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FiveHourMarathon

Wawa Nationalist

17 followers   follows 6 users  
joined 2022 September 04 22:02:26 UTC

And every gimmick hungry yob

Digging gold from rock n roll

Grabs the mic to tell us

he'll die before he's sold

But I believe in this

And it's been tested by research

He who fucks nuns

Will later join the church


				
User ID: 195


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
FiveHourMarathon


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Wawa Nationalist

				
				
				

				

					17 followers  

					follows 6 users  

					joined 2022 September 04 22:02:26 UTC
				


				
					

					
And every gimmick hungry yob


Digging gold from rock n roll


Grabs the mic to tell us


he'll die before he's sold


But I believe in this


And it's been tested by research


He who fucks nuns


Will later join the church



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 195


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Why are advertisements for AI so bad?


There's one running during football games where a coach is, I think, supposed to be picking players for the draft. And he starts asking the AI to give him the linebackers with various traits, then asks for the ones with "strong leadership abilities." And that is OBVIOUSLY A TERRIBLE QUESTION to ask AI! All an LLM could maybe do is search news articles to see if any have been called out for it, but in all honesty I'd expect it to tell me "yeah no can do boss." Like there's probably a lot of useful things an LLM can do for NFL draft prep, but asking it to assess intangibles is not one of them!


And there have been others just the same. Apple ran a series of ads where employees used AI to just not do their jobs. Like a producer using it to summarize a script that she then agrees to buy (the benefit being that she didn't get caught not reading it). Or using it to pretend to participate in a meeting you aren't prepared for, or reply to emails. And the impression I get out of it is that as an employer I would not want my employees using AI to make it harder to see if they're doing their jobs.


It just seems like they're giving terrible examples of awful and irresponsible ways to use LLMs which will almost certainly lead to disappointment and disillusionment.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The ufc white house event is a good barometer of whether the ufc is a legit league or if it's gone full WWE: if all the Americans win, it's cooked.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's all part of the same supernatural tradition, right? The same thin places can lead to a kid eaten by monsters or a kid being gifted magical treasure by fairies in two different legends. The liminal Shitbird Geography of every suburban town provides both the overlooks and reservoirs and abandoned camps and empty barns where teenagers make out or smoke weed, and the same places where every serial killer story is set when the slasher gets at the horny teenagers.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This post is so riddled with errors (it's obviously not a bodycam and he doesn't go down) that I think it might be a troll and it's probably a bad idea to engage.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Liminal horror is in many ways the modern manifestation of the "horror of the gaps," that horror exists just at the edge of civilization, just at the edge of what we have normal knowledge of, and as that line has shifted so has the location of horror. In the same way that we talk about the God of the Gaps shrinking to exist in the spaces between human scientific knowledge, supernatural horror has shrunk over the years to fit into the spaces where civilization does not adhere.


In ancient and medieval horror stories, the spirits exist just at the edge of the village. The forest is dark and full of terrors. You might meet the devil at any crossroads at night. Only God sees what goes on in the mountains or the deserts, and who can possibly say what might be on the other side? Hansel and Gretel can run into a witch just on the edge of town, the Black Forest has everything from dwarven kingdoms to the gates of hell depending on the story, the Irish bogs are full of fairy lights and changelings.


Then the Enlightenment happens in England, science happens, exploration happens, the world is connected, the forests that aren't cut down are well mapped, the deserts and mountains have good roads through them. We know there aren't witches in the woods. So then you have Bram Stoker, who projects that horror across the English Channel, to Transylvania, a gap in modernity, a place where horror can still exist without modernity knowing about it. Then a few more decades pass, and modernity is pretty well hit in Transylvania, so Lovecraft has to fit his cosmic horror into smaller gaps: Antarctica, the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, a strange cult on an Island or among the negroes and Portuguese down at the docks. Then you have the "highway horror" of mid-century America: Children of the Corn or Deliverance or Silent Hill, the idea that if you take the wrong turn off the highway traveling between civilized towns you can end up in horror. This is a very real experience any Pennsylvanian has had: driving your nice comfortable car on a nice modern highway between metropoles of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, you can end up at a gas station that time forgot very easily. Hell, driving from NYC to Syracuse, you briefly find yourself in towns where all the signs are in Hebrew and the locals make it very clear that the uncircumcised are unwelcome. Then the world became a little more connected, and a little more documented, and highway horror started to lose its credibility, because those towns have high speed internet and cell phone service and cameras and everything. In the 1970s, Deliverance just barely works, today banjo kid would be watching videos on TikTok just like any other kid.


