The First Time We Broke Something (and Laughed)
Norman Mockwell
Founding Mockitor
Editor-at-Large
From missing menus to meltdowns, the launch wasn’t spotless. But chaos is part of the charm. Here’s what went wrong, what we learned, and why perfection is overrated (especially when the satire’s good).
Every great launch has a meltdown. Ours just had several, often at once, and usually while someone was mid-sentence about “polishing the satire flow.”
Let’s set the scene:
The site was live. Barely.
The categories were tangled like Christmas lights.
The homepage grid was stuck showing the same article four times (which we briefly considered calling a “design statement”).
And one of our editors accidentally published a test post titled “Mock Check Garbage 4” to the live site, tagged under Style & Identity no less.
We laughed.
Because that’s the kind of place The Mocking Post is.
Chaos Is a Feature
We’re not a machine. We’re a living, erratic media creature held together by wit, caffeine, and an unhealthy relationship with WordPress hooks.
We believe in testing live.
We believe in failing with flair.
We believe that every time something breaks, we gain a little more character—and maybe a meme-worthy screenshot.
The Point Wasn’t Perfection
Perfection is for product launches.
Satire is messier, riskier, more human. The cracks are part of the comedy.
The first time we broke something, we thought:
“Well, at least it broke on-brand.”
And that has quietly become our internal motto.
So if you catch a typo, a broken link, or a floating piece of lorem ipsum: you didn’t find a bug.
You found our creative process in public.
Until next time,
— Norman Mockwell
The Mocking Post™
