Bluespirit

Apologies to friends here at DW. I've been so obsessed with HR everything I'd gotten very behind in reading my flist here. I am now caught up! Will try to do better.

I remember this state from when I first fell into fandom in about 2008/2009, and the key word is salience. The object of your desire becomes virtually the only salient (important) thing. Everything else pales in comparison and seems less important and interesting. It's no accident that salience is a technical term in addiction medicine. It's for sure linked with dopamine receptors and my brain is now very trained to give me dopamine hits for things related to HR, especially, at this stage, fic.

I'm not complaining, but I realise that we loons (an in-joke name suggested for the HR fandom) must be tiresome for those not in the fandom. (There's a solution to that...)

Anyway, it's also midsummer here and very nice, too. The garden (will do a few pics soon) is getting blowsy and a bit beset by fungal annoyances as we've continued to have intermittent rain and high humidity, but most days have highs of 27^C which is lovely and not too hot. Perfect for lying around reading and rewatching! I finally finished and mailed my second tranche of seasonal cards for NZ friends and family, the earlier lot having been sent overseas. They're later than usual due to the aforementioned salience of other distractions.

The bloody ducks managed to force their way back into my water garden through the duck dome, so the dome is now a basket weave with weft as well as warp, and tied more firmly to the barrel. The waterlilies are slowly recovering for a second time. The giant Mexican sunflower (Tithonia) is once more as tall as the house, having regrown from a 2 foot stub after cutting back. I'm not sure there's anything in the earth under my flat except Tithonia roots, these days. My peppers aren't thriving - not enough direct sun, as my potted plants got away from me and I didn't have the peppers in the front row. Lesson learned. Scarlet runner beans are doing well, but a lot of veggies and annuals haven't been great, probably as the very hot early summer exhausted and confused them. I'll plant some things earlier, in winter next year (sweet peas, tomatoes, peppers.)

Okay, that's my update - hugs for everyone and hope you're all coping with 2026 so far!

(Downs periscope and prepares to dive back into excellent HR fic).

Oh noes! Toomuchplor just posted a new HR fic but there's no fic! Must have taken it down after posting so as to fix something. *whimpers and waits impatiently*

The 3rd and final chapter of "Ember and Ice" dropped yesterday. Hilariously, fangirls on tumblr are getting stuck into the political situation in the story, which does leave a lot to be desired although the defeat of the Lunare by the Solari results in a slightly "captive fairy prince" situation which is always fun. I enjoyed this extra offering by the boys, but audio erotica as a medium does nothing for me, as opposed to the fanfic (and podfic) now being produced by the ton for Heated Rivalry, much of which is excellent and extremely hot. I find it more hilarious than hot to actually hear our heroes giving a blow job - all those wet sucking and smacking sounds - and I kept imagining the poor foley person having to slap their wet thigh, or something, when they were getting into serious fucking. Imagination works way better than surround-sound for me! Although, if "My Moon My Man" is the standout song of HR, "my moan my man" is definitely Hudson's theme song in Ember and Ice!

I've signed up for the Hollanov Big Bang as a writer, artist, and beta (not that I'm going overboard with this or anything). If you're interested, sign ups are here. Info and the schedule are here.

Excellent recs by lotstradamus, here. Almost all are explicit, with some great ideas and interesting writing.

If you're looking for another gay romance with a happy ending, try the movie "Bros". Where I live it can be rented from Apple+. It's more typical of gay culture than HR and the protagonists are a lot older (pushing forty), but it's very charming in its own way. Commitment-challenged bros to lovers in this case, not "enemies". I thoroughly enjoyed it.

OK, today is the day I'm going to talk about a topic other than Heated Rivalry, because something amazing just happened.

Back in high school when I was 17 and in the 6th form (as we called it then, same as junior year in the US), my first boyfriend was a US exchange student from Illinois called Dave, a farm boy from the vicinity of Springfield, south of Chicago.

This morning I was woken up by someone knocking on my door at about 9am. I'm a night owl so I'm not always up then. I staggered about calling out for them to wait, and after pulling on some clothes, opened the door to find an older guy asking if I knew [my name]. And it was Dave. Neither of us recognised the other at first sight, obviously.

So for the past 3 hours we've been talking, catching up and exchanging reminiscences, filling each other in on our lives. He was only in NZ for 3 months back in our high school days and I think it was a pretty intense experience for him, urban New Zealand (Christchurch, where I grew up) being very different from rural Illinois, and my family were more liberal than his so I was a bit wilder than the girls he was used to. We thought we were in love, of course, and he says he was heartbroken to have to leave me, and that he regretted never corresponding with me afterwards - I thought my heart was broken, too, and wrote to him a few times, then stopped when there were no replies.

