Dane's Polar Plunge: A 365 day Lake Tahoe Challenge. With Scott Gaffney, Danish dicks, and nude guys at Notre Dame

 

I've been following Dane G. on Instagram.  He doesn't post much, but in August 2026 he complains that he just arrived at the University of Nevada Reno for his freshman year, when he had to evacuate due to the wildfires.   

Back when he was a student at North Tahoe High School, Dane posted a lot: he was doing a challenge where he jumps into Lake Tahoe every day for a year. 

Even on Day 190: Water temperature 39.3, air temperature 32.  That's Fahrenheit. 

 

Day 173: Gray, cloudy. Water temperature 37.3, air 33.0.  Dane walked through the snow-- barefoot! -- toward his icy plunge.

On Day 184, he brought his Dad, professional skiier Scott Gaffney Water temperature 48.5, air 55.

He invited Tony Cavalero of The Righteous Gemstones, but Tony ended up ignoring him to flirt with Scott.

On Day 120, he brought the North Tahoe High School Varsity Basketball Team -- at least the ones brave enough to try. Water temperature 39 degrees, air with wind chill 19.  

The Wildflour Baking Company in Tahoe donated some donuts.  How about space heaters?

I can't imagine being interested in the aesthetics of the penis after all that icy plunging, but here are some guys running naked through the snow.

More after the break.  Caution: Icy.

Topper Guild: The youtube star breaks into tv. With Kaido Roberts, muscle men, Nick d*ck, and Topper playing with balls

 

 Something called Topper Guild Creator Essentials appeared in my Hulu recommendations.  I had no idea what it was, but the guy was cute, so I clicked on it.

Episode 1.1, "Roblox 99 Nights in the Forest in Real Life," begins in media res, with Topper, the cameraman Shutters, and a bounty hunter searching in the woods for their pal Kaido (Kaido Lee Roberts, left).  And Topper's "brain rot," whatever that is.

They discover that he has been kidnapped by cultists wearing red robes and deer masks.  

While Shutters researches the cult online, Topper, Mike the Bounty Hunter, and a muscular cop track down four other missing kids.  Each requires a different challenge to be rescued:

Dino Kid: A bucket of roaches.

Kraken Kid: A pool of sticky glop.

 

Squid Kid: A stinky, used cultist robe.  The kid asks for Topper's autograph before he escapes, suggesting that the guy is famous.

Koala Kid: Attacking the cultist guards.  At this point the Cop goes home.  I don't know why.

They are deliberately over-acting, usually while addressing the camera.  Animated images of their thoughts appear over their heads, and there are other animations for no apparent reason.  When Topper tells us "Guys, they're tied up!", the ropes start to glow.  When he says "Maybe I can find something useful in this box," the box starts to glow.  

 I think this sort of thing happens on a show for preschoolers: "Can you find the object that doesn't belong at the beach?  Right, the snowman."  But this isn't for preschoolers; it's rated PG. 

Topper and Mike the Bounty Hunter discover that Kaido is being prepared for sacrifice in the King's mansion, so they go undercover as cultists. Mike is captured, and tied up next to their friend.

Topper/Cultist claims that the King sent him to beat up the captives. While punching, he slips Mike a knife, allowing him to cut the ropes and knock out the guards.  All three escape in Topper's van.

The "brain rot" turns out to be a cutout of a squat, square humanoid formed from the number 6-7 (the meaningless number that kid chant to annoy adults).

Three cast members are listed, but only Kaido Lee Roberts appears on the IMDB: he stars in some of Dhar Man's clickbait videos.

And Topper Guild?  Not really a guild, the guy's name.

Born in 2002, Topper Guild grew up in Los Angeles, but now lives in Austin, Texas.  When he was 12 years old, he began posting humorous pranks and challenges on social media platforms.  He soon gained 84 million youtube subscribers, plus 34 million followers on Tiktok, and 1.3 million on Instagram.

The videos became more elaborate,with fictionalized plots and characters:

"I Build a Secret Room for Ronaldo"

"I Murdered K-Pop Demon Hunters"

"Surviving Evil Kids"

More after the break. Caution: explicit.

Benjamin Ainsworth is possessed, kidnaps Dream, dances with a drag queen, rides a dragon. Plus his nose grows. With Champion and Elf cocks.

 

Benjamin Ainsworth (the one with the handbag) was born  in  Nottingham in 2008, and later moved to Lund, near Hull in Yorkshire.  He scored his first professional acting job in 2016, in the musical Priscilla, Queen of the Desert on the Norwegian Epic Cruise Line, six weeks in the Mediterranean and then six more in the Caribbean.  He played Benjy, son of the drag queen Tick. who sings "Say a Little Prayer/Always on My Mind."  

The same year he was cast as "a cheeky schoolboy" in an episode of the soap Emmerdale.

His next major role was the troubled boy Miles in The Haunting of Bly Manor, loosely based on Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, with the two troubled children and ghosts bedeviling the nanny.  I stopped watching in the first episode after a particularly nasty trigger (hint: "does the dog die?"), but according to a review there's a lesbian romance "drowned in sad and tired tropes" like Bury Your Gays. Yuck.

Left: Oliver Jackson-Cohen as Peter Quint, who is possessing Miles and forcing him to do bad things.

