A project for the new year

The Professor and I have been writing code for several days now, and have gotten most of a very rough version of my Exciting Fractal Project assembled. It's almost far enough along that it could be considered alpha-test, though beta is still some ways off.

Having gotten this far, I am now reaching the stage where I start to completely panic and second-guess myself. What if this is a completely stupid idea? I ask. What if no one wants to play with my internet toy? And the huge, glaringly obvious question of How do I prevent this from turning into a horrible snake pit bunch of tedious longwinded squabbling?

Because the whole point of this thing I'm building is that it should be pleasantly entertaining (or indeed quite silly), and should provide a small, steady dose of interesting pictures and a small amount of feedback on same. I don't want to build it and then have it turn into either a sad ghost town or a battlefield. Neither of those is the kind of fun I'm interested in, so I'm struggling with questions of how much participation is enough for people to be interested, and how much is too much, and allows loud shouty people to just take over. I worry that what I'm planning is the equivalent of going down to the bus stop and inviting all the hobos (and that dude who appears to smoke crack every day at lunchtime) to come visit me for tea.

But at least I'm working on it! Progress is being made. This is me reminding myself to dive in, and worry about hypothetical stinging jellyfish later.

Plunge