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chaosciara · 3 years

Text

where the arch meets

I have not read King of Scars so I do not know anything about the plot therefore some information about Nikolai could be outdated. This is also the first time I've ever written for this fandom so hopefully I did the characters justice. My friend and I watched S&B and were talking about ships and I said I wanted to see Kaz and Nikolai together which then prompted whatever the hell happened here, please enjoy!

CW: mentions of blood, mentions of gambling

There are no spoilers for the S&B show

masterlist; my links

[image has alt text]

Kaz stares out the window, a glum look on his usually stoic face. Ketterdam was alive, unusual joy spinning itself in the streets as the city busies itself for the arrival of the one and only King Nikolai Lantsov. The festivities of the "Peacekeeper" as he had been so lovingly named, had started three long days ago. Every day that Kaz wakes up to popping streamers, and the litany of ballads associated with the King's ever growing list accomplishments, is a day his stolen peace gets ripped from beneath him. He's not even sure why the King is so popular. He can't say he was anywhere near impressed enough at their brief meeting to warrant the five different ballads about those hazel eyes alone. Kaz looks down at the papers littering his desk, crow club books and bank statements for his various 'assets', communications between the various councils in Ravka and Ketterdam, and the most recent letter from Inej, smelling of the sea.

Their friendship is something of a mystery to the world but between them she is the rock that kept him steady. Even now, with her sailing the high seas content to her freedom, he can feel the unwavering quiet of her. Briefly, he wishes she were here. She would make him laugh, tell him to stop being so glum about the brown-eyed, blonde haired king if he insisted on doing nothing about it. He wouldn't let his amusement at her teasing show, but later in the safety of his room, this room, he'd let a rare smile show. He misses their quiet friendship most of all. But she is happy on her ship with her crew and he has shit to do. He always has shit to do.

The thought, stark and unwelcome, snaps him back to the present. A scowl replaces his faraway look as he shuts the window to the new round of baudy tunes drifting up and straight into the headache knocking at his skull. He sits back down harder than he intended, and winces at the pain that lances down his back and into his leg. He can hear Nina, chastising him for not putting on the salve, for not resting. But he doesn't have the time. He can't do something as normal as rest. He has a city to run. Or at least the underbelly of a city to run.

The statements stare at him but the numbers swirl like melting ice-cream in a bowl, and he wants to throw the pages in the fire in frustration. But he has never acted on emotion, and he will not start now. So he pushes away from his desk, cane already cool under his fingertips, and makes his way to the floors of the crow club.

The passage muffles the sounds of chips cluttering on a table, and glasses set down hard on the wood, and shouting when someone wins, loses, almost gets decked for supposed cheating. But as soon as he steps past the doors, nodding at the two guards he'd posted at this entrance, all of that chaos surrounds him. There is no hush as he steps into the room, no blanket of fear or anger or anything. They don't even know he is there. They won't until he makes himself known. Spending years with his Wraith had taught him some things, even with the click of his cane. He looks to the corner expecting to spot Jesper; his heart, as it had done every day since they had all parted ways, clenched upon seeing the empty space where his sharpshooter was supposed to be. The disappointment doesn't stop his eyes from travelling to the table closest to the kitchens— or as the Nina lovingly called it, the muck hut— where Wylan was usually hunched over notebooks or losing to just about everyone, except maybe Inej, in a game of cards.

He misses them. He'd never tell them, would never let it so much as flash across his face, but he couldn't stop his heart from the same onslaught. He felt it every day. Every time he looked to his window and Inej wasn't perched atop it. Every time he walked to the gambling tables and Jesper wasn't leaning over it, brown eyes shining with hope. Every time he wandered the corridors of the club hearing Wylan's flute. When he decides to put salve on it's because he hears Nina's voice, sees her frown, as she tries so hard to heal them. He even misses Matthias but that is a road he doesn't allow himself to go down. A failure he cannot yet acknowledge. His trip down memory lane ends abruptly when a man with a hood over his eyes, shadowing his face, steps up to him.

"You Kaz, Kaz Brekker?" The voice is rough, almost too rough, but the lilting accent is familiar. Before he can place it the man is talking again.

"I want to speak with you, about a deal."

Kaz tilts his head, resting gloved hands on his cane as he takes the figure in. "Liar."

The man sputters jerking back, and just briefly he catches a glimpse of golden skin and something shiny pinned to his coat. "It's urgent!" The man's voice is not so rough, and that accent, charming in a way, bleeds through more and more.

"I'm not available for deals." It is not true, but he wants to see how they'll react, what they're capable of if he says no.

"You'll like this one." The roughness has been replaced by arrogance. And the world opens wide for Kaz.

"Come," He turns, already limping towards the doors and his rooms beyond. "Don't say anything until we're behind closed doors"

It takes them exactly one minute and twelve seconds to get to his study. As soon as he hears the door click behind him, he lifts his cane and with brutal precision he rips through the clasp at the man's chest and watches the coat land in a heap on his wooden floor. Letting the crows head of his cane fall back into his hand he finally looks up. "What are you doing here King?" The question holds more exhaustion than he's willing to admit.

"What?" The King of Ravka grins, beautiful and bright and full of arrogance, "You aren't happy to see me?"

And Kaz wants to tell him no and piss off and leave me alone, but his heart is pounding and there is blood rushing between his ears and he doesn't really remember what breathing does, how it works. Because this is the first time he's ever seen Nikolai. When they met all those years ago he was Sturmhond, the privateer. Since then Kaz has only seen posters, and art. But none of them, not a single one, has ever done the king justice. He is........ he is magic.

"Oh come on," The blonde is laughing. It sounds like water. It sounds like peace. "You can't expect me to act like a stranger after all the letters we've sent." Yes, the letters. The updates King Nikolai had requested about Ketterdam, about the barrel, about the illegal smuggling of grisha to work as slaves. Those letters. "What?" The King looks at him speculatively, amusement sparking in his hazel eyes— they suit him so much better than the green of Sturmhond. "Volcra got your tongue?"

“Didn't know you would be in town," Kaz manages to grind out. He hopes it sounds like irritation and not infatuation.

"The six million posters and seven ballads about my adventures aboard the Kingfisher were not notice enough?" That grin is back. It is ruining him. "Oh dear, next time I'll be sure to add floating parades to the mix."

"That's tomorrow." He glowers. He doesn't think the blonde could get anymore insufferable. He is wrong.

"Do you have plans to attend then?"

He ignores the question, the tease. "What are you doing here Lantsov?"

"I'm here for the festival Mr, Brekker."

"I mean here." He motions to the room, to him. "What are you doing in the Barrel, in my club—" He wants to say 'in my room'. He catches himself.

"I came," Nikolai steps a little closer. There's still do much distance between them, practically an ocean, but Kaz can feel the tension wrapping around his lungs. He wants out. He wants closer. He wants, he wants, he wants....... "To visit a friend Mr Brekker. I don't exchange letters detailing my failed attempt at diving through the sky with just anyone." Oh saints he's going to die. He's never going to survive this. His face is a brick wall, a crack where his frown breaks through.

"You are a busy man King, busier even, than i am." He wants to applaud himself for the steadiness of his voice. "I doubt that you had time to just pop by. So what do you want, Nikolai?"

There is a flash of something in those beautiful eyes, and he wants to chase it to the ends of the earth. "Must we always have an ulterior motive?" The voice is quiet, but it is filled with curiosity and emotions Kaz doesn't have the ability to unpack. "Is it not good enough that I wanted to see you Kaz."

The Underboss of Ketterdam becomes a rain, becomes wind, and earth, and gold. He sits down on his desk, uninterested in the groan of the wood as it tries to carry his weight. Nikolai looks at him, soft and open, all that charm hidden- packed away for a moment far removed from this one. Somehow the distance has shrunk between them until there is only two steps, maybe three before their bodies can collide. He knows Nikolai would not come closer, but some part of him wants the king to try. Wants to see what would happen. He shoves that part so far down it got to hell before him.

"Say something," The blonde whispers.

"How long till they realize you've snuck off?" The bark of laughter that escapes the king is like jurda straight into his bloodstream.

"We have an hour tops."

"Let's go." He throws a new hood, midnight blue and embellished with golden thread, at him. It's his own. He doesn't have time to find another. Nikolai puts it on, fastening the small gold clasp at his front, and Kaz has to remind himself to breathe when he sees how beautiful those colours are against that golden skin. It looks a thousand times better on Nikolai than it ever had in him.

"Where are we off to then?" The blonde asks, his familiar charm steady through his features once more. "You're not intending to kidnap me and sell me to the highest bidder are you?" Before he can even start to ignore the question Nikolai is carrying on. "I have to tell you I won't make a very high bid. I seem to have botched myself a little when I turned into one of the Darkling's little pets. I think my di—"

"Shut up will you," He snaps, black eyes scanning the club as they walk through it.

"A little tense Mr Brekker," He can hear the grin. He doesn't know whether he wants to slap it or stare at it. He keeps walking.

They're outside and it's just started to drizzle and he has the brief thought that maybe he shouldn't be making the king of Ravka gallivant in the rain. But then he catches a glimpse of Nikolai's expression, full of wonder and glinting with excitement and he can't turn back even if he wants to.

"Kaz," Saints he loves the way the blonde says his name. "I really think it's better if I know where we're going, sake of safety and all that."

"We're going to the docks."

"You're not intending to drown me, are you?" There is no concern hidden behind the question, only delighted amusement.

"If I had intended to be rid of you Nikolai," Kaz turns his head, stares at the man, "I would have done it the second you walked into my club."

"Even though you didn't know it was me?"

It's his turn to smirk, and he revels in it. "I know everyone that comes into my club, King." The title reverberates in his throat. He catches the flash in the royal's eye.

"Why are you taking us to the docks?"

"I want to show you something, privateer." The strangled noise he hears in answer makes him force down the smile threatening to erupt.

The rain is at that awkward stage where it's more than a drizzle but less than a downpour. The kind that seeps into your clothes, makes your bones wet before you can even feel it on your skin. But they're almost there, he can see their destination clear in front of him. They are quiet, a rare thing for Nikolai he thinks, as they walk. Every now and then he glances to his companion who is always staring at the world in wonder. Like every corner produces a new kind of thrill. Like he'll be able to collect them all and bottle them for his journey home.

"Why are you staring at my pretty face?" The subject of his hidden amazement asks. "You've never been one to appreciate beauty Mr Brekker. If you did you'd have commented on my lovely violet wax seals at least once." He fights the urge to roll his eyes at that. The wax seals were the least interesting thing about the letters. He usually ripped them open like a mad man, clawing for the content inside and reading it as if it were going to disappear before he could get to the, 'fondly, Nikolai Lantsov' at the end.

"I have more interest in the contents inside."

At that the King does roll his eyes, "Oh yes, the ever so interesting reports about dock lookouts and safe grisha arrivals."

"It's my business."

"Mhm" Is all the blonde has to say.

They step onto the docks, and the tap of his cane, louder, more prominent on the wood, rings slightly in his ears. It's a comforting sound. One he has come to rely on to keep him steady. Especially when there's a king walking in stride with him, a king who kind of looks like the sun just before it disappears over the horizon. A king who scents his letters with lavender because he wants people to know calmness. A king who has never touched him but always stands close enough that he can feel the heat of him.

He recognizes the marker that tells him they're in the right place and then he motions for Nikolai to stay behind him. "Its small so we'll have to be close together." He says quietly.

"Are you okay with that?" The question is so gentle, so full of worry it almost buckles his knees.

"I'll manage."

"Kaz," He sounds hesitant, he sounds worried. "You don't have to force yourself to do something for me."

"I'm not, now come on before it disappears." And then they're stepping into an alcove only slightly bigger than a coffin and they're so close and there's so little air. But still Nikolai is not touching him and the leather of Kaz's gloves is warm against his skin. There is no part if him exposed to the elements, except his face. He takes one breath, takes two. The king is looking at him with concern, it is swimming in his features.

"Look up." Together they tilt their heads, and as the weak sunlight, bogged by rain, sinks to the floor the gems buried in the stones of the roof above them come ablaze. Crimson reds, and sapphire blues, and forest greens, and golden yellows. The light fractures and morphs and dances around them, like coloured stars.

He had discovered this wonder in a burning rage, trailing blood down the docks. He'd beaten up a man who betrayed their gang- dirty work for the boss- but half way down the docks he'd thought he was being followed and he slipped into this little alcove. He comes back every chance he gets.

"This is—" For once King Nikolai Lantsov is speechless. "How did you even find such a thing?" The hood had fallen off his head when he looked up so every angle of his face is on sharp display. The miserable lighting only made him more golden as if he was defying the weather simply by existing. And the gemstones reflected in his eyes, turning them every shade of rare rainbow. One of three Kaz had ever seen in Ketterdam.

He just raises a brow. "We should be getting back, I'm sure they've already sounded the alarm."

The blonde snorts, "They're used to it by now."

"Oh you sneak off to visit all your friends?" They step out carefully, making sure not to disturb the structure or get caught in the act.

"Feeling less special?"

"Wondering if maybe you should pay your guards more."

They bicker all the way back, about everything, trading wit and meaningless insults in equal measure. Kaz insists on dropping Nikolai off at his lodgings and Nikolai insists he doesn't have to despite leading them towards the building he's staying in. When they finally arrive, it is with a sense of longing for more that settles between them. More time, more laughter, more traded quips, just more.

"Goodbye Mr Brekker." The King bows his head.

"Nikolai." He nods.

"Come visit me in Ravka soon." It's the line he prints in every letter, no matter how far apart their replies are, or how many other things they have going on. Kaz never acknowledges it. He won't put that kind of hope into them. He must stay here. He must work.

But today, with happiness bubbling under his skin, he cant help but let loose a small smile and a dangerous promise. "I'll try."

And fading under the bustle of people is a small golden plaque on the floor of the alcove. "To those we love, and love unconditionally." A bigger promise, one that has lasted through time itself.

"That's all we can do Kaz," Nikolai smiles. "We try."

#Kaz x Nikolai #Nikolai x Kaz #Kaz Brekker/Nikolai Lantsov #grishaverse #The grisha trilogy #six of crows duology #shadow & bone #six of crows #Kaz Brekker #Nikolai Lantsov #TLYJ writes #soc #s&b

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fatoujallovv · 4 years

Photo

so here’s my disclaimer: I hardly know what I'm doing. This is my glued together homemade giffing method that I’ve created over months of just random experimentation and bits and pieces from all kinds of tutorials. there are probably better or more correct ways to do a lot of these things! this also isn’t a completely universal tutorial, some of the specifics are geared towards giffing skam, specifically skam france.

I gif in photoshop cc 2020 on a macbook. Some things like keyboard shortcuts and little things about the photoshop interface will probably vary if you are on a pc/ other version of photoshop!

this is very long and very unprofessional, but I hope there is something in here that someone will find helpful!

we’ll be going from this:

to this:

up to date as of October 25, 2020

downloading clips

selecting what part you’re going to gif

cropping

my action for resizing, converting to a smart object, and sharpening

coloring

exporting and setting the delay

tldr tips

1. downloading clips

4k video downloader (which you can get for mac or pc here) is great for things posted to youtube, especially from skam france because all the clips are on their youtube with no weird geoblocks or anything! it’s really easy, you just have to open the clip in youtube, copy the link, and go into the program and hit paste link. I like to put on smart mode first and set the destination folder so all my clips go into the place I want.

There is a 30 video per day download limit, so if you’re thinking you really want to gif lots of stuff from the show, and want a big chunk or a full season it’s definitely worth hunting for a mega or google drive with full episodes to download because it’s just less hassle! I might come back to this post later and compile a list of all of those, but for now if you type “[remake] no subs google drive” or “[remake] no subs mega” into a google search, you’ll probably find something! the all of skam website has no subs for several remakes, but not all!

If you don’t have enough space on your computer to be keeping full seasons, I know there are methods to get screencaps without having to download (generally for giffing movies and regular tv I think this is a common method), but I’ve never done it so I’ll redirect you to this tutorial that explains it! you should probably just go there for the whole thing tbh it’s much more coherent than this, but I digress.