We dated for several weeks and were both virgins when we finally had entirely unprotected sex, not long before he had to return to the states. We had sex several times after that, ostensibly "going to the movies" but actually to a quiet park near where I lived, putting a blanket on the ground in a copse of trees. Apparently, (I have zero recall of this), I wrote to him after he got back home and told him that I hadn't gotten pregnant, thank goodness! (I do remember anxiously waiting for that period to come). His mother read that letter for some reason, and gave him hell! So I think he was kind of traumatised by that and never replied to me. He regrets that, now, and one reason for seeing me again was to apologise.

It's not like either of us has been carrying a torch all these years, but I think he really liked New Zealand and had fond memories, and he and his wife came back here as tourists in their fifties. He has a son back in the states and a daughter in Sydney, so when he decided to take a trip downunder he hired a private detective to try to locate me (as he's not great with computers and searches etc.) I'm not easy to google under my own name as although it's an unusual one, there's an Australian poet with exactly the same name, so all the hits are for her.

Anyway, eventually, through torturous routes via my old employment as a doctor, Dave got an address for me, but the street number was slightly wrong. (He wrote to me but it'll have been returned to sender). Luckily, today when he went to the wrong address across the road from me, a neighbour helped him to figure out the right number and he ended up on my doorstep.

So I was a bit muzzy, just woken up and no tea or breakfast yet, and my flat is a complete tip right now. Fionna who cleans for me Mondays is on a 3 week Christmas break, and every day I keep meaning to do a big tidy-up and put away dirty dishes and paper grocery delivery bags that are all in a big heap, but I hadn't gotten around to it due to a) painting seasonal cards each day, and, b) being obsessed with Heated Rivalry rewatches, fanfic, and art! Anyway, Dave didn't turn a hair at the mess, and frankly I'm past caring about that sort of shit these days.

We had a nice long talk, comparing notes about our lives.

• I'm happily single - he was married, not very happily, had an affair then got divorced, then his wife died from cancer. He has twins - a son and daughter, in their 40s.
• I'm staunchly leftist - he voted for Trump for specious conservative reasons and now regrets a lot of the Trump administration's bullshit. He didn't seem full-on MAGA but I told him I was anti-Trump so we wouldn't talk about that. He seems otherwise a nice guy, not bigoted, sings in his local choir, Christian in a social sort of way, cares about his kids, friends, and local community.
• I was a doctor (a psychiatrist, then ran the local psych registrar training programme) - he was a farmer, then elected to the state legislature, then worked for a passenger rail company. We're both retired.
• He's a prepper! He told me a little about how he's set up his farmhouse with a two year food supply and various other survivalist gear. I'm into apocafic, so weirdly we have something in common there, and have exchanged book recs for favourite post-apocalyptic series!
• He's intrepid enough to still be traveling the world. He flies small planes and is having a space-age plane built. It's called the Samson Switchblade - a 2-seater plane that on landing, folds itself up into a fucking 3-wheeler sports car/bike! He plans to travel more widely in the states, once it's finished and delivered. Obviously he's well-off, from selling the farm's land (most to the government as flood mitigation rewilding), and a good pension after the legislature work. I'm also comfortably off due to a sensible superannuation plan (same as what he calls a pension) plus as an only child I inherited my parents' house, and sold my own. But I stopped flying anywhere after Covid, and never plan to get into an aeroplane again.
• He's fairly trim, with just a knee replacement (used to be a runner), but he has Parkinson's disease, with a noticeable hand tremor. I'm generally healthy but also fat and profoundly unfit, with limited exercise tolerance.
• He's not at all tech-savvy in terms of phones or computers, whereas I'm comfortable with all that and a lot "younger" than him in my internet activities.

None of those differences mattered - it was just nice to catch up again. We've exchanged emails, and I plan to write to him and tell him what a blast it was, seeing him once more after so many, many years. He's off to other parts of NZ now, and Australia.

I'm still feeling a little stunned, but that may be low blood sugar as I still haven't had breakfast.

Dave, thanks so much for remembering me and tracking me down. I hope you have a blast with your amazing transformer plane before the Parkinson's gets too bad (and that you never need that two year food supply).

Man, what a way to start the day!

What I said in my last post? Today is not that day...

There's now a DW comm for Heated Rivalry and the Game Changers series.
gamechangerhr - the profile page has several resources and events listed, like a big bang organised via tumblr.

And I did locate a Hollanov discord - here's an invite.