OK. So I’m working on burning a movie on a DVD for a friend, right. I’m using iDVD. It’s mixing and encoding. It takes fucking hours. What’s up with that? Oh, I’ll just let it run. I go to sleep and let it do its jig overnight. I wake up. Has this thing done anything overnight? iDVD asks for a DVD-R. Okay, that’s reasonable. Except the DVD was already in when I clicked burn. The fucker has ejected it. Okay, stay calm. Disk-rot happens. Pop in another DVD-R. “Nope, not a DVD-R.” Pop in a DVD-RW, for good measure. “The disc cannot be detected.” Fuck. Pop in yet another DVD-R of a second brand from an unopened box, which I didn’t want to use because the plastic on the jewel case requires a blowtorch in conjunction with a minor atomic bomb or something to come off - anyway, pop in the DVD-R. “The disc cannot be detected.” Now this is just creepy. iDVD ejects the DVD, and fuck if you don’t know it, one of those flimsy pseudo-textile DVD slot-in covers, from here referred to as “textile doodads”, have come off, and is attached to the disc. The textile doodad’s sticky (from glue?) but I remove it from the DVD and pop the DVD in again. Success! We’re burning. Except I still don’t know what to do with the textile doodad. Do I reattach this or what? Do I call AppleCare and send it back and forth to Holland for 3 fucking weeks? Do I just not bother?
This just in: Sources inform me that the proper name for this thingamajig is “dust jacket”. (Its purpose, as you might imagine, is to stop dirt from entering (or exiting from, I guess) the poor slot-in drive, having no other way of escape, but we knew that already.)