2. selecting the piece of the video you want to gif

now that you’ve got your episode or clip you’ll want to just open it in photoshop! if you go the screen capping route the way to do that is a bit wonky, so you can keep following the tutorial I linked above and join back in here at coloring if you like!

if the timeline at the bottom doesn’t pop up automatically you can go to window > timeline and turn it on! now you can use the scrubber bar thing to find the moment you want to gif!

The advantage of this over screen capping is you can scrub with more precision. the arrows circled in blue below let you jump only one frame, where in screen capping I'm pretty sure you can only go by ten second or one minute intervals.

I usually drag the scrubber as close as I can to the start of the shot/moment I want to use, fiddle with the arrows circled in blue below to jump forward or back one frame at a time until I'm at the first frame I want. I move the left grey handle to the scrubber and then I hit the play button and let the whole shot/moment play. Pause and repeat the shuffling with the arrows until you’ve landed on the last frame you want to use and move the other grey handle.

the moment you want to use should be between your handles (it’ll look like what I have circled in red), and if you hit play, you should see the thing you want to gif playing on loop above the timeline. the speed will probably be weird, but we’ll deal with that at the end.

now I recommend doing command or control + s to save your gif as a psd (photoshop document). this is a working, editable file which means if photoshop crashes you can open your file right back up and keep working as long as you’re hitting command or control + s at regular intervals as you work. later we’ll go through exporting in gif format that can actually be uploaded to tumblr.

3. cropping

next I crop out any logos or black space at the top and bottom. Just click on the crop tool on the lefthand side of the screen, drag the edges and hit enter when you’re done. you can of course crop out more than just that, but regardless of what you crop out, now is the time to do it.

you can set an aspect ratio for your crop at the top of the screen if you’d like to be positive that all the gifs in your set will be the same:

4. my trusty action: resizing, converting to a smart object, and sharpening with one click

Now is when I use an action I made that does all the resizing, converts to a smart object, and sharpens. I’ll take you through the steps so you can conceptually get what’s going on, but I highly recommend using the actions window to record your process as you follow along so you have this action as well. It easily shaves at least 5-10 minutes off of the whole process, and these steps will be the same every time.

here’s how you make an action: go to window > action and open the action panel. click the plus symbol to start recording a new action:

in the window that pops up, give it a name and hit record:

now just continue with the steps below, and it will save them!

first you flatten frames to clips (I think it says flatten to layers on older versions of photoshop). this is in the menu at the top right corner of your timeline:

next you convert to frame animation by clicking on the symbol in the bottom left, circled in red:

if there is more than one thing in the frame animation, delete the extra one. you don’t need to keep the last one but it won’t let you remove it until there are other frames in there. also go into your layers and delete video group 1 and its contents. don’t ask me why these steps are necessary, I don’t really know, but I’ve noticed it sometimes gets wonky if you don’t do this:

now you want to make frames from layers and delete that first frame that was there before:

then we return to the timeline:

use command + option + a (control + alt + a for pc I'm pretty sure) to select all layers and then right click within your layers window and select convert to smart object. It’s important to convert to smart object after you go back to the timeline, or the gif won’t move:

next I resize. gifs for tumblr should be 540 pixels wide. for recording your action you should just go into image > image size and only change the width to 540 in case you ever have gifs cropped to different aspect ratios. don’t touch the height, let constrain proportions figure it out!

now, here’s what our base gif looks like, no sharpening, no coloring:

now to sharpen. go to filter > sharpen > smart sharpen. this is up to personal preference, but my go to settings are:

this is what we have after sharpening:

now is when you can stop recording your action.

just press the stop button in the action window:

this action is pretty much universal and after I select the moment the gif will be and crop however I want, I use it on every gif I make! so although this initial setup is tedious, now you’ll never have to do these steps again, and the process is magically much quicker.

5. it’s time to jump into coloring!

I typically start with exposure and sometimes some brightness/contrast. with really dark gifs like this, you kind of have to make it worse before you make it better. I did this:

now the gif looks like this:

we have some static and some ugly bits, and this is where selective color comes in to fix it! boost blacks like this:

and now your gif looks like this:

the skin tone is looking a little sickly and weird, so I go into the yellows and reds in my selective color layer to fix it! I also messed with the greens here because I didn't want color in the background (that part is totally optional and just up to your preference):

now we have this:

to really take the color 100% out of the background, I did one more separate selective color layer for cyan (again, I just felt like it but this is optional!):

and now the finished gif:

there’s lots of fun extra things you can add like text and tints and overlays and all that I won’t get into, but feel free to reach out for help on those types of things!

this gif was certainly not the most complicated to color. some ridonkulously dark clips (*cough cough* vendredi 20h27 *cough cough*) take tons and tons more effort than this and a lot of the time you’ll want to use color balance layers and vibrance layers and all of that to mess with your coloring.

with all of this coloring business, I really just learned by doing. I don’t know all the technical purposes of each type of adjustment layer, and I tend to stay away from curves just because I find them confusing and annoying. The bottom line is that you should always experiment and find out whatever coloring works for you and run with it! I’m sure every gif maker you talk to does things at least a little differently!

I highly recommend taking the time to go through all the types of adjustment layers and just move the sliders around to see what they do! That’s honestly one of the best ways to learn and decide what you like!

6. now to export and adjust the delay!

the keyboard shortcut for exporting on mac is command + option + shift + s, control + alt + shift + s for pc, otherwise you can go to file > export > save for web

my settings are here:

the settings only need to be configured once! otherwise just hit save and follow the pop ups to choose where to save and what name you want to give your gif. Since you saved as a psd way back, that will be the name it’s automatically given, but call it whatever you want!

then I adjust my delay by opening the gif I just exported (not the psd, the .gif file) and using one of my delay actions. I’ve made an action for each delay between 0.05 (real time) and 0.08 (really slow mo for certain super short shots, typically for more ~artsy~ sets).

all my action does is select all frames:

adjust the delay (which will differ based on whether you want them slowed down and by how much):

for reference, this is a 0.05 delay:

and this is a 0.08 delay

now you just export the same way you did before!

remember if you’re recording this as an action, you don’t want to touch the file name, just say yes when it asks if you want to replace the file. if you always save your gifs to the same place, your action will now enable you to override any gif with the incorrect delay with the correct one with one click!

7. tldr: the main tips

for downloading 4k video downloader works well for non geoblocked youtube videos, the all of skam website is another place you can look to download with no subs, here’s the screen capping method if you don’t want to download

The main way I combat dark lighting is to bump exposure to the right, gamma correction to the left, and then enhance black in a selective color layer. The amount of these three adjustments will vary gif to gif. I know lots of people use curves, but I find them really confusing for some reason, so this is my method! As my graphics teacher likes to say: there are always at least 3 different ways to reach the same result!

there’s a little bit of additional coloring on this one, but here’s another before and after example so you can get an idea of how those steps get you a better lit result without making the lighter parts super over exposed:

besides those three steps, you have free rein to use the other selective color channels, as well as color balance, vibrance, hue/saturation, etc. to restore color that was lost or to change the colors altogether! mess around with it and have fun experimenting!

7a. bonus coloring tip:

sometimes you can make use of selective color to completely alter an isolated color in your gif. You can get very adventurous with this, but here's a simple example of changing blue tones to teal (I got away with these gifs being longer because they were in rows of two in the set I posted them in. I'm too lazy to trim frames so I can put them here at 540 px without going over the 10mb limit so just ignore the quality ok):

7b. actions, actions, actions!

if you find yourself doing a certain thing over and over, always record it as an action. the amount of time they will save you is honestly really impressive.

You can duplicate actions, so, for example, if you have different sharpening preferences for different shows or scenes, you can duplicate your gif process action and go into the steps, double click smart sharpen, and alter it however you want!

This could also be good to do for the different widths for tumblr if you ever do sets with rows of two or three! Duplicate actions is also how I made my actions that set delay at 0.05, 0.06, 0.07, and 0.08!

when in doubt, always make an action! it’s worth minimizing the tedious bits of the process as much as possible so you can focus on the fun part of seeing your awesome gifs come to life! any little task you find yourself doing often, make an action!

and for now that’s all I have. if any of this made no sense, if you want to suggest a correction or addition I could make, if you’re ever curious how I did something on any gifs I post, or if you have any other sort of questions, feel free to send me an ask or a dm! if I can’t answer your questions I’ll be happy to try to direct you to someone who can or a tutorial to help! again, I'm no expert, not even close, but I hope at least one person will find one thing in this mess that helps.

#this got . so long omg #mystuff #mytutorial #gif tutorial #tutorial #resources #fellow gif making peeps feel free to correct me or give input on how to improve or add to this tutorial!

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bladekindeyewear · 4 years

Text

HS^2 bloggin’ mainline 2020-05-19

Figured an upd8 was coming, it’s felt like enough time has passed for one.

Huh, looking at my last post I’d completely forgotten I was supposed to play through Pesterquest sometime... work is busy and stressing me out a bit, I’m not sure when I’ll have the energy on the side to do that. (Maybe I’ll livetweet it like I did Undertale a while ago, but this time not looking at my twitter replies so I don’t get spoiled by One Guy™?)

Also, including bonus commentary on A Threat Sensed.

Okay, going in completely blind. I’d guessed from context that we’re hopping over to Meat side to get a chapter there before we can come back to actually see Yiffy?

Yep. Okay, what is this about exactly?

(Agh, dammit, I’ve been copying and pasting so much at work remoting into Windows lately that now I’m automatically trying to hit control-C instead of command-C to copy.)

> CHAPTER 9. How Goes The Eulogizing, Dear?

CONTENT NOTE: This chapter contains Child Abuse.

Which one???

Wait

JANE: (Where is he?) JANE: (It's a question I've found myself asking many times in recent days.)

Holy SHIT we get two Candy chapters in a row??? So we might see her right away?? No, it’s gotta just be another tiny glimpse.

(Has two Candy chapters in a row happened before? Future Boots, scroll back up and put this here. FUTURE BOOTS: “I forgot to scroll back up and put that here.” EDIT: Also, not the first time with two in a row, but it IS the first time with THREE in a row, huh.)

So Jane has to be talking about either Tavros or Dave. --Oh, if this was a Candy Side chapter title, I guess Rose or Jade is eulogizing Dave for John?

> (==>)

JANE: (Where now is our merry savior?) JANE: (Where is the horn that was honking?) JANE: (Where is the cape and the codpiece, and the...) JANE: (The...) JANE: (Oh, fiddlesticks.)

What? Is she reading a childrens’ book? --Oh. She’s eulogizing Gamzee. So that gives us a third option, where the rebellion crashes the funeral somehow, probably audiovisually rather than in person. (Which would make sense, given Candy practically began with Gamzee crashing Dirk’s funeral.)

> (==>)

Ah never mind, she’s still writing it.

That sure is a single button drama-remote that’s going to be pressed at some point. Oh, and who the fuck keeps a spork in a pen cup??? --No no, don’t say it’s one of those pens with a spork at the eraser end, either ready-made or rubber-banded to the side. That would make sense. You totally know it isn’t that and is just a spork.

JANE: (Okay, poetry is out.) JANE: (What else?) JANE: (Hrm...) JANE: (I've always been pretty good at crying on cue.) JANE: (Could I try staging an emotional breakdown?) JANE: (That could work; playing to people's humanity.)

Why were you crying in Jake’s arms about his death if you didn’t care that much? Did you just want him to hold you and kinda make him feel in on things again? Or did you just cry yourself out about him?

JANE: (Or whatever is the more inclusive term.)

I bet the rest of Earth C figured out a more inclusive term millenia ago FUCK I accidentally added millennia to my dictionary misspelled instead of correcting it hold on--

...There, killed the entry for it. ...Huh. Take a look at my Chrome dictionary’s custom-added words over the years, apparently:

Caliborn Eridan Kanaya Matriorb Meenah Tavros alchemiter dichotomic nephilim reblogged uncaptchalogues uncaptchaloguing

That’s fun.

Okay back to reading. Millennia. Phew! Where was I.

JANE: (One really good and calculated weep could do it, I think.) JANE: (But then there's the danger that I might get carried away and do it for real.) JANE: (And I can't risk that.)

So still feeling something, just too used to calculating over the past years.

JANE: (What can I say about him that will stir up their emotions?) JANE: (Do I mention the stuff about the milk?) JANE: (Think Crocker, think.)

WHY would you-- how much did Gamzee normalize adult breastfeeding?!

JAKE: Ahoy over there!

Not the best time.

(The thing with the divorce papers from the Epilogue and John implying he was planning with Jake to execute something that sounds like a divorce... is that going to be sprung here? Did her lawyers send the divorce papers way back when she was in a fit of pique, and he just had them available to sign now at the tactical moment? Or... let me pull the exact text...)

JOHN: now, harry anderson, i know that you and tavros haven't always gotten along. JOHN: but i am going to have to ask you to try and look out for him for the time being. JOHN: your uncle jake and i... well, i'll explain later. JOHN: let's just say that gamzee isn't the only family member jane is losing today.

(So is John going to submit the papers? Or did they already go through a while ago and default custody to John or something who’s going to adopt him too or some nonsense? And did he plan this out with Jake NOW, or a while ago, and if only a while ago, is Jake going to KNOW whatever John’s about to pull in that respect is about to happen??)

> (==>)

Butte

Janepalme

> (==>)

JAKE: Er... how goes the eulogizing, dear?

Gah. I completely forgot again that capitalized-first-letter chapter names don’t mean KANAYA is saying them. That probably makes a lot more sense out of my wondering about the chapter title earlier to those of you who didn’t realize I was making that mistake.

JANE: It turns out that it's mighty difficult to find touching things to say about a person, the relationship with whom was predicated on deep-seated mutual loathing.

Hah!

--A loathing you regarded as largely more important to you than Jake ever was, by the way. You asshole.

JANE: I imagine this is one of the reasons no funerary tradition was ever established on Alternia, besides the barbarism of their culture. DIRK: Jesus christ. JANE: Not only did a significant proportion of their interpersonality depend on romance in the form of hatred, but it was a society based on cruelty and violence. JANE: What reason could they have had to provide for the dead? JANE: What kind of last rites could they have even imagined?

I wondered for a moment why (bg!)Dirk of all people would react to a single line of her starting to bring up prejudices, but then I realized that (1) Brain Ghost Dirk is a little more Jakey, and (2) Dirk knew that more ranting would follow the first line.

JANE: I can't think of anything good to write about him because deep down, I hated his guts. JANE: But he was and is beloved of the multitude, so I have to think of something regardless. JAKE: Im not sure i understand. JANE: Don't worry your pretty little head about it. JANE: This is politics, Jakey. JANE: Lying through your two front teeth about people you hate is about as good a definition as it's possible to get. JANE: But, by gum, is it tiring work.

Mm. It’s a position Jane put herself in, but it’s still a legitimate position once you’re there.

JANE: The funeral is tomorrow, after all.

Got it.

DIRK: Dude, the bowl. JAKE: Hm? JAKE: Oh, right. JANE: What is it now, Jake. JAKE: I brought something for our guest as well. JANE: You mean the prisoner. JAKE: Y...es.

Wait, bowl?

Oh god damnit which of you had the idea to feed her with a DOG BOWL. Either of you could have thought of it, and either of you would be horrible for it.

> (==>)

Huh, that outfit on Yiffy looks familiar, like a reference to something. And a black tail? This definitely isn’t quite the look I was expecting from Jade Plus Rose, but I suppose the snazzy tie is a Roseish vibe. Also reminiscent of Jade’s old Dead Shuffle dress. Formal wear and soccer cleats??

JANE: She's over in the corner. JANE: Don't worry, she won't bite. JANE: I've seen to that already.

WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN. I don’t see anything over her mouth! Did she stick something in it, or drug her? File her fucking teeth???

I mean I did forget the Child Abuse trigger warning to be fair. Hoping whatever would be on her mouth is just not shown in-panel yet for stylistic reasons.

> (==>)

JAKE: Its only mac and cheese, sorry. JAKE: Its all I know how to make, haha. JAKE: ... JAKE: I um... hope you can safely partake of cheese? JAKE: ... JAKE: Well, JAKE: Bon appetit.

