#the point of the laws (from a meta level) is that by making them immutable

[cats-of-eden-valley]

Do your cats make jam? If so, with what fruits? Man, I can’t help but picture Amaranth making jam for the kittens! Also, I’m confused. If a tom is staying without going to the coalition, he is forbidden from mating. But what about Ursinia and Larkspur? I’m confused.😐

Hmm a quick jaunt over to wikipedia suggests that they wouldn't quite have the resources to preserve fruits in the form of jams. More likely, Amaranth is teaching the kittens how to dry meats to keep over the Sleeping Year <3

Ursinia and *Honeysuckle got permission to have kittens from the Matrons because Honeysuckle was an outsider .o. theirs was an uncommon pairing, it doesn't happen too often

[diaboleite]

D&D as “cooperative character development”.

I want to talk about character design not in terms of stat choices and class selection, but in terms of personality, motivation, and characterisation. Making an interesting, fun character in a story is not the same as making an interesting, fun character in D&D; the total control that a writer has over their own story is completely at odds with the chaotic clusterfuck of D&D campaigns. Here is how to create and develop a character in a way that facilitates cooperation between you, other players, and most importantly your DM: 1) Make a character that can "play D&D". This one is pretty simple, but fundamental enough to warrant inclusion in this list. Even narrative focused 5e, with its heavy emphasis on plot, roleplay and character customisation, is still a bunch of PCs going on adventures. (If you’re not interested in exploring and combat, D&D is not the game for you! Plenty of other RPGs will cater to you better.) It is essential that some aspect of your character’s personality or backstory or environment drives them towards a risky lifestyle of adventuring. There are plenty of unique potential motivations, both in the PHB, and of your own devising. Just be sure you’re motivating your character towards the gameplay of D&D.

3) If your character’s goal is to stop "playing D&D" and settle down, at some point they may be in a position to achieve their goal and there's nothing the DM or other players can do about it. Closely linked with number 2 on the list-- if the character you have created wants nothing more than to settle down and sell homemade jam, a couple of levels into your campaign, they will likely be in a position to do exactly that. Either be prepared to retire and reroll a new character at this point (talk to your DM, if this is on the table!!!!!), or have character development over the campaign that has them change their goals. They could become aware of how much good they are doing in their role as an adventurer, become too attached to the party to leave, or develop a personal vendetta against wrongdoers; whatever this growth manifests as, the onus is on you as a player to ensure your character continues on with the campaign.

4) Create a character with flaws. If your character does not need the other characters in the campaign, you have created a boring character to play alongside.

From a writing perspective, there’s no practical problem with creating a badass, self-sufficient protagonist, especially if you want to tell a gritty, survivalist story. In D&D, there are practical problems with trying to have a character that is entirely self-reliant and rounded: you are not the single protagonist of this story, and you shouldn’t try to be. Sure, with the right character stat finessing, feats, and playstyle, you can make a character without too many in-game, or in-character weaknesses-- but don’t! This is bad manners in the same way that a munchkin-y character build is bad manners: you are feeling good about your character at the cost of other players’ fun. D&D is cooperative, so cooperate. (Specialised characters will ultimately be more powerful, anyway!) If you feel a little useless in melee combat, but have a ball navigating through social encounters with your +7 persuasion, you’re playing the game right. Someone at the table is on the other side of the coin, smashing skulls effortlessly and then barely able to order a beer without offending someone with their poor social graces. (This does not mean your character should not have “self-sufficient” as a character trait, especially if you’re selecting something like the “hermit” background. There’s a difference between being a character being practical and slow-to-trust, and trying to make a character so self-reliant and well-rounded that there’s no situation you wouldn’t feel your character could handle better alone than with the help of the rest of the party.) The space on your sheet for character flaws should not just say ‘has trouble trusting others’. Spend some time balancing your character’s good qualities with the bad, and consider how stats may play into this in more complex ways than ‘my character with a low intelligence modifier makes stupid decisions under pressure’. If your strength is high, consider making your character unwittingly bullying, because nobody dares stand up to them. If your character’s charisma is off the charts, consider making them a little too deft at manipulation, even amongst friends. Flaws are the startpoint for character growth, and without them you will find yourself reluctant to change your character as the story unfolds.

5) If your character does not want to share backstory at all costs, they might never end up sharing backstory, and you're going to have to deal with never getting to show off your creative writing. Keep in mind that if your character is too secretive, even if the DM tries to shove you face-first into plot related to your own backstory, you may feel obliged to play your character weaselling out of it. This is related closely with my next point:

8) If it's unrealistic for your character to forge connections with other people in the party, then you have created a bad D&D character. Remember when I said it’s fine to have a character trait that is “slow-to-trust”? There’s a difference between slow, and flat out unwilling. Maybe your session one character is instantly chummy, maybe your session one character holds the rest of the party at arm’s length and keeps secrets. Whatever the case is, you will need to reach a point of investment in other PCs, or you will not be able to participate in cooperative character growth. One of the most important traits of a good D&D player is investing in PCs that aren’t your own. Try to compare, relate, and contrast other PCs with your own. Try to understand their goals, their relationship with your PC, and with the rest of the party.

