Everything good opened on one Friday | The Rewind Vol. 3

This was supposed to reach you Sunday night. It is Tuesday. I would love to tell you something dramatic happened, a drive died, a storm took the block out, a raccoon got into the attic and ate the router. None of that. I lost the weekend to a week that would not stop producing news, and every time I sat down to close the file another anniversary walked in the door.

Two issues ago I promised you Sunday. One issue ago I delivered Sunday and made a whole thing about it, like a man who has done one push-up and wants a certificate. So here we are. My record is one out of three, and my only defense is that this particular week has forty years of birthdays stacked in it and I could not get them all in the car at once.

The attic hit 94 degrees at four o'clock yesterday. The fan I complained about in July has been joined by a second fan, which does nothing except move the same hot air in a slightly different direction. Management, if you are reading this, the window unit remains available for purchase at several fine retailers.

In this one: a Friday in 1986 that turns forty on Saturday, a pile of new records including one I told you I would judge and now have to, a movie you legally could not rent for fifteen years, a Kickstarter that did not happen after I promised you numbers from it twice, the return of the art desk, and an argument that broke out in three corners of this hobby inside eight days.

August 8, 1986

On Friday the eighth of August, 1986, four films opened in American theaters. I want to list them in the order a seven year old would have ranked them, which is the order I ranked them, because I was seven.

The Transformers: The Movie. One Crazy Summer. Stand by Me. She's Gotta Have It.

That is the actual slate. One Friday. Robots, a Cusack beach comedy, the best American film ever made about being twelve, and Spike Lee's first feature, shot in twelve days in Brooklyn for a hundred and seventy five thousand dollars with no permits and no insurance. It made seven million. All four turn forty this Saturday.

I got exactly one of them. My mother took me and my sister Carol to the robots, because it was a cartoon about robots and cartoons about robots are safe, and you know how that went because I wrote about it two weeks ago and I am still not over it.

The other three arrived sideways, later, through a strip mall in Parma with a burned out V in the sign.

Stand by Me came to me on VHS around 1990, from my cousin Pete's house, on a tape with a soap opera recorded over the last ten minutes. I did not see the real ending until I worked at the store and could take a copy home. One Crazy Summer was a permanent resident of our comedy wall, one of those tapes that never made it back to the shelf because it never made it out of the return bin. And She's Gotta Have It was not on our shelves at all. I found it in college on a fourth generation dub, and what I remember is being annoyed at how good it looked for something made for the price of a used Camaro.

Four movies in one day and the seven year old only got the toys, which is not a complaint, it is just how the video store worked. The theater was a lottery your parents ran. The store was where you went back and collected everything you missed, at your own speed, for a dollar and change a night. I got paid to stand at the counter where the collecting happened, which is still the best arrangement anybody has ever offered me.

The theater was a lottery your parents ran. The store was where you went back and collected everything you missed.

Now the robots, because Hasbro is not letting this week pass without a receipt.

The Apology Tour I wrote about after Comic-Con has hard dates on it now. The Transformers: The Movie returns to theaters in 4K with a new audio mix from September 17 through September 21, with the 17th branded as Transformers Day. Tickets go on sale this Friday, August 7. It is screening in premium large format and in 4DX, which means the seat will physically move while Optimus Prime dies, and I need everyone to sit with that for a second.

There is a new post credits chapter. Brand new footage, the first attached to this film in forty years, playing after Unicron comes apart. Hasbro will not say what is in it. There are also collectible popcorn buckets and specialty drinkware at participating US theaters while supplies last, and I have already decided I am going to be the guy with the bucket.

Two things about the original release, because they are the good kind of terrible. It lost money. Against a budget around five or six million it took under six million domestically, and the archives disagree about how far under, so the honest version is that nobody made anything.

And Orson Welles recorded Unicron on October 5, 1985, and died five days later. His voice was so weak that technicians ran it through a synthesizer to save the takes and sped his dialogue up around eight percent. Welles described the job himself: "I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I'm destroyed." Last performance from the man who made Citizen Kane, pitch shifted, playing a planet that eats other planets, in a cartoon that killed a truck.

Forty years later they are putting it in 4DX with a bucket. I do not know what to do with that except buy a ticket, which is what the slide deck predicted.

The rest of Saturday's mail

This week is absurd. Metroid turns forty on Thursday, August 6, released on the Famicom Disk System in Japan in 1986. Heavy Metal turns forty five on Friday, August 7, and it gets its own section because it earned one.

