2009(?!) CD Swap Finally Completed

[rfunk]

Over a year ago, 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 Girls — Kill Hannah
2. Cynical Boy — Big Hello
3. Cynical Girl — Marshall Crenshaw
4. September Gurls — Big Star
5. Tell It To My Gurl — Pat Dull & his Media Whores
6. Too Bad About Your Girl — The Donnas
7. Tell That Girl To Shut Up — Holly & the Italians
8. Girls Kick Ass — The Its
9. Boys Can Be Dumb — Big Hello
10. All Boys Want — Wonderlick
11. Les Boys — Dire Straits
12. Cute For A Girl — Alix Olson
13. I Kissed A Girl — Jill Sobule
14. Fast Girls — Sarge
15. Rock & Roll Girl — The Muffs
16. Androgynous — Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
17. As Girls Go — Suzanne Vega
18. Lola — Madness
19. I’m A Boy — The Who
20. A Boy Named Sue — Johnny Cash
21. Now I’m Your Mom — David Byrne
22. Be My Girl — Sally — The Police
23. Coin-Operated Boy — The Dresden Dolls
24. Girls And Boys — Blur

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 World — Bob Geldof
2. Turn On The News — Hüsker Dü
3. The World Is Too Much With Us — Regatta Sixty-Nine
4. End Of The World — X-Rated Cowboys
5. Until The End Of The World — U2
6. Fear Of The Unknown — Siouxsie and The Banshees
7. Worse — Too 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) Reaper — s.e.k.s.
10. Nothing To Fear (But Fear Itself) — Oingo Boingo
11. The End Is Near — Headboard
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 World — Joey Ramone

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

Comments

[rfunk]

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]

What do you use to imprint the CDs themselves?

[rfunk]

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.