How the fuck did Jake eat on his island then? --Oh right, preserved food cans that Grandma Jade stored up, I think I remember. Why would cheese not be a thing for them, if it’s fine for Jade? I know he’s probably not just worried about lactose intolerance.

Either way, if she’s drugged here, that’ll mean we won’t get a good idea of her for a while, so which is it...

> (==>)

DIRK: Bon appetit. DIRK: Seriously dude? JAKE: (What? Did i pronounce it wrong?) DIRK: Jake. DIRK: You put the food in a fucking dog bowl. JAKE: (It was all there was, ok???) JAKE: (I feel awful enough as it is without you getting on my case about it.)

Ah, missed the bone pun. AND, yeah, Jake, you’re a fucking idiot, you could have put it in a cup or something.

JAKE: (So far ive yet to see anything come of that brilliant plan of yours.) JAKE: (Are you sure sending that message to the others was enough?)

Okay, so he IS coordinating this slightly.

> (==>)

Horrifying image to contemplate, eh Jane?

Or anger-inducing?

> (==>)

Seems about right!

> (==>)

Oh that’s a GREAT exasperated Jane face.

JANE: I hope you're not expecting dessert, young lady.

I like how Jane didn’t notice, comment on, or care about the bowl. How can you hate a kid so much??

> (==>)

Oh I know why I felt like I recognized the outfit style, it’s because it’s ANIME AS FUCK. Feels like some Persona 4 Arena nonsense, and I say that not having played any of those games or even remembering what they looked like. Also, white hair, black fur’d dog parts? Nice change of pace.

YIFFY: GRRRRRRRRR... JANE: Oh no you don't.

Red text? What color exactly... “#D00009”? Huh. That’s nowhere near Alt-Callie’s #FF0000, and darker than Dave’s #E00707. In fact, let me go back and check those spilled color pins the commentary pointed out from an update or two ago... no, the red pin is #E63225, closer to Dave’s color. (Also, is Yiffy blocking the doorway out? That’s a pretty slack chain then.)

Did Jane see to it that she wouldn’t bite with like, a water spray bottle?

(EDIT: Oh my FUCKING GOD, THAT's why it's #D00009...)

> (==>)

FUCK I didn’t notice the shock collar in the Yiffy image! FUCK YOU, Jane.

> (==>)

Keeping someone in line with collars, especially ones that punish whenever one strays out of line, has always been a decent way for her to mix in some Doomy control of others to show how she’s “grown” to balance her main role and her Tiara-controlled-like inverse for more power. Doom in part represents boundaries that you can’t cross without getting hurt or punished.

> (==>)

FUCK, those little buck teeth!? D’:

JANE: That's more like it.

She HAS to have more of a reason for hating her than hating her parents, right? Like, more than that and general racism applying to partdogfolk?

> (==>)

Hey fuck off with that!

> (==>)

This is a pretty cool ima-- are those piercings on her dog ear? I didn’t notice that in the first shot, neat.

JANE: You've been a thorn in my side ever since I agreed to enroll you at the academy, little madam. JANE: Back then, I was doing a favor for two old friends who made a disgusting mistake. JANE: I'm no longer going to play nice with you just because of your parents, however. JANE: That truce is over. JANE: Do I make myself understood?

What the fuck? WHY would you do that? Why does Jane run "Ms. Paint’s Home for Inconvenient Girls”? What did Yiffy do to piss her off so much there, how much trouble could she have caused?

I don’t know if she’s referring to the behind-Kanaya’s-back part as disgusting or she’s just being MORE racist.

> (==>)

JANE: We don't want you passing out during the ceremony, do we?

Oh, just showing the hostage off during the clown funeral, huh? Classy much?

> (==>)

JANE: Now, be a good hostage and get some rest, Yiffany dear. JANE: We've got a big day tomorrow.

For a politician, Jane’s not good at looking at herself in a mirror.

> (==>)

JANE: Night night. JANE: Hoo hoo.

> (Yiffy: Lights out.)

Huh, dream stuff is gonna be relevant out in Candy then? *click*

Okay, dark background all of a sudden. Properly dramatic? You even have to highlight the non-link “>” part of the Next link to see it.

> (==>)

-- thespiansGlamor [TG] began pestering adamantGriftress [AG] --

Well, I don’t know WHY it’s happening, but the white-backed pesterlog suddenly on the dark site framing is certainly evocative. Of like, a mood, or something.

TG: i thought he was pretty quiet down there. TG: we'll make a rebel of him yet! AG: Lol. AG: I think it's more that he can't sleep. AG: I know how he feels. TG: yeah. TG: today was a lot. AG: ... TG: do you wanna talk about it? AG: Ugh, not you as well.

It’s really jarring to transition between Homestuck’s “kids jarringly mentally resistant to freaking out about the end of the world” to HS^2′s more realistic “kids traumatized by their first firefight even though it was an overwhelming victory-escape”.

TG: but seriously, do you? AG: Not really. TG: not even about... you know? TG: her? AG: No. TG: ... are you sure? AG: A8solutely. AG: What are you, my moirail? AG: Just leave it, Harry. TG: ok.

Are they about to have an “I wonder what Yiffy’s like” talk?

> (==>)

Very similar Tav/Vrissy convo to the previous one.

GG: I havent ever shared a bedroom before,,, GG: Not even for a slumber party,,, AG: Tavvy, you are just a8out the saddest person I've ever met.

Well, we have an even better idea how horrible Jane can be with kids, now. From Nanna to THIS is quite jarring. I wonder how the double Nannasprites that must still be around here somewhere feel?

> (==>)

TG: nothing about my dad is cute. TG: what are you even saying. AG: Lmao. TG: seriously! TG: i think he has something against that word, even. he gets super weird about it. AG: He's a strange and funny m8n. TG: yeah. TG: ... TG: i think something bad must have happened.

...um. What? Why would John have some sort of trauma about the word cute or being called it?

Did John dress up as a hint of his buried June ambitions as a kid and Dad lavish him with “SO CUTE” praise in an epic supportiveness backfire that caused him to shelve the idea of wearing non-masc clothes and being happier on the flipside of gender ever again??? Because if that’s how June gets canonized as promised, it’s a little harsher than the back of my mind was hoping. I guess it kind of had to be though from the premise of how it was read into his childhood for the original idea, though. Fuck, I hope this Cute business is about something different from that (like a Terezi reference or such) just to get less John Sads. (But still June. Definitely still want to get June.)

> (==>)

Oh, and now Vrissy is doing nothing but talking about what she said she didn’t want to talk about, of course. (Also I like how JANE’s now being called the Batterwitch.)

AG: And the worst part was they didn't even fight a8out it! AG: That made me madder than 8nything else. AG: It felt like I was the only person who even W8S mad! GG: I dont think thats true,,, AG: What would you know a8out it?! GG: Maybe nothing,,, GG: Sorry,,, GG: Its just,,, GG: To me,,, all the way through the conversation,,, aunt kanaya looked even angrier than you,,, AG: ... AG: Adults are so fucking weird.

Guh, I don’t want to be reminded how hurt a good chunk of the fanbase is by Kanaya getting hurt this badly.

Original Tavros was always SLIGHTLY perceptive of others sometimes, but maybe perceptiveness is being hinted at as a Tavros specialty? We still don’t know his classpect/hero-title or have any firm guesses based on purely him evidence. (Also, frightened kids of abusive households tend to learn to get perceptive pretty fucking quickly I hear.)

> (==>)

TG: dad was sitting in the cafeteria with aunt jade and your moms. TG: it looked like they were discussing something important... they were whispering and stuff.

[etc etc] Alright, the what-happened-to-Dave bit. And I imagine they’re kind of helping John grieve there, since Rose and Jade have talked that out already.

TG: aunt kanaya's was the only face i could see. TG: she was standing next to them, but she wasn't looking at what was going on. TG: almost like she couldn't bear to. AG: I doubt it. Kanaya's got a8out as much Emotivity as a very reclusive stone. TG: ok, i think that is bullshit but whatever. TG: she saw me standing there, but didn't say anything. she just shook her head slightly, and pointed back out into the hallway i came down.

Yep, giving them some space to grieve. Also-- gosh, shouldn’t Vrissy have the same emotive senses that Aranea implied Vriska shared with her? Kanaya isn’t that EXPRESSIVE but she’s certainly full of emotion. Also, I hope part of her not bearing to watch wasn’t lingering anger toward Jade and Rose mixing with that, but there probably was a bit of that too, though Dave being gone is so much harsher than that. --I just realized they might not have broken the news to Karkat yet, either.

AG: I guesadxcxzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz TG: vrissy?

Put to sleep by someone slumping down on your phone keypad, or surprised by something about the other conversation?

Oh shit, “other conversation” reminded me I didn’t look at Tavros’s chumhandle:

glutinousGymnast [GG]

HHHHHhhhhuh. Hm... huh? hhhh. huh? what, but. Why would. ?????

I really don’t understand what that chumhandle or any of its entendres should signify in this context.

Also, this means for our new four kids we have TG, GG, AG, and ??.

> (==>)

GG: I think she might have succumbed to sleep quite suddenly,,, GG: It would explain the,,,,,, interesting messages I've been getting for a while,,, TG: hehe. TG: i guess that tracks. TG: she does that from time to time.

That’s... strange. Homestuck’s taught us to be suspicious of that.

TG: ... TG: tav? GG: Yes,,, harry anderson,,,? TG: what does it feel like to know someone who's died?

Who is Harry referring to? (EDIT: Yes I know Gamzee for Tavros, but I meant Harry talks like he's worried he'll have to feel that way soon?) Is he just kind of inferring that something bad might have happened to Uncle Dave? Got that perceptive “parents are about to tell me about a death in the family” vibe? Or did he overhear more than he let on to Vrissy?

...alright, that’s the last page of this update. Looks like this chapter is going to continue to have a good bunch of grieving, or talk around it.

---

Now for Bonus Commentary for A Threat, Sensed. For some reason I have a dim memory of like... reading this myself without commenting on it? Or skimming it? But I’m pretty sure I didn’t do that. Weird. Must have imagined doing it.

Ah, I think I saw the opening paragraph scrolling Patreon, and my mind kinda filled in the blanks, this is still looking new to me.

Okay, mostly banter and japes in the commentary here. About Dirk “throwing a huge tantrum in his philosophy cave”.

We’ve had quite a bit of speculation on whether this is “really” Andrew. To that, I think we’d say that it doesn’t “really” matter.

Really? That was speculated about? :/

Here we discover that Dirk has not, as some people have speculated, been directly intervening into the Candy timeline, or influencing it in any way. In fact, he has a very hard time seeing anything going on there at all.

Mhmm, and that was a pretty important thing to learn.

A couple of years ago I might have agreed with the take that everything happening in Candy is simply too outlandish to ever happen naturally, without direct, villainous interference, but that was before literally every fucking batshit insane thing that has happened on Real Life Earth started going down, and now I will believe literally anything.

This is a nice bit of distraction from the idea that at least the opening parts of the Candy story were written/narrated by Original, Alive Calliope over on meat side. To refresh your memory of what was pointed out to me:

ROXY: back when jade first got all effed up callie saw somethin and it made them freak out ROXY: it took me weeks to convince them that it was safe to come home ROXY: but now we got the opposite problem and they arent leavin the house at all ROXY: they stay home all day with the blinds drawn paintin some weird ass shit on the walls TEREZI: WH4T? ROXY: its not as bad as it sounds i promise ROXY: some of it is like ROXY: weird and violent?? ROXY: like lotsa nasty purple blood and um ROXY: nudity???? TEREZI: >:? ROXY: yeah yikes ROXY: but MOST of it is cute stuff like... various combos of all of us being happy and gettin married and shit ROXY: anyway thats kept callie kinda busy

Which tracks with the initial out-of-character-seemingness of almost everyone at the start of Candy, and how they kind of tried to railroad things back onto the “Happy??” track after Dirk derailed it with his weird self-accumulation suicide, along with some of the flowery-idyllic descriptions of characters seeing each other bathed in a halo of light and such.

Of course, they’re not going to out-and-out STATE that Calliope was at fault for that narration, helping the Candy story not necessarily fall out the way it did “naturally”, until we finally get a glimpse of her on the heroes’ ship in Meat probably still painting the continuing Candy events, inspiring them into the void of the singularity with her latent powers. Til then, it’s a bit of misdirection whenever the topic is to be brought up. Along with a mix of Roxy’s late-Candy point to John of more or less “why COULDN’T we have done this naturally? you don’t know”.

He might even think that he has more direct power over the narrative than Hussie does himself. Surprise, motherfucker, you are a fictional character.

I’ll quote this next part in full:

There’s been talk of whether or not this bonus was written in the two days between its release and the Yiffy reveal chapter. The answer is--no. It was written over a month ago. But I think the things it addresses were not difficult to suss out. Obviously, Dirk is highlighting the issues that the readership are having with Yiffy, in his typical Dirk fashion. If it seems a little defensive, well...I suppose it is. Yiffy is one of the two hard lines drawn in the sand, and all of us love her, and we’re hoping that everyone else will love her too. But more than that, it focuses on the fact that update culture has a rhythm to it--shock, revulsion, acceptance (or not), and then excitement (or not). Will it follow that pattern this time? Who knows. I guess we’ll find out.

Yeah, given what was going to be dropped on us I expected they would have had exactly this lined up, especially because Andrew specifically mandated Yiffy. --I wonder why they aren’t mentioning that somewhere in the commentary and only on one of their Twitters?

Also quoting this:

There’s something both incredibly “cringe” and self-indulgent, as well as philosophically intriguing, about the author arguing with his villain, especially since he’s writing both halves of the conversation himself. You are, for all intents and purposes, trying to solve a problem that you have created for yourself. You are looking an aspect of your personality in the eye and asking, hey, what the fuck, man?

But in the end, isn’t that what every story is? Trying to untie knots that you put in the rope yourself?

Since it’s part of the central struggle of this story, and kind of the question Andrew’s tried to imply with every Homestuck work about what right we have to keep these characters trapped in a story, and if they’d be better off escaping it.

I’m really trying to avoid quoting so much of this, since the commentary is paid... but I think we can make an exception here? I’ll have only quoted about half of it; just, the really plot-important half. Plus, I left out a LOOOT of japes.

Dirk has a certain idea of how stories are supposed to go. That’s pretty much what the Epilogues is about. The audience also has a certain expectation of how a story is supposed to go. In a way, the Epilogues were also about that. They were taking a story that had reached the traditionally “acceptable” happily ever after, and saying, wait, no. What happens next? Thinking past happily ever after in any story is a terrifying prospect. Once Cinderella marries the prince, what then? Sure, she got what she wanted, but who knows that it will be everything she dreamt it would? What if she changes her mind, if not today, what about ten years from now? What if the prince dies of malaria?

And I’m...

Yeah I don’t have anything else to add here, I’m kind of out of brain juice to think about this tonight. BUSY day I had. Y’all take care!

#Homestuck #hs2 #Homestuck Liveblog #upd8 #Homestuck^2 #bladekindeyewear #blastyoboots #spoiler #spoilers #Homestuck Commentary

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kumoriyami-xiuzhen · 5 years

Text

Hakuoki SSL Kazama Cross Short Story “Food” Translation + note at bottom

the Japanese chapter name for this apparently translates to ‘meal’ (so says google mtl) but i’m just going to refer to these cross short stories as “food” because of the Eng on the chapter visual below.

also i have decided that at the end of every month imma go and actually edit my postings so that i can go and remove all those ‘to be edit tags’.... will also remove some side/personal notes for some things then as well... and may add char tags to some things though i dislike the idea of tagging every character that appears in a drama...

Enjoy... also I like prawn flavoured instant noodles.

Hakuoki SSL Cross Short Story: Kazama Chikage x Food

Translation by KumoriYami

Kazama: Tell me, Amagiri. What are "cup noodles"?

Amagiri: ....Ha?

Amagiri: I believe cup noodles are cup noodles. Have you not eaten them (before)?

Kazama: Of course I know of them. Only (I) haven't eaten them (before).

Amagiri: Why are you suddenly bringing this up today then?

Kazama: People in class were saying that a delicious flavour of cup noodle was released recently.

Kazama: And apparently my wife was very happy after eating it.