Also on Friday: Bandcamp Friday, the same day as the Transformers ticket drop. I have looked at this collision from several angles and there is no version where I come out of it with money.

One week after

I filed a dispatch last Wednesday about Kavinsky, so I am not writing that again. But two things happened after I hit publish and they belong in the record.

The Weeknd opened his tour in Frankfurt and played "Odd Look," the track they made together in 2013. In Paris, the night after the news, people gathered at Silencio and a DJ played until it was not Tuesday anymore. Pedro Winter of Ed Banger called him the crazy uncle who talked louder than everyone else.

The one that got me was on Reddit, of all places. The r/outrun thread that hit almost four thousand points was not a news post and it refused to say he died. It said there have been rumors that the mysterious driver finally reached sunrise, but that the people who knew him best insist no body ever turned up. They buried the man by declining to break the character he invented.

Less pleasant, but I said I would tell you everything. Within about twelve hours, resale asks on signed OutRun vinyl and the limited Yema watch climbed, and at least one tracker reported four figure listings. I have verified no completed sale and I am not linking it. I mention it because the vulture cycle now starts before the funeral, and knowing that is the only protection anybody has.

This week in music

Big week. Starting with the one I owe you.

PYLOT, The Carbon Ghost

Two weeks ago I told you this was coming on July 31 and that I would report back. It came out on July 31. Five tracks, twenty one minutes, nine pounds. No label is named on the page, so I am not naming one.

The trick is that five tracks is really four songs, because track five is the title track again with the vocal taken off. I usually hate that, and I complained about instrumental repeats last month. This one I forgive, because "The Carbon Ghost" with the vocal is about a rider and "The Carbon Ghost" without it is about a road, and those are not the same four minutes.

"Splitlane Echo" and "Heart Engine" are motorcycle titles from a man not pretending to be subtle. It is billed as a concept record about a rider in a dystopia and it leans harder and rockier than this shelf usually allows. I drove out past the airport with it twice. It holds up at seventy, which is the only review criterion I have ever fully trusted.

WOLFCLUB, City of Once

The big commercial swing of the week, out July 31 on NewRetroWave Records as NRWR212. Twelve tracks, twelve dollars digital. The page has it at number one on Bandcamp's retrowave, synthwave and synthpop sales charts, and 34 on the iTunes UK electronic album chart, which is a chart with actual strangers on it.

Cadenti sings on five of the twelve. At that point it is a duo record with extra steps, and I mean that as praise, because the Cadenti tracks are where the album stops being pleasant and starts being about something. The closer is "You Sleep, I'll Drive." I have been the guy in the passenger seat and I have been the other guy, and I remember which one felt like love.

A.L.I.S.O.N, Tape #5

Eighteen tracks, sixty three minutes, nine euros. This is the chillsynth record of the summer and I am going to tell you the thing nobody else noticed.

Look at the track titles. "Aléria." "Cinto." "Omessa." Those are not mood words. Aléria and Omessa are towns in Corsica and Monte Cinto is the highest mountain on the island. Three tracks on a French artist's ambient record are named after places on one Mediterranean rock, and the cover is a photograph of clouds sitting in a mountain valley.

I am not going to tell you the whole album is a map, because "Astia" is a film stock and "Tansei" is Japanese and I would be inventing a pattern to have something to say. But somebody went somewhere and came back with sixty three minutes, and once you know those three names you cannot unhear it.

Ultraboss, Eclipse

Out July 28 on Rosso Corsa. Fourteen tracks, a full hour, ten dollars digital, thirty for the twelve inch on pre-order. Vocals from Christoffer Ling. And then, buried in the credits like it is nothing, instrumental contributions from Cody Carpenter.

That is John Carpenter's son, who has spent the last decade playing on and scoring alongside his father's work, turning up on an Italian label's synthwave record in the summer of 2026. The tracklist has both "Dominus Abraxas" and "Dawn of the Ninja" on it. I did not need more information than that and I got the Carpenter credit anyway. I sat in the driveway with the engine off for the last three minutes of it.

Short spins

Cassetter and Cyberwalker put out After The Rush on TimeSlave on July 31. Fifty cassettes and fifty CDs, which is one hundred physical copies on Earth. There is a saxophone credit, which you know I am contractually required to approve of, and a remixer named Timesloth on a label named TimeSlave, which I choose to believe was somebody's entire reason for booking the remix. Good record, too. Thirty seven minutes, no filler.

