#lets brain the algorithm once more with my messy style

[thebibliosphere]

So I'm currently unemployed because I got fired for taking too much sick leave (it was legally sketchy blah blah blah but in the end I just can't work and take care of myself and investigate my mystery health problems at the same time). So I've been spending more time writing!

I really admire your writing and loved Hunger Pangs. I'm looking forward to the poly elements developing and I'm wondering if you have any advice for writing about poly. I've made one of my projects a snarky take on "write what you know" ... Apparently what I know is southern gothic meets Pacific northwest gothic, chronic illness pandemic surrealism, and falling back-asswards into threesomes.

I know this is a very open-ended question and I don't expect an answer, I'm just curious about it if you have the energy. As a writer, trying to write honestly / realistically about polyamory/enm, I'm curious if you have any thoughts on what's different about portraying monogamy or nonmonogamy in books, romance or erotica or otherwise.

I'm trying to read examples but it's hard to find examples that fit the niche I'm looking at. Excuse me if this question is nonsense, it's the cluster headaches.

I'm sorry to hear you've been dealing with all that and solidarity on the cluster headaches. But I'm glad you're finding an outlet through writing! And I hope you're happy with an open-ended ramble in response because oh boy, there's a lot I could talk about and I could probably do a better job of answering this sort of thing with more specific questions, but let's see where we end up.

There's definitely a big difference between writing polyamory/ENM (ethical non-monogamy) and what people often expect from monogamous love stories.

Just even from a purely sales and marketing standpoint, the moment you write anything polyamorous (or even just straight up LGBTQIA+ without the ENM) you're going to get considered closer to being erotica/obscene than hetero romances. It's an unfair bias, but it's one that exists in our society. But also the Amazon algorithm and their shitty, shitty human censors. Especially the ones that work the weekends. (Talking to you, Carlos 🖕.)

So not only do you start out hyper-aware that you're writing something that is highly stigmatized or fetishized (at least I'm hyper-aware) but that you are also writing for a niche market that is starving for positive content because the content that exists is either limited, not what they want, or is problematic in some fashion i.e. highly stigmatized or fetishy. And even then, the wants, desires, and expectations of the community you're writing for are complex and wildly varied and hard to fit into an easy formula.

When writing monogamous love stories, there is a set expectation that’s really hard to fuck up once you know it. X person meets Y. Attraction happens, followed by some sort of minor conflict/resolution. Other plot may happen. A greater catalyst involving personal growth for both parties (hopefully) happens. Follow the equation to its ultimate resolution and achieve Happily Ever After. 

But writing ENM is... a lot more difficult, if only because of the pure scope of possibilities. You could try to follow the same equation and shove three (or more) people into it, but it rarely works well. Usually because if you’re doing it right, you won’t have enough room in a single character arc to allow for enough growth, and if ENM requires anything in abundance, it’s room to grow.

And this post is huge so I’m going to put the rest under a cut :)

There's also a common refrain in certain online polyam/ENM circles that triads and throuples are overrepresented in media and they may be right to some extent. Personally, I believe the issue isn't that triads and throuples are overrepresented, but that there is such minuscule positive rep of ethical non-monogamy in general, that the few tiny instances we have of triads in media make it seem like it's "everywhere" when in actuality, it's still quite rare and the media we do have often veers into Unicorn Hunter fetish porn. Which is its own problematic thing. And just to be clear, I’m not including this part to dissuade you from writing "falling back-asswards into threesomes." If anything, I need more of it and would hook it directly into my brain if I could. I'm just throwing it out there into the void in the hope that someone will take the thought and run with it, lol.

I’d love to see more polyfidelitous rep in fiction, just as much as I’d like to see more relationship anarchy too. More diversity in fiction is always good.

Another thing that differs in writing ENM romance vs conventional monogamy is the feeling like you need to justify yourself. There's a lot of pressure to be as healthy and non-problematic as possible because you are being held to a higher standard of criticism. Both from people from without the ENM communities, and from the people within. Granted, some people don't give a shit and just want to read some fantastic porn (valid) but there are those who will cheerfully read Fifty Shades of Bullshit and call it "spicy" and "romantic," then turn around and call the most tooth-rottingly-sweet-fluff about a queer platonic polycule heresy. That's just the way the world works.

(Pro-tip for author life in general: never read your own reviews; that way madness lies. I glimpsed one the other day that tagged Hunger Pangs as “ethical cheating” and just about had an aneurism.)

