Nero times

"The 'burn' part is like what the climate change does, which you are familiar with.
The 'CD' part is like your brain, where the 'burn' causes microplastics to melt in a pattern that stores data."

"Now kids, can anyone tell me why the historians often say 'CDs nutz'?"

This is like Technology Connections having to explain what an MP3 CD is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkIR23emsWY

So tellllll me, what's the price to pay.... for glooooooory

"We first had to venture miles deep into the woods to find a local Circuit City, which bountifully bore free trial AOL CDs like fruit. We then grabbed an armful, despite the protests of the clerk, and hastily returned to camp. We then had to build a fire by hand, with kindling and wood, and we donned our robes. As the fire grew, we meditated and chanted around the fire, as we mentally mounted the Serious Sam bootleg install files. It took weeks to and a several acres of wood to chant the correct order of ones and zeroes, so we had to work in teams and take shifts. When it was my turn, I took a CD and stuck it through a metal stick stuck into the fire. I spun the CD with my bare hands, blistered and swollen by fiery praying, and lowered it into the fire to burn the ones, and raised it slightly for the zeroes. Any error found by the final validation step would result in premature cremation by the group. There were not many of us left by the time we had the LAN party. A room full of Pentium 4 PCs made the room feel as hot as a furnace, but the pizzas were cold that day, little ones. So cold..."

Nah, I'd end up explaining why floppy discs weren't floppy, instead, and let the younger folks explain the CDs.

Me explaining what "Insert Disk 2 of 5" means.

I had a program that came with special CD Labels for the printer where you could make your own cool CD label covers. that was fun.

Or going into a Dreamcast IRC channel to download games and burn them to disk. I think I only ever actually bought like 2 Dreamcast games, Shenmue and Seaman, the rest were just burned to CD-Rs.

Alcohol 120% and Daemon Tools

“What’s a seedy?”

I downloaded a 1GB update on my phone today and it took a couple minutes. I spaced out remembering how fucking advanced it felt getting a x2 CD burner.

Fun fact! The Laser in the burner didn't actually burn from thermal effects, and instead caused a chemical reaction using specific wavelengths of light to activate a substrate called pthalocyanine.

This is part of why you could burn "faster", although typically you had a higher quality burn at slower speeds as the change from one color to another via the chemical effects was more complete. This allowed weaker reading lenses to better perceive the new colors easier, and greatly increased compatibility.

I am very, very old.

mkisofs . | cdrecord - ?

I had to explain what a CD was to my kids the other day because I saw a CD-ROM mirror and decided to get one. We didn't even cover what "burning" one was.

...and for a while it was fairly normal to refer to writing bootable USB sticks as "burning" as well.

Now I don't say that anymore because I don't want to sound like a boomer, or - worse - I don't want people to take me at my word or think I'm just plain mad.

What I miss most is burning .cue files with hidden tracks; you just don’t get the same high from streaming services.

Microwave

Still the best no frills digital audio medium.

postapocalypse looking kinda cozy