Kazama: This time the husband must take the initiative to understand his wife's interests.

Amagiri:.....No matter the reason, this may be a good opportunity for Kazama-sama to broaden his horizons since he is a bit biased. This is a very joyous/happy matter.

Kazama: So Amagiri, buy a cup noodle for me!

Amagiri: .....Understood. Please wait a moment.

(After a while)

Kazama: Ha, (so) this is cup noodles.

Amagiri: Yes. This is an extremely novel/original recipe that requires pouring hot water into it that can be eaten within a few minutes.

Kazama: Taste.... is a bit salty. The ingredients in the soup are too small to offer any nutritional value. [食用 translates to edible... but changed to nutritional for more word sense....though i can’t figure out what to replace small with right now. think of something later]

Kazama: However, the taste of commoners is not bad. Although it cannot satisfy this gourmet[alt: this one's palette].... (but [removed this]) I am very interested (in this). Amagiri.

[The first part of the sentence before "Amagiri" roughly translates to "Although this can't satisfy this uncle/this one who is a foodie... but," so I changed it.]

Amagiri: Yes. Then....

Kazama: Speak to the chef at home. Have them give me a cup noodle every three days.

Amagiri:.....Ha? Are you serious?

Amagiri: I think having/making a three-star chef make cup noodles is a bit insulting/disgraceful...

-fini-

------------

Well...i don’t intend to ever do this much stuff at once ever again lol... but I had a shitty week (sleeping-wise) and spent that time doing things that didn’t really help... like translating lol. Anyway, I’m not entirely sure how many SSL non-drama cd things I’m going to translate [btw: currently looking for someone to translate about 2 lines of dialogue that are missing from student general assembly track 3 translation that i found that are spoken in the background] though if I did it would only be from the cross or daily stories for the game since I can’t really find route translations nor care to look for them... also I honestly don’t have the much interest in the routes aside from Saito’s, Yamazaki’s and Kazama’s given the summaries I’ve read online [well it’s more that I’m happy with what other people have already put together to read]. still looking for a Chinese translation of reimeiroku’s serizawa’s route (the 6th chp in particular since it’s when ibuki encounters kazama and chizuru on their way to ezo, and the epilogue [?] where i think he ends up with that cg.... though i did find a video and translations for when kazama and chizuru are talking in her home and she leans onto his back)... unfortunately some of the yuugiroku 2 vids i found used vnr translations... so iuno if i’ll bother with that.. or reimeiroku kozue’s route as it also used vnr since i don’t really want to translate mtl + human translated stuff with the help of the same methods.

Also holy shit I can’t believe I spent about 45 min extracting text from a 14 min Hakuoki drama only to spend 50 minutes double checking that that was converted properly into text via an image to text extractor then going over that to ensure it was accurate... and I’m going to be spending an even longer amount of time to translate said shit. T_T im such a masochist for hakuoki stuff. iuno if that’s a good thing or a bad thing lol.....

*sigh*

btw does anyone have Adobe after-effects (or another program that can do falling snow visuals/white balls falling like snow similar to the hakuoki games) and/or can recommend a free video editor that can allow for inserting timed text as animations? I found the audio for the Hakuoki Stories of the Shinsengumi bonus character stories (I’ve only listened to the Saito one “warm first snow” and the Kazama one with Amagiri and Shiranui) and kinda really want clean videos of them with english text for my own enjoyment... I’m thinking I can probably get something free to add text onto a video and don’t really care if said text isn’t animated or not, but I’d really like the animated snow effect on the saito one...

gnight technically morning now.

#Hakuoki #Hakuouki #Hakuoki Game Translation #Hakuoki SSL Cross Story Translation #Hakuoki SSL #Kazama Chikage #Amagiri Kyuuju

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woohooligancomics · 6 years

Text

A Personal Racism Issue. Can I Get Your Advice?

I'm at a bit of a loss... so I'm hoping some of you hooligans might be able to help me out. This weekend I'm tabling a gaming convention with a friend of mine (and I'll leave his name out here for reasons that will be apparent -- I'll call him X). Admittedly, I'm a comedian and a cartoonist, so a gaming convention is slightly off-brand, but I'm hoping there will be a good cross-section of people who also enjoy comedy, and at the end of Friday I've already collected 5 new subscribers to our newsletter, the Woohooligan Weekly Dick Joke Advocate.

This came about when I got an unexpected call from X about a month before the event and he mentioned in passing that he'd already booked a table for this event. I offered to share the booth with him, because I want to attend more cons and I thought I could handle the 5hr drive. I've tabled about a half-dozen cons so far, this would be his first. And although he's a relatively new friend (a year?), I didn't have the impression he was racist -- at least not overtly or knowingly so... I wouldn't associate myself with anyone who identified as "Alt-Right", I think that should be apparent from my work, of which X is aware. Dunking on these racists was part of all three of my most recent YouTube videos, and a comic I published in 2016 which appears in my recent Woohooligan Vol 2 (page 29) that I now have on the table at the event thanks to our recent Kickstarter.

youtube

What I didn't realize until I arrived at the event, is that X is selling t-shirts labelled "Fantasy Lives Matter". There are about a dozen of them, roughly half of his t-shirt designs, so for example a picture of an orc with the text "Orc Lives Matter", another for Elf, Dwarf, etc. I hoped at first that it would go unnoticed as people often don't read the text and just check out the artwork. I've already noticed one girl at the table this morning was put off. She asked me, "are you a Black Lives Matter person or an all lives matter person"? To which I responded "black lives matter... I haven't had that specific conversation with X, though I suspect he's the same"...

Apparently I was wrong, which, I realize in retrospect is what I should have expected, because I think the majority of people would have picked up on the poor taste of trivializing serious problems faced by real people. I want to say I think most people would have picked up on that faster than I did actually, since I think I'd seen these graphics before (I mean, months ago), and it just hadn't clicked in my mind, despite all the work I've done.

I tried to have a brief conversation with X about it, which went nowhere good...

Me: Hey, X. This girl just left, put off by the FLM designs... she asked if I was BLM or ALM.

X: [rolls eyes] Yeah that was my dad's big problem too, thinking people would be offended, and if they are, fuck 'em. I'm saying "all lives matter", even fictional ones.

(That last sentence is a huge problem for me, for reasons I think should be obvious.)

Me: "All lives matter" is intended to shut down people trying to address serious problems.

X: People don't know how to address problems... and to be honest, some of those people running in with the police deserve what they're getting.

(We're way into not-okay territory here and I've invested a huge amount of time and a notable amount of money in this event, and knowing now that X apparently has difficulty staying awake while driving on the freeway, I'm also concerned about his safety if I decided to just leave suddenly... but at this moment I'm not ready to get into what seems like is likely to devolve into a screaming match in front of everyone at the con.)

Me: the BLM movement only exists because there's a huge amount of injustice built into the system. When everything else is held equal, a black person on average receives 2-3 times more jail time than a white person, and that should never happen.

(I don't have reference for that specific figure on-hand -- please check my work and leave a link if you have one, whether I remembered it correctly or not. Thank you.)

X: [basically murmurred agreement]

I don't want to make any excuses for his diminishing of real-world problems, I think it's bad... I'm conflicted about how to address this problem for myself... I plan to publish photos of myself at the con, and the signs for those designs will be in the background... do I black them out? If I do that, am I enabling him?

I don't *think* he realizes what the problem is... I don't *think* he's deliberately racist. On the way back to the house from the convention he offered to buy me dinner at a shawarma place (I'd never had it -- it was good -- it actually reminded me of some southern cafeterias, although the seasoning and the decoration were a little different.)

The waitresses wore hijabs and he was familiar them (had been there many times), and treated them nice enough... though I will say that some of the things he says seem fairly insensitive in a general sense. For example, he makes a lot of objectifying comments about women, including for example, one of the shawarma waitresses, "[damn she's hot]... and great tits". (Of course, he's only seen her breasts 100% covered -- not even cleavage -- so it's a little odd to me to hear someone be so overtly objectifying of someone who's entire outward image is one of "I am not here for you to ogle".) And the whole day at the con was similar -- frequent mentions of "she's smokin' hot" or "that red head" or "I've never wanted to give wood to an elf so bad", which I tried not to encourage. (I like porn too, but my interest in potential partners isn't based on their looks.)

These are things I hadn't noticed in previous phone or online conversations. So I'm a bit conflicted... He's open enough to be friendly with the shawarma waitresses... but he's also interested in them to the point of sexual interest in women who're being very careful to be NOT sexy. So how confrontational should I be about "fantasy lives matter"?

I don't plan to share a table with him again if he's going to continue promoting them... I would hope he would eventually figure out that the phrase is likely to reduce his sales, even when a person might agree with his sentiment, because they don't want to buy a shirt that's going to get them into verbal fisticuffs with people. But this being his first event, and saying that he's already plunked down $1400 into it, it seems to me unlikely that he'll learn that soon. Though in honesty, it always feels like cold comfort to me when someone is doing the right thing only because they realize some kind of financial reward for it.

So should just not sharing tables in the future be where I leave it? Is it okay to accept that, "he's not a deliberate racist, just kind of an insensitive jerk" and just limit my involvement? As an autistic person who knows what it's like to be ostracized for being unintentionally insensitive, am I being too harsh if I say I feel like this is too much? Does that make me a hypocrite? And what about the fact that there are now photos of me in the act of affiliating myself with the creator who promoted "fantasy lives matter"?

Regardless of how it may impact my image, I'm trying to figure out what course of action will produce the best results for everyone -- that hopefully anyone who can become a better person will, regardless of how it impacts my image. Obviously I always have to think about my image, we all do, but that's a secondary concern. I feel like I should be willing to sacrifice my image if the alternative is being hypocritical, cruel, or even just unwilling to evolve or better myself.

Thanks for reading and helping me with this. I appreciate any advice you have.

- Sam

(Now I need to get about 6 hours sleep, because I spent too long composing this blog and have to be up early for the event tomorrow. Thank god my diabetes didn't trash my energy today, and fingers crossed I have the same luck tomorrow.)

UPDATE 9/17/2018

Maybe I should have waited until the end of the event before writing this blog, but the subject distresses me and I wanted to talk about it sooner than later. At the end of Friday, neither X or I had sold anything at the event. Saturday morning, X printed off about 4 shirts as samples to lay on the front of the table (good marketing), to show people that, "hey these pictures on the poster in the back go on t-shirts". It worked and over Saturday and Sunday, he sold at least a half-dozen shirts, most of them "Fantasy Lives Matter" shirts. So while there are some people who are offended by them, there are apparently also a large number of people excited by them (I think exclusively white people that I saw, although most of the attendees looked pretty white to me as well). ::sigh::

Over the course of the event, 27 new people signed up for our Woohooligan Weekly Dick Joke Advocate mailing list. I know many of those people were either indifferent to the FLM shirts or some may have even been excited by them... but I have no idea how many people may have simply avoided conversation with me all-together because of them.

I still have no plans to share another table with X. It's weird to me, because he's really sensitive about other things, like he kept profusely apologizing for falling asleep in the car because he apparently suffers from pretty bad road hypnosis. He's made the hour drive before, but I was concerned about him making the drive after a full day manning the table at the con. Meanwhile I also discovered he's got a huge chip on his shoulder about (of all things) shaking hands.

X: I hate it. I don't like people touching me.

Me: You know people are about 30% more likely to buy from you right?

X: You may be right, but I don't care. It was originally a symbol of distrust. Do you know where it came from?

Me: Yeah, it was originally a way of showing that you weren't armed, but it's evolved into a symbol of trust.

X: It's evolbed into a bullshit thing we do for no goddamn reason!

So to recap: shaking hands is tragic evidence of the decline of civilization, while Black Lives Matter is deluded and don't know how to address problems, and "many of them deserve what they're getting anyway".

I just can't fathom how a person can have that set of priorities when they go out of their way to eat shawarma and so forth and don't appear to be outwardly racist in any other way that I can tell.

His FLM shirts outsold mine by a wide margin, and frankly I don't care... or rather, I find it disheartening... and I'm not about to deliberately associate my work with it in the future. All people need justice, and if you think it through, you should realize that "all lives matter" is the actual meaning of "black lives matter". Saying "all lives matter" as a response is like saying of the condition of slaves, "slave owners have problems, too!" It takes air away from the importance of addressing a great deal of injustice in our country and I don't want to contribute to trivializing that in any way. Even if I stood to gain financially from it, I wouldn't do it.

I'm still not sure what else to do, beyond just not sharing con tables with him again, and would still appreciate hearing any thoughts you have on it. Thanks.

- Sam

#racism #public relations

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remelitalia · 4 years

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How to Get Google to Instantly Index Your New Website

Do you want more organic search traffic to your site?

I’m willing to bet the answer is yes – we all do!

Organic search traffic is critical for growing your website and business.

Some research claims around 53% of your site’s traffic can be attributed to organic search.

But the stats don’t matter much if your site doesn’t show up in the search results at all.

How do you get your new site or blog indexed by Google, Bing, and other search engines?

Well, you’ve got two choices.

You can take the “tortoise” approach – just sit back and wait for it to happen naturally, but this can take weeks or months.

(Trust me, I’ve been there before – not fun.)

Or you can make it happen now, giving you more time and energy to put towards increasing your conversion rate, improving your social presence — and, of course, writing and promoting great and useful content.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather get my sites indexed as quickly as possible because it gives me more time to build my audience.

These strategies are exactly how I grew this blog to over 600,000 monthly visitors as fast as I did!

Want to do the same thing?

Stick around, because I’m spilling the beans on everything I’ve learned about SEO and how to get your website indexed fast in this step-by-step guide!

I’m going to walk you through how to get Google to index y our website quickly, which will bring you more organic search traffic and higher rankings.

Let’s get started!

Why Do You Need Google to Index Your Site?

First, the obvious answer.

If you want your site to show up in the search results at all, then it needs to be indexed.

However, you don’t want your site to be indexed just once. You want the search engines to keep re-indexing your site.

Search engines like Google don’t just update automatically.

They rely on spiders — little bits of computer code that each search engine sends out to “crawl” the web (hence, “spider”).

You want an efficient, frequent crawl rate.

The spider’s job is to look for new stuff on the web and update the already indexed version of your site. That “new stuff” can be a new page on an existing site, a change to an existing page, or an entirely new site or blog.

Once the spider finds a new site or page, it needs to figure out what that new site or page is about.

Way back in the Wild Wild West of the early web, search engine spiders weren’t nearly as smart as they are today. You could force a spider to index and rank your page based on nothing more than how many times a particular search phrase (“keyword”) appeared on the page.

For today’s content success, you can’t rely on these old school search engine optimization strategies.

The keyword didn’t even have to be in the body of the page itself. Many people ranked for their biggest competitor’s brand name just by stuffing dozens of variations of that brand name in a page’s meta tags!

Fortunately for Google search users and ethical website owners, those days are long gone.

Today, keyword and meta tag stuffing will get you penalized, not rewarded. And meta keyword tags aren’t really part of the algorithm at all (though there are still good reasons to use them).

If you’re not careful, you could get your site kicked out of the index altogether — which means your site won’t rank for any keywords at all.

These days, Google is more concerned with the overall user experience on your site and the user intention behind the search — i.e., does the user want to buy something (commercial intent) or learn something (informational intent)?

They even made Page Experience a ranking factor.

Don’t get me wrong — keywords still matter. Other factors are also important — up to 200 altogether, according to Brian Dean of Backlinko. These include things like quality inbound links, social signals (though not directly), and valid code on all your pages.

None of that will matter if the spiders can’t tell the search engines your pages are there in the first place, meaning they won’t show up in search results.

That’s why website indexing is so important.

To put it simply, indexing is the spider’s way of gathering and processing all the data from pages and sites during its crawl around the web.

Frequent indexing improves your search results.

The spider notes new documents and changes, which are then added to the searchable index Google maintains. Those pages are only added if they contain quality content and don’t trigger any alarms by doing shady things like keyword stuffing or building a bunch of links from unreputable sources.

When the spider sees a change on your website, it processes both the content (text) on the page as well as the locations on the page where search terms are placed. It also analyzes the titles tag, meta tag, and alt attributes for images.

