I'm really not sure about this one. First of all, I loved the title. Loved the song going with it, too. The story, though? Hm. Let me try to make explain it a little.

I'm a fan of flamboyant characters. Most of all because I hate how hard it is for these guys in real life to be their true selves. In the straight communtiy, they constantly have to put up with ridicule, cruelty and lack of understanding. I'm so sick and tired of people spouting crap about how these guys are so "fake", and they should stop trying to be a woman, and that "real men" would never wear make-up or do this or do that. T

 

he gay community really isn't that much better. The ignorance and cruelty coming from a lot of gay men and women when it comes to flamboyant guys is unbelievable. It amazes me in the worst way how ingnorant people can be who actually have to fight their own stigma all the time. And don't get me started on all the crap about how these guys destroy the image of the "regular, normal gay guy" and how nobody who is gay wants to be with a woman, but with a real man, and how these "queens" damage the image of gay people "LGBTQA+ activists" want to promote. The nice, regular gay man, who looks and acts and talks and lives like every other straight man does and therefore has to be accepted uncondictionally. At the same time they refuse to live by their own standards and treat someone who doesn't exactly fit THEIR promoted image with the same ignorance and cruelty everybody else does. Drives me up the wall every damn time. And stop calling these guys feminine all the time, damnit! They're not! They are guys with make-up, or nail polish, or lip gloss or whatever else! Nothing more, nothing less. If I stop wearing make-up and never paint my nails pink, does it make me a more "man-ly" woman? No? Then stop using the generalized BS to put someone you don't know or understand into neat little boxes! Himmel, Arsch und Zwirn, as my grandma would say. Sorry for the rant, just had to say it once.

So, back to the book. As I said, it's always nice for me to see a flamboyant character portrayed in a book, who doesn't "tune it down" because he can't and shouldn't have to, wether at home or when he is in public. On the other hand his struggles, everyday-problems and fights are portrayed very well. And I enjoyed the dance of the two MCs around each other quite a bit. One could argue that Lukas was too one-dimensional, just too good. But in the end, it worked somehow.

What made it difficult for me to read was the stream-of-consciousness-feeling of it all. You have to like it to really make it work, and it just isn't that great for me. Details, minutes like hours and weeks like seconds - it all comes together in a long description that is "one-sided" and more often than not leaves me with a tiny little bit of a "WTF"-face. And I wasn't quite comfortable with the ending. The marriage as a "fix" was hard for me to swallow. Of course they put it somewhat into perspective and I got the feeling that both guys knew that things wouldn't automatically be all rainbows and sunshine from there on. Still, it didn't sit right with me. The side characters in the end also were somewhat... overwhelming? I like diversity in my books, and creative "world building", but here I struggled a little bit with the last part of the story.

So, I really liked it, but I also had some problems with it and I don't feel comfortable with an exact rating. But I'd definitely recommend it. Just take it with a little bit of salt. Or sugar. Whatever floats your boat.

"I only saw you looking at me , 'cause I was watching you back"

Oh God. The feeling. It's overflowing. I couldn't stop myself from smiling like an idiot from the very start till the end of story. I had so much fun with the characters. They were adorable. And cute. Especially every time Luke feels awkward talking to the boy of his fantacies, Cameron. And I was like: for God's sake, Luke! You can do it! This sweet cute couple surely made my day. And the part where they were talking alone in the park and had their kisses. I was already fainting.What really made me liking this whole thing is that music put them together. I really listening to music aside from reading books. Just like what Luke said, he used music to block out the shit that sometimes got thrown his way. He nailed it. Seriously, I did really enjoy this a lot.

Lovely short story about two high school boys, the nerd and the jock, falling for each other.

Sweet, cute and left me wanting more.

Step 1: Be born into the right environment.

 

Germs, Guns, and Steel attempts to answer one of the more uncomfortable questions of history: why on earth did some civilizations dominate others?  Ignoring the various power-struggles that occurred within each continent, why was it the Eurasian explorers who "discovered," conquered, and destroyed so many native civilizations?  For far too long, we have clung to the idea that "the white man's burden" was to be a somehow superior being to the people he tyrannized.  While we've finally dispensed with that old chestnut--at least in polite conversation--the troubling question remains: given that there is no actual difference between peoples, what shaped societies to create the outcomes that we observe?

 

Diamond's answer is simple. (Hint: it's in the title.)  In fact, his thesis can be stated even more simply: it's all down to the environment.  This doesn't mean to imply that early environment actually shaped better or smarter types of people; all it means is that environments shaped societies in various ways that eventually led to conquest or capitulation.  At no point did any of the events of history make one ethnicity or tribe of people actually qualitatively "better"; the environment only changed the tools available, not the peoples themselves.  The book itself can get a bit dry, and I would really like to remember the theories here, so I'm going to summarize the talking points. So spoiler warning, I guess, just in case the title and what you know about history haven't given away the whole thing already.

