Creative procrastination

I was taking Mrs. Bang for a walk last night, at 2am or so, and mulling over my ideas for a dauntingly large new feature I want to add to my music theory site. One idea spun from another, and I started thinking about mad libs — you know, the game where you fill in the blanks in a pre-written story with input from your friends (“adjective about a person”, “action ending with -ing”, “unusual animal”), then read the resulting silliness aloud.

Well, an online mad-lib engine would be pretty trivial to write — just collect the words from the user first, and plug them into the text of the story in the right places. You could play madlibs at a party without anyone knowing beforehand what the final result would be, or even play alone.

I jumped from there to erotic madlibs, which seemed at the time to be an amazingly good idea (it would have to be real erotica at heart, but somehow incredibly enriched by the carefully-placed randomness of the contributed words; sometimes silly, but still sexy). I could register “FillInMyBlank.com” or something else slyly racy (or just MadLibErotica.com?) and put up a few good stories for free access, plus a library for subscribers only, and wait, wait, subscribers could also contribute their own stories — there would have to be rules on content, because I don’t want the site to fill up with sexist shite, of course — and….

By this time I was back home. Wow, the domain names I had thought up were ALL available! No one was doing this already! I was already thinking about how to structure the site (should I build on one of the PHP CMSes? Or play with GWT, maybe?). For a user entering a new story, after each paragraph was entered I could pull the text from the textarea in JavaScript, format it to make each word a separate link… hover to highlight, click to show an overlay for replacing it with a “blank” plus description.

I dug around in my pocket for my credit card to register the domain.

The “now you are spending money” alarm went off in my head, so I paused for a second, then a few more seconds.

This all took place in maybe 20 minutes. And here I was, about to launch into an entirely new project at two something AM, Thursday night, because —

Because it was such an amazing idea, right? Hah, no.  It was losing the halo fast now (er, who exactly would subscribe to this site, now?).

No, this was just my brain saying “huh, this looks like a lot of work you have to do here, some complicated stuff that’ll probably take a lot of — holy crap, look over there!”

Nice.  I put the credit card away.

And tonight, I’m writing it up at 3am to share this valuable and entertaining… ah.