Hello Meteor's The Oahu GP: World Tour arrived July 30 with the funniest tracklist of the year. Every title is formatted like a course select screen from a racing game that does not exist. "SUSUKINO: YUKI NO MACHI -YUKIMICHI-." It uses real Japanese driving vocabulary across five languages and ends the album on "YOU LOSE...: CONTINUE?" instead of a victory lap. It made me laugh out loud at a stoplight.

TOMMY '86's Alpha Synthauri runs Ignition through Mission Complete as a full flight arc and is name your price. Viperdrive is back after a year off with Second Spark, outrun crashed into 1992 trance. Sleepless Nights got the vinyl of Moments Lost In Time back from the plant, a nebula marble limited to two hundred at twenty two pounds, and there were eleven left when I looked. And Karl Casey put out White Bat 62, because of course he did, and we will be back to him shortly.

Bandcamp Friday is this Friday, August 7, midnight to midnight Pacific, no revenue share. The next one is September 4. Ultraboss has vinyl on pre-order going in, the TimeSlave physicals are fifty each, and the Sleepless Nights count is in double digits. I am telling you this as a public service and also as a man who last time went in for two records and came out with six, a cassette, and a patch for a jacket he still does not own.

The deep cut

Heavy Metal turns forty five on Friday. It premiered August 7, 1981, and for fifteen years you could not legally rent it, which is why it is in this column instead of somebody else's.

The production cleared its soundtrack for theatrical use and the soundtrack album only. Black Sabbath, Blue Öyster Cult, Cheap Trick, DEVO, Donald Fagen, Journey, Stevie Nicks. Nobody was thinking about home video in 1981 because home video was a rumor with a rental counter attached. Then the rental counter became the entire business, and the film sat there, unreleasable, because clearing that many songs again would have cost more than the movie made.

Kevin Eastman, the Ninja Turtles guy, picked up the magazine in 1991 and spent about five years untangling it. The theatrical re-release came in March 1996 and the tape landed on June 4.

I was seventeen that summer and working the counter, and I remember the Heavy Metal tape arriving the way you remember weather. People had been asking for years. Not politely. There was a guy, and I promise this is true, who asked roughly every six weeks for four years, and every time I said no and every time he said "you'll get it," like a man predicting rain. When it came in I put it behind the counter and called him. He showed up in a Blizzard of Ozz shirt, did not say thank you, said "told you," and rented it for a week straight.

Watch it now and it is a mess. Anthology films always are, and the ratio of leering to storytelling has not aged into anything I would defend at length. But the Taarna sequence still moves like nothing else animated in America that decade, half the voice cast is SCTV, and the score is Elmer Bernstein's first time using the ondes Martenot, an instrument that went on to define the rest of his career. He found it here, in this.

The reason it matters is the fifteen years. Every argument we are having now about servers going dark and licenses lapsing and a thing you paid for vanishing out of your library is a rerun. It already happened, to one movie, over music rights, and the only reason it came back is that one guy with Turtle money got stubborn.

Pixels and polygons

UrbX, and I have to eat this one

Two issues ago I told you the UrbX Warriors 16-bit Kickstarter numbers would be here. Last issue I told you they would be here for real. Here they are.

It never launched.

Tony Warriner and Stoo Cambridge, working as Brazen Gameplay, said the campaign would open Thursday July 30 at three in the afternoon UK time. That was six days ago. As of this afternoon the page says "Launching soon," has a "Notify me on launch" button, and shows 871 followers. The story section is one sentence. No goal, no tiers, no end date, no update explaining anything.

I do not think something bad has happened. A two person team building the same game natively for Amiga AGA and Sega Mega Drive, separately, on real hardware, is a schedule made of wet paper.

What bothers me is me. I promised you a number twice on the strength of a date somebody tweeted, and a date somebody tweeted is not a number. That is a rookie mistake from a man who spent four years telling customers a movie would be in on Tuesday because the distributor sheet said Tuesday.

So, no third promise. When it launches I will tell you what it raised. If it does not launch, I will tell you that too, and I will not pretend I forgot.

Metroid at forty

Thursday. Famicom Disk System, Japan, August 6, 1986. Gunpei Yokoi produced it, Hirokazu Tanaka wrote the music, and the most famous thing about it was somebody's shower thought during development: "Hey, wouldn't that be kind of cool if it turned out that this person inside the suit was a woman?"

Forty years of a franchise, a whole genre named after it, and the hinge was a maybe in a meeting.