And while that feeling of needing to justify yourself comes from a valid place of being excluded from the table of socially accepted norms, it can also be to the detriment of both the story and the subject matter at hand. I've seen some authors bend so far over backward to avoid being problematic in their portrayal of ENM, they end up being problematic for entirely different reasons. Usually because they give such a skewed, rose-tinted perspective of how things work, it ends up coming off as well... a bit culty and obnoxious tbh.

“Look how enlightened we are, freed from the trappings of monogamy and jealousy! We’re all so honest and perfect and happy!”

Yeah, uhu, sure Jan. Except here’s the thing, not all jealousy is bad. How you act on it can be, but jealousy itself is an important tool in the junk drawer that is the range of human emotion. It can clue us in to when we’re feeling sad or neglected, which in turn means we should figure out why we’re feeling those things. Sometimes it’s because brains are just like that and anxiety is a thing. Other times it’s because our needs are actually being neglected and we are in an unhealthy situation we need to remedy. You gotta put the work in to figure it out. Which is the same as any style of relationship, whether it’s mono, polyam or whatever flavor of ENM you subscribe to* And sometimes you just gotta be messy, because that’s how humans are. Being afraid to show that mess makes it a dishonest portrayal, and it also robs you of some great cannon fodder for character development.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to my current pet peeve in how certain writers take monogamous ideals and apply them to ENM, sometimes without even realizing it. The “Find the Right Person and Settle Down” trope.

Often, in this case, ENM or polyamory is treated as a phase. Something you mature out of with age or until you meet “The One(tm).” This is, of course, an attempt to follow the mono style formula expected in most romances. And while it might appeal to many readers, it’s uh, actually quite insulting. 

To give an example, I am currently seeing this a lot in the Witcher fandom. 

Fanon Netflix!Jaskier is everyone's favorite ethical slut until he meets Geralt then woops, wouldn’t you know, he just needed to find The One(tm). Suddenly, all his other sexual and romantic exploits or attractions mean nothing to him. Let's watch as he throws away a core aspect of his personality in favor of a man. 

Yeah... that sure showed those societal norms... 

If I were being generous, I’d say it’s a poor attempt at showing New Relationship Euphoria and how wrapped up people can become in new relationships. But honestly, it’s monogamous bias eking its way in to validate how special and unique the relationship is. Because sometimes people really can’t think of any other way to show how important and valid a relationship is without defining it in terms of exclusivity. Which is a fundamental misunderstanding of how ENM works for a lot of people and invalidates a lot of loving, serious and long-term relationships.

This is not to say that some polyam/poly-leaning people can't be happy in monogamous relationships! I am! (I consider myself ambiamorous. I'm happy with either monogamy or polyamory, it really just depends on the relationship(s) I’m in.) But I also don't regard my relationship with a mono partner as "settling down" or "growing up." It's just a choice I made to be with a person I love, and it's a valid one. Just like choosing to never close yourself off to multiple relationships is valid. And I wish more people realized that, or rather, I wish the people writing these things knew that :P

Anyway, I think I’ve rambled enough. I hope this collection of incoherent thoughts actually makes some sense and might be useful. 

----

*A good resource book that doesn't pull any punches in this regard is Polysecure by Jessica Fern. It's a wonderfully insightful read that explores the messier side of consensual non-monogamy, especially with how it can be affected by trauma or inter-relationship conflicts. But it also shows how to take better steps toward healthy, ethical non-monogamy (a far better job than More Than Two**) and conflict resolution, making it a valuable resource both for someone who is a part of this relationship style***, but also for writers on the outside looking in who might have a very simple or misguided idea of what conflict within polyam/ENM relationships might look like, vs traditional monogamous ones.

** The author of More Than Two has been accused of multiple accounts of abuse within the polyamorous community, with many of his coauthors having spoken out about the gaslighting and emotional and psychological damage they experienced while in a relationship with him. A lot of their stories are documented here: https://www.itrippedonthepolystair.com/ (warning: it is not light material and deals with issues of abuse, gaslighting, and a whole other plethora of Yikes.) While some people still find More Than Two helpful reading, there are now, thankfully, much, much better resources out there.

*** Some people consider polyam/ENM to be part of their identity or orientation, while others view it as a relationship style.It largely depends on the individual. 

