An Innocent Countdown
On September 24, 2022, Neatorama published a short blog post titled “Halloween is Just Around The Corner!” It reads like a thousand other seasonal posts: pumpkins, costume ideas, a promise of snacks before October 31. Nothing to see here, you’d think.
Except buried in the links sits a bedroom designed to look like a rainforest, a parody painter called “Bob Ross of War,” and a heavy metal band called Cattera, fronted, as far as the post lets on, by an actual cat.
None of that has anything to do with Halloween. So what is it doing there?
Wait, Why Is This Here?
A Halloween post mentioning a cheese platter or a roundup of T-shirts makes sense, costumes get expensive. But then it mentions “Reverse Pinterest,” a trend about restoring furniture someone else had badly painted. Then it asks which American city has the rudest reputation. Then it drops in a Scottish pancake recipe attributed to the Queen.
Try connecting pumpkin snacks to a city’s rudeness ranking and you’ll come up empty. This isn’t random weirdness, it’s organized weirdness.
It’s a Link Roundup, and That’s the Point
The explanation is simpler than it looks. This is a link roundup: a format where one seasonal hook, Halloween counting down to October 31, becomes a doorway into a network of other blogs under the same publisher.
Neatorama runs several sister sites built this way: Spooky Daily for Halloween content, Pop Culturista, Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Infinite 1UP, and Supa Fluffy, covering horror, pop culture, design, gaming, and pets. One post mentioning all of them is basically a lobby with six doors.
A reader who clicked for a cheese board might stay for a story about a bedroom rainforest, now reading a totally different blog than the one they opened. That mismatch isn’t a mistake. It’s the business model.
The Seasonal Bait, Up Close
The actual Halloween content is built for maximum shareability and minimum effort. There’s a “Hocus Pocus”-themed charcuterie board, a “Scream” cheese platter, a roundup of 10 Halloween-themed T-shirts pitched as a costume shortcut, and a Disney “Hocus Pocus 13 Frights of Halloween” countdown calendar.
It’s all recycled by design: the same puns, cheese boards, and costume-adjacent shirts return every October, dressed up slightly differently. It works because it’s familiar, you don’t have to think, you just screenshot it and send it to a group chat.
Pointers, Not Deep Dives
The roundup never explains its stranger links. It doesn’t say who built the bedroom rainforest, whether “Bob Ross of War” is a video series or a meme account, or whether Cattera is a touring band, an animated bit, or a one-off joke.
It just names these things and trusts curiosity to do the rest. A roundup’s job is to make you want to click, not to satisfy you once you do. Mentioning something is the product; explaining it is somebody else’s job, on some other page with its own ad slots.
The Internet Has a Niche for Everything
Step back and the real curiosity was never Halloween. It’s the range of tiny, specific communities one post happens to graze: people ranking which American city is rudest, people restoring furniture someone else ruined, people sustaining a metal band whose singer is a cat.
Each has an actual audience, checking in, sharing, keeping the thing going, hidden inside a cheese board pun. Noticing that a seasonal hook doubles as a funnel is its own small skill. Most people never catch it. You did, by the second paragraph.
Whatever your weirdly specific interest, war-parody painting, cat-fronted metal, a city’s reputation for rudeness, there’s probably already a small, devoted corner of the internet keeping it alive. You just have to click the right cheese board to find it.