The part I think about is the passwords. The Disk System could save. When it came west on cartridge it could not, so they bolted on a twenty four character password system that was new to the industry, and an entire generation of American kids learned to transcribe gibberish onto the back of a homework sheet, then learned what happens when you write a zero that looks like an O. NARPAS SWORD is still sitting in more American heads than most poetry, which is a strange fate for a workaround.

Short shifts

Defender of the Crown: The Legend Returns is out in nine days, on August 13, and still has no price. Not on Steam, not on PlayStation, not at the key resellers. No demo, no new trailer since June. A forty year old revival going on sale next week with no number attached is a strange way to run a launch, and I say that as a man who is already buying it for Retro Mode alone, which is the 1986 Amiga original with James Sachs' pixel art and Jim Cuomo's score, rebuilt from scratch rather than emulated.

Arcade1Up's OutRun Supreme is listed at $629.99, "Coming Fall 2026," Notify Me only, no pre-order and no ship date. Five games on it, and their own marketing copy only bothers to describe four. The best thing on the page is the review section, which has 4.6 stars from fourteen people who cannot buy it. Half of it is British men filing a petition: "Please release outrun in the united kingdom! Listen to the people of England." The other half are reviewing the review section: "I am the seventh review... It's got a steering wheel and everything."

Ninety seven sealed copies of an undocumented Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt variant turned up in a Wisconsin store, in a box built for a hundred, and the owner was going to move them at about fifteen dollars each. They reached him through a man whose job was extracting gold from scrap circuit boards, so these were minutes from being melted. Five have graded PSA 10 since. The tell is one word: known manuals say "maintenance or repairs" and these say "maintenance or service." The codes date them to late 1993, after the bundle had stopped selling, so they may be the last ever made. The man who found them said the blood drained from his face, and honestly, same.

A third independent homebrew port of Data East's 1988 RoboCop landed on Mega Drive, and yes, that is three separate people building the same 1988 arcade game for the same console at the same time. The developer found out about the other two after he was already deep in, and instead of a fight the other guy sent over assets and tips. Somebody else rebuilt the cancelled Nintendo 64 Resident Evil 0 demo out of surviving videos, screenshots and magazine scans, because no ROM of it exists anywhere. And Nintendo is finally putting out two cancelled Virtual Boy games, Zero Racers and D-Hopper. Zero Racers was going to be an F-Zero before the Virtual Boy took it down with it.

Hardware. Krikzz announced the EverDrive-64 Pro at $169, with native 64DD support on a physical disk swap button and a whole FPGA NES core hiding inside it. ModRetro shipped its fanless FPGA N64, then opened pre-orders on an $89.99 adapter that takes HDMI in and puts composite, S-Video, component and RGB out, which matters because most surviving CRTs in America only ever had composite. And somebody turned an Atari Lynx into a four channel music tracker called AlynxDJ, with MIDI over an RP2040 bridge and direct access to the console's shift register. A groovebox, out of a 1989 handheld nobody bought. That is the most this newsletter has ever been about anything.

Three rooms, one argument

This is the part I actually wanted to write, and I found it by accident, in three places that do not know they are having the same fight.

The first is MiSTer FPGA, where a wave of new cores has shown up built with AI assistance from MAME source rather than reverse engineered off the actual arcade boards. The community split down the middle over it. Jotego, who has spent years doing this the hard way and is building the Neo Geo AES+, laid out the objection in three lines on the 27th. AI slop "1. Turns the platform into a second class MAME, that tries to emulate what the emulator does. 2. Drives human talent away 3. Discourages research."

The practical complaint underneath is simpler and better: these cores land in the update script unlabeled, so you cannot tell what you are installing and you cannot opt out. The replies got ugly fast. One guy: "You guys are fighting the steam engine during the industrial revolution. You already lost." Another went straight at the Patreon money. Eighty comments, which for that corner of the internet is a riot.

Then, four days later, a new Batsugun core goes up and the developer says plainly that it is an AI vibe coded project based on MAME source. A System 32 core lands carrying the line "This core was developed using AI" right next to "No tiers, no donate, no paywall, ever." Which is, whatever else it is, an answer.

Then Bandcamp. Karl Casey put out White Bat 62 on Saturday, six tracks, name your price, same as the previous sixty one. His page has always said you can use his music if you credit him. What it says now, in 2026, is that the music contains no AI and is one hundred percent copyright safe for your film, your animation, your video, your game.

Nobody had to say "no AI" in 2019. It was the water. Now it is a feature you advertise, like "no MSG."

And then r/DarkSynth, where on Saturday night somebody posted "I vote we implement a 'no AI' rule" over a one line body that said they were tired of this nonsense. It went to 160 points and became the biggest thread of the week in that subreddit, bigger than its own Kavinsky post, without a single dissenting comment.