So horror has had the retreat again, and having nowhere left to go geographically (the forests are parks, transylvania and silent hill both have high speed internet, Antarctica has been mapped and the pacific islands are mostly resorts), horror has to retreat into the interior. The liminal spaces are a new wilderness, created by humans but over time taking on a life of their own. This is just the latest gap that horror has shrunk to inhabit. The backrooms and hallways are a reflection of internet horror, the horror that is hidden in recursive chatrooms and forums and groups. That infrastructure created for one thing can be used for others. The same horror around homeless people living in subway tunnels. Some of it is a sense of living in the ruins and margins of a great civilization that has retreated. As a kid living in the exurban-rural rust belt, realistically there was no wilderness, but there was the abandoned. There was an abandoned construction company building we used to "explore" each year on a certain camping trip in the boy scouts, the "House of Nine Inch Nails" because of graffiti made years before I arrived. Places like this became part of the "shitbird geography" that forms a big part of teenage suburban life, the places you can go in town to smoke or drink or make out with a girlfriend: dead ends where bridges are out, abandoned industrial buildings, access roads built for projects that were never completed, old churches that have been empty for years, school buildings still used only for storage, reservoirs with long access roads and no traffic at night. Of course, cheap chinese surveillance cameras have probably disrupted this activity for today's kids anyway. But there's still some space, somewhere, that remains abandoned, wrong, uncanny, still existing but eternally empty.


This fits into the book I read last week: House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski.


It was a really good horror book for me, probably the best horror literary experience I have ever had, primarily in that a friend gave it to me  for Christmas and I had heard of the book but knew nothing about it. It was often mentioned as a book in the "confusing metafiction" space, but if you had asked me in advance what a book called "House of Leaves" was about, I would have said that it was a domestic drama about a Japanese lady and the passage of time, or something like that. So I'll say right now, if you want to read House of Leaves the way I did, STOP READING THIS COMMENT.


HoL is fun because it combines Borges style reality-bending metafiction with simple horror: there's an alternate dimension and a monster in it, a big monster that growls and has big claws and might want to kill you. Or it might not exist at all. There's absolutely no certainly about anything. The book is layered with at least three unreliable narrators: it presents itself as a found text of a found text of a review. The narrative of the book is a summary and review of a documentary, The Navidson Record, about a family that moves into a house in Virginia, only to find the house is bigger inside than outside, and that a mysterious door appears leading to an infinite hallway with more doors and staircases etc. But the summary and review is presented as the incomplete and damaged found papers and work of Zampano, an old blind man living by himself who died under mysterious circumstances, and put together by Johny Truant, our punk rock vulgarwave guide and narrator. Johny in turn inserts his own opinions and stories through footnotes to Zampano's review of Navidson. Then, on top of Truant, you have the "editor" who published Truant's mostly complete manuscript. So you have these layers of Event >>> Navidson's documentary >>> Zampano's review >>> Johny's editing and interpolations >>> the editor. There's additional sub layers, like when Navidson's wife cuts a trailer for the movie and the critics that Zampano either cites or invents, but there are always those layers to deal with.


In some ways, i think this is kind of a cheat code for Danielewski. No matter what mistake or inconsistency or bad writing HoL partakes of, it's impossible to pin it on Danielewski, it's always an error made "by" the unreliable narrator, revealing something about our knowledge or his character. If the parts of the story don’t fit together, that’s an unreliable narrator, or it’s a call out to some kind of symbolic happening, it’s meaningful that the error was made. Then you chase down that error and turn it into a new theory. The book is about the labyrinth but it also is the labyrinth. And you get lost in the book. In theories, in readings. Which of narrators and levels of narration are “real?” The obvious answer is none of them, but also some of them. Each level involves claims that don’t make any sense. Navidson claims there’s a giant labyrinth in his hallway, Zampano claims that there’s this movie and all this academic criticism of it, and Johny claims that despite being marginally employed as a tattoo apprentice despite having no tattoos he gets laid constantly. The latter is actually the least believable claim for me, to be honest. There’s theories that hold that all of them exist, that none of them exist and it’s all a mysterious other person, that one of them is the real writer and the rest are created fictions to cover up or represent parts of the psyche of the real author. And you can’t escape the labyrinth, there is no answer. Danielewski successfully creates a riddle with no answers. I had a lot of fun debating it with friends, and it’s a good atmospheric spooky book, but there is nothing real at the end of it. I highly recommend it, but my answer to the question is ultimately that we choose to enter or exit the labyrinth, as Davidson ultimately is retrieved from the House by his wife’s love, and that the real answer is the friends we make along the way.