9) Your new character is at the start of their most important arc: their adventure with their new companions. Create backstory accordingly. As someone beginning a D&D campaign, is important for you to understand that your character is about to go through the most incredible, dangerous, vivid experience of their life. This is reflected both in experience points, and also an immutable truth of the D&D universe: people with the skills and power of PCs are rare and special. There are very few people in the world who will ever achieve the power of high player class levels; the campaign that gets your PC there will accordingly be legendary in scale. (On the other hand, don’t be scared to give your character some epic or heart-wrenching backstory, just be mindful that their ‘character arc’ isn’t yet complete. There’s a world between “I was just sitting in a room on a chair eating saltines for, like, 28 years” and the sort of well-told, unresolved backstory that comes out over the course of a Critical Role campaign. Also, consider the purely in-game, mechanical reason: even if your barbarian’s backstory involves slaying an entire horde of murderous dragons and becoming a renowned folk-hero, you’re going to be at the same starting point as the rogue whose backstory is ‘I cheat at cards to make enough money to eat’. Your level 1 character will not be up to fighting dragons for at least a couple of dungeons. Well-written backstories are about intensity of character motivation, richness of detail, not about the epic deeds accomplished off-screen like a low budget superhero TV show.

10) The show game must go on. Cooperate and be willing to compromise your characterisation to make that happen. D&D is a hobby that you and your group are going to voluntarily participate in. Make a character that facilitates that. I’ve already covered a few ways in which your characterisation may end up sabotaging your own ability to get involved in the plot; there are untold ways in which you can sabotage the plot or the enjoyment of your fellow players. Above all else, being a good player means having a capacity to compromise and cooperate. Is your character such an asshole that nobody in the party will want to play alongside them? Retire your character, or be prepared to do a supersonic heel-face turn. Is your character so morally puritanical that they cannot remain in the company of anyone who isn’t unfalteringly lawful good? Retire your character, or find a way for your character’s stance to soften. Is your character going to be so boring to play that RP will feel like a chore? Retire or change your character. (A sticking point in the game is not necessarily your fault. If you’re finding another PC impossible to play with, talk to your DM about it. Their player might not have even noticed the ideological/motivational divide.) It’s important to be “on your character’s side” so you can play them convincingly, but on a meta-level try to take a more objective stance in disputes, with an explicit goal to resolve tension in a timely manner. If your fellow players aren’t on the same wavelength, talk to your DM who can clear it up with them.

[malaysiawebsitedesigners]

The Secrets of Relevancy

Check out latest article on http://www.bjweb.com/the-secrets-of-relevancy/

The Secrets of Relevancy

In the previous section, we discussed how popular pages (as judged by links) rank higher. By this logic, you might expect that the Internet’s most popular pages would rank for everything. To a certain extent they do (thinkWikipedia!), but the reason they don’t dominate the rankings for every search result page is that search engines put a lot of emphasis on determining relevancy.

Text Is the Currency of the Internet

Relevancy is the measurement of the theoretical distance between two corresponding items with regards to relationship. Luckily for Google and Microsoft, modern-day computers are quite good at calculating this measurement for text.

By my estimations, Google owns and operates well over a million servers. The electricity to power these servers is likely one of Google’s larger operating expenses. This energy limitation has helped shape modern search engines by putting text analysis at the forefront of search.Quite simply, it takes less computing power and is much simpler programmatically to determine relevancy between a text query and a text document than it is between a text query and an image or video file. This isthe reason why text results are so much more prominent in search results than videos and images.

So what does this emphasis on textual content mean for SEOs?

To me,it indicates that my time is better spent optimizing text than images orvideos. This strategy will likely have to change in the future as computers get more powerful and energy efficient, but for right now text should be every SEO’s primary focus.

This is especially true until Google finds better ways to interpret and grade non-textual media.

But Why Content?

The most basic structure a functional website could take would be a blank page with a URL. For example purposes, pretend your blank page is on the fake domain www.WhatIsJessicaSimpsonThinking.com. (Get it? It is a blank page.) Unfortunately for the search engines, clues like top-level domains (.com, .org, and so on), domain owners (WHOIS records), code validation, and copyright dates are poor signals for determining relevancy.This means your page with the dumb domain name needs some content before it is able to rank in search engines.

