Twitter Users Feel Their Age When Someone Asks What 'Burning CDs' Means

By Petr Knava | Social Media | March 23, 2021 |

You’d think that after a year of lockdown-induced stress, boredom, sorrow, fear, uncertainty, and rage I would be immune to most kinds of psychological attacks you find on social media.

You would think so, and you’d be mostly correct.

But some days you wake up to such unspeakable acts of violence that they truly do shake you to the core. Like this savagery right here:

Wtf is “burning CDs”
— ⋆ (@yngthgw) March 21, 2021

Who hurt you, @yngthgw? What happened in your life that you felt compelled to kick down my door and dump a few gallons of napalm in my lap?

Goddamn it, do I miss CDs. There are only a few feelings in the world better than getting into the passenger seat of someone else’s car as you’re setting out for a journey, and popping open the glove box to find a roughed-up black CD wallet. F**k all this aux cable-to-phone or Bluetooth connection nonsense. Car journeys are miserable experiences by themselves. The only legit way to transform one into something not just pleasurable but divine is to feel the heft of that CD wallet drop into your palm as you pop open the glove box, its never-zipped-shut pages opening slightly upon impact, the sun catching a bit of the reflective back of a CD and beckoning to you to enter a domain of tactile joy. Any wallet worth its salt would have a mixture of the well designed and eye-catching artwork of the official albums—there’s the blue of ‘Rust in Peace’—and the generic tabula rasas of the blank CDs that had had something burned onto them, maybe an album, maybe a lovingly curated mix of tracks from various artists, but always marked with some title or description written in the same marker pen that everyone on Earth had just for the purpose of writing on CDs.

What a time to be alive.

And it wasn’t that long ago, dammit!

Twitter responded to the confusion about burning CDs as Twitter must:

Absolutely not! You need to google this shit and apologize to a whole generation 😩 pic.twitter.com/ZmC7twShFq
— Kisswithah 👊🏾 (@kisswithah) March 22, 2021

*picks up cane and hobbles over to explain*
— Not A Cat (Erika With a K) (@badbuddhist01) March 22, 2021

lmfao. a love language. you just had to be there.
— B (@DontWorryBoutB) March 22, 2021

Gather around I’ll tell you. pic.twitter.com/waeW9U7xCI
— Paul (@thepet24) March 22, 2021

It was a technology invented so serious business people could mail excel spreadsheets to each other, but was actually used almost exclusively to make illegal copies of nu-metal albums.
— Jimb O'Saur (@Jimbosaur) March 22, 2021

You could literally burn CDs on laptops less than 10 years ago… still can on some laptops
— elizabeth. (@lizzie__ol) March 22, 2021

pic.twitter.com/AsuCIMsXop
— Wesley Miller (@getwired) March 22, 2021

How old I feel right now: pic.twitter.com/DYF2SMSu63
— Kelly Cohen (@gaiapurpure) March 22, 2021

Actual footage of me reading this tweet. pic.twitter.com/49hQLWvC7I
— Matt Skywalker (@Jedi_Adopted) March 22, 2021

1980s cancel culture, when we'd gather in the town square and throw all of Foreigner's albums onto a huge bonfire. Good times.
— John 'allocishets allothetime' McDonnell (@mcdonnelljp) March 22, 2021

You take a blank CD and the CD you want to copy and stack them together. Then use 2 (only 2) magnets so they stay firm and can energize off of the magnetic field. Then microwave for 30 second. And Frank Viola, a Third Eye Blind bootleg.
— I am Skipper's Human (@SkipperIsMyDog) March 22, 2021

CDs are tiny records to play music on. Sometimes they would get scratched and not play correctly. So we leave them in the sun all day (or microwave them for 30 seconds). the heat from "burning" them would melt them back into new condition.
— Ray Kooyenga (@RayKTweets) March 22, 2021

I can smell that stack of CDs through the screen
— Aurora Noor 🏙 Boston 3/24-26 (@DateAurora) March 22, 2021

A really painful STD that was rampant in the 90s and oughts.
— Aoife “Fe” Baker 🦕🐯🧠🌈 (@vivaciousvandal) March 22, 2021

A popular application to burn CDs at the time was Nero Burning Rom with the logo representing the Colosseum on fire, a reference to emperor Nero burning down Rome

Simply brilliant marketing. pic.twitter.com/CMxPXDZFKH
— Stat Boy Steven 🇳🇱🇦🇹 (@StatBoy_Steven) March 22, 2021

This is a reference to the Great Aluminum War of '02.

We burned CDs so that Lord Diskmun couldn't extract the shiny metal parts to build his super weapon
— Skarekrow (@Jeff_Kantrowski) March 22, 2021

We shot lasers at aluminum discs covered in a thin plastic as a means of preserving data. Very cool thing to do in the late 90s.
— Vince (@slatermaus) March 22, 2021

It's when we used to steal shit instead of just handing our money to bloated corporations, but you gremlins wouldn't know nothing about that would you https://t.co/BB1AI9wzKc
— Q. Anthony (FKA Andray Domise) (@andraydomise) March 22, 2021