The tape over the socket is the whole decision

One cassette, large and straight on. On the label, two layers of handwriting: an older line in faded felt tip, scribbled into total illegibility by hard biro loops, and above it, in fresh marker: DEMO 2.

On the top edge, the write-protect sockets sit open — except one, covered by a small strip of sticky tape.

Nothing about this tape is broken. Every mark on it was put there on purpose, at two different times, by the same hand.

What is the strip of tape over the socket actually doing?

Undoing a safety feature the tape already had.

A cassette's write-protect tab is designed to be snapped out once a recording is finished, and once it's gone, a deck won't record over that side — the mechanism physically refuses. Covering the resulting hole with tape restores the deck's ability to record, which means somebody had deliberately protected a recording at some point, then later decided that recording no longer needed protecting. The strip of tape is a second decision, not an accident.

Why is the old line scribbled into total illegibility rather than crossed out once?

Because a single strike leaves the earlier word readable, and this one wasn't meant to stay readable.

A struck-through line still shows what it replaced. Biro looped over and over until nothing survives is a different act: full deletion, done by hand, because whatever the old line named didn't need to be remembered next to the new one. It's a harder edit than the fading that comes from a recording losing quality one copy at a time — that loss is gradual and unwanted; this one is total and chosen.

Why does the label read DEMO 2 with no DEMO 1 anywhere on it?

Because DEMO 1 is very likely the line underneath — the one just scribbled out.

Numbering a demo the way this one is numbered only requires there to have been an earlier one; it doesn't require that earlier one to still exist anywhere, on this tape or another. The label counts the recordings that were made, not the ones that survived. Two happened. One is legible.

Does the old recording get destroyed the moment the new one goes down?

In the sections that get recorded over, yes — magnetic tape doesn't keep a version history.

Recording writes a new signal straight onto the same tape, replacing whatever was there rather than layering on top of it. There's no partial state and no way to recover the earlier take once new audio has been recorded across it. That finality is exactly why the tab existed in the first place, and exactly what taping over it chooses to accept.

Did keeping the old recording ever get weighed against the cost of a new tape?

Yes, and the tape lost that comparison — stated plainly, with nothing else attached to it.

A blank cassette costs money every time; a used one with nothing else planned for it costs nothing the second time around. Reusing this one wasn't a failure to plan ahead, and it isn't a loss to mourn on the shirt or anywhere else — it's the same arithmetic that decides which record on a shelf gets sold to cover a run or a booking: the cost that's already been spent gets given up before any new money gets spent.

Does this only happen with cassettes?

No — anything recorded onto a reusable physical medium runs into the same choice eventually.

Videotape, developed-and-reused stencil stock, even a chalkboard carries the same shape: a surface that can hold new work only by giving up the old work it's currently holding. The reasoning behind it is the same one that leaves nine rows of a cost list scribbled past legibility once the total is circled — once a thing has done its job, keeping it legible stops being worth the effort. What's specific to tape is the tab — a built-in, physical way of marking a recording as protected, and a strip of sticky tape as the equally physical way of overriding that mark on purpose.

Does it print well?

Yes — the label is close to monochrome and the interest is entirely in mark-making, which fabric reproduces cleanly.

Charcoal or another dark, warm ground lets a pale paper label sit forward. The scribbled-out line wants to stay a dense tangle of loops rather than resolve into anything readable — that's the whole point of it — while DEMO 2 stays clean, single-weight marker. One ink for the label's paper tone, one for the two layers of handwriting, is enough.

How do I get one made?

Describe the tape at JustOG — what the new line says, and whether the old one is fully gone or just mostly. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Whatever DEMO 1 said, it's under there somewhere, unreadable and unrecoverable, holding the tape together.