More Fridays, smaller Fridays | The Rewind Vol. 8

At Video Vault the register had a paper tape that ran all day, and on a slow Tuesday you could pull it at close and the whole thing fit in your palm. On a Friday in December you needed both hands and it hung off the counter like a receipt for a small country. I loved that. Not the money, I made $4.35 an hour and none of it was mine. I loved that you could hold the day.

Friday was Bandcamp Friday, the fifth of eight this year, and people have been saying these days matter for years without anybody showing you the tape. So this week I went and got it.

This week in music

Bandcamp puts a line on its own front page telling you two things: how much fans have paid artists through the site all time, and how many pieces of music people bought yesterday. It changes daily and nobody archives it, except the Internet Archive does, without being asked. So you can go back and read any yesterday you like.

Here's the tape. The counter rolls over on the UTC day, so a copy archived on any date reports the day before, and once you know that you can read a whole month off it. Ordinary Wednesdays sit near 70,000, Thursdays run 83,000 to 101,000, and ordinary Fridays, the real yardstick, land between 99,873 and 109,475.

Bandcamp Friday did 356,237, about 3.4 times an ordinary Friday and five times a Wednesday, and the Saturday after it did 167,419, beating any normal Friday all month. So the day is real.

Then the number that made me check three times, because I'd already written the opposite. August 7th, the last Bandcamp Friday, did 409,587. September's did 356,237. Thirteen percent down, and the Saturday tail fell with it, 203,349 to 167,419. The biggest sales day of the season was smaller than the one before it.

Caveats, next to the number where they belong. The counter is Bandcamp's own and I can't audit it. It counts units, not money, so a name your price download and a lathe cut vinyl score one apiece and I can't separate them. And the all-time dollar figure at the top didn't move all week, which proves nothing except that it's rounded in ten million dollar steps.

While I was in there I found a figure that doesn't agree with itself. Bandcamp's own blog, announcing this year's calendar, says these days have "contributed more than $150 million to independent musicians around the world." Bandcamp Daily's standing page, live right now, says "over $120 million directly to labels and musicians." Same claim, same company, thirty million apart. I won't guess which is stale. I'm going to note that a company which just moved a third of a million units in a day can't tell you within thirty million what it has raised. And I'll put the two findings next to each other, because they belong there: Bandcamp went up to eight of these a year, and the fifth one moved 13 percent fewer than the fourth. More Fridays, smaller Fridays. Either the scene is out of money by September or a good idea is being spread thinner, and I can't tell you which. Next one is October 2nd.

To the records, which is where these Fridays cost you money. Lyst, Operator is the one I'd put in your hand. Their own description is the sound line, and it's honest about the recipe: "Blending dreamy popwave, shredding guitars, funkwave basslines and lush vapor melodies into one sleek package." Twelve tracks, nine new and three remastered, out Friday on RetroSynth. $9 digital, $13 CD, $40 for the electric blue lathe cut, shipping December 4th. The credits are complete and specific: written, produced and mixed by Lyst, guitars from Out Runner, Lazer Club co-writing and singing on "Tell Me," Jessy Mach on two more. Digital master by Tonebox, vinyl master by John Kershaw, listed separately, which almost nobody bothers with. And one line off the page I wish were standard: "the vinyl omits the remaster of Downhill Drift due to space limitations." Twelve tracks digital, eleven on the record, said before you pay.

Then two records on the same label on the same day which, side by side, make the argument this issue keeps circling. ACTORS, Our Love Will Live Forever on Artoffact, ten tracks of guitars and drum machines, $11 digital, $30 for the first black pressing shipping November 13th, and a $100 test pressing with 17 left. The label calls it "romantic post-punk and cinematic darkwave," and I'm giving you their words rather than inventing mine, because I've had one pass through it and not the six a record like this deserves. Player's right below. Then Corbett tells you what happened: a cardiac emergency partway through making it.

Getting wheeled into an emergency room and spending days in the cardiac care unit put me in a state of deep reflection. Would I finish the album? Would I ever be on a stage again? I was given a second chance to cherish every experience and live in the moment. My goal was to bring that energy to the album.

