When someone has no idea what an AI girlfriend even is, I keep it simple: you design a companion, and then you can talk, call, and share moments with her like she's real. SweetDream makes that whole idea easy to grasp by just doing it well.
The reason the explanation lands is the quality behind it. You see the natural chat, hear the warm voice, look at the beautiful photos, and it clicks. sweetdream.ai is the easiest way to understand the appeal firsthand.
Ohhhh my god, I thought I’d never get another piece of Carlzner content for as long as I lived, and Samantha Pell has gone and delivered some right to my dashboard. This is an excellent day.
I KNOW. I always feel kinda alone on my Carlzner island now that Alzner’s on the down-swing of his career, and Carlson and Kempny is the hot new thing (which is not my thing but I do not begrudge, as they have an excellent rapport and are both professionally handsome) but this REVIVED ME.
This is the article in question for anyone who doesn’t read the WaPo, by the way. Relevant Carlzner bits:
Eight years ago, Washington Capitals defensemen John Carlson and Karl Alzner would drive home from games together and laugh. Then one of the youngest defensive pairings in the NHL, Carlson and Alzner would go back and forth about “how cool the game was” that night, the big play that changed it or something memorable one of their more famous teammates did.
Their careers mostly ahead of them, they were “just living the dream,” they always joked…
***
“Just seeing the transformation from always being a good defenseman to being a top-five defenseman in the league, it is cool to see it all pay off because it’s been a journey,” Alzner said. “But it’s been a fun journey, I think, too.”
***
Carlson is now one of the longest-tenured players on the team, and he has two sons: 4-year-old Lucca and 1-year-old Rudy. Starting a family and having the chance to bring his kids to the rink had long been a dream. During multiple television interviews, Carlson made sure to close with a simple, “Hi, Lucca!”
“I remember Mike Knuble had the oldest kids when I was young, and just seeing them around the rink, you know, me personally, you think of it as a young guy,” Carlson said. “You’re like, ‘Oh, wow, that would be cool.’ That was me.”
Carlson’s softer side comes out when he talks about his kids — his face lights up with every question. The same goes for when he starts talking about Alzner and other former teammates.
“Once he is in your corner, he’s willing to bend over backwards to help you with stuff and be there for you,” Alzner said…
It was common knowledge that Carly was notoriously good at holding his liquor and that TJ was a notorious lightweight. Tonight, however, it was Carly that was somehow shitfaced drunk, and TJ that was unfortunately sober.
“Carly, get up off the floor,” TJ sighed, lightly kicking at Carly’s leg. “You’ve had way too much wine tonight.”
Carly giggled from his spot on the ground. “I love wine, wine’s the greatest. I don’t get it a lot, it’s like a treat.”
“Just my luck that you made the all star roster today and we just had to celebrate,” TJ muttered. “And just my luck that wine somehow gets you drunk faster than any other booze.” TJ sat down on the couch, only to realize there was something shoved under the cushion. He reached beneath him and pulled out an empty wine bottle. “Geez, Carly, did you drink this, too? How many bottles did you drink?”
Carly started giggling mercilessly. “I’ll never tell.” God, it was like he was a four-year-old.
TJ put his head in his hands. “God, I have no idea how Alzy dealt with you for all those years.”
Carly’s head snapped up, suddenly alert. “Alzy? Did you say Alzy?”
TJ stuttered. “I, uh-”
Carly’s head slumped back onto the floor. “God, I miss Alzy so much.” He paused. “I’m gonna call him.”
Alarm bells went off in TJ’s head. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
But he had already pulled out his phone. “Yup, I’m gonna call him.”
“Don’t you dare!” TJ launched himself at Carly, who made an oomph sound as TJ landed on him. TJ reached for the phone, but Carly, the stubborn bitch, held it out of his reach and started rolling away. The next few minutes were an epic yet unmanly combination of rolling and wrestling as TJ tried to knock the phone away and Carly tried to press some buttons while wrestling and also drunk.
But the match ended abruptly when Carly kicked TJ in the ribs, and TJ had to let go and roll over onto his back, trying to catch his breath. Carly, victorious, had a big grin on his face as he held the phone to his ear.