Quick story - I got mildly lost in the suburbs once. The idea of suburbs as liminal spaces is probably not a new one, but it was interesting to encounter this in real life.




I experienced this same kind of thing when doing my eponymous marathon run. Most of the roads I planned to use are long and straight and grid-style, easy to navigate as long as you know which direction the sun or the ocean or the bay is in. But there are two patches of neighborhoods at the far ends of the Island that are that same kind of labyrinthine subdivision, with discontinuous road names that start and stop, curve around into cul-de-sacs, disconnect and then restart after an offset. And after 20 miles, buzzing on exhaustion and endorphins and caffeine, I couldn’t find my way out. I had my phone, I had it tracking my progress!, but I don’t want to sit there and stare at it, and somehow I kept making wrong turns and getting spun around. Partly I suppose I’d gotten comfortably with the open grid, where I had basically memorized the five or so turns I would make before leaving home in the morning, and now trying to remember directions was impossible. I didn’t want to walk it staring at my phone, both for pace and pride reasons, but I had to stop and look at the map multiple times, and still got turned around, because all the buildings look the same and all the roads have similar names of flowers or trees, and everything is so similar it’s hard to figure out. It starts to stress me out, out of a mix of shame and fear that I’m crashing out. And it’s creepy because it’s empty, it’s the off-season, and there are maybe two dozen people in a neighborhood with a hundred houses. I feel like an intruder, the silence is deafening. I found my way out eventually, but the gps map of my trip looked permanently stupid, with long lines up and down the boulevards and then a tangle of knots up at the north end of the island.


I think these kinds of liminal spaces are where we run into our limitations, no longer in reaching a space or conquering it, but in mapping or understanding it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But in this case it would be the "other side" celebrating her death no?




And that makes it ok and not a sign of civilizational decline?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thank you.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for January 7, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I thought they did too! Imagine my disappointment!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for January 7, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It helps that I'm like 10kg heavier than you. Anyway, the whole point of the story was that bench isn't that predictive an exercise anyway.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
For the most part, market forces are such that if you can have sex with men you will have sex with men. In the same way that if you're neutral between shopping at Target and shopping at Neiman Marcus, you'll probably buy all your clothing at Target.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the debate we're really having here is:


What level of activity do you consent to when you consent to meeting someone from a dating app?


This is essentially the same as the debate over whether you need to [consent to every action in a romantic escalation] or whether there are basic menu expectations you have, an overton window of things that you consent to when you start. And then of course the argument over what is in that overton window.


Do I have to ask specifically before trying to put my arm around a girl on a movie date, or is that basically expected and her saying "no" after is sufficient? After a date, if I try to kiss her goodnight, is that allowed? Clearly kissing someone who says they don't want to be kissed is bad, but when you get kissed once when you didn't want to be, that's just a hazard of being in certain situations with someone, you have effectively consented to it by going on a date/going to the movies/going to a dance club etc.


But of course, we're talking about gay men so the question is, do you consent to seeing a naked man by going to meet a man in a men's room stall. I think the answer is probably yes, inasmuch as it is bad and offensive to see a naked man you didn't want to see, that's just a risk you took when you met a guy on Grindr.


But they should probably both be fired for this.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for January 7, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My dog considers it a treat, but she's so stupid that she'll eat pills directly out of my hand. My father is constantly worried he'll drop one of his medications and she'll eat it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/01/08/renee-good-woman-killed-by-ice-agent-in-minneapolis-was-a-mother-poet-and-new-to-the-city




Her ex-husband, who asked not to be named out of concern for the safety of their children, said Macklin Good had just dropped off her 6-year-old son at school Wednesday and was driving home with her current partner when they encountered a group of ICE agents on a snowy street in Minneapolis, where they had moved last year from Kansas City, Missouri.




I'm not sure how much credibility to give this semi-sourced story, but it seems to me like if she was involved in an organized protest the government probably knows what group it was by now, and there's going to be video all over the internet of her at this or other protests. It's not really the kind of thing that would be a mystery.


To say nothing of the footage that ICE definitely has that has not been released for some reason.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for January 7, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I want my glucosamine Beef flavored, but the corporations just won't do that for me! I want a glossy smooth coat just like my hound!


