Hollanov: Take Daily As Required (and an Update on my Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov Avatars in Second Life)

I forget exactly how or when I found this piece of Heated Rivalry fan art, but I love it.

Hollanov is the name of the ship (relationship) between Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov. It’s shorthand which covers all the fan-created works inspired by the hit television series Heated Rivalry, based on the Game Changers series of gay hockey romance novels by Rachel Reid.

On December 31st, 2025, I wrote on my blog:

And so it was, that my Second Life freebie fashionista friend and partner in crime, whom I only know by their avatar name, Dreamer Pixelmaid, messaged me via Discord and asked me if I had watched Heated Rivalry yet. I had not. (Tonight I am finishing my second rewatch. I am hooked.)

…

It turns out that Dreamer and I not only have a shared interest in ferreting out fabulous Second Life freebies and bargains (something we both happen to be very good at!); we also shared an interest in same-sex romance fan fiction! Soon we were exchanging links to YouTube videos, Tumblr posts, and podcast links, all to do with the outsized reaction which a small Canadian TV show about a gay romance in the professional hockey world (actually, not one but two such romances) was causing, both among the gays and the straights.

Here is a zoom-out of all the pictures stored in the Photo Library on my iPad. Ever since Dreamer Pixelmaid told me about Heated Rivalry in late December 2025, 99.99% of my saved pictures are Hollanov fan art! I am legitimately obsessed.

Also, I now have well over 400 Heated Rivalry-inspired fanfics (fan-written fiction) bookmarked to read. I usually spend an hour or two lying on the sofa reading through recommended HR fanfics, some of which are good, and a few of which are among the best writing I’ve ever read. (I usually read lying on the sofa, to rest my neck and shoulders if they are aching. Oh, and the best place to find this fanfic is a website called Archive of Our Own, or AO3 for short. Here’s a link to get you started, of the most popular Heated Rivalry/Game Changers fanfic sorted by popularity. You’ll need to set up your own AO3 account to read some of these. Enjoy!)

Well, as you might already know, I have been using my 19 years of experience in creating and styling avatars to create Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov avatars in the virtual world of Second Life. I wrote about an earlier version of them back in January, but since then, I have been able to obtain much better head skins for both Shane and Ilya, and I have been tinkering around with the face and body sliders a bit more, so now they look like this:

And here are some pictures and videos I have taken of them in the past few months:

The cuddle animation in this video is from the Dutchie sofa (worth every Linden dollar spent!)
This tender animation is from the menu of options on this bed from Dutchie.

My most recent Hollanov creation in SL is the following work-in-progress video (silent, 1:14), in which I show various skating animations from two different AOs. Unfortunately, I still cannot seem to find any kind of hockey jersey that fits well over these hockey pants from Meva (the only ones I could find on the entire grid and in the Second Life Marketplace). So we have a topless Ilya skating around (I’m quite sure this is a sexual fantasy of Shane’s in some Heated Rivalry fanfic I have yet to read!).

Ladies, gentlemen, and fabulus people of all genders—Ilya Rozanov on ice!

I have been posting these pictures and videos to Primfeed (the Twitter of Second Life), as well as to four different Hollanov fan Discord servers of which I am a member. And I even resurrected my ancient, long-dormant Tumblr account to be able to post them to the thriving 31,000-member Hollanov community there:

Below is an example post of my Shane and Ilya Second Life pictures to the Hollanov community on Tumblr

Of course, the Hollanov fans (who call themselves “loons,” IYKYK) know next-to-nothing about Second Life, and many of the SL folks, who have not watched Heated Rivalry or read the books, are probably mystified as to why I am so often posting shots of these two fictional hockey players to my Primfeed. What can I say? My two obsessions have collided. I might need to create a very niche, very specialized 12-step group for myself… 😜

So, now you know how I have been keeping myself busy when I have been feeling anxious and overwhelmed and need an escape: enjoying Hollanov fan fiction, fan art, and fan-made music videos, and busy dressing, posing and taking pictures and videos of my Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov avatars! It’s been a blessed escape to enjoy other HR fans’ works, or to get lost in the creative flow of Second Life for an hour or two.