The actual news is buried four comments down, from a user who says they already asked the moderators and were told the community should police it itself. So the fight is not really about whether AI is bad. It is about whether anybody will write it down, and as of this morning no moderator has replied.

I have two positions and they do not sit together comfortably.

On the cores, Jotego is right about research and wrong about inevitability. MiSTer exists because people photographed chips and argued about timing for years. If the pipeline becomes "point a model at MAME," the knowledge stops accumulating and we end up with a very expensive box approximating an approximation. So label the cores and let people choose, which is not gatekeeping, it is an ingredients list. Though I should say the new Virtual Boy core, which is by all accounts excellent, admits in its own readme that AI did a lot of the refactoring, so the line is not where either camp would like it to be.

On the music, Casey is doing something smarter than a slogan. He has built a library that thousands of channels run on, and the risk to those channels is not artistic, it is legal. "No AI" on that page means "nobody is going to send you a letter." He understood who his customer actually is.

What gets me is the timing. Three corners of one hobby, eight days, same phrase. I have been doing this job for a month and I already know what half of next year looks like.

The art desk

I said last issue that this column was staying and that I was taking suggestions. You sent them. This one I found myself, then spent two days making sure he was real and working, because I got burned on that once already and said so in print.

Andrew Tremblay. Out of Asbury Park, New Jersey. He also makes music as STRNGR, which is what got my attention, because he is the only person I have found in this scene who both draws the cover and plays on the record.

Forget pastel sunsets and grids. Tremblay works the horror end: dense pen and ink, hard black and white, grindhouse poster grammar, bodies coming apart in ways that would have gotten the box turned around on our shelf. He calls it retro science fiction and horror. He also screen prints, and you can tell, because everything he draws is built for the moment it becomes ink on a shirt, with thick silhouettes and nothing that falls apart at small sizes.

The credit list is checkable, which is the part I care about. Visceral Instinct: Blood Memory in February of this year. MOTOKO 3 for NewRetroWave Records in August 2025. Live At Club Fuga in 2024, MOTOKO 2 in 2023, the "Strangulator" GosT remix single in 2022. Before that, tour posters and shirts for GosT going back to 2017.

Which brings me to the part I sat with for a while before writing.

James Lollar, who was GosT, died on the first of April this year at 46. Tremblay drew that man's posters and shirts for the better part of a decade. On April 2 he posted two words. In May, explaining that his workload was full and he was not taking new gigs, he mentioned he was working on a tribute for the homie. That is all he has said publicly and it is all I am going to repeat. I am not asking him about it in print before I have ever said hello.

The practical stuff. His Instagram is public and it is where he actually lives, at actremblayart, around seven thousand people watching him post commissioned Yu-Gi-Oh playmats between album covers. His Behance is public but it is a 2017 time capsule, and his old personal site is dead, so I am not linking a dead domain to look thorough. He was still posting at the end of June, and back in May he was booked solid enough to publicly turn work away, which in illustration is the only currency that means anything.

Nobody has interviewed him. I checked. That seems like an oversight I could personally correct, and I am going to try.

Disclosure while we are on the subject of ink: the people upstairs who sign my checks also print shirts, so I have opinions about how few printers get the black right, and you should weigh that accordingly.

Rewind culture

The Stranger Things complete series box went on sale in the UK on July 27 and in the States on the 28th. Twenty five discs, 2,703 minutes, Atmos on the last two seasons. The deluxe 4K was $269.99 and comes with a Palace Arcade token, a Hellfire Club d20 with a character sheet, a Hawkins map with the Upside Down on the back, and a 148 page artbook.

Seven days later Arrow's own store had it at $215.

The reviews say the transfers are gorgeous and the extras are old material that has been out before, which for a tenth anniversary set is the part that stings. I am not above it, I looked at the discount twice. But a $270 box selling at $215 in a week tells you how many people were waiting for the definitive edition of a show they can already watch, and the answer is fewer than the packaging assumed.

Better news on the same shelf. Arrow is putting out Enter the Video Store: Video Vengeance on October 27, five discs, $70 in the States, four of them newly scanned in 2K off the original 35mm negatives. The lineup includes The Final Alliance, in which David Hasselhoff fights an albino biker named Ghost played by John Saxon and also has a pet puma.

And there is a sixth film hidden on disc three as a bonus feature. Interzone. Not on the cover, not in the title, just sitting there. Somebody at Arrow understands exactly what a video store felt like, which was mostly the shelf you were not looking at.