Seriously, her joint problems have disappeared, her coat is softer and glossier, she's regrowing hair on her stomach that's been bald for years, and she's shedding much less. It's WILD.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


What is WhiningCoil right about?




My learned friend in Kettlebells Mr. Coil has frequently expressed distress that his ideological enemies want him dead, and would celebrate his and his family's deaths simple because of who he was. Particularly around the Jay Jones controversy.


If this woman turns out not to have been involved in any protest actions, then the broad reaction from the right wing internet is pretty black pilling to me, in that people are celebrating the killing of a white American citizen because she looks like an ideological enemy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Not particularly. The information has been spotty from the beginning.


And anyway, protestors have a vested interest in it being bad for protestors to get shot, for obvious reasons. Protestors don't think it is better if she was an "innocent bystander" as they think protestors are definitionally innocent.


The only people interested in the distinction would be those, like me, whose opinions would change if she weren't protesting.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for January 7, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Creatine is a hell of a drug.


I stopped taking creatine a while back because it didn't match my goals at the time, but now I'm back to bulking and lifting heavy. And I got back on Creatine and, poof, in a week my muscles have inflated a good ten pounds. My understanding is that is more like water weight than it is like muscle fiber, and it will mostly disappear when I hop off creatine again in the spring, leaving behind whatever real gains I've made in the meantime. But man is it weird how well it works. My mirror selfie has changed completely in a month. I don't have good numbers to track its fitness impacts, I'm in kind of a chaotic place right now.


It's amazing how when something works, it works.


I'm also frustrated that they don't make Cosequin for humans. My dog has completely turned around since I put her on it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for January 7, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Bench press is weird. There's a lot of delta that depends on training it specifically.


I rolled at BJJ with a random kid the other week, and I was tossing him around pretty good all round, and after he asked me how much I benched. I told him I could do 225 (1.1bw for me) for maybe 3 reps, and I could probably do 235 if I tried, but I hadn't trained bench a lot in a while. He looked at me stunned and told me he just did 225x10 for multiple sets.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for January 7, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Great work! Sounds like you had a good time!


Poker is fun, but it's one of those games where I find the advanced strategy kinda lame and boring. If I could find a regular table where I was neither the fish nor the shark, I'd probably want to play more regularly.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Depends on the layout of the street, right?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not trying to get you into trouble. Quite the opposite, this is strong bayesian evidence that you might be right. Initially I assumed that ICE was going after an immigrant, and the escaping immigrant was indifferent to driving at a cop and got shot in the process, and that seemed unfortunate but basically orderly to me. Then it came out that this was a middle aged white woman, but there were the allegations this was a protestor, which seems more like "bad situation all around."


But if it really is the case that this was an American citizen, driving down the street, trying to turn around, and got shot; and the response is as it has been. Then this is a pretty deep black pill for me. I hope it isn't the case.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah everyone seems to have made that assumption from all sides, but her family members have come forward and said she wasn't involved in any protests.


With all the cameras around, I'd think we'd have pretty concrete evidence if she was involved in any organized protest group. So far it's just politician statements.


It's a pretty dark scene here if she wasn't, @WhiningCoil might be right about this country.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Is there any evidence she was at a protest or in the act of protesting? There's some evidence she wasn't.


We can't just go around shooting women if they can't make K-Turns quickly enough.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Sure, if they're meant to be hated rivals on teams that hate each other, then hanging out might seem odd.




Not really, low key most of the big players hang out together, and while we love team rivalries, we love chivalry and sportsmanship between players. "Beat the piss out of him, but when the clock hits zero go get a beer" is pretty much the male ideal.


If anything, the one actual homosexual superstar in US sports history responded by being so out-there party-hardy macho that he ultimately killed a bunch of people to prove how tough he was. Which is a shame, because if he had come out instead of shooting those immigrants outside a night club, we'd probably have the Aaron Hernandez Supportive Teammate Award given out every year in the NFL. And it would have been fine because he played with the one white QB in the NFL who worships the devil instead of Jesus Christ.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It's about gay hockey players, and from what I understand, it is very gay indeed. But it's not simply two hot guys having explicit (as you can get away with on TV) sex that has the girlies all hot and bothered, it's the relationships. I'm trying to avoid the show, because I'm not interested, but simply by osmosis I understand that the fans are invested in the main couple and their trials and tribulations. Will they become a couple, or will it stay at the level of frenemies to lovers? The emotionally distant father of one guy which has hurt him and stunted him emotionally. The commitment issues of the other guy. And so on - it's the relationship as much as the butt-humping that is the appeal.