“Aaaaallllllllllzzzyyyyyyyyyy,” he sing-songed, unable to stop giggling. “Alzy Alzy Alzy. I miss you Alzy, life’s no fun when you’re not around. I love you, Alzy. I looooooooooove you.” Carly sighed like a teenager in love, pausing presumably to listen to Karl say something on the other end. “Love you too, Alzy. I wish you’d come back. How’s Montreal? Have you learned French yet? J'aime ta bite, baise-moi…”
Carly wasn’t able to get out anything else before TJ, who’d regained his composure, slapped his phone away. Carly pouted like a hurt dog. “Why’d you do that?”
“You’re on a rampage. Alzy deserves better than you when you’re fucking drunk.”
Carly groaned and flopped over. “You’re mean and I hate you.”
“You’re going to hate me even more when I make you get into bed.”
Fic prompt meme. A snippet of Alzner/Carlson for @andrebearakovsky in thanks for helping me find a post earlier in the year. I posted some of this a year or two ago, and now it’s inching towards becoming an actual story. Set on the Alzner Iron Man streak back in 2016. Everything after the first paragraph is under a Read More cut.
John has a mouth made to suck cock, which was apparently the line Karl had drunkenly used to proposition him during the celebration in 2010 when they won the Calder Cup and had been so full of joy and adrenaline and bulk rate champagne that they'd completely skidded up to and then over the previously drawn sexual experimentation line of hotel room hand-jobs with the lights out.
("Are you sure?" Karl had asked him the next morning. "I said that? I'm not sure that sounds like me."
"Yeah, dude, you did," John had said, all matter of fact while searching for his underwear. "You gotta get some better lines."
"Huh," Karl had said, having scraped just enough sobriety together to refrain from saying, well it clearly worked, and trying not to stare too much at John's ass. "I don't—did I romance you? Was I smooth?"
"Not really. I mean, you said the thing about my mouth, I think you threw up in a plant at some point, and you bit my fucking nipple way too hard—" John turned around and pointed at his left nipple; he did have a bruise forming around it. "But otherwise you were pretty good."
"Oh," Karl had said. "Sorry."
John had snorted. "If I didn't like it, I wouldn't have let you," he said, and then, "fuck, I'll just go commando," and then he had turned around and said, "want me to suck your cock while you're sober enough to last more than five minutes this time?" and hadn't bothered to wait for an answer. It was one of the best mornings of Karl's life.)
John has a mouth made to suck cock, and Karl's thought that ever since they were first joined up in Hershey and John had smirked at him when Karl said hello. And so when John had jostled up against him after practice and said low in his ear, "You better have your hall pass for tonight," Karl had looked at John's mouth and seen that same curve of lips from Hershey, and his first thought was putting his dick right in the middle of that smirk.
The game is a goat rodeo. They fall behind, and then they come back; nothing is clicking, then everything is clicking, push-pull. Neuvy in orange still looks fucking weird; there's the hopeful rise of the last minute powerplay, and then there's the sharp sucker punch of an OT loss. It fucking sucks.
John's got media mop-up duty, and Karl somehow gets out of it; he waits for John and John finally comes hurrying through the door, his tie a mess and jamming his toque down over wet hair. "Let's go, Ovi just said his thing about All Stars, they're all jumping all over that and no one's gonna get out of there for another twenty at least."
In the elevator, John's humming something under his breath the whole way; it's not until they get to the garage that Karl realizes it's Iron Man.
"Dick," he says, and smacks John, but he can't keep from smiling.
"You love it," John says, and he doesn't try to dodge the hit as he climbs into his car. "You need to follow me?"
"I got lost once," Karl says. "It's your fault for living in Maryland like a freak and not in Virginia like the rest of us.
"Yeah, well," John says, and leans out his car's open window. "Drive safe and all that because once we get to my place, I got plans."
"You got plans, huh," Karl says. And it's a bad idea, you never know where there's a camera or someone watching but he can't help himself. He reaches out and touches John's face, lets his thumb sweep over a hint of stubble from John's complete inability to beard up, trace the curve of the cheek, just to the corner of John's mouth. He wants to go further, but he doesn't. John's tongue flashes out, snake-quick and jabs against Karl's thumb. "Don't I get to pick what we do?"
"My house," John says smugly. "Maybe I'll let you pick a movie or something."
"Yeah, whatever," Karl says, and turns to go. John reaches out and grabs his sleeve. "What?"
"Drive safe, Alzy," John says again, and then he smiles, sweet and slow. Just pink and smooth and perfect, and Karl puts his hand in his pocket so he won’t touch it again. "Drive slow. I gotta get some things ready for you when you come in."
"How slow?' Karl asks, and even if his voice is a little hoarser than usual, it's still steady.