Soft Vein, All We've Known of Heaven, same label, same Friday. Eight tracks, $10, $30 on vinyl, a $100 test pressing with nine left. The label's line is "a dreamy, alternative take on synthpop and sophisti-pop," the glossy, saxophone-friendly end of 80s pop, and it promises "lush synthesizers, sparkling guitars, melodic vocals." It has the best credit block of the week and I mean that as a compliment to whoever typed it in: produced by Justin Chamberlain and Andrea Mantione of Nuovo Testamento, recorded winter 2025 into 2026 at Seahorse Sound and at Jacknife Sound in Vancouver, mixed by Chamberlain, saxophone from Rachel Mazer. Vocal engineering and mastering by Jason Corbett at Jacknife.

Read that last name again. Corbett mastered the Soft Vein record, and his own album, out the same day on the same label, publishes no mixing or mastering credit at all. He does the paperwork for other people and leaves his own line blank. Modesty or a label oversight, I don't know. The credit exists, somebody has it, and whether it reaches you is a coin flip.

The one that got me in the chest is free. Neon Retro Records, Night Run 1986, eight tracks, name your price, and the about text says: "Night Run 1986 is our new outrun compilation, and we dedicate it, among other things, to the memory of Kavinsky. His contribution to retrowave is enormous, and we appreciate it." Track two, by M.Zi, is called "Vincent Belorgey." That was Kavinsky's real name, and he died in July. A Russian label put a man's legal name on a four minute forty outrun track and gave it away. Art by Aleks Kot, credited, a name I wrote in this column two issues ago for a different sleeve. Speedworld, M.Zi, Sellorekt LA Dreams, AWITW, Xuji Sunset, Born in '82 with INCORE, Morze1982, SYNTHFEVER. Take it.

Dan Terminus put out five B-sides on the 1st and wrote a credit line better than any headline I've managed: "Decomposed, misproduced, dismixed and unmastered by Dan Terminus." Name your price. The credits say the vocals are his own, run through a vocoder, and it opens with a Daft Punk cover, "Human After All," credited properly to Bangalter and de Homem-Christo. Artwork by Jim. That's a man clearing his desk in public and I like him for it.

PIG, Dirt Box arrived on Friday too, and it hooks into something I did write about. There's no description on the page and the credits are empty, so all I can honestly give you is the shape of it: four originals and then those same four handed to four other people. The remix roster does the rest of the talking: Cyanotic, Combichrist, Rabbit Junk, and Stabbing Westward on "An American Ideal of Beauty." Neat timing, because Stabbing Westward's own Wither: ReWired is still on pre-order for the 10th at $12 digital. The 180 gram vinyl was 370 copies when I last looked and it's 350 now, shipping October 10th, a month behind the download. Two formats I missed last time: a CD with a bonus track at $15.99, and a cassette limited to 150 with 30 left. The tape is 80 percent gone and the record has moved twenty copies. While you're in there: Rosetta Stone's Executing Nostalgia lands on the 25th and this afternoon its vinyl, cassette and CD all read 5 remaining. Five each.

The counter list

Five out of the Friday pile. Not the highest rated, the ones I went back to.

1. Lyst, "Ray Tracer." Track ten, and one of the three remastered ones rather than a new song, so call it a cheat if you like. It's where the guitars stop being a garnish.
2. M.Zi, "Vincent Belorgey." Four minutes forty on a free compilation, named for a man who died in July. It doesn't try to sound like him. It sounds like somebody driving home thinking about him, which is the harder thing to write.
3. Soft Vein, "White Towers (White Shores)." Mantione's synth and Wooding's backing vocals, and the point where the label's promise stops being a promise.
4. Dan Terminus, "Armored Disco Coffins." Unmastered, he says. It's louder than most things that were mastered.
5. ACTORS, "Bad Boys (Don't Go to Heaven)." Closing track on a record made by a man who spent part of it in a cardiac unit. I'd have put it first. He was right to put it last.

Out of the house

The ICA is doing something I didn't expect. TG50, Sunday October 18th, all day, general admission nothing. Get the number right, because I nearly got it wrong. This isn't the band's fiftieth birthday. It's fifty years to the day since Throbbing Gristle played the ICA as part of the Prostitution show and got themselves called wreckers of civilisation in Parliament. Same building, same date, 1976 to 2026. Screenings and talks are separately ticketed and capacity limited, and the one to book is founder members Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti with Luke Turner, 6pm, Cinema 2. Mute is co-presenting. The most deliberately unwelcoming band in Britain, and the door is open and costs nothing. Somebody there thought about it properly. Nine days later the same room has Duet Emmo, the Daniel Miller and Wire side project whose only LP was cut in 1982 and which has never once played live, still not flagged sold out. The ICA is having a good autumn.

