Welcome to mezzacotta!
What is mezzacotta, I hear you ask? Good question! Let me tell you a story:
Back in June or so, a bunch of us were sitting around, talking about random stuff as we do and coming up with half-baked ideas for “cool new websites”. We keep a record of these weird ideas we have, and some of them we consider good enough to have a go at implementing. Three of these have spawned actual websites:
I lamented that the problem with our furious generation of ideas and our attempts to implement them was that we kept needing to register new domains for sites that might turn out good, but are in fact more likely to turn out truly half-baked and never do much. What we needed was a single site which could be a central repository of half-baked ideas that we sort of half-implement, to see if they’re any good.
mezzacotta is that site.
I registered the domain without any idea of what we were actually going to put on it. The next day, Mr Shellshear had a truly half-baked idea:
Hey, let’s put up a countdown timer, with a time… about 4 months away… and at the end of the countdown we’ll launch something amazing! And, and, and… We’ll offer the site for sale for a million dollars before the launch! And the price goes up to five million after launch!
The countdown timer went up that night. I changed dollars to euro just because it sounded cooler (no other reason, really). The next day:
Me: So. What’s this amazing thing we’re going to launch on mezzacotta when the countdown runs out?
Shellshear: I dunno. But we’ve got four months to come up with something!
(silence)
McLeish: What about that webcomic idea we had a while back? We might be able to do something with that in four months…
Me: Sounds good. Let’s do it.
So, the initial idea was half-baked. The countdown timer was half-baked. The €5000000 thing was half-baked. (We never expected anyone to go for it. But if they did, hey, that would have been cool.) The webcomic is half-baked. Everything about this site is half-baked. That’s what mezzacotta is.
Welcome to our central repository for half-baked web implementations of half-baked ideas. Most of the stuff on this site won’t be great. But by just throwing it all out there and daring to be stupid, you’ll get to discover the rare gems that we might generate and not immediately recognise ourselves.
Coming up with ideas is easy – anyone can do that. Actually doing something about them is the hard part. Anyone who’s done it knows how much sweat you have to put in to get an idea beyond the “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…?” stage. This is our place for doing the hard work. It’s a spur to drive us to do something with some of those crazy half-baked ideas we get. And hopefully we’ll entertain a few of you, rather than just ourselves.