 

Personally, I'm not convinced that the guns/germs/steel trifecta is actually the best summary of the environmental effects that Diamond describes.  Take the case of Pizarro versus the Incan king Atahualpa: how did Pizarro's 168 men take down the Incan nation?  And why wasn't Atahualpa marching on Madrid?  Technological superiority was definitely a factor--Atahualpa assumed that 168 men weren't a threat because he didn't account for the armour, guns, and canon.  He therefore allowed Pizarro to march unopposed to the capital.  But Pizarro also got there long before Atahualpa expected because of another important factor: horses. Fast transportation gave Pizarro the mobility that improved scouting and the ability to send for recruitments.  And then there's the third, and most important factor: disease.  At various points in history, disease has been recognized as one of the most effective methods of warfare.  This was particularly devestating in Pizarro's case, since the worst of the diseases tended to go mainly in one direction, often knocking out over 90% of the native peoples that the Europeans encountered.  Colonists were more than ready to take ruthless advantage of the power of germs, but even this still leaves some nagging questions behind:

• Why did the deadly diseases tend to spread in only one direction?
• Why weren't there horse equivalents in Peru?
• Why was the fighting technology of the Spaniards superior?
• Why did Spain take the role of conqueror/explorer instead of the reverse?

 

The answer to all of the above is (you guessed it): environment.

 

One important thing to note: in my summary, I've severely simplified the structure of the book to that of Eurasia against other parts of the world.  The book itself looks at a far larger variety of conquests: Māori versus Mauri, Polynesians versus other Polynesians, Incans and Aztecs versus their surrounding groups, and far more.  In simplifying the examples to those of the European conquerors, I've also added a focus on European imperialism that may be a major theme, but is, I think, absent from much of the book.

 

The first important distinction is hunter/gatherer versus agrarian.  I really like how Diamond approaches this: he explicitly states that neither lifestyle is inherently superior, and that those who remained in hunter/gatherer societies did so not because of stupidity or stubbornness, but because it made economic sense to do so.  (In fact, early agrarian peoples tended to be malnourished and live shorter lives.) For agrarian societies to work, you need to have fertile land and easily cultivatable crops, and you need to be in a situation that the risk of crop failure can be weathered.  Domesticated crops tend to be radically different from the wild versions, and the difference comes, of course, from genetic modification.  Since none of the early peoples did much gene-splicing, this meant that early cultivatable crops tended to be ones that required only one or two mutations to become a crop variety.  For example, peas only needed one mutation, while bananas, acorns, and apples were impressively difficult because they required a long chain of mutations to be edible or domesticable. Wild almonds, for example, are chock-full of cyanide, but only one mutation was required for the almond tree to stop producing poison, leading to an early distinction between domesticated and wild plants.  A disproportionate number of cultivatable crops--especially the cereal crops-- turned out to be in Eurasia.  This wasn't because of some superior agrarian capabilities of early European people--according to Diamond, we haven't managed to domesticate a single new crop in recent times, implying that early peoples were darned good at domestication.  More importantly, the entire setup of Eurasia helped with crop domestication, because in the end, it's all about size (and shape.) Eurasia is pretty darn big, and most of its size is width along a similar latitude, meaning that climate remains comparatively similar and crops can be spread.  The same isn't true for little continents or big continents with massive mountain chains in the way, or places where most of the landmass stretches along the longitude. 

 

The other major aspect of the agrarian society, is, of course, the livestock.  Yet again, livestock depended heavily on the animals available to the civilization.  Eurasia again came out ahead, with thirteen large domesticated animals, including horses, cows, sheep, goats, and more.  Why did they end up so far ahead?  Continent size is obviously a factor, but there are others: for example, the Americas were inhabited later than Europe, and by explorers who were probably more advanced in hunting and survival.  While Eurasian animals were able to slowly develop defensive tactics against the humans, the unlucky American animals who encountered humans probably (literally) didn't know what hit them. While it's hard to find real evidence to back up this hypothesis, there certainly seems to be a suspicious concurrence in dates of human arrival and extinction of certain large animals in the Americas and other locations--all during the Pleistocene era.  Add in the factors discussed above--easy spread of domesticates throughout Europe--and it starts making sense.  Again, the difference clearly had nothing to do with skill; for example, we still haven't managed to effectively domesticate zebras, and Plains Indians certainly proved adept with horses when they were finally introduced to North America.  