They're also putting out TG24+ on December 4th, a USB box of 36 live performances restored and mastered by Chris Carter. No price yet, Mute is taking registrations of interest, a phrase which usually precedes a number you won't enjoy. And they haven't said what the files are, which is the only spec that matters here. It's a stick, not discs. Whether 36 shows survive fifteen years in your drawer depends on your own backups and on whether those files are lossless, and right now nobody will tell you.

Mute announced two of these in three days, and the other one is on the same date. Telex, MAXI, December 4th, thirteen extended versions cut from the original tapes and newly mixed and remastered by Dan Lacksman and Michel Moers, the two surviving members. Double vinyl on transparent red and blue, plus CD, and the digital doesn't arrive until 2027, which is a choice. They're leading with an extended "Moskow Diskow."

A week ago I had to correct my own emphasis, having admired the Opéra De Nuit credit list for a whole paragraph while missing that Dan Lacksman mixed most of it and that Lacksman is Telex. Nine days later the man announces thirteen of his own extended mixes. I don't think he read it. I'd like to think he read it.

Synthrave Live in Sheffield sold out its early bird. The £30 tier is gone, general admission is £40 plus a pound of fee, and the bill has grown from eight names to twelve. Here's the part to use: every aggregator still lists that show at £30. Songkick, EventsList, all of them. That tier does not exist. Price a trip off a listing site and you're budgeting against a ghost.

The times got worse, not better. The promoter's ticket page says 14:00 to 22:30. The venue's own page says 1pm to 10:30 with last entry at 10, which is the same finish and an hour earlier start. Then the press release everybody reprinted in June says doors at 13:00 and a curfew of 23:00. So the promoter and the venue disagree about when you get in, and the press disagrees with both about when you get thrown out, ten weeks before the doors. And before anybody books a flight: Synthrave Live and Darker Waves in Huntington Beach fall on the same day, November 14th.

One absence worth naming. Vehlinggo hasn't published since August 17th. NewRetroWave's site hasn't published since July 29th. The two outlets this scene actually has, in the week the scene bought a third of a million records, are both dark. I'm not scoring points. I know exactly how much unpaid work sits behind both of them, and I'm one guy in an attic with a deadline he mostly makes. But if you were wondering why the biggest sales day of the season produced no coverage anywhere, that's why.

Pixels and polygons

CAVE's producer wrote everybody a letter on Thursday and I want to start there, because it's the opposite of every other story in this issue. DoDonPachi Resurrection Reignite came out on Steam on August 26th and the launch has been a mess. The 1.0.1 patch fixed three sound bugs and broke the game's ability to start, and the note attached to 1.0.2 says the quiet part out loud: "Due to a launch issue identified in Ver 1.0.1 released on August 27, we temporarily rolled back the game version to Ver 1.0.0." They shipped a patch, it stopped the game launching, they put the old build back. Then the letter. "I also want to deeply apologize for the major issues caused by the update immediately following the release." A roadmap is coming, including the training mode covering stage 6 that people have been shouting for. Signed Akihiro Kotani, Producer, CAVE Interactive CO., LTD.

Where that game stands as I write, from Steam's own page and not a press release: 161 reviews, 72 up and 89 down, 44.7 percent, Mixed. That's up from the 133 reviews and 40 percent I printed a week ago, so it's climbing out of a hole. The price is the other half. I printed $12.49 with a further ten percent off. That was the launch window and it's over. It's $24.99 now, no discount. Before you buy it: Windows only, no Mac build, no Linux build, minimum spec Windows 11 64-bit, and the requirements box still has untranslated Japanese sitting in it. Steam Deck is not rated, which isn't the same as not working. It means nobody at Valve has looked.

Somebody ported Super Mario Bros to the Master System and finished it. LackOfTrack started it as a level-one competition entry and v1.0 is the whole game. RetroRGB is emphatic that it's the real thing: "this isn't a re-skinning of an SMS side-scroller with SMB graphics, this is a true port of the original, using the disassembly by doppelganger as a reference." The good part is what you don't need: it's free, it wants no Nintendo ROM off you, and it's a standalone Master System build that runs in emulation and, RetroRGB says, on real hardware from a ROM cart. There's an optional FM soundtrack and the README is careful about it. It "requires a console with a YM2413," meaning a Japanese Master System or a machine with an aftermarket FM mod, and then: "The Sega Mark III's FM Sound Unit is not compatible with this mode." The one piece of period Sega FM hardware you'd reach for is the one that won't run it. Emulators will.

