Remember placeholder content? Cleverly resized cat photos and variations over Lorem Ipsum. Call an endpoint and get back filler that looks like Latin. Clever stuff, useful back then, now replaced by generative AI. Here's today's novel idea, then: Murder Ipsum. A mystery with its clues hidden in placeholder text.

An audience of none

Imagine somebody cruel and patient, a serial killer with a web dev kink: he's running a free to use placeholder text service. Users get structured filler text that contains, at random intervals, a name followed by three apparently random words, but... they are not quite random. Not random at all.

Nobody will read it. That's the whole point. This sicko needs to confess, but doesn't really want to get caught. And he has found the perfect audience.

Tens of thousands of staging environments serve the names of his victims, padded between consectetur adipiscing elit, whatever that means, but these sites are never indexed, and never actually read. The placeholder content is replaced with real content for prod, and the confessions go unnoticed.

Or maybe it's something weirder than that. A cosmic entity, a moth man type figure that knows things and means well. But its only mode of communication is to subtly influence the random generation of strings hidden among fragments of dodgy Latin.

Or maybe it's a message from the future, somehow. The main character himself, who in the future got hold of a tachyon emitter that can flip single bits in the past. In the future, as an old man, he targets the placeholder generator's content seed key, which will create the clues he will discover as a young man. Why not. It's not like I'm going to write this novel anyway.

A short history of filler

Placeholder text started as a typesetter's joke. Lorem ipsum is Cicero with the front teeth knocked out: dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet means "pain itself, because it is pain", but it got chopped into lorem ipsum dolor sit amet to fit the line-length better, and everybody thought it was real latin, for a Letraset specimen book published in the sixties. Designers needed Roman-shaped paragraphs to test fonts, and didn't care that they got a philosopher's mangled complaint about pain, recut to not quite mean anything at all, because no one was ever supposed to actually read it. They used it for sixty years. No one cared about what it meant anyway. It was just placeholder. Sure, it reached prod, some times. Fun times.

If placeholder text can be called a literary genre, and it probably can't, it is the least pretentious, least assuming, and least relevant of all genres. But the genre had real craftsmen, and fun projects: Bacon Ipsum. Hipster Ipsum. Shakespeare Ipsum. JSONPlaceholder gave you a fake REST API: ten users, a hundred posts, comments that nested correctly, so you could build a frontend before the backend existed. Faker.js was famously blown up by its own creator to protest corporate greed.

Those libraries and services were, and this is worth saying, clever, and also generous. Developers saw a pain point, and just made cool stuff that sorted it out. No signup, no SaaS subs. No tokens burned. The load-bearing trait of all of it was always the same: nobody reads it. Two words in, the eye glazes. The placeholder is for seeing the shape, not for reading the message. There is no message.

So. Let's get back to the mystery. Whoever is using Murder Ipsum, has built their broadcast on top of that one fact: No-one reads this stuff. That's a good place to hide a confession.

Murder Ipsum

No-one had even seen the site for years; I was just by to check what it was before culling the pod. Lorem ipsum header to footer, an image carousel, a product list, a list of portraits with generic names and made-up titles, cute cats instead of portraits. So a test site, ready to be deleted, except...

I noticed the name of a member of the placeholder board. Lucrezia Diallo. That's an unusual name, and I knew a Lucrezia once. We called her Lucy, but when her mother hung up posters of her all over town, she used her full name, and it stuck with me.

Her title was weird too. The others had titles like Assisting Director of Party Services and Executive Polenta Manager. But Lucrezia's was Stick Chapels Reputable.

Write another 300 pages of that, and you've got yourself a novel that no one will read.