That spider then adds, or “indexes”, that content into Google.

That’s indexing in a nutshell. It is an essential webmaster tool.

When a search user comes along looking for information by typing in search keywords, Google’s algorithm goes to work. The algorithm then decides where to rank a page in comparison to all the other pages related to those keywords.

How often your site is indexed can affect your performance in search results. You want to make sure all your latest content is available for those searching and Google’s spiders at all times.

That’s the short and somewhat simplified version of how Google finds, analyzes, and indexes new sites like yours.

Many other search engines, like Bing or Yahoo, follow similar procedures, though there can be variations in the specifics as each has its own algorithm.

What Website Indexing Factors Matter?

You want an efficient index rate for your website.

That means you want search engine spiders to find your new content as quickly as possible after you hit publish.

You can check how often Google is crawling your pages by logging into Search Console.

Not set up with Google Search Console yet? Jump down to Step 2 to learn how to get your website set up.

In Search Console, click on your website. Then click on Settings > Crawl Stats > Open Report. You’ll see some graphs like this:

The first graph shows how often Google is crawling your site.

That graph — the “Crawl requests” one — shows how often Google is crawling my site each day.

As a rule of thumb, the more crawling the better.

There are some cases, however, where too much crawling can overload your server resources. Typically it’s the result of a server misconfiguration instead of an issue with Google’s spiders.

This is very rare though, so you probably won’t need to worry about this. Google allows you to change the crawl rate (only down, not up) if this is happening to you.

So how did I increase my crawl rate?

I’ve been posting a lot lately and updating older content, so Google is eager to get all my updates and changes as fast as it can. It’s learning to check in with me more often.

I also switched to a new web host in April that is much faster than my old one.

The faster your site loads, the faster Google can come in and index it!

Google wants to recommend the best websites to its users. It looks for sites that offer a good user experience. While that includes many factors, quality content and site loading speed is highly important.

To put it simply:

Faster site = better user experience.

Better user experience = higher search result rankings.

More important than how often Google indexes your site is how many pages it’s indexing. You want to ensure as many of the pages on your site as possible are indexed.

(Don’t worry, your sitemap will take care of that, which I cover in detail in Step 7.)

But first, let’s start at the beginning. The following 18 steps will guide you through everything you need to know about getting your website indexed.

You don’t necessarily need to do all 18 steps to have a well-indexed website, but if you’re wondering how to rank higher in Google, this is the only guide you’ll ever need!

Step 1: Is My Site Indexed Already?

Unless you’re starting a brand new site, your website is probably already indexed.

If you’re not sure, here’s how to find out.

The easiest way to check this is to search site:yourdomain.com in Google. If Google knows your site exists and has already crawled it, you’ll see a list of results similar to the one for NeilPatel.com in the screenshot below:

If Google hasn’t yet found your site, you’ll get no results at all, similar to this:

If your site is already indexed, that’s great, but there is likely room for improvement.

The rest of the steps in this guide will help you make sure that your site is indexed to its full potential.

Step 2: Install and Set Up Google Analytics & Search Console

If you’re not already familiar with these free Google tools, here’s a quick breakdown.

Google Analytics: Measures stats about your website like visitors, time spent on site, what pages they looked at, where they’re from, etc.

Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools): It allows you to monitor different aspects of your website like when it was last crawled, any indexing errors, security issues, etc.

Search Console also lets you manage some key aspects of how you appear in search results and manually submit sitemaps — I’ll cover all of this later on in this article.

But first, let’s get set up.

If you already have Google Analytics and Search Console, click here to skip ahead to Step 3: Create a content marketing strategy.

To set up Google Analytics, click here and sign in with your Google account.

This would be either your @gmail.com email address or your @mydomain.com email address if you use Google’s G Suite for Business service.

Then, click Sign Up.

Enter your website name and URL, then click Get Tracking ID at the bottom of the page.

You’ll see a page like this. Don’t panic!

There are a few ways to install Google Analytics on your website.

Google Analytics Setup

If you’re using WordPress or another content management system that is asking you for your Google Analytics Tracking ID, then you just need the number at the very top. In my case, it’s UA-98962030-1.

That’s not my real tracking ID! Just saying, don’t post that online! ?

The WordPress plugin Google Analytics by MonsterInsights is really easy to set up.

Just download it, upload the plugin to WordPress, activate it, and you’ll see this screen.

Press the blue “Authenticate” button and it walks you through the rest.

To set up the plugin, you need to have an Analytics profile already created, which we did in the previous step.

If you’re not using WordPress or want to add your Analytics code manually, here’s how to do that.

You need to put this code (in the red box) onto every single one of your website’s pages.

The easiest way to do this is to create one file with the code in it and then create a line of code on each of your website’s pages that pull in that file.

Piece of cake, right?

Don’t worry, here’s how to do that!

For this step, you need to be able to access your website files on your web hosting company’s server. This is commonly done via FTP.

Open up your FTP client (FileZilla is a great, free one) and login to your server. If you don’t have this information, you can create an FTP account in your web host’s cPanel, or just contact your web host to ask them for the information.

Your login information should look similar to this:

Once you’re connected, you’ll see a list of files and folders like this.

Open up a new text file (Notepad for Windows or TextEdit for Mac are fine for this). Make sure it’s set to Plain Text Only.

In TextEdit, you click on Format -> Make Plain Text to do that.

This is really important because word processors like Word can add formatting to the code that can mess up the coding on your site. When working with code, always use plain text.

Once you have your plain text document, paste the Google Analytics code. You’ll end up with this:

Save your file as analyticstracking.php. Make sure it has the .php extension on it and not .txt.

If your text editor saved it with the name “analyticstracking.php.txt” for some reason, just rename the file on your computer to “analyticstracking.php”.

Upload this file to your root directory via FTP (the first folder of your website).

You need to add one line of code for each page template you have. This “calls” the file we just made and ensures every page of your website that uses that template is tracked in Google Analytics.

To do that, download all your website PHP template files and edit them.

If you have one named header.php that loads on every page, you only need to do this once!

Download header.php.

Next, open up the downloaded file in your text editor.

Look for the </head> tag and the beginning of <body>, like this:

Insert one line of code right after the <body> tag.

Copy this code: <?php include_once(“analyticstracking.php”) ?>

And paste it here:

Save your header.php file, and reupload it to your website.

Done!

If you don’t have a header.php file, you need to repeat this process for each php page template you have on your website, like index.php, blog.php and so on.

If you use WordPress, you’re definitely at an advantage. All you need to do is install a plugin.

Okay, one more thing to set up and we’ll move on to Step 3.

Google Search Console Setup

Now that we have Analytics set up, it’s time to add our website to Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools).

Click here to go to the Search Console. Log in with your Google account.

You’ll see this screen:

Click “Start now.”

You’ll then need to verify that you own that domain. There are a few ways to do this.

By default, it may show you a verification option through your web host.

Click on the dropdown to find your domain name provider.

If yours isn’t on the list, you can press Other (at the bottom).

Search Console then asks you to create a TXT record, which involves an edit to your domain configuration.

Is this a little over your head? Not to worry, I’ve got a much easier way!

If you still want to add a TXT record though, here’s how.

Click on Alternate Methods at the top.

There are two easy ways to verify your domain: with Google Analytics or via an HTML file upload.

I’ll cover both of them.

To verify with Google Analytics, just select it and click Verify.

Google will check your Analytics account to make sure you are who you say you are, and if you are, you’ll see a success message. Make sure you’re using the same Google account with Search Console that you do with Analytics.

The process is still pretty easy with the HTML file upload method.

Click to download the file to your computer in step 1, then open up your FTP program again. Upload Google’s HTML file to your root directory.

Next, visit the URL Google gave you to make sure the file is there. In my case, that’s https://neilpatel.com/googlefba739b2a6dd0306.html.

If you uploaded it correctly, you’ll see the filename in your browser window.

Go back to Search Console and click Verify at the bottom.

That’s it!

Make sure to leave the HTML file on your server. It ensures that your website will stay verified with Search Console.

There are two more really important things you need to do now:

Add both the neilpatel.com and www.neilpatel.com versions of your domain

Set a preferred domain

Why do you have to do that, you ask?

It can cause crawl errors, which we are trying to avoid!

Adding the other version of your URL is easy – repeat the same process that I just explained. In the example above, I verified my neilpatel.com domain. So I would go into Search Console and do the exact same steps but use “neilpatel.com” instead.

Once you have both “yourdomain.com” and “www.yourdomain.com” added to Search Console, you need to set the preferred domain.

To do that, click on your website in Search Console.

At the top-right corner, click the gear icon and click Site Settings.

Select if you’d like your URLs displayed with the “www.” or without.

I’m going to show you all the awesome things you can do with Search Console later in this article, so keep that tab open!

But now, we need to get back to marketing fundamentals and talk about creating an SEO strategy for your content.

Step 3: Create a Content Marketing Strategy

It’s for your own benefit to have a written content marketing strategy that’s focused on search results.

But don’t take my word for it.

From the Content Marketing Institute:

“Those with a documented content marketing strategy:

Are far more likely to consider themselves effective at content marketing

Feel significantly less challenged with every aspect of content marketing

Consider themselves more effective in their use of all content marketing tactics and social media channels

Are able to justify spending a higher percentage of their marketing budget on content marketing”

All of those things are absolutely true. For me, I feel a lot more on track when I have a written plan of action that I can refer to and track my success.

My blogs and multiple businesses would not have grown as quickly as they did without having a written plan.

In addition to keeping you focused on your goals, a documented content strategy also helps you get your site’s pages indexed by creating new pages of content.

According to HubSpot’s “Not Another State of Marketing Report 2020” , 60 percent of content marketers said content is very important or extremely important to their overall strategy.

One study found that companies that use content marketing enjoy conversion rates that are six times higher.

Doing your best to publish valuable, interesting, and useful content and then doing everything you can to make sure that your potential customers see it.

Here’s an example.

When I create and publish a professional infographic on my site and it gets shared on another web page with a link back to my page, I get content marketing “credit” for both posts.

Since it’s an infographic, I’m more likely to engage my audience on both sites.

Infographics have one of the highest reader engagement rates. It’s been proven that most people spend longer looking at infographics than they do reading the text on the page.

But you’re totally reading this, right?!

Infographics get shared on social media about 3x more than any other type of content.

When you’re putting together your content marketing strategy, blogging definitely needs to be on the list.

But you also need to factor in content that you’ll publish on other websites. This not only helps grow your traffic but also helps with indexing speed and obtaining inbound links.

Here are some examples of offsite content to go into your plan:

Guest posts on other sites in your niche

Press releases submitted to sites that publish that kind of content

Articles on high-quality article directory sites (Note: Be careful here — the vast majority of article directories are not high quality and can actually hurt your brand, reputation, and SEO.)

Some reputable directories are Medium and HubPages.

Videos hosted on Vimeo or your YouTube channel

Of course, any content you put your name or brand on must be high quality and published on a reputable, authoritative site.

Otherwise, you’re defeating the purpose of search engine optimization and hurting your traffic and brand in the process.

Content that’s published on “spammy” sites with a link back to your site suggests to Google search results that your site is also spammy.

Examples of reputable sites to guest post on might be Forbes, Entrepreneur, Smashing Magazine, etc. These are well-known websites with a reputation for quality content, which is exactly what you want to be associated with your brand.

Not so good places to post? Sites full of low-quality red flags: cluttered with ads, lots of grammatical or spelling mistakes, or unknown in the industry you’re trying to target.

I don’t want to name any names here, but your common sense should be enough to tell you what a spammy site is. For example, a site named “neilsbestmarketingadvice101.tumblr.com” is probably not going to do much for you, right?

A well-thought-out content marketing plan helps you avoid getting tripped up in the mad rush to publish more content. It puts you in the driver’s seat of search engine optimization so you can focus on generating leads and increasing your conversion rate.

Creating a written content strategy doesn’t have to be difficult.

Here’s the framework I use for mine:

What are your goals? Specify SMART goals and how you’ll measure your progress (i.e., metrics).

Who is your target audience? Customer profiles or personas are essential to understanding your audience and what they want/need.

What types of content will you produce? You want to make sure you’re delivering the type of content that your target audience wants to see.

Where will it be published? Of course, you’ll be hosting your own content on your website, but you may also want to reach out to other sites or utilize platforms such as YouTube, LinkedIn, and Slideshare.

How often will you publish your content? It’s far better to produce one well-written, high-quality article a week consistently than to publish every day for a week and then publish nothing for a month. Consistency is key.

What systems will you adopt for publishing your content? Systems are basically just repeatable routines and steps to get a complex task completed. They’ll help you save time and write your content more quickly, so you can stay on schedule. Anything that helps you publish content in less time without sacrificing quality will improve your bottom line.

What tools will you use? Include the blogging/content tools and technology you’ll use and how they fit into your system.

Once you have your content marketing plan documented, you’ll find it easier to publish great content on a consistent schedule. This will help your site’s new web pages get indexed faster.

Step 4: Start Blogging

Why do you need a blog?

It’s simple: Blogs are hard-working SEO machines. Blog content gets crawled and indexed more quickly than static pages.

Blogs also bring in more traffic. Businesses that blog regularly generate 55% more visitors to their sites than those that don’t.

Blogging works for every kind of business, industry, or niche, as well as for almost all business models — even B2C and e-commerce sites.

Don’t be afraid of committing to a blog.

Yes, it does require consistent effort. You do have to write (or outsource) high-quality, in-depth blog posts on a regular basis.

The rewards, I’ve found, are absolutely worth it.

If you have an ecommerce site, blogging doesn’t have to be terribly complex or difficult.

For example, when you create a new product page, write and publish a blog post about the new product. Add quality images of the product and link to the product page. This helps the product page get indexed more quickly by search engines.

Another great blogging strategy for ecommerce is to write a post every time a customer asks you a question.

For more of a sales-oriented strategy, share that blog post link with other bloggers and influencers to get the word out. Maybe they’ll want to feature your product on their blogs, which again is a great source of links and traffic and will positively impact your crawl rate.

Step 5: Use Internal Links on Your Website

Internal links, i.e. linking to pages on your own website, is another great way to get indexed quickly and increase your position in organic search results.

One very obvious source of internal links is your website’s navigation.

It’s important to structure your website navigation in such a way that it makes sense to Google.

Your navigation should follow a predictable flow like Homepage -> Category -> Sub Page.

All elements should be obviously related. So if you are a web designer, your navigation might look like this.

Homepage -> Web Design Services -> WordPress Design

See how those are all related and make sense?

Another key factor is to structure your URLs properly. Google’s rule of thumb is for them to be as simple and straightforward as possible.

So if it makes sense to you, a human, it should make sense to Google too.

Another great way to link to your content is in blog posts.

People typically link phrases in their blogs over to relevant topics, like if I wanted to offer you more information on URL structuring.

Or, I could create a line like this:

Related: Does URL Structure Even Matter? A Data Driven Answer

This builds links, which causes Google’s spiders to come back and crawl those pages again. Also, it positively adds to the user experience. Your readers will appreciate the further resources.

Remember to keep user experience in mind at all times. It goes hand in hand with SEO. Google has all these rules and ways it works because it’s trying to deliver the best results to its users and give them the answers they’re looking for.

You should be focused on the same thing!

Step 6: Promote Social Sharing of Your Content

Naturally, getting people to share your content on social media is a good thing. Pretty sure I don’t need to convince you about that!

It exposes your content to new people, attracts them to your website, and it’s the kind of content people want to see the most.

But sharing your posts on social media also has SEO benefits, because it creates links back to your content.

Which, if you’ve been paying attention… tells Google’s spiders to go index your site

Bonus points if you already guessed that.

There is some debate out there about just how much social media links factor into organic search rankings.

Google has mixed statements on the subject, saying at first in 2015 they did not factor in social media posts to organic search ranking at all and then later saying they did.

“Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article.”

Matt Cutts of former Google fame said a few years back:

I filmed a video back in May 2010 where I said that we didn’t use “social” as a signal, and at the time, we did not use that as a signal, but now, we’re taping this in December 2010, and we are using that as a signal.

Bing, on the other hand, has been very clear about how it uses social media links in search result rankings, known as “social signals.”