#long post #writing #ethical non-monogamy #relationship styles #relationship models in fiction #also that kindle link is an affiliate link #because fuck giving amazon free recs

[rocketcollider]

How Math Works

You may have noticed that mathematical formulas on this blog look kinda nice. They depend on a multitude of modern technologies generally referred to as "The World Wide Web".

There are two main technologies involved: protocols and documents. Protocols make sure you can send and receive documents. The documents contain some content and instructions what to do with that content in computer readable language.

Over the past years, protocols have gotten more and more sophisticated. Quite recently, a lot of effort went into encrypting all these protocols better. But they also get faster, integrate new algorithms more efficiently and generally move forward at an impressive pace. There are some problems, but generally speaking humanity has protocols figured out.

Documents are a bit more problematic. When you look at a web-page, you use a browser (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and some unimportant ones) to do all the heavy lifting for you. The browser figures out what protocols to use, who to talk to and what documents to request. Once it got all the documents, it reads all the computer languages in the document to figure out how to display the content.

There are three main languages we use to make web-pages pretty:

Hyper Text Markup Language or HTML describes the structure of a document. Where does a paragraph start and end? What text should link somewhere else? Is that text for the user or the computer?

Cascading Style Sheets or CSS tell the browser what the document should look like. Text color, size, where to position text and what text should be hidden is defined using CSS. It's probably the most difficult to learn language of these three.

[Javascript or JS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript "Wikipedia on JS"] is the only programming language here. It can change a documents layout, evaluate input and is nothing short of the brain of a web-page.

That's the good part. Let's start with the bad part at a point you bare some responsibility for: bad browser support.

Superficially, all browsers agree on how the internet should look like. Over some time, we got all browser-suppliers to listen to the World Wide Web Consortium, an organisation that defines how HTML and CSS should work and how JavaScript interfaces with both. In detail however, many browsers speak there own, specific "slang" instead of what the W3C defined.[1] Sometimes browsers charge ahead and implement features the W3C didn't have time to define yet. Other times they don't implement something for various reasons. And then again some browsers understand words differently.

For everybody caring about their web page, that meant to write different documents for different browsers. Most of the time, only tiny bits and pieces need to be different. Though there is not much work involved, it's a plethora of annoyance to test every detail in every browser. So much so that it's big business to help people with cross-browser-testing.

That's where the math breaks.

There is a great standard embedded in HTML, the Math Markup Language or MathML. Though it's part of HTML, part of the web and well defined by W3C[2], most browsers don't understand MathML.

JavaScript To The "Rescue"

It's such a pain to test different browsers, sometimes only to find out that what worked nicely in one doesn't work at all in the other, that developers started to use frameworks. Frameworks teach a browser some new language, usually as an extension of JavaScript. Most are written in JavaScript, but all promise to look the same across all browsers. It's a lot easier to write a page nearly exclusively in JavaScript than using HTML and CSS, both possibly failing in one browser or the other. Furthermore, CSS tends to have unexpected results. It's a quite old language that pales in comparison to newer ones. CSS' complexity is partly to blame for the popularity of frameworks.

Here the math came in. Since MathML is badly supported, a framework exists to display mathematical formulas. I used MathJax because it allows formulas to be written in LaTex, a language used in scientific literature.

E.g. this LaTex code:

\gamma ={\frac {1}{\sqrt {1-{\frac {v^{2}}{c^{2}}}}}}={\frac {1}{\sqrt {1-\beta ^{2}}}}=(1-{\frac {v^{2}}{c^{2}}})^{-{\frac {1}{2}}}={\frac {dt}{d\tau}}

ideally renders as:

People are lazy. Web developers especially. If there is a tool out there fixing a problem[3], people will use it. The additional cost is conveniently hidden. But there is plenty!

Your browser is a tool to display HTML and CSS. It's well optimised to do that quickly, neatly and securely. JavaScript on the other hand is designed to be able to do everything. And it's actually quite hard to do that quickly, not to mention securely.

JavaScript is awesome. Used correctly, it allows a more fluent user experience. And smoothing over browser differences is possible as well. There seems to be no limit to what JavaScript can do.

But when it's used for everything, web-pages require a lot more code to be transferred, slowing users down. JavaScript, though fast, can't come close to a browsers native ability to read HTML and CSS.

More recently, JavaScript is used for user surveillance. Tracking your device, your click-behavior, and of course what pages you visit is all possible with JavaScript.

