've missed the last three issues, is the company that turns a typed prompt into a finished song. Its chief executive, Mikey Shulman, was on a stage in Los Angeles the next day. According to Music Business Worldwide, Shulman said the company is "far beyond" the 2 million subscribers and $300 million in revenue it last reported. Asked about rules for this stuff, labeling included, the answer was: "it's actually good that we don't have firm rules of the road just yet."

Nobody made Gary put his name at the bottom of a page about a car. There wasn't a rule for that either.

Two other things from the same week. An appeals court in Philadelphia ruled against an AI company on fair use, in a case called Thomson Reuters v. Ross, and you'll see headlines saying that's bad news for Suno. Maybe. Complete Music Update pointed out that the case wasn't about generative AI at all and the ruling "may be limited" for that reason, so I'd hold off on the victory lap. And Songtradr's Marketplace for Artists is gone. The support page now opens with: "Songtradr Marketplace for Artists is now closed (as of September 30, 2026)." If you had a withdrawal pending, they say it's being processed. The old help article explaining why it was closing is a dead link.

Now the three ports, because they're the same argument with the lawyers taken out.

The Out Run port's page has a section in bold. "This game was programmed entirely by an AI," it says, names the model and the tool, and adds: "I did not write a single line of assembly." Louvet's own credit is "project direction and testing." Nobody on that page is claiming to be the programmer. I have mixed feelings about a machine writing Z80 assembly for a 1985 computer, mostly because I thought that was the last place it would bother to go. But I know exactly what I'm downloading.

The MediEvil team went the other way and built a fence. Their README says, with an exclamation point, that the project "was made by human hands, no AI is involved in writing this code!" Contributions written with AI "will be closed." There's a section headed "Warning To AI Bros." You can find that a little much, and I do, a little. It's still a label, and it tells me who to thank.

Then Daytona. The project keeps a file called rules.md, and it's written for the AI assistant that helps build it. Rule one: "No Co-Authored-By trailer. Ever." Rule two: "Never mention Claude, AI, or an assistant in a commit message, branch name, PR body, tag, or any committed file." Time Extension's headline called the port "AI-assisted," and its write-up described the help as undisclosed. The work might be superb. Getting a Model 2 arcade game to run natively on three operating systems is hard no matter what's helping, and this is the same developer whose Model 1 notes I've praised for listing every game that doesn't work. But a standing instruction to keep the tool's name out of the record is the opposite of a credit. It's also sitting in a committed file, in public, which is how any of us know about it.

So that's three small free projects with nobody regulating any of them. One wrote the name of the tool on the box and one wrote "human hands" on it. The third told its own tool never to sign anything. Shulman's right that there are no firm rules of the road. Hobbyists are making them up in README files while he waits, and two out of three this week came down on the side of telling you.

The Art Desk

The desk has an artist this week, and he paints in acrylics one state east of here. Vinegar Syndrome's tape label, Degausser Video, listed four new deluxe VHS editions on Wednesday, and the one for a film called Satan War carries the line "(artwork by Wes Benscoter)." It's $45, limited to 200. The same name is on the slipcover of the label's 4K of Fear No Evil, the 1981 high-school-Antichrist picture, where the listing says "designed by Wes Benscoter" and the run is 6,000.

Benscoter keeps a site with a biography on it, which makes my job easy. "Wes Benscoter is a Pennsylvania based artist known for the heavy metal and horror film cover art that he's been creating professionally for over thirty years." The bio lists Slayer, Black Sabbath and Cattle Decapitation among the bands, says he's self-taught, and says he "works predominantly in acrylics." Thirty years of painting monsters for record sleeves, and now for the boxes that tapes come in. If you bought metal CDs in the nineties you've probably owned his work without knowing the name, and that's the reason this column exists.

The other three tapes are credited too. Ghostkeeper, the 1981 Canadian snowbound one, has artwork by Haunt Love and a run of 250. The fourth, Night of the Vamp-Friars, is by Steak Mtn., in a run of 200. Night Train to Terror is by Robert Sammelin, the Swede who's been through this column a few times since August, and he's also credited on three Blu-ray slipcovers in the same batch. That's four credits for one man in an afternoon. All four tapes are $45 in a light-up case with a clear shell. Not one listing gives the TV standard or the recording speed, so I can't tell you whether your $45 buys SP or EP.