 

The obvious value of livestock such as horses, camels, and llamas is that they improved communication over large areas, meaning that innovations and inventions could spread more readily, and increasing the impetus for the development a writing system. They also were useful for agrarian societies, because plow-animals and similar radically altered the forms of farming that could be practised within the society.  However, the real reason that livestock were important was the germs that they carried.  Most European diseases appeared to bridge from livestock to humans, but it takes a certain amount of time for the diseases to mutate into a human-vector form.  Since Eurasia started into the agrarian lifestyle rather earlier, it meant they got a head start on disease--and resistance--development.  In fact, the human-to-animal disease issue was initially one reason why the sedentary life actually wasn't a clear winner over hunter/gatherer societies.  However, it did mean that Europeans developed a resistance to an impressive set of terrible diseases that they were all too willing to share with their conquests.

 

And then, of course, agriculture changes the population.  While hunter-gatherers are forced to travel often and therefore tend to have children only at strategic moments, in an agrarian society, the more kids, the more hands to do the work.  Agrarian societies tended to undergo a population explosion, with far denser concentrations that congealed into towns or cities.  This, in turn, allowed people to diversify their roles, which allowed the creation of a warrior class and a status hierarchy.  And, of course, in agrarian societies, land had value, so there was always something to fight over.  This diversification tended to lead to more complex social structures and technologies such as writing.  Writing, in turn, also improved the ability to spread and improve various inventions.  Given Eurasia's large landmass and population, the probability of having a random person turn out to be an innovator was reasonably high, and improved methods of communication guaranteed that the invention could spread.  This trend was also true in China, but with a difference: China contained a central control that often shut down various inventions such as guns, prohibiting usage and stifling development.  The fragmented city-state nature of Europe meant that no-one could afford to ignore technological inventions because they could be sure that their neighbours wouldn't. 

 

So where does that leave us?  Eurasia won the lottery in terms of domesticate animals and crops, meaning that they could drop the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to increase the probability of innovation.  However, more importantly, the herding aspect meant that they developed and became resistant to an entire host of animal-borne diseases that would play havoc with the other cultures.  Agrarian societies required places to grow crops, meaning that finding new land via exploration was tempting and squabbling with neighbouring countries made it imperative. Which brings us back to what created the world that we know today: it wasn't superior intelligence or skill or planning or religion:it all comes down to the timeless mantra of the realtor: location, location, location.

 

So far, I've spent almost all of this "review" summarizing the book, mainly because I think the theory is freaking awesome, but also because Diamond tends to go off onto tangents and build his thesis gradually and I wanted to try to get my muddled mental summary into a slightly cleaner form.  Don't get me wrong--I really liked the structure: he usually starts by asking the "obvious" question (e.g. why did Europeans have all the bad germs), then explores and reformulates the question (e.g. given that the diseases and subsequent immunity came from livestock, why did they have the livestock?) 

 

The tone is definitely problematic at times: Diamond so earnestly disputes the "superior European" hypothesis that he has a tendency to drift into "noble savage"/exoticism mode, most gratingly in his anecdote of Levi, a Blackfoot Indian that Diamond encountered as a child.  I found it useful to keep the generational gap in mind: Diamond was born in 1937 and therefore grew up hearing the imperialist theories he so strongly disputes, which I think goes quite far to explain a certain problematic tone at times.  The book itself was published in 1997, and it's very Euro-centric because it is explicitly fighting against the idea of inherent European superiority.  It doesn't really discuss how Europe itself was created via a succession of conquests that destroyed the true native peoples.  It doesn't discuss how areas of Africa and South America (the Amazon, anyone?) remained unconquered for years.  It doesn't really discuss the advancement in Asia, mainly because Asia made a decision towards isolation and was therefore mostly out of the imperialism game. It doesn't talk about various partnerships between indigenous peoples and conquerors, the political machinations, the diversity within a continent, the cultural differences which shaped the outcomes, the ways in which the native peoples had agency in their own fates.

 

To me, the book needs to be examined in context, both of its time of publishing (over 15 years ago) and Diamond's own era. Diamond is really fighting against a prevalent viewpoint of his era: that of biological determinism.  His main goal is to refute the idea that some people or some cultures are actually "better" than others.  He spent time in New Guinea in a time when they were trying to gain their freedom, so the argument about whether whether some people were innately inferior, so while biological determinism may seem silly to us, it was very much on his mind.  His real goal is to show that such beliefs have no real validity: initial differences in environment shaped societies, but they didn't alter peoples.  He demonstrates that no matter the culture, each society was impressively adept at optimizing their lifestyles to fit their cultures.  The real problem with our viewpoint is that we compare cultures not by how well they fit their environment, but how various tangential consequences of these lifestyles led to victory or defeat when the societies clashed with one another.  While the cultures were different, nothing about them led to the creation of inherently smarter or "better" races of people.

