Heated Rivalry

Heated Rivalry is an M/M hockey romance TV series based on the book of the same name. It’s some sort of popular sensation, supposedly the #3 most popular TV show online. At time of writing, four out of six episodes have been released, and we’ve been keeping up with it. We’re used to accepting a lower quality standard when it comes to gay film. But this is surprisingly high quality, having good writing, good production, and amazing acting.

It’s about two hockey players on rival teams, Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov who are having sex with each other. But their relationship has to be kept secret because it would be bad for their careers. Fair warning, these are explicit sex scenes, and there are a lot of them, to the point of being pornographic.
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Link Roundup: December 2025

Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger Episode 1-4 | Video, 2 hours, via – An old television show, talking about the interpretation of European painting.  Episode 1 talks about the mistique placed on traditional art, episode 2 is tropes vs women in oil painting, episode 3 talks about the function of art as a class signifier, and episode 4 compares the tradition of oil painting to the modern tradition of advertisement.  Pretty fun and insightful.

What struck me was that for all the cultural reverence placed on traditional oil painting, we (as in the general public) have a fairly poor understanding of where it came from, and how its original context made it the way that it is.  And yet the origin is precisely what makes those paintings valuable in the first place.  So what does that say about art?  Do we value origin stories, or do we not?

How Dan Trachtenberg Built a Grand Unified Theory of Predator | Second Wind (video, 50 min) – I knew absolutely nothing about Predator before, so I learned a lot!  Darren Mooney discusses how it’s basically a slasher film where most of the victims are manly men, and also basically Vietnam soldiers.  I had no idea that this horror series I was barely aware of had such commentary on masculinity, and now I’m glad I don’t have to watch them to learn about it.

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On Steam AI disclosures

The Steam game store has a policy that games with AI-generated content are required to say so. The CEO of Epic Games (which owns a competing game store) recently criticized this policy:

The AI tag is relevant to art exhibits for authorship disclosure, and to digital content licensing marketplaces where buyers need to understand the rights situation. It makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production.

This has been making the rounds as people react to it on social media. I thought I’d offer my two cents, since I just set up a Steam page a few months ago, and had to familiarize myself with the AI disclosure policy at the time.

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Origami: early works

Early origami models

From top to bottom, left to right:
1. Dimpled Model with Curls by Meenakshi Mukerji.
2. Sonobe Cube, by Mitsunobu Sonobe.
3. Cube with Windows, by Bennett Arnstein, simplified from Lewis Simon’s Decoration Box.
4. Equilateral Triangle Edge Module, by Lewis Simon and Bennett Arnstein, modified by me to make a square pyramid.
5. Same as #4, making a tetrahedron.
6. Simple Chain-of-4-Equilateral-Triangles From a Square, by Lewis Simon.

I mentioned that I messed up my photo organization, so I was trying to figure out what I hadn’t posted already.  I think I’ve posted a few of these, but let’s just knock them all out from my list.  These are the very first models I folded when I started doing modular origami in 2012.

Most of these are from Beginner’s Book of Modular Origami Polyhedra: The Platonic Solids by Rona Gurkewitz and Bennett Arnstein, and I do recommend that for beginners.  The Dimpled Model with Curls is from Meenakshi Mukerji’s Exquisite Modular Origami.

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