Follow-up on Coki Greenway, the illustrator behind those DROIDGLOW sleeves. The last line of the credits on that DROIDGLOW and New Arcades single is "Coverart by Coki Greenway." That's the third NewRetroWave cover with that name on it in about a month, after "Legacy of Terror" and "Danse Macabre." Still no reply to my note.

Rewind culture

I signed off last week promising my niece the Assault on Precinct 13 theme. The Academy Museum in Los Angeles got there before I did. Their John Carpenter series had the film on Monday night, with Carpenter listed in person. That was the third of his four scheduled nights. The fourth was last night, a double bill of Escape from New York and Escape from L.A., and the listing reads "In person: John Carpenter and Kurt Russell." I wasn't in the room and I haven't found one account from anybody who was, so all I can tell you is what the schedule promised. If you were there, write to me.

The series runs three more weeks without him. Big Trouble in Little China is Thursday, The Fog is Friday, Prince of Darkness is next Sunday, and it closes with Christine on the 25th. The Fog on a Friday in October, in a real theater: I'd pay for the flight if I had the flight money.

Miami Vice '85 added another name. Deadline reported on Thursday that Walton Goggins is "set to join" Michael B. Jordan and Austin Butler in Joseph Kosinski's film, and its sources, which Deadline itself calls unconfirmed, have him as a henchman to John Leguizamo's cartel boss. The date is still May 19th, 2028, and the same piece says production starts this year. Goggins in a pastel suit and a bad mood is a picture I can already see, so somebody in casting knows what they're doing.

A Different World got a second season. Netflix renewed the revival on Friday, eight days after it premiered. I did get to it this week, three episodes in. It's lighter than the original, and I'm not sure yet whether I like it or whether I just like seeing them.

One anniversary, because it's a good one for this magazine. September 29th, 1986 was a Monday, and three records came out that day that had no business sharing a shelf: New Order's Brotherhood, OMD's The Pacific Age and Iron Maiden's Somewhere in Time. That last one is the album where Maiden picked up guitar synthesizers and half their fans acted like they'd been robbed. I was seven and knew none of this. I found all three later at the same used record store, in the same month, and it took me years to notice they had a birthday in common.

It's October now, which in northeast Ohio means the nine days a year when a windbreaker is the correct jacket. Mine came from the shop that publishes this magazine, the people who pay me, and I mention it only because I wore it to the grocery store on Thursday and a teenager at the register asked where I got it. I told him. He nodded like I'd said "an estate sale."

Static

Vehlinggo is back. After six weeks of nothing, the scene's one real news site published on Wednesday: a premiere of "My Only One," the new single from Johan Agebjörn with the Italo singer Fred Ventura, off Casablanca Nights 2. There was no note about where it had been. I don't need one. I just wanted the lights on.

Stock check, from the numbers the pages will give up. Michael Oakley's Prologue CD is down to 12. The Thought Beings bubblegum vinyl, the one limited to 100 that doesn't ship until March, has 46 left, and the pink cassette is at 23 of 50. The blue vinyl of Casablanca Nights 2 is an edition of 500 and it's down to 60, with four weeks to go before it ships.

Black Tiger MD, the free Mega Drive port of the Capcom arcade game, is up to version 1.7. The notes say the author "updated the SRAM header for flashcart compatibility" and split the saved high scores three ways, one table each for Arcade, Home and Boss Rush. If your flash cart wasn't saving scores before, that's your fix.

Kelly Clarkson, on a podcast this week: "when you see AI artists competing on a chart with humans, I have an issue. I think there should be a separate chart." She and I agree.

That's the week. I called Pete on Friday to check the Lamborghini story, because I check things now, and he says it was a Ferrari and I'm wrong about the year. He's sure about the phone, though. His mother picked it up, the modem dropped, and she never once apologized.

Nobody's disputing Gary.

Be kind. Rewind something.

Marty