The search engines must use their analysis of content as their primary indication of relevancy for determining rankings for a given search query.For SEOs, this means the content on a given page is essential for manipulating—that is, earning—rankings. In the old days of AltaVista and other search engines, SEOs would just need to write “Jessica Simpson”hundreds times on the site to make it rank #1 for that query. What could be more relevant for the query “Jessica Simpson” than a page that says Jessica Simpson 100 times? (Clever SEOs will realize the answer is a page that says “Jessica Simpson” 101 times.)

This metric, called keyword density, was quickly manipulated, and the search engines of the time diluted the power of this metric on rankings until it became almost useless. Similar dilution has happened to the keywords meta tag, somekinds of internal links, and H1 tags. Despite being more sophisticated, modern-day search engines still work essentially the same way they did in the past—by analyzing content on the page.

Hey, Ben Stein, thanks for the history lesson, but how does this apply to modern search engines?

The funny thing is that modern-day search engines still work essentially the same way they did back in the time of keyword density.

The big difference is that they are now much more sophisticated. Instead of simply counting the number of times a word or phrase is on a webpage, they use natural language processing algorithms and other signals on a page to determine relevancy.

For example, it is now fairly trivial for search engines to determine that a piece of content is about Jessica Simpson if it mentions related phrases like “Nick Lachey” (her ex husband),“Ashlee Simpson” (her sister), and “Chicken of the Sea” (she is infamous for thinking the tuna brand “Chicken of the Sea” was made from chicken).

The engines can do this for a multitude of languages and with astonishing accuracy.

Don’t believe me?

Try going to Google right now and searching related:www.jessicasimpson.com.

If your results are like mine, you will see websites about her movies, songs, and sister. Computers are amazing things.In addition to the words on a page, search engines use signals like image meta information (alt attribute), link profile and site architecture, and information hierarchy to determine how relevant a given page that mentions “Jessica” is to a search query for “The Simpsons.”

Link Relevancy

As search engines matured, they started identifying more metrics for determining rankings. One that stood out among the rest was link relevancy.

The difference between link relevancy and link popularity (discussed in the previous section) is that link relevancy does not take into account the power of the link. Instead, it is a natural phenomenon that works when people link out to other content. Let me give you an example of how it works. Say I own a blog where Iwrite about whiteboard markers. (Yes, I did just look around my office for an example to use, and yes, there are actually people who blog about whiteboard markers. I checked.)

Ever inclined to learn more about my passion for these magical writing utensils, I spend part of my day reading online what other people have to say about whiteboard markers.On my hypothetical online reading journey, I find an article about the psychological effects of marker color choice. Excited, I go back to my website to blog about the article so (both of) my friends can read about it.

Now here is the critical takeaway. When I write the blog post and link to the article, I get to choose the anchor text. I could choose something like “clickhere,” but more likely I choose something that it is relevant to the article. In this case I choose “psychological effects of marker color choice.”Someone else who links to the article might use the link anchor text“ marker color choice and the effect on the brain.”People have a tendency to link to content using the anchor text of either the domain name or the title of the page. Use this to your advantage by including keywords you want to rank for in these two elements.This human-powered information is essential to modern-day search engines. These descriptions are relatively unbiased and produced by real people. This metric, in combination with complicated natural language processing, makes up the lion’s share of relevancy indicators online.

Other important relevancy indicators are link sources and information hierarchy. For example, the search engines can also use the fact that Ilinked to the color choice article from a blog about whiteboard markers to supplement their understanding of relevancy. Similarly, they can use the fact that the original article was located at the URL www.example.com/vision/color/ to determine the high-level positioning and relevancy of the content.

As you will find out later on this website, these secrets are essential for SEOs to do their job. Beyond specific anchor text, proximal text—the certain number of characters preceding and following the link itself—have some value. Something that’s logical, but annoying is when people use a verb as anchor text, such as “Frank said . . . “ or “Jennifer wrote . . .“, using “said” or“wrote” as the anchor text pointing back to the post. In a situation like that,engines have figured out how to apply the context of the surrounding copy to the link.

Tying Together Popularity and Relevancy

So far, we have discussed both popularity and relevancy. These two concepts make up the bulk of Search Engine Optimization theory. They have been present since the beginning of search engines and undoubtedly will be important in the future. The way they are determinedand the relationship between them changes, but they are both fundamental to determining search results.

Popularity and relevancy are the two concepts that make up the bulk of Search Engine Optimization theory.This fact is critical to SEOs. We have very little control over how the major search engines operate, yet somehow we are supposed to keep our jobs. Luckily, these immutable laws of popularity and relevance govern search engines and provide us with some job security.

Summary

In this issue, I explained the concepts of popularity and relevancy in relation to modern search engines. This information, along with your prior SEO experience, will make up the foundation for all of the SEO secrets and knowledge that you learn throughout from our website.