I’ve worked for a couple of Pop Culture news websites, so I’ve had the whole SEO and metadata thing forced on me pretty thoroughly…

Incidentally, if you’re wondered why those websites are the way they are, it’s because they’re trying to maximise their SEO and metadata efficiency so more people can find their website, so more people click on their visit, so they can push more ads on people. Which is how they make their money.

Even for my various blogs – i.e. this very website, and also here and here – I do try to make sure my posts have some level of SEO-ified metadata. Hence, the various links in this section…

I just try to be less obnoxious about it than I was mandated to be when I was doing this professionally…

But, like, number five on my list of Top 10 Anime Betrayals will surprise you.

[It was Vegeta…]

All of which is to say, if you’ve ever looked up a recipe only to be faced with an entire post’s worth of preamble, the reason is for that is probably the state of established best SEO practices.

Essentially, if you want to your post about egg recipes to show up on Internet searches, you want to work in the phrase “egg recipe” on the actual post as much as possible. It’s a bit more nuanced than that, but the point is to get search engines to recognise that your post is about what the sort of people who’d want to read it would be searching.

Incidentally, when I was researching this post by actually looking up recipes, I was actually pleasantly surprised by the number of recipes I found that really only had a single paragraph or so of introduction before getting to the actual recipe.

But, seriously, Internet, just tell me to how to cook the dang egg!

Kat groans, burying her face in the cookbook before her.

“Goodness, Katherine,” Amara notes. “Whatever is the matter.”

“I just want to know how to cook the egg!” Kat moans.”

Amara blinks.

“Excuse me?”

Kat peels her face from the book and looks at Amara.

“Mom used to boil us eggs when we were kids,” Kat explains. “And I realised that I don’t actually know how to do it. So I figured I’d learned. But this stupid book…”

She points down to the cookbook.

“And why, exactly, is this book stupid, Katherine?” Amara asks.

She peers over Kat’s shoulder to study the book for herself.

While considering the act of the boiling of an egg, the implications which must be pondered are both plentiful and numerous. Contrariwise to the act of the boiling of, say, a turnip, the implications of which are neither plentiful and numerous and, indeed, rather quite simplistic. Thus, our story begins with the very creation of the Universe.

“It goes on like that for fifteen pages!” Kat moans. “Who wrote this thing?”

“Well,” Amara offers. “The silver lining here is that fifteen pages is rather quite a succinct summation of the entire history of the Universe.”

“I just want to know how to cook the egg!” Kat protests.

“I am confused,” Tenebella says, peering over Kat’s other shoulder. “Surely there is no great art to the boiling of an egg. You boil the water. You put the egg into the water.”

“Don’t you start,” Kat says, levelling a finger at Tenebella.

“Clearly,” Amara mutters, “I’ve missed something.”

“She burned the water,” Dunstana explains.

Amara blinks.

“She what-now?” she asks.

“She wanted to make tea. But she burned the water,” Dunstana explains.

“Oh, Powers,” Amara mutters. “Really?”

Dunstana nods.

“But, like,” she muses, “why do people even eat eggs? They come out of a chicken’s butt!”

Tenebella thoughtfully touches her chin.

“Quite the quandary indeed. But no daughter of Rhadamanthus the Grim shall be so vexed by a mirror egg,” she says.

She nods resolutely to herself.

“We are in need of assistance,” she declares.

She looks over her shoulder to the kitchen door.

“Captain Ratsumies,” she calls. “We are in need of assistance.”

“You already said that,” Kat mutters.

“Hey-ho!” Captain Ratsumies answers, all but materialising in the ktitchen in his haste to spring to his lady’s assistance.

“Captain Ratsumies,” Tenebella bids.

“Hey-ho!”

“Boil for us an egg.”

“At once, m’lady!”

Captain Ratsumies steps forward, girds himself with a frilly apron, stokes the fire, fills a pot with water, places the pot on the stove. Then, he contemplates the selection of eggs, picks one, and drops it into the pot.

“Now, m’lady,” Captain Ratsumies says, turning back to Tenebella, Amara, Kat, and Dunstana as the egg boils. “Before we begin with the act of the boiling of an egg—”

Kat groans.

“—let us consider the implications of the boiling of an egg.”

Kat groans again.

“Our story, of course,” Captain Ratsumies happily continues, “begins with the very creations of the Universe.”

Kat groans.

Angrily.

“I just want to learn how to cook to the egg!” she sobs.

---

And if you want more more Realmgard, please considering subscribing to me on my various platforms listed at the bottom of this page.

If you’ve enjoyed my content, please consider supporting me through Ko-fi or Patreon, or through Paypal by scanning the QR code below:

Follow Realmgard and other publications of Emona Literary Services™ below:

Subscribe to the Emona Literary Services™ Substack newsletter here.

---

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The author prohibits the use of content published on this website for the purposes of training Artificial Intelligence technologies, including but not limited to Large Language Models, without express written permission.

All stories published on this website are works of fiction. Characters are products of the author’s imagination and do not represent any individual, living or dead.

The realmgard.com Privacy Policy can be viewed here.

Realmgard is published by Emona Literary Services^TM