Many marketers believe social signals are a considerable ranking factor, and I’m one of them.

Social sharing has helped me grow my blog significantly. When I started NeilPatel.com, I started from nothing and quickly grew my audience to 60,000 monthly readers within 2 months.

Now I average over 20 million monthly visits.

I attribute a lot of my success to social sharing and the positive SEO growth I got from social signals, links, and increased speed of page indexing.

When it comes down to it, social sharing has many other benefits for your website anyway, so just do it!

Step 7: Add a Sitemap Plugin to get Google to Index Your Site

First, let’s talk about what a sitemap is.

You’ve undoubtedly seen the word “sitemap” before – but maybe you never knew exactly what it meant and how it relates to search engine optimization.

A sitemap is a file that tells Google about the files on your website, including how they relate to each other. This makes it easier for Google to crawl and index your site.

The sitemap is basically a list (in XML format) of all the pages on your site. Its primary function is to let search engines know when something’s changed – either a new web page or changes on a specific page – as well as how often the search engine should check for changes.

Do sitemaps affect your search rankings? They can, but only slightly.

They do help your site get indexed more quickly with a more efficient crawl rate.

In today’s world of search, there are a lot of SEO myths you need to be wary of. But one thing remains the same: all things being equal, great content will rise to the top, just like cream.

Sitemaps help your content get crawled and indexed so it can rise to the top of SERPs more quickly, according to the Google Webmaster Blog.

In Google’s own words, “Submitting a Sitemap helps you make sure Google knows about the URLs on your site.”

Is it a guarantee your site will be indexed immediately? No. But it is definitely an effective webmaster tool that helps in that process.

Casey Henry wondered just how much sitemaps would impact crawl rate and indexing, so he decided to conduct a little experiment.

Casey talked to one of his clients who ran a fairly popular blog using both WordPress and the Google XML Sitemaps Generator WordPress plugin (more on that below).

With the client’s permission, Casey installed a tracking script, which would track the actions of Googlebot on the site. It also tracked when the bot accessed the sitemap, when the sitemap was submitted, and each page that was crawled. This data was stored in a database along with a timestamp, IP address, and the user agent.

The client just continued his regular posting schedule (about two or three posts each week).

Casey called the results of his experiment nothing short of “amazing” as far as search engine optimization is concerned.

But judge for yourself: When no sitemap was submitted, it took Google an average of 1,375 minutes to find, crawl, and index the new content.

When a sitemap was submitted? That average plummeted to 14 minutes.

How often should you tell Google to check for changes by submitting a new sitemap? There’s no set-in-stone rule.

However, certain kinds of content call for more frequent crawling and indexing.

For example, if you’re adding new products to an ecommerce site and each has its own product page, you’ll want Google to check in frequently, increasing the crawl rate. The same is true for sites that regularly publish hot or breaking news items that are constantly competing in search engine optimization queries.

But there’s a much easier way to go about the sitemap creation and submission process. If you’re using WordPress, simply install and use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

Its settings allow you to instruct the plugin on how frequently a sitemap should be created, updated, and submitted to search engines. It can also automate the process for you, so that whenever you publish a new page, the sitemap gets updated and submitted.

Other sitemap tools you can use include the XML Sitemaps Generator, an online tool that should work for any type of website.

Once you have your sitemap, you want to submit it to Google Search Console, which we’ll cover next.

Step 8: Submit a Sitemap to Search Console

It’s crucial to ensure your sitemap is up to date with Google Search Console. I like to go in once every 2 weeks, or at the very least monthly, and update it.

Not signed up for Google Search Console yet? Head back to Step 2 to see how.

Click the URL to go to the Dashboard for that site. On the left, under “Index” click “Sitemaps.” You’ll see the sitemaps already submitted to Google as well as add a new sitemap.

For the next step, you need the URL of your sitemap. If you’re using a plugin for WordPress, that information will be available in the plugin’s settings.

Typically, the URL is yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.

As I mentioned above, you can also use a website like XML-Sitemaps.com to create one. To do that, just enter your URL and choose a change frequency time.

The change frequency just tells Google how often it should index your site. It’s merely a suggestion to Google, and it’s up to the spider to determine when it will come back to index your site again.

Once it gives you the sitemap.xml file, upload that to your website via FTP.

Once you have your sitemap URL, enter it into Google Search Console.

Once you submit it, you’ll see this at the bottom of the page.

Once Google is finished indexing it, the Processed column will change from Pending to the date it was indexed.

As you can see, only 294 out of my 473 web pages were indexed! Hopefully, the spider picks up more of them on this crawl. However, don’t be alarmed if you see similar stats — some of those pages are probably ones you don’t want to be indexed anyway (see Step 17 for details!).

Make a habit of submitting a new sitemap at least every month.

You can also use Bing’s Webmaster Tools to do the same for Bing. It’s good to cover all of your bases, especially since Bing is the second most popular search engine after Google!

Step 9: Create Social Media Channels

Do you have social media profiles set up for your site or blog? If not, now’s the time.

Why? Because as we learned in Step 6, one component of search engine optimization is paying attention to social signals.

Those signals can prompt the search engines to crawl and index your new site.

What’s more, social signals will help you rank your pages higher in the search results.

It’s obvious by now that a solid social media marketing plan helps SEO. But social profiles for your website also give you another place to add links to your site or blog.

Twitter profiles, Facebook pages, LinkedIn profiles or company pages, Pinterest profiles, YouTube channels, and especially Google+ profiles or pages — all of these are easy to create and the ideal places to add links pointing to your website.

If you don’t want to create new profiles on social sites for your new site or blog, you can alternatively just add the new site’s link to your existing profiles to increase the crawl rate.

I do, however, highly recommend creating new profiles for projects. Aside from being good for SEO, it will be great for branding.

This probably goes without saying, but if you’re making those social media channels, be prepared to update them regularly with new content, too.

Step 10: Use robots.txt

If you’re not an expert coder or developer, you might have seen a file called “robots.txt” in your domain’s files and wondered what it is and what it does.

The “what it is” part is very simple. It’s a basic, plain text file that should reside in the root directory of your domain. If you’re using WordPress, it’ll be in the root directory of your WordPress installation.

The “what it does” part is a little more complex. Basically, robots.txt is a file that gives strict instructions to search engine bots about which pages they can crawl and index — and which pages to stay away from.

When search spiders find this file on a new domain, they read the instructions in it before doing anything else.

If they don’t find a robots.txt file, the search bots assume that you want every page crawled and indexed.

Now you might wonder “Why on earth would I want search engines not to index a page on my site?” That’s a good question!

In short, it’s because not every page that exists on your site should be counted as a separate page for search result purposes. (More on this topic later!)

Your first step is to confirm that your new site has a robots.txt file. You can do this either by FTP or by clicking on your File Manager via CPanel (or the equivalent, if your hosting company doesn’t use CPanel).

If it’s not there, you can create one quite easily using a plain text editor like Notepad.

Note: It’s very important to use only a plain text editor, and not something like Word or WordPad, which can insert invisible codes into your document that will really mess things up.

WordPress bloggers can optimize their robots.txt files by using a reliable WordPress plugin like Yoast’s SEO plugin.

The format of a robots.txt file is pretty simple. The first line usually names a user agent, which is just the name of the search bot – e.g., Googlebot or Bingbot. You can also use an asterisk (*) as a wildcard identifier for all bots. This type of WordPress plugin is an effective webmaster tool.

Next is a string of Allow or Disallow commands. These tell search engines which parts they should crawl and index (“Allow”) and which parts they should ignore (“Disallow”).

These rules ensure that only the pages you want to get indexed end up in search results.

So to recap: the function of robots.txt is to tell search engines what to do with the content/pages on your site. But does it help get your site indexed?

Harsh Agrawal of ShoutDreams Media says:

Yes.

He was able to get sites indexed within 24 hours using a combination of strategies, including robots.txt and on-page SEO techniques.

All that being said, it’s crucial to be very cautious when revising your robots.txt file, because it’s easy to make a mistake if you don’t know what you’re doing.

An incorrectly configured file can hide your entire site from search engines. This is the exact opposite of what you want! You must understand how to edit your robots.txt file properly to prevent hurting your crawl rate.

You may want to hire an experienced developer to take care of the job and leave this one alone if you’re not comfortable with the risk of hurting your SEO.

If you do want to try it out yourself, you can use the Google robots.txt tool to make sure your file is correctly coded.

Step 11: Index Your Site With Other Search Engines

You can also take the direct approach and submit your site URL to search engines.

Before you do this, you should know that there’s a lot of disagreement about manual site URL submission as a method of getting a site indexed.

Some bloggers suggest that it’s at least unnecessary, if not outright harmful.

In most cases, if your site has been up longer than a week, search engines have found it already. Submitting manually is pointless and paying companies to do it for you is robbery.

Manual search engine submission may also be harmful when you’re submitting your site to free submission sites that offer to list your site on multiple search engines. Those links can be low-quality and negatively impact your SEO.

See all these random directories and websites it’s going to submit your site to?

If those sites are seen as spammy by Google, having links to your site from them will hurt your SEO rankings. Google will penalize you for being “attached” to those sites.

Since there are other methods that work efficiently, most bloggers and site owners ignore this step.

On the other hand, it doesn’t take long and it can’t hurt your SEO as long as you’re just submitting to Google, Bing, Yahoo, or other very reputable websites.

To submit your site URL to Google, simply ask Google to recrawl your URLs via a sitemap update or use the URL inspection tool.

Note: Google used to let you directly submit URLs for indexing, but no longer does.

Step 12: Share Your Content on Aggregators

Content aggregators are websites that act as a search engine for user-submitted content.

What that means is people submit their content to these sites, then visitors can search and find content from people all over the world. They are huge networks of searchable content.

Well-known examples are Reddit and Medium.

Submitting your content on aggregators is a great source of links and new exposure, just like social media.

Some other aggregators you can share your content on are:

Quora

Slideshare

BlogEngage

Digg

Scoop.it

Medium is also a great place to share your content. For more detailed information, check out my full guide for growing your website traffic with Medium.

Step 13: Share Your Website Link Everywhere

Another simple way to get links to your new site or blog is through your own social status updates.

Of course, these links will be nofollow, but they’ll still count for indexing alert purposes, since we know that Google and Bing, at least, are tracking social signals from web pages.

The old saying “your network is your net worth” also applies here. If you’re just starting out, your first customers could come from family, friends or people they know, so don’t be shy about sharing your new website on your own personal social media accounts.

If you’re on Pinterest, select a high-quality image or screenshot from your new site.

Add the URL and an optimized description (i.e., make sure you use appropriate keywords for your site) and pin it to either an existing board or a new one you create for your site.

I love the way Whole Foods uses Pinterest to engage with its target audience (e.g. foodies and natural recipe seekers). They have boards for every topic, including current holidays and seasonal trends.

If you’re on YouTube, get creative! Record a short screencast video introducing your site and highlighting its features and benefits. Then add the URL in the video description.

Social Media Examiner suggests putting your URL in the first line of the description.

I also recommend using the right keywords in your title and descriptions.

If you have an existing email list from another business that’s related to the same niche as your new site, you can send out an email blast to the entire list introducing your new site and including a link.

Jon Morrow of Copyblogger fame did this with his new website, Unstoppable.me. He’s built an email list of thousands of people from his multiple businesses and successfully leveraged that to drive traffic to his new venture.

When he published his first post, he sent out an email to his subscribers from his other websites to let them know about his new site.

He also used his bio section on his site SmartBlogger to drive traffic to his new blog.

His first post on Unstoppable.me earned over 60,000 Facebook shares and 3,000 Twitter shares in just the first month.

Finally, don’t forget about your personal email account. Add your new URL and site name to your email signature. It’s simple, but it works.

Step 14: Set Up an RSS Feed

What is RSS?

RSS is an automated feed of your website content that’s updated when you publish a new blog post. It stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, and it’s good for both users and site owners.

How does it impact indexing and crawling?

Well, before we get to that, let’s clear one thing up now: Many think RSS is dead.

The number of users has been steadily dropping since Google killed Google Reader back in 2013. I think RSS is evolving, rather than dying.

RSS generally helps increase readership and conversion rate, but it can also help get your pages indexed.

To users, RSS feeds deliver a much easier way to consume a large amount of content in a shorter amount of time.

Users can subscribe to your RSS feed in their favorite RSS reader and receive your new posts automatically. Popular RSS readers are Feedly and Feeder.

As a site owner, you get instant distribution of new content and a way for readers to subscribe to you without having to give up their email address, which some people don’t like to do.

While you still want to focus most of your efforts on building your email list, offering an RSS feed subscription improves user experience by giving privacy-conscious people another option for subscribing to you.

When considering an RSS feed, there are a few best practices you should follow:

Decide if you want to show full post content or excerpts. If you write long content (over 2,000 words) you should most likely choose to feature only excerpts in your RSS feed.

Make sure your feed includes images, otherwise your subscribers could be missing out on valuable infographics or other graphics required to understand the post.

Setting up your RSS feed with Feedburner (Google’s own RSS management tool) helps notify Google that you have a new blog post or page that’s ready to be crawled and indexed.

To create an RSS feed for your site, head over to Feedburner. Sign in with your Google account.

Enter your URL into the box and click Next.

Give your feed a title and a Feedburner URL (this will be the public address of your RSS feed).

You’ll then see a success message with your new Feedburner URL. To get people to subscribe to it, just link over to that URL.

For example, you could have a button on your website saying “Subscribe via RSS” and link to that URL.

Step 15: Submit Your Website to Directories

You probably already know that submitting your new URL to blog directories can help your site “get found” by new potential users. Didn’t I just tell you not to do that a few steps ago?

Here’s the thing — it can your website be indexed faster — if you go about it the right way.

Once upon a time, free blog directories littered the digital landscape. There were literally hundreds – if not thousands – of these sites and most provided little to no value to blog readers.

The quality problem got so bad that, in 2012, Google purged many free site directories from its index, properly dropping the rankings of web pages with little content value.

Moz examined the issue by analyzing 2,678 directories, finally concluding that “[o]ut of the 2,678 directories, only 94 were banned – not too shabby.

However, there were 417 additional directories that had avoided being banned, but had been penalized.”

So what’s the answer?

If you’re going to submit to directories, then make sure you only submit to decently ranked and authoritative directories.

Best-of lists of directories compiled by industry and authority blogs can help you weed out the good from the bad, but make sure the list you’re using is current.

For instance, this one from Harsh Agrawal has been updated as recently as 2019.

Other options that you might want to explore are TopRank, which has a huge list of sites you can submit your RSS feed and blog to; Technorati, which is one of the top blog directories around; and — after you’ve published a decent amount of high-quality content — the Alltop subdomain for your niche or industry.

Submitting to high-quality sites with decent Domain Authority ratings can not only open your content up to a whole new audience but also provide incoming links that can nudge the search engines to crawl and index your site.

An easy way to submit your site to several directories at once is to use a free service called Ping O Matic.

Ping O Matic notifies directories that your website has changed, and that they should go index it. It takes about 30 seconds to do, and here’s how.

Fill out your blog name, homepage URL and RSS URL (if you have one), like this. Under Services to Ping, select the directories that make sense for your site:

Click Send Pings and you’re done.

Step 16: Check for Google Crawl Errors Frequently

This step is really important for maintaining your indexing frequency. I like to check for crawl errors at least once a month for my websites.

To check for crawl errors, open up Search Console.

On the left, click on Settings > Crawl Stats > Open Report.

The crawl stats page is where you find out how often Google is indexing your website, and it’s definitely something to keep an eye on.

For example, if my results are going up that meaning Google is indexing me more often now — a good thing. But if your graph is trending downward, that may be a sign you need to post more content or submit a new sitemap.

Next, look under “Index” and click “Coverage.”

This screen will show you any errors the Googlebot ran into when crawling your site, like 404 errors.

Here’s what you should be monitoring at least once a month:

Crawl errors

Average response time

Crawl stats

Another great tool to take advantage of is the Structured Data Tester. Google uses structured data to better understand what your website is about.

Structured data basically means you’re providing relevant information to Google to help answer users’ questions.

Here’s an example. I searched for concerts near me.