Thank you to Rachel Reid for writing the series of novels, and thanks to Jacob Tierney for making such a wonderful TV show from Rachel’s books. Heated Rivalry has inspired me to move forward in so many areas of my life. I’m so grateful for the push it has given me!

UPDATE 4:15 p.m.: I’ve been asked to provide the full styling credits for both the Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander avatars (please note that this is an update from my January blog post about them, before I bought new head skins for both):

Ilya Rozanov Styling Credits:

  • Head, Eyes, and Hairbase: LeLutka Kris head (a freebie from a previous LeLutka December event)
  • Head Skin: Ilya by Stray Dog (matches Velour’s Ivory skin tone)
  • Neck Moles: Izzie’s neck moles (medium)
  • Hair: WingsDG ER0714 brown pack (this was probably the hardest thing to find; I tested out a lot of hair at a LOT of different places before deciding this one came closest to Ilya’s shaggy, curly hair! I actually added the same hairstyle twice, and slightly rotated the second one, to get this look.) Underneath I have the BoM LeLutka EvoX hairbase 42 from the LeLutka head package.
  • Body: Meshbody Legacy Special Edition Basic (free, from the Avatar Welcome Pack)
  • Body Skin and Hair: Velour Picasso Homme fit figure body skin in Ivory skin tone (along with the chest, leg, and happy trail body hair and body moles included in the package; all body hair was tinted blond to match Ilya’s hair).
  • Arm Hair: Arm Hair 05 from Samurai (I bought this for free using free Samurai store credit from a previous Shop and Hop event; also tinted blond to match the rest of the body hair)
  • Fingernails: Purec Nature Nails Male (free group gift; group is free to join; they come with a fingernail alpha)
  • Toenails: Purec Nature Nails Male (free group gift; group is free to join; they come with a toenail alpha)
  • Shape: My own, playing with the face, head, and body sliders to match up with internet pictures of Ilya Rozanov/Connor Storrie (still somewhat a work-in-progress, although I am very happy with this result).
  • Animation Overide: Tuty’s sLIFE Free Male AO (free)
  • Shorts: Hardcore (HD003ST) Men’s Slim Fit Shorts in black (I bought this for free using free Hardcore store credit from a previous Shop and Hop event)
  • Black Underwear: Hardcore (HD013BS) Men’s Basic Briefs in black (I bought this for free using free Hardcore store credit from a previous Shop and Hop event)
  • Hockey Gear for Video: Meva’s Hockey Pants Complete (these only come in the Signature Gianni size, but with alphas they fit well). I had to create a BoM/underwear layer grey wool sock to cover some bare skin above the skates.The skates were bought from a gacha reseller, they are from the Winter Hockey gacha by Sese & PA and you’ll need to find a good ankle lock to use with them, as well as foot and fingernail alphas! There’s no skating AO that comes with them, so I am trying to cobble something together myself from other skating AOs I can find…still a work in progress! Somebody please make a hockey AO, you’ll make a killing once season two of Heated Rivalry hits!

Shane Hollander Styling Credits:

  • Head: LeLutka Gen head 4.0 (while there’s a free Gen Lite version in the Avatar Welcome pack, I bought the full-price version to use the facial animations and poses in the HUD)
  • Head Skin: Shane skin by OuterNaked (matches Velour’s Idol skin tone; includes the optional, tintable freckles shown in these pictures)
  • Eyes: Florest eyes from Alexandrite
  • Hair: Jack hairstyle by ADE (free group gift; group is free to join). Underneath I have the BoM LeLutka EvoX hairbase 49 from the LeLutka head package, tinted a darker black.
  • Body: Meshbody Legacy Special Edition Basic (free, from the Avatar Welcome Pack)
  • Body Skin: Velour Picasso Homme fit figure body skin in Idol skin tone
  • Arm. Armpit, and Leg Hair: Arm Hair 02 and Leg Hair 02 from Samurai (I bought this for free using free Samurai store credit from a previous Shop and Hop event)
  • Fingernails: Purec Nature Nails Male (free group gift; group is free to join; they come with a fingernail alpha)
  • Toenails: Purec Nature Nails Male (free group gift; group is free to join; they come with a toenail alpha)
  • Shape: My own, playing with the face, head, and body sliders to match up with internet pictures of Shane Hollander/Hudson Willaims (still a work-in-progress, but I am extremely happy with this result).
  • Animation Overide: Tuty’s sLIFE Free Male AO (free)
  • Shorts: Arcback Shorts Blue – Legacy Basic (free; I believe I picked these up at the new Avatar Shopping Island here).
  • Hockey T-Shirt: Matching Hollander and Rozanov Ottawa Senators team T-shirts. Available on the SL Marketplace for only L$60 here: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Tribute-T-Shirt-Heated-Hockey-Tees/27912865
  • Underwear: Hardcore (HD013BS) Men’s Basic Briefs in black or grey, depending on the picture (I bought these for free using free Hardcore store credit from a previous Shop and Hop event).