 

In terms of the science, I have to admit that I have very little faith in evolutionary biology, but I think Diamond's impressively methodical examination made a reasonable case; he utilizes a lot of statistical theory surrounding matched pairs and natural experiments, and if you're not familiar with the terms, unfortunately, he made the rather odd choice of saving his brief explanation for the epilogue.  The other major complaint (at least from a conversation with my mother, a historian) is a strong reaction against the idea of environmental determinism.  To me, this ties into my issues with evolutionary biology: I believe strongly in the role of chance and randomness.  When we look back at history, we are in the odd position of seeing one outcome and attempting to provide a deterministic explanation for why this particular reality occurred.  I think we need to try to look at it much the same way as we look at the future: choices and situations place different priors on the outcomes--change the odds, if you will-- but we should always leave room for blind chance.  Because even in Diamond's world, in the end, it all comes down one factor: it's not about who you are; it's about where you live.

~~Moved from GR~~

 

The Sword-Edged Blonde

by Alex Bledsoe

 
Eddie LaCrosse has been on the run from his past for years, slumming it in backwater towns and trying--mainly unsuccessfully--to make a reasonably ethical living as a private detective and sword for hire, or, as he says, "A private sword jockey with a talent for discretion". However, when an old friend, King Phil, seeks him out, Eddie travels back to his old kingdom to help. Phil is certainly in need of assistance: his beautiful wife Rhiannon has been accused of murdering their young son, and as she was caught literally red-handed, there seems little doubt of her guilt. Yet matters are made even more complex when Eddie thinks he recognizes Rhiannon and she maintains ignorance due to a mysterious amnesia. Eddie straps on his sword--an old Fireblade Warrior three-footer--and sets out on a quest to uncover Rhiannon's past in the hope of saving her future.

The Sword-Edged Blonde is fun and light, a noir pastiche set in a Celtic-mythology-based alternate world. My favourite aspect of it was the mythology it invoked: the basic story is a retelling and enhancement of one of the branches of Y Mabinogi from Welsh mythology. It's actually one of my favourite stories: the tale of Pwyll (which means "thought"), his wife Rhiannon, and her apparent murder of their baby son (named Pryderi, which means "worry.") It's a great story to retrofit into a comic mystery, as the original story is bizarre, funny, and chock-filled with puns. (Yes, Pryderi is intended to be "worry son of thought.") I have a special fondness for the oft-overlooked Welsh mythology and therefore loved Bledsoe's retake on the classic tale. I think I gave it an extra point in my rating solely because of its allusions to Y Mabinogi, because otherwise, I have rather mixed emotions about the story. The plot is very light; not only does it fail to invoke any complex or interesting themes, but it actually must be read at the farce level: the sheer number of casual deaths, as well as certain other aspects, are extremely troubling if considered more seriously. For example, there is a scene in which Eddie meets up with a pair of inbred hicks; the scene is so unrelated to the remainder of the plot that I can only imagine it was intended as rather gory comic relief.

Another troubling aspect was Eddie's treatment of Rhiannon. I was very weirded out by their sexually-charged conversations, but that's nothing compared to the moment where he forcefully grabs her and looks up her dress to see her birthmark--yes, she thinks he's raping her--and the other point where he grabs her and she tells him he's free to rape her if he wants. Yuck. What a great protagonist. I also wasn't too fond of that moon scene, or what it implied.

(spoiler show)

I think much of the humour is supposed to be derived from stereotypes and situations involving "rednecks," gays, dwarves, etc, and it irritated rather than amused me. I also had some issues with the flow of the plot itself, especially the ending, which seemed to me to be an inexpertly-tacked-on afterthought.

Seriously, twins? You lose one, so just replace her with another off the shelf? The end is not only absurd, but seems to directly indicate that most of a character's "personality" is really just their physical appearance. I really have no words for what a disappointment that was.

(spoiler show)

Evaluating the story at a very light, superficial level, however, there were other aspects I appreciated. I liked Eddie himself; I thought he had an entertaining voice and an interesting backstory. I read a lot of books in this genre, so I'm automatically predisposed to like any detective who isn't tall, dark, and ruggedly handsome; Eddie's rotund form and lack of youth made for a pleasing change. The medieval world combined with noir pastiche was very reminiscent of Glen Cook's Garrett, PI series. The major differences I saw were in tone (I think this was intended to be even more of a lighthearted farce than the Garrett books) and Bledsoe's incorporation of various myths into his story. I very much enjoyed the allusions to various legends; for example, one of the characters is identified by a specially-shaped birthmark on her thigh, which to me invoked the various Greek myths in which gods disguised as humans were marked in the same fashion. (I have no idea why the Greeks had such a fascination with birthmarks on thighs, but it comes up in more than one story.) Bledsoe also invokes the myths of Circe and Epona, and melds these various legends into an interesting and coherent whole. Although the story is not particularly groundbreaking and the story and characters rather superficial, The Sword-Edged Blonde makes for a fast and funny read. If you share my fondness for the generally unappreciated Welsh myths, you're sure to enjoy this entertaining retelling of the Pryderi story.

Dda iawn, neu efallai eithaf da, dw i ddim yn siwr.