rfunk: (about time!)
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posted by [personal profile] rfunk at 09:56pm on 13/04/2010 under ,

Over a year ago, [personal profile] featherynscale announced the 2009 CD Swap. The participants were divided into groups, and were to send out mix CDs to the rest of their group. The primary rule, besides being playable on a normal CD player, was that the CDs must have a theme.

I had participated in 2008, and since it took a couple months to get my CDs out that I made that my theme: It's About Time!

I had no idea that I'd be much much later with my 2009 CDs. I finally mailed them out yesterday morning. I ended up making two mixes this time:

First, Girls & Boys And Other Options, which was originally inspired by a discussion of the Kinks' song "Lola".

  1. Boys And GirlsKill Hannah
  2. Cynical BoyBig Hello
  3. Cynical GirlMarshall Crenshaw
  4. September GurlsBig Star
  5. Tell It To My GurlPat Dull & his Media Whores
  6. Too Bad About Your GirlThe Donnas
  7. Tell That Girl To Shut UpHolly & the Italians
  8. Girls Kick AssThe Its
  9. Boys Can Be DumbBig Hello
  10. All Boys WantWonderlick
  11. Les BoysDire Straits
  12. Cute For A GirlAlix Olson
  13. I Kissed A GirlJill Sobule
  14. Fast GirlsSarge
  15. Rock & Roll GirlThe Muffs
  16. AndrogynousJoan Jett and the Blackhearts
  17. As Girls GoSuzanne Vega
  18. LolaMadness
  19. I’m A BoyThe Who
  20. A Boy Named SueJohnny Cash
  21. Now I’m Your MomDavid Byrne
  22. Be My Girl — SallyThe Police
  23. Coin-Operated BoyThe Dresden Dolls
  24. Girls And BoysBlur

Next, Songs For The End Of The World, which at one point was going to be "Songs For The Great Recession" but that was too depressing (especially when I was unemployed). Somehow the end of the world was less depressing, and slightly more focused.

  1. The End Of The WorldBob Geldof
  2. Turn On The NewsHüsker Dü
  3. The World Is Too Much With UsRegatta Sixty-Nine
  4. End Of The WorldX-Rated Cowboys
  5. Until The End Of The WorldU2
  6. Fear Of The UnknownSiouxsie and The Banshees
  7. WorseToo Much Joy
  8. When The World Is Running Down (You Make The Best Of What’s Still Around)The Police
  9. (Don’t Fear The) Reapers.e.k.s.
  10. Nothing To Fear (But Fear Itself)Oingo Boingo
  11. The End Is NearHeadboard
  12. Is This The End?The Its
  13. It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)Saint Eve
  14. What A Wonderful WorldJoey Ramone

(I did make a few extras, if anybody else wants one.)

Mood:: 'accomplished' accomplished
There are 4 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
triadruid: Grigori Rasputin captioned with "SUP LJ?" in Cyrillic. (Rasputin)
posted by [personal profile] triadruid at 03:59pm on 15/04/2010
The artwork on both CDs is very well done!

Obligatorily, I have to ask if you did that in Linux or Windows. :P
rfunk: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] rfunk at 04:28pm on 15/04/2010
Thanks, I'm rather proud of the artwork. :-)

I did it all in Linux, mostly in Gimp, with some help from Scribus and Inkscape. And Xine helped me get a few frames of Earth exploding from a DVD.
triadruid: Apollo and the Raven, c. 480 BC , Pistoxenus Painter  (Default)
posted by [personal profile] triadruid at 08:52pm on 15/04/2010
What do you use to imprint the CDs themselves?
rfunk: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] rfunk at 09:09pm on 15/04/2010
I used my LightScribe-capable CD burners for that. I think there are exactly two different codebases that can do LightScribe on Linux, both proprietary. I used the one from LaCie called "4L" (actually the "4L-gui" variant), which is pretty easy to use, within its limitations. It let me adjust how the image would be scaled and placed on the disc, and it shows where the printed vs unprinted areas will be, but it's so primitive that it wouldn't let me save those parameters in any way, nor does it show any numeric indication of the settings -- which means that every time I closed that program and later restarted it, I had to visually re-do the scaling/placement of the blow-up image.

I do think the blow-up label turned out much better than the 'splodey one though. Getting text to go in a circle was a huge pain; Inkscape was the only GUI I found that could do it (though there certainly may be others I'm not aware of), and it was cumbersome. I was tempted to write some PostScript to do it, but didn't want to put in the time. I wanted to improve the look of that text, but it was just too painful and taking too much of my time.

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