The Me That Remains

May, June, and July were a roller coaster. Dealing with my mother’s illness and death, and my continuing neck and shoulder pain, while frantically trying to wrap up all the loose ends at my job before starting my one-year research and study leave, left me feeling overextended, overwhelmed, and utterly exhausted.

I still have bad days, days where I sleep for 16 hours, and days where all I seem to be able to do is listen to music and cry, but they are getting fewer and further between. And, in between the bad days, I am also having some great days. I just need to take things one day at a time, one step at a time.

Grief is not linear; it comes in waves. A song will bring back a memory, and the memory might bring back more tears. The afghan that my mother crocheted, that used to be in her bedroom, now adorns my sofa. Her cookbook now sits on my microwave. My brother is bringing me three framed needlepoint canvases she stitched, along with the urn with her ashes, to be interred privately at a cemetery here in Winnipeg at the end of the month. (Although I disagreed with her decision, she insisted that she did not want a funeral service of any kind.)

And, for some reason, I asked for my mother’s pin tin: her hinged, metal British sweets tin (Meggeson Glycerine & Blackcurrant Pastilles), containing her much-used dressmaking pins, with their brightly-coloured heads which had so fascinated me as a child. God knows what I would ever use them for; I don’t even own a sewing machine. But it was some small part of her that I remembered: sitting on the bed in her bedroom, almost sixty years ago. pushing the coloured pins into her green chenille bedspread to make patterns. It’s funny, the things you remember.

I mentioned that I have been listening to music, digging up old playlists I had created in previous decades and carted over wholesale to Apple Music. One song led me down a rabbit hole, and I discovered that a singer whom I had grown up with, and listened to a lot as a teenager, had released a new album this year (do they even call them albums anymore? God, I feel like a dinosaur🦕🦖).

Anyway, the lyrics in the title track of the “album” spoke to me this evening:

Coming out of the dark
Coming out of this cave
It’s taken me months of days and years
To find my way
My face in the mirror doesn’t look the same
But I recognize a light in my eyes
That never did fade
And I’m gonna find
Yeah find and revive
The me that remains

Life cut me wide open
When my head hit the ground
Wasn’t my time for dying
Guess my soul just stuck around
And out of this wreckage
I’m beginning to claim
The gifts in the healing
And the me that remains

—The Me That Remains, Amy Grant (2026)

Like most queer people, I have had a complicated and conflicted relationship with organized religion. Depending on what day you ask me, I’m either agnostic or atheist. But no matter what, I will still, always, carry a soft spot in my heart for Amy Grant.

Navigating Grief: Eat. Sleep. Shower. Go Outside. (And Second Life.)

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

One of the advantages of having a blog that is branded with your own name is that anything you write is topical. And today’s topic is grief, and how to navigate it. (Hey, my blog, my rules. This wouldn’t be the first time I got side-tracked, by the way.)

My psychiatrist’s instructions are simple. Focus on four things: sleeping, eating, showering, and going outside. Nothing else matters (however, we did agree to some time spent in Second Life 😉).

I have to give myself the time and space I need to grieve properly for my mother, and I have to respect that process, rather than diving heedlessly and headfirst into one of the many other projects that I have planned (like, say, working on my OER textbook about the metaverse, or decluttering and doing a thorough spring cleaning of my apartment, which currently resembles a Red Cross disaster area).