This website used structured data to tell Google these listings would be helpful for me, and they display underneath their normal SEO page title and description.

So how do you get that too?

It’s pretty advanced, so this may be another item you want to outsource to a developer.

You can see all the options for structured data in Google’s Search Gallery.

Google also has a simplified tool for helping non-developers add structured data to their sites. Go to the Structured Data Markup Helper, and enter your website information.

Then you just have to highlight the element on the webpage that you want to turn into structured data.

From the menu that pops up, you can add attributes like Author, Date Published, Image, URL, Article Body and so on.

If you’ve implemented structured data, you can use the testing tool to validate it.

Again, this is pretty complicated stuff, so unless you’re a developer, it’s probably best to hire a professional to take care of this for you.

Step 17: Make Sure Pages that Shouldn’t be Indexed Aren’t

There are some pages you don’t want Google or other search engines to index. Here are the pages you don’t want to show up in search:

Thank you pages: These are usually pages that someone lands on after signing up for your mailing list or downloading an ebook. You don’t want people to skip the line and get right to the goods! If these pages get indexed, you could be losing out on leads filling out your form.

Duplicate content: If any pages on your site have duplicate content, or slightly varied, like a page you’re doing an A/B test for, you don’t want that to get indexed.

Say, for instance, that you’ve got two pages with the same content on your site. Maybe it’s because you’re split-testing visual features of your design, but the content of the two pages is exactly the same.

Duplicate content, as you probably know, is potentially a problem for SEO. So, one solution is to use your robots.txt file to instruct search engines to ignore one of them.

Here’s how to make sure that pages you want to exclude don’t get indexed.

Option 1: In Your robots.txt File

Remember that robots.txt file we made back in Step 10? You can add directives in it to tell search engines not to index a file or a whole directory. That can be handy when you want to make sure an entire section of your site remains unindexed.

To add this, open up your robots.txt file.

See Step 10 for how to do that if you need a refresher.

To block a page from being indexed, enter this code into your robots.txt file.

Disallow: /nameoffolder/

This blocks everything in that folder. Alternatively, you can just block one single file.

Disallow: /folder/filename.html

Save it, reupload to your server and that’s it. For more information on robots.txt files, check out robotstxt.org.

Option 2: Use a nofollow or noindex Links

This option is very simple. When you’re creating a link on your site, just add either a nofollow or noindex tag to the <a href=””> link.

First, let’s cover what they mean.

Nofollow: Tells Google not to crawl the links on that page.

That means is if I link over to your website from neilpatel.com and use a nofollow link, none of my link juice (or, domain authority) will be passed over to you.

Noindex: Tells Google not to index the page, even though the spider can see it. It won’t be added to search results.

You can use both at the same time.

Here’s an example.

If you’re linking over to a special landing page for an event you’re having for VIPs only, and don’t want that page to appear in search results, you would link to it with a noindex tag.

That would look like this: Check out my <a href=”/neilscoolevent.html” rel=”noindex”>super cool event</a>.

Even if people search for “Neil’s super cool event” in Google, that page won’t show up.

(You will, however, get a lot of Neil Diamond tribute concert options.)

Most often, you’ll want to use the noindex tag. You usually only want to use nofollow for affiliate links, links someone has paid you to create, or you receive a commission from. This is because you don’t want to “sell links”.

When you add nofollow, it tells Google not to pass on your domain authority to those sources. Essentially, it keeps the web free of corruption when it comes to linking.

If you want to make sure an entire page is excluded from search results from all sources, instead of just including the nofollow or noindex tags in your links, follow the steps below.

First, open up the page’s HTML.

If you use a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress, you can edit this file using Yoast to add a noindex tag.

If you don’t have a CMS like WordPress, you can download the page you need to edit via FTP.

Not sure how to use FTP? Jump back to Step 2 where I explain it!

Click on the page you’re wanting to exclude from search results, and download it.

Open it up in a text editor. Notepad for Windows or TextEdit on Mac are great for this. Look for the </head> tag, like this:

Right before that </head> tag, you want to insert ONE of the following pieces of code.

If you want the page to be excluded in search results, but still follow the links on the page, use:

If you want the page to be included in search results, but for Google to not follow the links on the page, use:

And, if you want the page to be excluded from search AND for Google to not follow links, use:

Like this:

Step 18: Make a Plan for Updating Old Content

So what have we learned about indexing so far?

Every time you update your website, Google wants to crawl it more often.

A great way to capitalize on that is to make a plan to regularly update your old content.

That’s actually what I’m doing right now with this mega post!

This post was originally published in 2015 and I make a point of updating it at least every few months, or when major Google changes happen, to keep it current.

Information gets outdated easily, especially in the fast-paced marketing world. Each month, I make a list of my older posts and select a few to update with fresh information and tips. By editing at least a few posts a month, I ensure my content stays relevant and helpful.

For the best impact on your indexing speed, try and update your website at least three times each week. Those three things could be posting one new blog post and updating content in two old posts.

Updating at least three times a week tells Google it better check in with you often to ensure it has the latest version of your site.

All that indexing, and new information, means that updating your old posts can increase your organic search traffic by 111%!

Here are some easy ways you can update your old content.

Check for outdated facts or terms: For example, this post referred to Google Webmaster Tools when it’s now called Search Console.

Link to fresh information sources: If you wrote a post about SEO in 2013 and used data from the same year in your post, that’s fine back then, but not in 2017. Update your points and supporting information to be recent.

Broken links/new links: Check for broken links and fix them, or change any links in your post to better sources, if needed. For example, I may redirect old links to fresh, new content on my own site.

Link to your other content: Include links to new posts or relevant content you’ve published since the original post. Most bloggers do it like this:

Related: Is SEO Dead?

Update your viewpoints: This is important. Go through old posts and update your recommendations to more current ones, if needed. Things change! So should the solutions you’re offering people.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this in-depth guide to getting your website indexed!

I know it’s a lot to take in. I didn’t know half this stuff when I started blogging.

With my first blog, I installed Google Analytics and that was it!

Of course, back then we didn’t have as many options for improving our SEO ranking or indexing, and it wasn’t driven by a complex algorithm like it is now.

That’s why I wrote this guide. It’s so important to educate yourself on SEO and indexing when starting a new website, especially with all the competition out there.

It is possible to rank on page one and “beat the big guys”, but it takes a lot of work and research to get there.

The best advice I have is this:

Keep learning and staying on top of industry news. Things change so quickly, especially when it comes to search engines.

Do your research on SEO and double-check any new suggested technique with your own independent research before trying it.

Mmake sure you’re updating your site frequently — not just with new content, but updating old posts too. It keeps Google coming back to crawl your site frequently and keeps those posts relevant for new visitors.

Next, make a digital marketing plan.

Write down your content marketing plan, including how you’ll monitor your indexing, analytics, and how you will update old information on your site. It wouldn’t have been possible for me to grow as quickly as I did without a written plan.

Finally, get professional SEO help if you need it. Not all business owners have the time to stay on top of marketing, especially since it changes so fast. A professional can often get results much faster — and actually save you money in the long run.

What crawling and indexing tactics have you tried? What were your results?

The post How to Get Google to Instantly Index Your New Website appeared first on Neil Patel.

Original content source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/google-index/ via https://neilpatel.com

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oneklickss · 4 years

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Learn the best SEO practices From Best SEO company in Pune

Learn the best SEO practices From Best SEO company in Pune which they follow to beat the competition Web advancement best practices are a lot of tasks expected to help improve a webpage's web list rankings. Normal site smoothing out prescribed procedures recollect for page improvement, investigating expressions, and building backlinks to a site. Put another way:

There are 1,000,000 things you can do to get higher Google rankings (tallying advanced SEO techniques and procedures).

In any case, it.'s fundamental to get the basics down first.

All things considered: you need to guarantee that your site follows current SEO best practices. That is the foundation.

By then, when you get your foundation set up, dive into new and advanced methodologies.

With that, here are the 10 most huge SEO best practices you need to know in 2021:

1. The main Keyword needs to be added Early On In Your Content

For Example “SEO company in Pune”

You need to use your watchword a little bundle of times on your page.

Nonetheless, you may not understand that the territory of your watchword also has any sort of impact.

Specifically, you need to indicate your rule expression on any occasion once at the most noteworthy purpose of your page.

Why does this have any kind of effect?

Google puts more weight on terms that appear at the most noteworthy purpose of a site page.

2. Form Unique Titles, Descriptions, and Content

The evading duplicate substance is maybe the principle of SEO best practice to recall.

Surely, Google has communicated that you should avoid "duplicate or close duplicate interpretations of your substance across your site."

Additionally, this standard applies to each piece of substance on your site, including:

Title names

Meta Description

Sitemap

Landing pages

Image alt text

Category pages

Essentially: in case you convey a page on your site, the substance on that page should be 100% exceptional.

In case you run a little blog with a presentation page and a ton of blog sections, this standard is very easy to follow.

Regardless, on the off chance that you're an online business site page owner with countless things, creating uncommon substance for each page can be dubious.

Fascinating yet advocated, in spite of all the difficulty.

In the event that you're encountering trouble forming content for each page, consider joining pages that have tantamount substance together. Or then again use the endorsed tag.

3. Improve Your Title Tag for SEO

Concerning on-page SEO, your title tag is KEY.

Here's the way to exploit your page's title tag:

Front-load Your Main Keyword: "Front-load" essentially suggests that you start your title tag with your goal expression.

Why is this huge?

For sure, web records give close thought to the terms that you use in your title tag. Which is the explanation you need your watchword in your page title?

However, what you can't deny is that Google furthermore puts more highlight on words and articulations that show up as it so happens in your title tag.

So if it looks good, start your title off with the watchword that you need to rank for.

For example, I as of now rank #1 for the unreasonably genuine term "online business SEO".

Likewise, my title name starts with that unmistakable articulation.

Every so often it's unfeasible to use your watchword that as it so happens because it will make your title name look unusual. Really, site improvement is critical. Regardless, your title marks ought to be significant for customers too.

(More on that later)

In the event that you're not prepared to start your title tag off with a watchword, no biggie. Basically, recollect your watchword as in front of the timetable as you can.

For example, this page is redesigned around the expression "Site enhancement framework".

I couldn't figure out a way to deal with join the watchword "Site improvement system" genuinely first thing in my title. So I just used my watchword as in front of timetable as could be normal considering the present situation.

It's off-base at the start. However, it's underlying enough so that Google can see that my page is doubtlessly about the "Site improvement method".

Use One Keyword Per Title: Google has been genuinely clear on this.

They needn't bother with you to stuff your title with a lot of different expressions.

Taking everything into account, you need to use one rule expression in your title. Additionally, if your page is first class, you'll regularly rank for that watchword… and lots of others.

For example, this page on my site is improved around the articulation: "expression research".

Did I improve my page by around 630 expressions? No way!

Taking everything into account, I improved my page (and title) around ONE huge expression. Likewise, Google generally managed the rest.

Form Compelling, Shareable Titles: Your title names should make people need to tap on your page to discover extra.

Why?

Exactly when loads of people to tap on your result in Google, you can end up with higher rankings for that term.

Which is the explanation, when my SEO-stuff is managed, I by then start improving my title for snaps and offers.

Toward the day's end:

I endeavor to form title marks that are captivating, persuading, and push people to share.

For example, this once-over of substance displaying instruments has an eye-getting title.

4. Overhaul Your Site's Loading Speed

Most of the SEO agencies in Pune trying to improve their clients loading speed.

Google usually doesn't talk straightforwardly about the situating segments in their computation.

So when they chatter about a specific situating sign, you KNOW it's not kidding.

Site stacking speed is one of those exceptional situating factors.

Which is the explanation I firmly recommend making your site load as quick as could sensibly be normal.

(Especially on PDAs.)

Your underlying advance is to benchmark your site's present stacking speed. That way, you understand where you're at before you start making changes.

I recommend the super-steady Page Speed Insights instrument.

Regardless, here are several different ways you can improve your site's stacking speed.

Compress Images: This is a significant one. Pictures will all in all make up most of a page's size (with respect to KB).

Use Lightweight Themes: Bulky WordPress points can back things off. So if your subject isn't smoothed out for speed, consider changing to one that is.

Use Lazy Loading: Lazy stacking pictures can uphold your site's stacking speed significantly or more. The disadvantage is that photos show up as customers peer down the page, which isn't phenomenal for UX. So it's a tradeoff.

Use a CDN: CDNs serve pictures and other media on your site on specialists that are close to your customers.

Track Your Results With The Google Search Console

Most of the Best SEO Company in Pune are using the Google Search Console In case you don't have the Google Search Console game plan, you're flying outwardly impeded with your SEO.

The Search Console takes after a live dashboard that discloses to you how your site is getting along in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

6. Improve Images for SEO

Picture SEO isn't just for situating in Google Images.

Google starting late nitty-gritty that fittingly overhauled pictures can help your pages rank higher in Google web search.

The Best SEO Company in Pune is using at least one image. So in case you use pictures on your page, you need to guarantee they're improved for SEO.

Fortunately, this is REALLY basic. You ought to just recall these two picture SEO best practices.

Name Your Images With Descriptive Filenames: Google can't "see" pictures (yet). Furthermore, your image's filename is one thing that supports them to understand the substance in your image.

For example, assume you have an image of hotcakes on your site.

7. Use Internal Linking

Inward associating is one of the easiest SEO best practices to use.

You ought to just add an association beginning with one page on your site then onto the following page on your site.

In light of everything, you would basically lean toward not to add a ton of unpredictable internal associations. Surely, sporadic inside associating is likely in a way that is superior to no inward interfacing using any and all means.

In any case, if you need to exploit internal associations, I recommend executing these tips.

Use Keyword-Rich Anchor Text: Google uses your anchor text as a snippet of data to what in particular is the issue here.

For example, the anchor text in these associations helps Google with understanding what the issue here is.

8. Appropriate Amazing Content

On the occasion that you've endeavored to learn SEO already, you've probably gotten some answers concerning the hugeness of "first-class content".

Besides, it's real: appropriating interesting, the obliging substances can help you rank higher in Google.

The thing is, what a large number of individuals consider "fantastic substance" has changed all through the latest couple of years.

I'll explain:

Some time ago, you could disperse a 1,000-word blog passage and overpower people.

Today? A 1000-word blog passage isn't a lot.

Undoubtedly, a distributing substance to a blog survey by Orbit Media found that the ordinary blogger presently experiences over 3 hours on an alone post.

9. Amass Backlinks To Your Website

It's in 2021. Are backlinks still a critical Google situating sign?

That is right!

Another report by SEMrush found that backlinks were insistently associated with higher Google rankings.

10. Improve Your Site's User Experience

Improving your site's customer experience (UX) can direct and by suggestion help with your SEO.

UX can direct help with SEO in light of the fact that Google acknowledges when people start "Pogo remaining" in the wake of showing up on your site from the rundown things.

f enough people skip from your webpage to the web crawler results, this uncovers to Google that your result didn't give that searcher what they were looking for.

Likewise, your web searcher rankings can start to plunge.

#best seo company #seo #search engine optimisation (seo) software #localsearch #digitalmarketing #Digitalmareketinginpune digitalmarketingagency

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bladekindeyewear · 5 years

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HS^2 bloggin’ upd8 2020-01-17

Alright, morningblogging yesterday’s 2020-01-17 upd8 to Homestuck^2 let’s go! Spoiler-free again. I kinda don’t want even the next chapter names image-spoiled above the cut anymore so I’m going to have to figure out WHAT to put above the cut in these liveblog posts for visual reinforcement... a unique silly icon? Going back once I’m done with the upd8 and posting something non-spoilery but weird-looking out of context?

Eh, can’t be assed. Just know that after this I’m going to pony up for the Patreon commentary and skim it for anything plot-useful to y’all (in a separate post). Let’s get started.

Okay, what’s next: Any bonuses? Oh, none! Phew. Unless those are coming faster too and just staggered differently, which would mean I gotta overcome my irrational pre-Homestuck-reading anxiety even MORE often. :T

No Homestuck you don’t GET to ask how my-- ah, right. :P

(FYI, HS^2 has been good to my emotions so far, quite a balm for the epilogues, so once I START reading I’m usually fine; but after being hurt so badly how could I possibly convince my lizard brain to trust it until it’s right in front of me? Seriously, just hearing that the upd8 has landed messes me up a bit until I come fix it by reading w/ y’all here.)