The Dreamcast thing everybody is waiting on moved this morning, and first a correction to how everyone including me describes it. DreamSTer is not a MiSTer core. Its own README says "very experimental and does not follow MiSTer conventions / is not a MiSTer core," and what it does is kill the MiSTer process, take the FPGA, run its own thing, then put MiSTer back. You supply a Dreamcast BIOS and your flash files in games/Dreamcast. Its published build hasn't budged off r6 since the end of July, but the hardware repo underneath it merged eleven pull requests this morning between 11:17 and 11:51 UTC, every one off a branch named r6b: fog, 240p line doubling, 16 MB memory, coplanar fixes, texture work. That isn't a release and I'm not calling it one. It's somebody picking the work back up, in public, today.

UrbX Warriors closed the gap. In August it was at £27,365 from 428 backers against an £18,888 goal. Kickstarter's own stats endpoint this afternoon says live, 647 backers, £41,250, or 218 percent. That is £13,885 and 219 backers in two weeks. The campaign is selling ownership, so read what it means here: back an Amiga tier and what arrives is a disc of disk images, needing either genuine AGA hardware or the wrapper they ship with it. The boxed 16-bit tier is £65. One manufacturing run, and the page says so plainly: "There will be one manufacturing run, and no further opportunity to own any of these high quality, and ultimately very rare, collectors items."

The RetroTINK-6X CE got its first firmware that matters. The CE shipped on v1.56.0 and Mike Chi's v1.77.0 landed on the 29th, headline fix legacy SD and MMC card support, which is the one that would make me go and flash mine tonight. Ownership, still the first thing to check: every input is analogue, VGA and SCART and component and S-Video and composite, no HDMI in, and it puts out 1440p60 rather than 4K, so the question isn't whether your console fits, it's whether your television takes 1440p. Out of stock at retrotink.com right now.

Three things I said I'd check, and I can't answer two of them. Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls was supposed to die on Apple Arcade on the 3rd. Konami's post said "to terminate the service on September 3, 2026 (PDT)" and it left the storefront on the 20th. I went looking for anything dated the 3rd or later confirming the servers went dark, and there is nothing. No statement, no offline build, no note. Second: Evercade's Visco Arcade 1 and 2, August 28th, £19.99 or $29.99, eight games a cart. They run on any Evercade and on the Super Pocket "running the latest available firmware," which is Evercade's own wording and worth keeping: you supply no ROMs, but you do have to have updated the machine. Second week running I cannot find one review. Sixteen arcade games, not a paragraph about them. Third one is a promise rather than a question: I loaded Michael Cranford's Shadow Snare site myself this afternoon and there is still no file anybody outside the tester list can run.

The ingredients list, sixth time asking

I have to correct myself and it's a plain one. Last issue I gave you Deezer's numbers as roughly 75,000 AI tracks a day, about 44 percent of uploads. Those were Deezer's April figures. Deezer's own newsroom published an update on July 21st, five weeks before I wrote that sentence, and it says "Deezer is now receiving approximately 90,000 fully AI-generated tracks every day, representing more than 50% of all daily uploads at peak in June 2026." More than half. I printed a stale number as a current one, on the one beat where I make a point of checking, and I didn't check.

Two more figures off the same page, and I'm quoting the hedges rather than sanding them off. Deezer says up to 85 percent of streams on fully AI-generated tracks were flagged as fraudulent in 2025 and demonetised. Up to. A ceiling, not a typical day. And those tracks take 1 to 3 percent of actual listening, which sounds like a verdict from the audience until the next line: Deezer already excludes what it detects from recommendations and editorial playlists. So that 3 percent is partly listeners and partly Deezer's own thumb, and anybody telling you it proves people hear the difference is reading a number the platform made on purpose.

Half the uploads and three percent of the listening, and some of that gap is the platform's thumb rather than yours. The machine isn't out-competing anybody. It's filling a warehouse nobody walks into.

Apple moved too. Its tag still runs on what the label declares, but around August 20th the declaring stopped being optional: the AI transparency tags are mandatory for content providers now, and the "Made With AI" label is meant to sit next to song titles for every listener by year end. The trigger is AI used for "a material portion" of a recording, and Apple hasn't published what counts as material. So the tag is compulsory, the definition isn't written down, and Apple still detects nothing itself.