Eat. Sleep. Shower. And go outside. (And Second Life, which is helping me stay sane because it gives me a sense of control, something which is notably absent from many aspects of my real life). I have been listening to the following song a lot.

I also find myself crying a lot, at inconvenient times, like in the middle of a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar at Rainbow Stage (which led to me making a weepy exit at intermission, with an apology text later broadcast to my friend group, who no doubt wondered where the fuck I went). I have been trying to push myself to do “normal” things, like go to friend’s 60th birthday parties and Rainbow Stage musicals, and I land up leaving early because frankly, I am exhausted, and I am a mess. But I know that I won’t be an exhausted mess forever.

Sometimes I put on a list of sad/grieving songs from Apple Music, and listen, and sob. My psychiatrist doesn’t think that this is useful, but it seems to me to be a good way to get some of those trapped feelings out. I, who normally take such great pride in my ability to wordsmith a sentence, or explain a complicated process or idea in a way that is easy to understand, am utterly flummoxed by my inability to articulate what is going on inside my brain right now. I struggle to find the words, and sometimes, all that comes out is tears, and more tears. So I lay down on the sofa, wrap myself in an afghan crocheted by my mother (an orange-and-yellow design that simply screams 1970s), and weep. Here are two of those songs which I weep to (be sure to click the CC to see the subtitles/closed captioning of the lyrics on the first video; the second one already includes the lyrics on screen).

So that’s kind of where I am right now. Sleep. Shower. Eat. Weep. Go outside. Do something in Second Life. Repeat as necessary until I feel like a human being again. Yes, I do have people to talk to (both professionals and friends, including an active listening service which I still use regularly, although we now tend to talk via Discord rather than meet up as avatars in Second Life). And yes, eventually, I will venture out and engage with people again in my social networks, and initiate outings and events.

Not tonight. And not this week. But soon. There will come a day, a day that is better than today.

My blog will still be on hiatus for a while.

A Memorial to My Mother

My mother recently passed away in her local community hospital, surrounded by her family. She was 87 years old, married to my father for almost 25 years before he suddenly died, and then remarried for another 29 years. She lived a good, long life, long enough to have two of her great-grandchildren sit in her lap. I was able to talk with her before she died, to tell her I loved her. She told me she loved me, and was proud of the man that I have become. We may have had our disagreements but we achieved closure before she passed away.

I have found that navigating through grief can be a very difficult process, one I am still working through.

I have one special Second Life alt (alternate avatar), because she bears my mother’s name, Karin (the German form of the English name Karen). As a little child she became a refugee in the messy aftermath of World War II, and eventually her widowed mother (my grandmother) married a man who brought his new family over to Canada when she was still a young girl, who didn’t speak any English.

I inherited from Karin my creativity (as expressed here in Second Life) as well as her well-honed sense of humour (which I also express here in SL!). I also got from her my distinctive, piercing laugh; you can immediately tell exactly where I am sitting in a crowded (movie or play) theatre, once the first joke lands! As a child, I used to lie in bed and hear her absolutely scream with laughter at a funny television show like Carol Burnett.

So today Karin is an angel, a loose representation of what she would have looked like as a young woman in the 1960s, when I was born. The retro hairstyle is available as a free gift (in the blonde colour HUD only) at the WINGSDS booth at the ACCESS event on now; the style is called ER0526.

The head is GENUS , cobbled together from bits and pieces of the Margo Genus Morph L$88 head and head skin offer from a couple of years ago, and the more recent Limited Edition 2026 female Genus Morph head giveaway. To it, I added the Genus Morph beak nose, the same kind of nose that my mother had, and her grey-blue eyes. The angel dress and halo were gifts from the most recent round of the Doves Dream shopping event, and the wings I picked up for free using past Blueberry store credit. The body is Maitreya LaraX. The handheld candle is the gift from .Viki. booth at the SL23B Shop and Hop event, on now.

So, in a sense, this alt is my memorial to my mom.

I’m going to need to take some more time than I expected to heal; please bear with me. I am grieving, and I am feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. Thank you for your patience.