In  the first season of The Sandman (2022), Roderick Burgess captures the Dream of the Endless and imprisons him naked in a glass jar.  His son Alex (Ben as a boy, Laurie Kyaston as a young adult) has many opportunities to free him, but refuses, worrying that Dream will harm him or his boyfreind (Christopher Colquehon).  

So far one gay and two gay-adjacent roles.  Good job, buddy. 

There have been dozens of movies based on Pinocchio, the 1883 novel by Carlo Colladi. The 2022 version, with Ben as the puppet boy, Tom Hanks as Gepetto, and Joseph Gordon Levitt (left) as Jiminy Crickett, is supposedly a live-action remake of the classic 1940 animated movie, with a lot of queer codes.  But in some versions Pinoke gets a girlfriend, so I wouldn't be surprised if he is changed into a real boy through a glimpse of the Girl of His Dreams.  

The IMDB description of Son of a Critch (2022-26) tells us that "Mark is 11 going on 70," and "tries to make connections with the small group of people in his limited world."  Sounds like he's got that syndrome where you grow old as a child, or maybe he's aging backward, but it's a misdirection: Mark (Benji Boy) is just smart, and his "limited world" is Newfoundland in the 1980s.  He's heterosexual; no gay people are mentioned in the series.   

Ben is posing here with the real-life Mark Critch, who plays his dad, and Colto Gobbo, who plays his older brother.

Everything is Going to Be Great (2025) covers a year in the life of the Smart Family, as they negotiate "over-sized dreams, identity, ghosts, and regional theater."  Trigger alert: this is advertised as a comedy, but Dad (Bryan Cranston of Malcolm in the Middle) dies halfway through.  

He leaves two sons, the athletic Derrick (Jack Champion), who has a girlfriend, and Lester (Ben), who wears flashy outfits, aspires to a career in musical theater, and has conversations with the ghost of gay playwright Noel Coward. Those are sizeable queer codes.  Google AI says that he's "openly gay," but according to the plot synopsis, he gets a girlfriend. 

More after the break. Caution: Explicit.

Cal Tolentino: Bodybuilder dates "Best Medicine's" Liam, rooms with Martin Herlihy, kisses a ninja. With two Cal cocks.

I've been watching Best Medicine (2026) on Netflix: Josh Charles plays a gruff physician in a small town in Maine, where there are a surprising number of diseases with weird symptoms.  Turning blue?  Suddenly seeing birds?  I like the gay characters fully integrated into the community, like sarcastic teenager Liam (Josh Hoon Lee).  

In most episodes, Liam hangs out with two girls, Harley and Amelia.  But in Episode 1.9, at a high school "sleep-in," Amelia is replaced by Kyle (Cal Tolentino), joining them for a giant-sized Connect Four and a "Skeeter" game.   

In Episode 1.13, Kyle appears as the third of the rude teenagers again, protesting the plan to bring a salmon farm to the city, which would destroy the ecosystem. They're arrested for trespassing, which they find thrilling.  Later, they sit together at the wedding of the gay couple Greg and George.

I couldn't figure out why the showrunners replaced the girl in the trio with a boy, except to imply that Kyle was dating one of the other two.  In my headcanon, he's dating Liam.

When I started researching the actor to see if he is gay in real life, I got a surprise:

The dude is built.

Cal grew up in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, about an hour west of Philadelphia.  He competed on American Ninja Warrior Junior, a reality show where you race through a multilevel obstacle course, beginning at age 11, then switched to the teen version, where he was a national finalist three times.  But he really wanted to be an actor, so the minute he got his driver's license at age 16, he started training at Playhouse West.  Also he changed his name from Caleb Plohoros to Cal Tolentino. From Greek to Italian?

While training, Cal was in three plays: A South Philly Christmas, Meisner, and Savannah. 

He broke into on-screen acting in 2025, with four short and a tv spot:

Hundred Dollar Brawler, about boxing. Cal plays the Hype Guy.

Guardians of the Outward Plain: A boy and his lion pal try to make human connections. Cal plays a Mechanic.

Godhead, not to be confused with the other 2025 Godhead short: A man searching for his lost brother stumbles into a sinister drug den. There are four characters other than addicts: Adam, Judas (Cal), and a Preacher (Sullivan Vaughan, left).

My Teenage Great Grandma, a vertical-format drama streaming on NetShort. A scientist dies in 1945 and re-animates as a teenager in 2025. Sounds wacky.  Cal's character appears halfway down the cast list.

Plus Cal and Peyton Carson wrote, directed, and starred in 4 AM: After a "rowdy Memorial Day Weekend," two guys try to go back to life as usual, but a text message results "in a painful test of trust." It's not available to stream, and I can't tell from the description and photos if they're buddies or boyfriends.

In 2026, Cal appeared in two episodes of Good Luck, Baby Girl, a short-form vertical series streaming on TikTok and Instagram.  It's about three girls trying to make it in L.A.

Two episodes of Best Medicine.

And the movie Roommates.  This photo is misleading: Cal and Martin Herlihy aren't the stars.  It's a comedy about girls who become roommates in college, and have increasingly dark adventures.   I went through on fast forward, and couldn't find Cal, but his sister posts a clip: he walks down the dorm corridor with his shirt off, and shakes hands with one of the girls while she gazes lustfully.

Aidan Langford plays the high school-aged brother of one of the girls.  He is outed as a prank.  

More after the break.