JavaScript used at the scale it's used today excludes slow connections and slow computers and enables user surveillance by big companies. That's why I try to reduce JavaScript to an absolute minimum in all my projects.[4]

How That Works

HTML tells the browser about a documents structure. Browsers expect everything in a document to be embedded in HTML. Documents are generally structured as follows:

- tells the browser this document may contain HTML - Everything between and is html-code. </p> All document properties go here. The head is never displayed, but used to tell the browser how to handle the document. <title>The Documents title goes here</title><style> Cascading _Style_ Sheet language goes here </style><script> JavaScript code would go here, use sparingly! </script><link href="Here%20we%20could%20write%20some%20link%20to%20load%20additional%20CSS-files" the> - tag is used for very basic document descriptions, like if the document contains emoticons: <meta charset="utf-8"> Content goes here. Ideally, we don't need any more property-definitions here, though it would be possible to enter them here as well.

tumblr allows quite substantial manipulation of a blog's HTML. But they insert some extra HTML without asking any blogger. By inserting some <script>-tags, they can add some JavaScript. That is mostly for surveillance purposes, but some is to show e.g. that tumblr-bar at the top of the page.

By adding some JavaScript to display nice formulas I contribute to the jungle of JavaScript. Then again, removing MathJax would change little. However, I could actually add some JavaScript to protect my visitors from surveillance. Even better, I can use HTML itself.

There is a lot more to HTML than most people, even web-developers[5], realise. For example, there is a way to define what sources the browser should trust, and discard all others. That way, a browser will block any JavaScript[6] which is not allowed.

These restrictions are actually part of the protocol, not the document. But HTML has a way to tell the browser about things the protocol might have forgotten to mention. This extra information is of course valid for the whole document, so they go in the <head> element. On this blog, this line keeps you safe from surveillance JavaScript:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Security-Policy" content="script-src 'unsafe-eval' 'nonce-optica_setup' 'nonce-disqus' 'nonce-mathjax' https://*.tumblr.com">

This line introduces itself to the browser as meta-information about the document. http-equiv tells the browser it's supposed to treat the line as equivalent to an HTTP[7] statement, which is specified in quotation marks. The content specifies what the statement is evaluated as. Suffice to say, this content tells the browser to ignore all JavaScript not from tumblr.

Safe From Math As Well

You may have noticed that I said pretty formulas needed JavaScript because browsers don't all support MathML. Well, there are ways around this shortcoming. MathJax is one way, browser specific CSS is another.

Assume a browser doesn't understand MathML. It's still HTML, but uses tags the browser has no use for. Since it's HTML, the browser would understand CSS styling it's content perfectly well. That allows to as a browser to please draw e.g. a square root in pure CSS. Or to define the style of how fractions are written. And how the typesetting of a formula differs from that of text.

This method is called a "CSS-fallback". Your browser doesn't understand MathML? Well, you can fall back to how we did it in the old days. It won't be as pretty and there won't be the same functionality, but it covers you for the most part.

There is a catch, though. Say a browser understands MathML perfectly fine and reads the CSS-fallback. MathML tells it to draw a square root. CSS tells it to draw a square root as well. Now you have two square roots on the screen. Ugly.

What needs to happen is that the browser reads the CSS if it doesn't understand MathML and ignores it otherwise. However, there is no way to ask a browser if it understands MathML. The only way to reliably test weather a browser does requires JavaScript.

Trying to reduce JavaScript, there is only one way: browser specific hacks. Browsers implement HTML and CSS differently. That's generally an annoyance. But, once you know how exactly they differ, it's possible to write code one browser will understand and others won't. Once we know [what browser actually understand MathML](https://caniuse.com/mathml “caniuse.com is a helpful page that documents what which browser understands”), all we need to figure out is how to talk specifically with those who don't.

I failed. There is nothing that exclusively browsers that don't speak MathML understand.[8] The frustration is real.

The Demise of The Web (Page)

On the modern web, fewer and fewer documents contain static content. Most web pages rightfully call themselves "web apps", since they more closely resemble a dedicated application than any form of document. But by using browsers, they need to work with the minimum set of features every browser supports. Electron to the rescue!

Electron is a tool that solves many problems. Using Electron on a page returns a stripped-down version of Chromium that runs only that page. The web-developers are happy, because there is only one browser looking at their page. Chromium is happy, because there are much more people using Chromium now. And app-developers are happy, because Chromium works on any computer so their app will work on any computer.

There is a bunch of problems with Electron, specifically security wise, but it's better these projects are turned into apps than pages. That's because your program is your problem. How much work you invest vs. how bad it turns out is your decision.