No, unfortunately Mrs. FiveHour watched it with one of her (horny, sad) friends who loved the books over the holidays, and there unless they were doing the lovey-dovey stuff every time I left the house, it was mostly just butt fucking and occasionally skating. The main characters fucked before they ever said more than five words to each other, and that's mostly all they did in between, saying as little as possible to each other (because they hate each other, they are rivals ya know?) and then meeting up in a hotel room to fuck. The show isn't really built around emotions beyond being gay, it's built around scenes of as much and as explicit of gay sex as can be done without showing an actual erect penis or an actual asshole. Which, honestly, is disappointing: if you're gonna make porn just go whole hog. But it is really focused on ripped abs and men groaning each other's names, the emotions are just kind of assumed to exist afterward.


My criticism of what I saw of the show is that it was clearly written by a woman/gay men, with nobody having any idea how heterosexual men functioned at the relevant times. While I've never played ice hockey, I was a hetero frat boy during most of the years the show is set, and the dynamic just doesn't make any sense, it's like they have the idea that straight men have no friends and no intimacy and don't hang out. The closet cases' strategy for staying closeted is to never, ever be seen together, seen talking to each other, seen being friends. When, frankly, in 2012 the most heterosexual thing you could do was have a best buddy you drank with and joke about being gay together. There's like a half dozen scenes where they have to, secretly, give each other their hotel room numbers and, secretly, sneak into each other's hotel rooms to, secretly, hang out. And it just feels odd, because when me and bunch of other 20 year olds had hotel rooms in the same hotel the most normal thing in the world would be to say to another guy "Hey I'm room 567 grab a case of beer and swing by." Shane is TREMBLING walking to Ilya's hotel room at the thought of anyone catching him, when if he just had a bottle of whiskey his cover is impenetrable. And frankly, if you're in love with a rival hockey star for YEARS, just get your agents on the line and try to get traded to the same team. A-Rod and Jeter it up! The sports media is still dopey enough that they'll publish puff pieces about how it's soooooooo funny that the two stars for Montreal are soooooo close that they have to live right next door to each other.




Ja’Marr Chase really wanted to live near Joe Burrow. The wide receiver and quarterback are best friends, college teammates, and are now set to play in Super Bowl 2022 together with the Bengals. So after Cincinnati drafted Chase last spring, it was only logical for the LSU product to do everything he could to live on the same street as Burrow. So he started knocking on doors and offering to buy houses. “He went down to the street that Joe Burrow lives on and went door to door, knocking on every door offering to buy their house,” The Athletic’s Bengals writer, Paul Dehner Jr. said on “Hear that Podcast Growlin’” this week.






“And guess what? He bought one. Somebody sold him their house, so he lives next to Joe Burrow now on their little street and they’re like one happy family. “He basically went around and was like, ‘Hi, I’m Ja’Marr Chase. I have lots of money and I want to buy the house.’ Eventually he found somebody that he bought it from and now they’re neighbors.” It’s certainly an extravagant approach, but we won’t knock Chase for wanting to live near his best friend.






On the field, the arrangement has worked quite well. Chase had 1,455 receiving yards in the regular season, winning AP and PFWA Offensive Rookie of the Year honors. Despite spending a year apart, it didn’t seem like he and Burrow missed a beat from their days at LSU, when they romped to a national title behind a historically explosive offense. Whether their chemistry has anything to do with the living situation, who’s to say. Obviously, though, it hasn’t hurt.




There's a second gay romance plot (apparently hockey is nothing but closet cases in this universe) where the captain for the Rangers falls in love with a guy who works at a smoothie shop, but their love must remain SECRET, and he can never be seen at his apartment! And once again I'm like, if you're a star player, having a weird smoothie twink living in your house as part of your entourage wouldn't even be all that odd.


A lot of twitter hockey fans complained that the climactic scene of that plot didn't make any sense, when the captain brings the smoothie twink onto the ice for a kiss after winning the stanley cup at MSG and the crowd applauds. I can only assume the complaints came from fans who have never seen their team win a championship. Jalen Hurts could have shown up to the parade in a fur suit last year after smoking Mahomes and the Philly fans would have applauded. Hell, for the most part, if right after the win a player started kissing a man on the field, I wouldn't even process that it was gay, I would just think he was really excited and got his wires crossed.