Spotify's badge still isn't live. Mid-September is the word, self-disclosure through Spotify for Artists has been open since August 11th, and the two states are "AI Persona" if you say so and "Likely AI Persona" if their reviewers decide it. Worth restating because people keep getting it wrong: Spotify says this is about the identity of the artist, not whether AI touched the music. A human using an AI tool isn't the target. Enforcement is the part that bites. Get badged and the music stays up, but Spotify stops putting it in front of anyone who hasn't already gone looking for you.

One real thing on the legal side. On September 2nd Judge Lee ruled Round Hill's case against Anthropic belongs with the existing Concord Music cluster, siding with Anthropic. Round Hill wanted it tied to its own suit against Suno. It lost. Relating is a case assignment call, not a merger, so nothing has been consolidated, but its two billion-dollar swings are now running in front of different benches than it wanted. Round Hill says it isn't looking to settle. The Suno case still has a statement due November 11th and a conference on the 18th.

The art desk

I opened this column last issue after promising it for seven, and this week the material turned up in the worst shape it could, as an absence. Four physical media stories, and the only thing separating them is whether anybody's name is on the object.

Start with the one that gets it right. Vinegar Syndrome's new sub-label Degausser Video listed a deluxe VHS of Iced on the 4th, $45, a custom moulded clear shell tape in a light-up case, and the copy says it plainly: "This special Limited Edition Deluxe VHS Light Case (artwork by Robert Sammelin) comes with a Custom Molded Clear Shell VHS and is limited to just 400 units." Named artist, already gone. Honesty compels me to add that the image dates to last November, so it reads as a re-drop rather than new work, and Sammelin has been in this column before. The credit is still the point: somebody there thinks the name belongs in the sentence. What the page won't tell you, and no VHS boutique page tells you any more, is whether the tape runs at standard play or the long stretched-out speed.

Arrow does it too, twice. Clash of the Titans comes in two limited editions on November 17th: a two disc 4K set at $45 against a $59.99 list, and a Blu-ray edition at $35 against $49.99. Richey Beckett is credited on both for the reversible sleeve and the foldout poster. I checked the Dolby Vision trap and Arrow passed: DV is claimed on the UHD disc only, which is the only place it can live, and nobody stuck it on a 1080p disc. The date is contested, Arrow's own pages say the 17th against two aggregators running the 15th and 16th, and I'm going with the label.

Now the other kind. Video Store Day has twelve exclusive releases for October 17th, six of them VHS, seven of them 1980s titles. The page gives you Format, Label, Genre and Runtime and that is the entire spec sheet. No prices. Nothing about NTSC or PAL, nothing about recording speed, which for six brand new tapes is the one thing a buyer needs. And not one cover artist named. Only Parasite says how many exist, "returns on VHS and limited to 1000."

Then there's Shout. Last issue I wrote about the Transformers: The Movie 40th anniversary steelbook, and the fact that the art on the tin was a dead Optimus Prime, revealed the same day Peter Cullen's obituaries ran. On August 31st, five days after Cullen died, TFW2005 noticed Amazon, Walmart and Gruv had all updated their listings: "the steelbook original art has been revised, now showing the same art seen in the DVD release, but it says artwork isn't final." That's a fan site reading retailer listings, not a statement from Shout, and Shout has said nothing. A man died on the 26th and the picture on the tin changed by the 31st. That is the order they happened in and I'm not going to pretend it's more than that.

What I can say is that in a week when a cover got swapped, no artist was credited on the old one or the new one. Nobody at any of those retailers, or at Shout, could tell you whose drawing came off the box.

Rewind culture

The Transformers theatrical run grew, and the reason is sad and good at once. Six days now, September 17th to 22nd, and ten more territories. The thing after the credits has a name and a length: Optimus Prime: Awakening, twelve minutes, animated in the 1986 style. It is Peter Cullen's last original performance as Optimus Prime, recorded before he died last month, and Frank Welker is in it as Megatron and Soundwave.

Welker put out a statement and it's getting the pull quote, because forty years of playing the other guy earns you that.

Optimus Prime and Megatron were made for each other. After all, one needs the perfect hero against the epitome of evil to create great drama. Peter's portrayal of Prime was born of his own personal beliefs; honesty, loyalty, and always insisting on doing the right thing. This made it easy to be friends. Returning as Megatron and Soundwave for one final story opposite Peter's Optimus in "Optimus Prime: Awakening" was a real gift. I will miss my friend, but that voice and his heart and values will always be part of Optimus Prime.