Queen's July 27, 1986 show at the Népstadion in Budapest has been restored in 4K by Park Road Post, Peter Jackson's shop, off a negative digitized by Hungary's National Film Institute. Eighty thousand people, seventeen cameras, and the production burned through every foot of 35mm stock available in Hungary at the time. Theatrical and IMAX on October 7, discs on October 30. Mercury sings a Hungarian folk song with the lyrics written on his hand. Three years before the Wall came down, in a stadium behind it, forty years ago last week.

Lunchmeat's Video Town novel still has not shipped. First printing of 250, $19.99, and they put the whole first chapter online free on July 24. They were on video vacation and only restarted shipping July 31, so the delay has a boring explanation, which is the best kind. Mine is still pending.

Ministry announced their last record and a farewell tour. If the only Ministry you know is the industrial stuff, go find With Sympathy from 1983, a synthpop record Al Jourgensen has spent forty years being embarrassed about and which is, sorry Al, good.

David Rivkin, who worked as David Z, died on August 2 at 78 of complications from an infection. He recorded the demo that got teenage Prince his Warner Bros. deal in 1976. He played on and helped arrange "Kiss." He produced "She Drives Me Crazy" and "Looking For A New Love." And he was the guitarist in Lipps Inc., which means the man who helped build the Minneapolis Sound also played on "Funkytown." His brother Bobby Z drummed in the Revolution. Put on "Kiss" this week and listen to how much space is in it. That was a decision, and he was in the room when it got made.

Static

• MAME 0.289 shipped on July 31. Virtua Fighter's collision detection is better, Wing War's DSP data got patched so bullets connect again, and Windows builds now carry SDL joystick support that goes up to 128 buttons, for the eleven of you who need that.
• Retroid started shipping the Pocket Nova on July 28 while saying they were pushing hard to keep the price stable. On August 3 they announced a ten dollar increase effective August 6. The promise lasted six days.
• A UK retailer is still listing the never released Intellivision Amico with box art covered in Luigi, Wario and Diddy Kong. Asked about it, the store said "Haha we didn't design it I swear," and that the image arrived as an official asset.
• Atari signed a deal with Universal to adapt ten of its games into films, including Pong, then a week later announced a new Atari World Championship with Twin Galaxies. I have spent two weeks trying to work out what a Pong movie is about and the best I have is "two guys, one ball, mutual respect."
• Taki Udon's Console Mode interface for MiSTer shipped on the 31st and installs on any MiSTer, including one you already own. His explanation for the delay was that they needed "to fix issues and to cook."
• r/outrun's Kavinsky thread cleared 4,700 points this week. In the same seven days the single biggest post on r/synthwave got six points, which tells you something about where this scene actually gathers, though I am not sure what.

And if you want the week in retro read back to you by people who do it better than I do, This Week In Retro's episode 279 went up Saturday and spends an hour on whether Xbox is looking after retro players, which is a question I have opinions about that would double the length of this issue.

The counter list

Five for the week, in playing order. Same principle as the top fives I used to staple to rental receipts, except this one nobody hands back.

• PYLOT, "Splitlane Echo." I said I would report back. I am reporting back at seventy miles an hour.
• WOLFCLUB feat. Cadenti, "You Sleep, I'll Drive." The whole record earns its keep in the last four minutes.
• A.L.I.S.O.N, "Cinto." Named after a mountain, sounds like the drive up one.
• Ultraboss, "Aspen to Malibu." A Carpenter is on this album and I cannot stop thinking about it.
• Stan Bush, "The Touch." Yes, again. It is the fortieth anniversary week and I do not make the rules.

That is issue three, filed two days late from an attic with two fans in it that hate each other. Started Sunday, abandoned Monday, finished today with one fan aimed at the laptop and one aimed at me, which I have decided is a fair split.

Next week: whatever the Bandcamp Friday damage looks like, and I will give you the real number. Whether the Transformers tickets moved on Friday morning, because I am buying one and I will tell you what the seat map looked like. Defender of the Crown is out on the 13th and I will have played it, and if it ever gets a price I will tell you that too. And I am going to try to get Andrew Tremblay on the phone, because nobody has, and that seems like a waste of a good phone.

Forty years ago this Saturday four movies opened on the same day and one of them broke a seven year old in Parma, Ohio. The other three waited for him behind a counter. I have been thinking all week about how lucky that is. Nothing you miss is gone. It is just later.

Be kind. Rewind something.

Marty