A web-page is everybodie's problem. Because of browser economoics.

The Politics of Browser Economics

Browsers and web-developers are in a weird dance with users. Every browser wants to be the most popular and lure users with features. Web-developers depend on browser support, so they tend to use features all browsers support. Users generally want a page to work before caring about what nice features it offers. And ideally, the W3C finds common ground and writes that down which we then call a standard.

To be the most popular, every browser found something it’s particularly good at. Firefox has the most experimental features, Chromium is super fast, Opera is pretty and Edge is good at downloading Firefox.

Faster browsers are easier to sell. The moment a user installs a faster browser he feels improvement. But it takes a document including e.g. MathML for a user to see the benefits of beautiful formulas. At the same time, every user with browsers not supporting MathML will leave the page because it looks ugly to them. That's why fallbacks are important. And that's why JavaScript frameworks are so convenient. But JavaScript is slow, so users would see a real improvement by switching to faster browsers. It's a vicious circle.

If we all could get faster browsers, that would be awesome. But we can't. There are people with old computers that don't have the power to run fast browsers. There are countries with slow connections and every byte JavaScript they need to download counts. And though JavaScript has it's applications, extensive use of JavaScript comes with many ramifications.

JavaScript takes time to load. A lot of companies use JavaScript for surveillance. Since JavaScript is so powerful, it's easier to hack. And since JavaScript is everywhere, it is used to grab your attention.

The Ad-Epidemic

The availability and prevalence of JavaScript everywhere has enabled new exploitation. Annoyingly blinking ads have existed since the very early days of the internet, but it took a lot of ~surveillance~ behavioral science to turn that into a business.

In the early days, to advertise you had to find a page that attracted users who might buy your stuff. Then you needed to actively reach out to that page and ask it to put some paid ads up. It was your responsibility to guess what users visit what pages and it was the pages responsibility to guess weather this or that ad might scare users away.

Today ads work like this: If you want to advertise, you hire an ad-network to show your ads to specific users. The ad-network has access to many thousand pages and will show your ad whenever a user you specified visits.[9] At the same time, all pages contributing to the ad-network can set what ads shouldn't be displayed on the page. There is no more guessing involved.

It's crucial to this process that the ad-network knows what user is currently visiting the page. Surveillance is a key element of modern advertising. The better an ad-network knows a user, the better it can show ads the user will actually click on and thereby earn money. Therefore, the best at this game are Google and Facebook. Google, because it knows what you search. Facebook, because you told them everything about you. And of course JavaScript based surveillance of user behavior.

Web-developers are lazy. Selling users attention and privacy is a super simple and reliable way to get enough money to keep a page running. Of course there are other concepts out there, ranging from plain paid subscriptions to more creative concepts! All of them require some thought into how a page adds value to a users life, though.

Plain And Simple

I'm lazy. I want a fast web. I'm easily distracted. And I don't know anybody who doesn't hate ads.

You are responsible for the browser you use. Could I convince you to switch to a browser with MathML support to make my life a little easier? If not, how about a fast browser with decent HTML support?

If you still have time, think about installing an ad blocker. You will experience faster pages, because the JavaScript trying to load ads is blocked. And if enough people block ads, web-developers will have to think of new ways to get money.

Another part to this story is mass surveillance. Surveillance is a lot easier with a lot of JavaScript and advertising requires surveillance to be efficient. Making surveillance more difficult is simple:

Privacy Possum disables surveillance a page does on it's own.

TorBrowser disables surveillance based on protocols

It's a bit more tricky to disable JavaScript based surveillance. The best way is to disable JavaScript. Some tools allow you to disable specific sources of JavaScript. uBlock has this functionality integrated. However, these tools require a bit more substantial understanding of how HTML documents work.

Most of this measures don't have an immediate benefit to you. Quite the opposite! TorBrowser is slow. Disabling JavaScript will break most pages because they rely so heavily on it.[10] But we shape the web by the way we use it. Using these tools shapes the web away from specific, slow, surveilled user experiences towards a common experience equal to all users.

EDIT: All of this was for nought, since tumblr filter MathML content from blog posts. They do that because they need to display posts on the dashboard, where a blog's layout isn't used. So any "invalid" HTML (i.e. HTML most browsers don't support) needs to be filtred. So for the sake of math on tumblr, please, PLESE use browsers that support the full HTML-syntax!

#MathML #JavaScript #WWW #surveillance