Okay, so whose feelings? As much as I’ve been waiting for Jade, I hope this isn’t about Jade.

> ==>

Ah fuck, we’re finally with the Pursuit Crew. Bracing myself. That means we get to see probably sleeping Jade ( :C ), full-swing DaveKat (approving nod), the first canon onscreen look at masculine-mode Roxy (<3), a probably pretty pissed off Kanaya (possibly either the feelings target, the one Saying How Are Your Feelings, or both), and uh... did they drag Callie along? Or leave her back there with her meta freakout? Probably left her back there, but... hm.

Let me turn up the brightness on this screen to sear these next pages into my retinas. (Also, it feels odd to still be using a four-person “==>” for these, although if Jade is still asleep the numbers might fit on both ends... :c )

> ==>

I don’t think Dad is in the spacefaring business, so this is probably one of Jake’s shittier spaceship designs.

> ==>

...well that’s a touch disturbing. Is that a Jade-occupied bed or are those just pillows?

Oh what the fresh fanfic’y heck is this command.

> i enter.

Okay that’s great. I got a kick out of that.

JADE [in calliope red]: the prince’s power grows.

--but that’s not. That explains the narrative command text, it’s alt!callie talking through a still conked-out Jade. Please let her wake up between speak-throughs, please tell me you’ve learned that trick?? I already know you’re gonna pull an “oh she was asleep pretty much all of those THREE YEARS OF TRAVEL” thing on me and that’s hard fucking enough to deal with.

KARKAT: JESUS CHRIST!

He’s actually using the full curse correctly, huh?

...These commands. Guess part of the puzzle is how much alt!Callie is being typically morbid and how much she might actually be wising up enough to get a kick out of this.

> the knight of blood falls.

DAVE: dude can you chill for like even a single fucking second DAVE: also are you ok

Has CallieJade chilled for even a single second this entire trip?? Is he asking just if Karkat’s okay or Jade too???

--yeah I’m overblowing things out of nervousness. Just wait and see a bit, boots.

Alt!Callie has at least learned to be more of a smartass:

> karkat is characteristically appreciative of the alarm call.

Shirt trade Karkat, nice. And uh, Jade’s dress sure is a... dress. Hm.

(Did alt!Callie alchemize adjustments to did she just luck out to have a red-symbol’d Bec belt and accent leggings? I’d prefer the former, because as much as it would be acceptable within Homestuck proper, using the transition between the epilogues and this new-author’d work to just HAPPEN to give her a fitting outfit without an excuse via providence is kind of lazy.)

KARKAT: OH, PARDON THE FUCK OUT OF ME FOR OVERREACTING A LITTLE WHEN MY GOOD FRIEND "POSSESSED JADE" BUSTS INTO MY RESPITEBLOCK AT 5 AM! KARKAT: NEXT TIME I’LL JUST PULL THE COVERS BACK AND LET HER CLIMB IN! JADE: i am uninterested in that scenario. KARKAT: GREAT! POSSESSED JADE ISN’T EVEN HORNY! HOW FUCKED UP IS THAT?

...please let that mean he’s not used to her being possessed all the time and she wakes up sometimes. PLEASE.

DAVE: but im pretty sure i locked that door JADE: i unlocked it with my mind. DAVE: fuck KARKAT: FANTASTIC. JADE: the prince’s powers are growing, but so are mine.

Dave, I’m pretty sure regular-ass no-Green-Sun Space powers can flip a few lock tumblers too. (--though, I guess from context this was a Jakeship technolock. Confirmation on the ship’s bad taste in design. --I think I’m foggily remembering it said in the Epilogues that they took one of Jake’s ships just like Dirk did, too... man, being depressed so much by the Epilogues sure took a lot out of my ability to recall them decently.)

KARKAT: LIKE YOU DON’T FLOAT AROUND LIKE A CREEPY PIECE OF SHIT ALL DAY AS IT IS?

God DAMN IT she’s been asleep and possessed the whole fucking time.

> sleep is abandoned, coffee sought.

More obligatory DaveKat being cute, somehow only emphasized by the embarrassing glowing-with-power observer who doesn’t really get any of it.

Ah, here we go:

> the rogue is also awake.

Oh huh. Cool!

Hero outfit, understated... her his choice of heart-shades color-coded to stand out from Dave more to avoid further mistaken identity cases. Works well! (Holy shit I only JUST remembered at the end to go back and correctly gender Roxy as him, that was close. I blame the epilogues for a lack of visual reinforcement; I shouldn’t have as much trouble soon enough. Seriously, I don’t remember ANYTHING without visual reinforcement, I think that’s why I remember so much of Homestuck proper so clearly.)

KARKAT: OH SHIT, THERE SHE IS! I DIDN’T EVEN HEAR HER FOLLOW US! ROXY: sometimes a girls just got to get her drift on i guess ROXY: it be like that

ilu roxy.

I missed Roxy so much, you guys. I need more of him remarking on all this crazy shit if I’m gonna stay sane though all this. (And I need more of him and AWAKE JADE kicking ass independently or together if I’m going to continue to believe there’s justice in the world.)

> ==>

We rarely saw Rose drinking anything but the rare coffee in canon, but I think Kanaya would have gotten her plenty into tea, yes. Or at the very least, wanting the aesthetic of drinking tea with Kanaya would have gotten Rose into tea even if it never crossed Kanaya’s mind to try the stuff.

ROXY: well i mean who knows what she drinks now ROXY: dirk probs tossed the coffee machine out the space window right away ROXY: dude doesnt "believe" in "substances" > the prince is contemplated for a moment in silence.

FUCK, Dirk can see the narrative all the way out here??? No wonder alt!Callie’s forced to have possession turned on 24/7. That’s fucking disappointing. How the hell are we going to get any proper Jade time with THAT hanging over our heads? She’d only be able to do anything when Dirk’s knocked out, and maybe not even THEN!

I was virtually promised more of actual non-asleep Jade getting shit done in HS^2. Now there’s an even longer wait on it than I expected. This sucks.

(EDIT: BOY did I misread that link line. Thinking “is contemplated” meant is sitting contemplating, when it meant "is being contemplated by everyone here". That was dumb of me.)

*clicks that next link*

Oh my goodness, Roxy joined the Bird Hair Crew. It makes him look like a fucking asshole but I kind of love it.

KARKAT: IS THERE MILK?

I can’t believe Karkat is okay with drinking milk. --yes, culturally Trolls are more comfortable with animal excretions than we are, but you would’ve thought years of railing against Equius would have purged any tolerance the idea of milk from his psyche.

I guess Dave introduced him to cereal, and it was all over from there.

DAVE: this is more like a castle DAVE: a castle of idk DAVE: twenty something ennui

Sounds like a relatable mood. Especially considering Dirk probably decided to conquer reality out of almost nothing but twenty-something ennui.

Alright. You aren’t going to turn Kanaya into an alcoholic or anything on us are you?

> the knight of time seeks a sylph...

--this is the shittiest shipboard starship aesthetic.

> ...and finds her, momentarily.

WOW that looks fucking depressed. :(

> ==>

...okay you know what? Never mind. That outfit has wrapped straight back around into Trying Too Hard and is now hilarious.

DAVE: you ever feel like our whole lives are eventually gonna end up like this DAVE: just blasting through space on a sweeps long journey to ""somewhere"" chasing after or running from some vague enemy thats sometimes a god modded pet dog and sometimes your dad DAVE: without the faintest fucking idea of whats going to happen when we get there DAVE: thats a little specific but you know what i mean

Why do you think the epilogues upset us so much? We thought we’d won free of that bullshit.

> ==>

Oh jesus christ that’s the most depressingly sad I’ve ever seen Kanaya drawn. :C

--Karkat got you to watch Serendipity? That’s amazing, Dave.

KANAYA: You Arent Reminding Me Of Her As I Rarely Think Of Anything Else KANAYA: I Close My Eyes And I See Her KANAYA: I Keep Them Open And I See Her

Fuck.

Y’know how little showing these two in love and actually HAPPY together we’ve seen in this entire comic and its subworks? Despite them having spent at least a few happy years together we only saw in tiny screenclips? And how Candy alluded super hard that they most likely couldn’t get that in this real timeline where shit’s going down?

Seriously, FUCK. You could at least pretend to give us some hope, here.

Oh no, don’t ask for the nursery story, Dave. Unless it turns out to be a funny one or a Rose twist on an old story or something. Which it probably is, I should stop worrying.

> ==>

KANAYA: Oh Its A Wriggler Story About A Young Prince And The Beloved Flower He Loved And Lost DAVE: flower DAVE: like a plant KANAYA: Its A Fairytale Dave DAVE: right KANAYA: A Singular Wild Rose He Failed To Cherish When He Had Her KANAYA: And His Journey Of Discovering What She Meant To Him All Along KANAYA: Culminating In A New Quest To Find Her And Win Her Back

Dirk you PIECE OF SHIT did you rewrite the narrative of the fucking STORIES SHE TOLD CHILDREN?!?? Does the fact that alt!Callie is only in the present mean he can rewrite ANY past event we didn’t literally SEE??? FUCK you. Seriously fuck all of this.

Please tell me she was kidding just then, or realizes there’s fucking something wrong with what she’s saying and getting angry or.

(EDIT: shoutyourporpoise replied: "Hey, idk If you picked up on this, but the 'nursery story' Rose told to the wigglers is just The Little Prince, which is maybe a BIT early for them to read, but I don't think that's a case of Dirk changing the narrative; its just Rose being Too Adult as usual." Oh, damn, I didn't even CATCH that it was that story. That makes all of this a lot more forgivable, even if pretty unforgivably leaning into the fiction that Dirk used to brainwash and kidnap her. Maybe that's exactly why it worked -- fiction, a story so blazed into the public consciousness? Hm. Thanks, shoutyourporpoise.)

KANAYA: But In A Way I Feel As If It Is the Greater Universe Trying To Tell Me Something

Mother fuck I’m even going to have to see our protagonists warped by Dirk when they’re ostensibly FULLY SHIELDED aren’t I. There’s only so much of that I would be able to take, you know.

KANAYA: It May Simply Stem From My Longing To See Her Again And How Much Is Indicative Of Something More Sinister KANAYA: She Is A Goddess Of Light And The Only Of Her Kind We Know Is Alive After All KANAYA: Maybe Shes Wrested Dominion Of The Entire Concept In All Its Appearances Within This Frame Of Reference

Hm. Well, it being a product of Rose’s ascension instead of Dirk’s is possibly a more charitable take, with Ultimate Rose projecting the delusion enforced on her backward, visible to past Rose’s Sight when she isn’t paying attention and thus paving the way for Dirk to paradoxically exploit that “ideal” as something Lighty and Important and “Perfect”. I still don’t fucking like it though.

> ==>

DAVE: sorry i know you say you got your badass monster powers but kanaya you look tired as hell DAVE: not that im tryna psyche you or whatever but youre waxing poetic in the dark which i guess is maybe on brand but still

Yyyep.

DAVE: unless terezi is lurking in the vents somewhere and now that i bring that up its actually not out of the question so im kind of gonna be thinking about that one for a while

Pffff.

DAVE: youre the only person i know whos still basically the same as when i met you

--Which is kind of going to have to change, right? She’s got some other cosmic purpose ready to change her a little more than she changed pre-human-troll-meetup, you’d think.

> ==>

Cute as hell.

> ==>

KANAYA: How Are Your Feelings

There’s the title drop. I’d think Dave’s doing pretty well, considering? Still fucked over by Dirk betraying and tricking Rose away who he’s been close with all his life, but.

> ==>

DAVE: except sometimes your best friend disappears and your other best friend goes into a ghost coma and your third best friend fucks off to space with your dad DAVE: the dude youve spent the last 7 years convincing yourself isnt an egomaniacal anime villain DAVE: and who isnt actually lying in wait to completely decimate your life and your emotions and shit

Ah... yeah. A little worse than my casual list, huh? Forgot that Jade vanishing into a possession-coma for THREE FUCKING YEARS is going to be hard on people inside the comic too, fuck.

DAVE: maybe it was naive to think that a bunch of twenty something trauma victims could run a society

I was honestly surprised they TRIED to run society at all. Jasp even just highlighted a big reason why not in the bonuses.

DAVE: cool how earth c existed for centuries then we show up and manage to ruin society in seven fucking years

Well, the trolls got THEIR lesson on why they didn’t deserve to rule over their new universe like gods; I guess some of y’all needed that lesson too?

DAVE: every serious conversation i have inevitably falls apart into riffing on a casual acquaintances ass

True.

Dammit, Dave didn’t feel like he could just be Some Guy even on Earth C. :(

> ==>

...don’t think I’ve forgotten that nursery story, though. I don’t want to think that it was something that ACTUALLY past happened, especially not without manipulation. Like maybe past Rose was foreseeing the false purpose that Dirk wrote for her or the like, a cooperative misunderstanding between the two instead of Dirk or Rose literally reaching back in time.

> meanwhile...

KARKAT: WAIT, WHY THE FUCK AM I EVEN ASKING? HE’S OBVIOUSLY NOT FINE. KARKAT: ARE ANY OF US? ARE YOU? ROXY: not rly KARKAT: EXACTLY.

--Oh right. I remember that Callie and Roxy were going reasonably steady in Meat even though it was only alluded to, she didn’t freak out and stay awol or what have you. That’s good to remember. But it means Roxy deliberately left her behind to go on this dangerous quest, for years. :C

KARKAT: KANAYA BARELY EVEN TALKS, CALLIOPE WON’T LEAVE THEIR CABIN, JADE JUST FLOATS AROUND LIKE A CREEPY BALLOON THAT’S MOSTLY MADE OF HAIR.

Oh, SHIT. I should have read one line further. They DID bring her. Alt!Callie being here too must really FUCK with her. ...maybe she can actually learn to accept that alternate way her life might’ve played out, though?

KARKAT: THE REALLY FUCKED UP THING IS I MIGHT BE THE MOST OKAY OUT OF ALL OF US, WHICH IS HOW YOU KNOW SHIT HAS REALLY GONE GLOBES UP.

Quite true.

ROXY: ur kinda an intense dude anybody ever tell u that KARKAT: NO.

Pff.

> ==>

KARKAT: AGAINST PRETTY MUCH ALL ODDS, AND DESPITE ME NOT DESERVING ANY OF IT, I ENDED UP GETTING PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING I WANTED. KARKAT: OVER AND OVER AGAIN. KARKAT: SOMETIMES IT ALMOST FEELS LIKE WHATEVER SLATHERING MONSTROSITY OF A COSMIC HELLBEAST THAT PUT ALL THIS SHIT INTO MOTION...ACTUALLY LIKES ME?

Well, if you want to blame Lord English for instance... we never saw Caliborn and Karkat interact much, but the parallels between the two were drawn so severely that Caliborn was basically the idealized, multiverse-threatening Ultimate Kismesis that he’d always dreamed of. And operated against him without him even ever quite realizing it.

If a level of “respect” went from Caliborn to Karkat, too, from his Lord-Englishy vision nigh-omnipresent, then this outcome isn’t very surprising at all.

> ==>

(I don’t quite feel I get why Roxy shifted to this exasperated-Dave expression, but I get logically that he’d been waiting for Karkat to make a breakfast choice... Homestuck proper rarely pulled a “last line said corresponds to next-panel’s expression” without either leaving the conversation blank or having the NEXT lines of the conversation reinforce it, to prevent this inelegant misunderstanding. Andrew was really damned talented in getting his point across visually, in that regard. Just like, that careful visual intent delivery.)

Alright, I guess that’s it for this short upd8! Meeting the pursuit crew was both more and less difficult than I expected. Hopefully I get desensitized a bit as the characters continue to feel semi-almost-sorta-fine.

I have NO idea how this group is gonna work as a proper crew when we get to whatever weird other-players’ session this shit is going down in, though.

#Homestuck #hs2 #Homestuck Liveblog #upd8 #bladekindeyewear #blastyoboots #spoiler #spoilers #shoutyourporpoise

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