No director, no studio, no writer is credited for that short anywhere I looked. Twelve minutes of new animation somebody had to draw, and the press materials name two voice actors and stop. I have my ticket, bought on the 7th of August, and I'll be in the room, and I'd like to know who drew it.

The campaign name has become a problem. Hasbro branded this "The Apology Tour," a joke about Prime dying in 1986, and five days after Cullen actually died people began asking them to stop. One fan, quoted on the 31st: "this one really hurts now." No response. I understand how marketing calendars work. I also understand this one is free to fix.

The Rewind Rolodex added eleven listings and two actual shops this week and is still stuck at six countries. That's the last weekly delta I'm printing. A directory of people who fix tape decks grows at the speed of people who fix tape decks, and I've made that point three times now.

And VIDEO TOWN is in month three of arguing with itself: the banner says "SHIPPING NOW," the product page still opens "THIS IS A PRE-ORDER" and still projects July. My copy has been on the shelf for weeks. While I was in there I finally took the credits down, which I should have done the first time: written by Robert Freese, edited by Ted Gilbert, cover illustration by Christopher Tupa, 192 pages, first edition of 250.

Static

• A modder ended a partnership over AI on the 3rd and wrote the most careful thing anybody has written about it this year. Sunlit and KandoWontu built Star Fox EX together, the big fan expansion of the SNES original. Sunlit cut the association after KandoWontu used AI tools to rush out a native PC port built partly on Sunlit's own work. What makes the statement worth reading is that Sunlit doesn't claim to be clean, admitting to using AI for scripts and helper tools before drawing a line somewhere specific: "I never have or ever will use AI tools directly in the programming of the actual game or project itself, only in a strictly assistive capacity." And then: "You may gain the product, but you don't really gain any meaningful experience or knowledge from it." Half the comments under that article are people asking why nobody will just write about the 60fps widescreen Star Fox port instead.
• Nightride FM has finished moving and still hasn't told anybody it moved. Five weeks on this isn't a rumour, it's in the plumbing. nightride.fm/blog now returns a permanent redirect to lissen.to, and so does the about page. The whole blog has been pointed off the old domain for good. The station's front page carries the line "Nightride FM is powered by lissen.to, our new music streaming and radio platform," undated, unheadlined, sitting there like a footer. There's still no dated post anywhere explaining this to the people who leave that stream running all day. A permanent redirect is the most final thing you can do to a web address, and they did it without a headline.
• Two archives died this week and one of them died twice. Side-Line ran a piece on Friday about bands losing their own history to the platforms. The detail that stopped me: Hybryds, the Belgian ritual industrial group, had their YouTube channel taken down this year, then found that two separate hard drive backups had failed as well. Everything at once. They're rebuilding an archive of the Belgian industrial scene of the 80s and 90s out of other people's copies. KLAR!, the Dusseldorf cassette label, lost master tapes and artwork and had to source a restoration from private collections. Anybody who has ever said "it's fine, it's online" should read it.
• The European shipping wall is still up and nobody in this scene has mentioned it since I did. BOREDOMproduct out of Marseille closed its webstore to EU customers on August 14th and the notice is still on the product pages: "No Shipment to European Union due to PPWR restriction." The rule applies from August 12th, and the blocker is Article 45: sell into a member state where you aren't established and you must appoint an authorised representative in that country, under written mandate, covering your whole packaging range. One per country, no single registration, no exemption for very small firms. A French label can't post a CD to Belgium without paperwork in Belgium. The Foretaste album is still postponed.

One last thing, out in the open rather than buried. Issue one contained an admission about overspending on one of these Fridays, and the souvenir at the end of it was an embroidered patch bought for a coat I had never owned. Issue three checked in: drawer, still no coat. That was July. It's September, Cleveland has turned, and on Friday I went upstairs to the shop that signs my cheques to buy the bomber the patch has been waiting for. Sold out. Both bombers, twenty variants on one and eighteen on the other, not one in stock in any size. So the patch stays in the drawer and I'm looking at a winter jacket instead, which is the least romantic sentence I've ever printed about my own employer. No link. A man who can't get his own staff discount to work in his size hasn't earned one.

Friday the scene put real money on the table, 356,237 units in a day, and it was still 13 percent less than the last time it did. A producer at CAVE signed his name to an apology. A steelbook cover got swapped and nobody signed anything at all. Video Store Day is selling twelve exclusives in six weeks and hasn't named one artist or one price.

The tape at Video Vault only ever told you the total. It never told you which of us rang it up. I think about that more than a man my age should.

Be kind. Rewind something.

Marty