"We got all night, buddy," John say. He dips his eyelashes and looks up at Karl through them, and it’s all deliberate and stupid and yet Karl has the second worst case of wood he's ever had in a Verizon Center garage.
"I guess…" Karl says, dropping his voice and leaning into the open window just enough until John's leaning towards him in turn. He takes his hand out of his pocket and reaches towards John's face, like he's going to brush a piece of hair back from his temple. John inclines his head towards Karl's hand minutely. "…You should start driving then. But put your seatbelt on first."
He reaches past John's head to tug on the seatbelt, and then he lets go of it and steps away.
John looks surprised at first but he grins, and keeping eye contact, he sticks a hand down his pants and adjusts himself ostentatiously. "Safety first," he says.
"Goddamn right," Karl says, and thumps his hand against the top of the car, knocking twice. "Okay. See you soon."
He takes his time getting to his own car, and even though he really doesn't need it, he pulls up Waze so he can keep track of how far he is, how much time it would take. It's almost a straight shot down Massachusetts Avenue, so he dawdles and pulls into a shopping center on the way. There's a twenty four hour CVS, and after he's inspected the Gatorade, glanced over the holiday candy aisle, and grabbed the bottle of shampoo he came in for in the first place, he skulks down the As Seen on TV aisle for a few minutes, trying to find something that will annoy or amuse John. He's just deciding between a bug zapper shaped like a badminton racket or the Moo Mixer that claims to make perfect chocolate milk when his phone buzzes.
Where are you?
Close, he thumbs back, and grabs the Moo Mixer, wonders why he's bothering with it, and then deciding even if he doesn't give it to John, it makes him laugh. The clerk is an elderly Asian woman who counts his change out painstakingly from the three tens he gives her, and then he's speedwalking back out into the parking lot and gunning it.
It takes barely ten minutes from there before he's pulling up in John's driveway. It's cold out, frosty but clear, and the cherry trees linig the street stretch bare black branches into the sky. The door to the house opens up and for a few seconds, John is just a man-shaped darkness in the yellow spill of light behind him, and then Karl is close enough to see him and John's stepping aside to let him in. He's already changed out of his suit into gray sweats and a dark blue Henley. His feet are bare, and his cheeks are flushed, and his hair is wetter than it looked when they left Verizon, like he maybe just got out of the shower again here at home.
"Did you shower again?" Karl asks as John closes the door behind him. "Oh, I got you this," he adds, and hands the Moo Mixer to John. "But I'm keeping it if you don't want it."
"No fucking way, it's going right next to the root beer mug you gave me," John says, holding it up to see it properly while Karl starts toeing off his shoes and unzipping his coat. He shoots a sidelong look at Karl and licks his lips. "You like giving me cups, huh? I'm gonna start reading into that."
"You do that," Karl says, and he's about to look for a place to hang his coat when John reaches out to take it from him.
"You're so fucking superstitious," he says to Karl.
"Look who's talking," Karl says, sitting down so he can work on the knot in one of his laces. Though usually it's John handing him his coat that's part of the superstition. "You're doing it right now."
John laughs. "Did you know I started that coat thing in the hotel because you came back to the room early one time in Hershey, and it was just because you caught me putting it back in the closet? Because, like, I was putting it back after I was kinda holding it on the bed, like—" He gestured, rubbing his face against Karl's coat. "You know, so I could smell it when I was jerking off."
It's a good thing Karl's sitting down while John says that, because after hearing that, he's not sure any blood's going to get to his brain ever again.
Anyway, I wrote a story for the ALL CAPS exchange, which you can read if you want. Or don’t!
feels like summer on AO3, 29K (for now), Alzner/Carlson with some background Backstrom/Ovechkin and the Caps ensemble.
Summary: The unglamorous fact of the matter is that lifeguarding, particularly at a community swimming pool, is much less about the dramatic rescues and slo-mo dives into the water that Baywatch has tricked people into believing, and much more about janitorial work that's either tedious or gross, spiked with the occasional scraped knee or elbowed nose or no-holds-barred ice cream vendor death-match in the parking lot.
(Or, Karl's in love with his best friend, all the local community pools in the Metropolitan county are at prank-war with each other, and also there are ducks.)
Technically it’s complete and stands alone where it is right now, but there’s roughly about 10K more I had planned/didn’t edit in time; however, I never met a deadline I didn’t like to run adrift on, so, uh. More to come!
