International grandpa of mystery

I had a thought this morning that I remember deciding had to be put on Tumblr. What if two competing novelty hat shops opened in your town, and they both just made small hats. In their competition, they made smaller and smaller hats to outdo the other. Eventually, to draw more customers, they both decide to mail out hats to people around town. You end up being one of those people, and every day you find two envelopes in your mailbox with progressively smaller hats every day

In the past few years I've been trying to keep up to date on popular reading trends. That involves reading a lot of books that are, let's say, tiktok-coded. The kind of book you'll see prominently displayed near the front of the bookstore with a sign next to it saying what kind of AO3 tags apply to it. On multiple occasions I have said, or at least thought, unkind things about those books and the quality of writing within them. Well I take that all back, because I just tried reading a reddit-coded book (arguably THE reddit-coded book) for the first time and it's so much worse. The whole thing is just a series of short unimaginative declarative statements. He did this and then that thing happened and then he made this joke and then another thing happened and then he did something else. It reads like the first draft you'd do of a story, where you're just trying to put down on the page all the events that happen and then later you'll come back and write the actual book, except this was the version that's on store shelves and which millions of people have bought and is soon going to be turned into a tv show.

It sucks that every horror movie has to be an allegory for dealing with generational trauma now, because with modern filmmaking we could be going balls to the wall in slasher movies. Just cranking out absolute gold in terms of mindless schlock.