Merry (almost) Christmas, cat lovers. The holidays bring out different things in all of us – for some, it makes us joyful, euphoric, and in an upbeat mood. For others, it can make us pressured, anxious, nervous and overthinking about what to get people for their gifts. Don't be a Scrooge, be a cat loving, meme scrolling, holiday hooligan and enjoy life while we still can! No matter if you're a Scrooge or not, you can still enjoy these cat photos and memes of felines in Santa hats celebrating one of the best holidays yet. And who can deny a little coquettish kiss under some mistletoe. What's more enticing than a pine tree stem hovering above you?
Cats kiss under the mistletoe too. If you don't believe us, go home and try it today, but if you end up with a furball caught in your throat after your cat goes in for first base, don't blame us! If your holiday plans include avoiding awkward mistletoe encounters and aggressively relaxing with your phone, then 25 Christmas Cats in Santa Hats to Scroll Under the Mistletoe is exactly the festive distraction you deserve. These cats have donned their tiny red hats (against their will, legally speaking) and are here to spread cheer, chaos, and an unreasonable amount of judgment.
Oh, lawd - Biggie Smalls is coming! He's coming, he's going, he's gaining followers, and losing pounds. Biggie arrived to The Big House Sanctuary & Rehab in Ottawa at a shocking 43 pounds. His organs were getting pushed out of the way, and even walking was hard for him. But, the workers at this sanctuary didn't give up on him. We're happy to announce that Biggie has lost… drum roll, please… almost 20 pounds! He's still a chonker, but he's literally lost almost half of himself since he started this journey.
Biggie quickly became an internet celebrity in the cat world due to his purrfectly round nature. He has millions of likes and followers, everyone pawistively invested in his de-chonkification. He's still got about five or ten more pounds to lose, but it's not about racing to the finish, it's about getting there in the furst place! We've been in love with him since the beginning, and we can't wait to see the cat he will become in the future. We're all about body pawsitivity, but we're also equally about healthy cats leading healthy lives.
He may no longer be round in body, but he is still round in spirit. Read more about the notorious C.A.T. by scrolling down!
The year 2025 has been one big challenge. And we mean that in varios ways, of course, but what we are taking about specifically here is the challenge of just… going online. So much negativity, so much drama, so much clickbait and madness. It has been everywhere. But inside all of that madness, something meowgical was happening. It was the same thing that happens every year. Cats. No matter what was going on online, there were always viral stories of cats for us to enjoy. And this year, one genre of cat post that we have seen go viral over and over again was unique and rare cats.
We think that people just wanted a little extra beauty in their lives, espeically on the internet. And so, every week, we would open some social media platform, and every week, there would be at least one unique and beautiful cat for us to stare at. Something about thsese posts captured the hearts of the people, so we thought that it was only right to give the people what they have been asking for, so we put together the coolest cats of 2025.
It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.
Back to Kirk and Spock again! Told you they’re almost half the list. Advent 2012. The Enterprise crew carry out their mission to investigate weird shit wherever they find it. Guided by a Christmas star (kind of) they stumble on an unexpected birth (kind of). One of my favourite things about writing Trek fic is how weird and unexplainable you can make things (this will come up again later).
‘By the time they reach the surface, it is no longer the barren wasteland the initial scans had indicated. They stand surrounded by vegetation, lush and thick and a shade of green so bright it's almost gold; by the sound of trickling streams and the growing thrum of insect life. The tricorders vibrate with each new discovery as lifesigns appear around them with increasing rapidity, and above them coloured clouds rush through the sky like a gymnastic rainbow.…’
Song: Silent Night (There are of course many versions; this is the absolutely haunting one by Sinead O'Connor.)
Technically this is an Epiphany fic, but since I'm doing pre-Christmas days and not post-Christmas days, here we are. It's about those few days after Dunworthy and Colin retrieve Kivrin from the Black Death, and the fallout - while knowledge of the canon will definitely help here, it's also a fic for anyone who has had to deal with university administrations.
There are all kinds of craft challenges and goals that people like to do. Some are individual, others are group events. Some are all year, others shorter. Some have speculative fiction themes, others are ordinary. They span a great many different arts and crafts including but not limited to crochet, drawing, knitting, painting, quilting, sewing, and woodworking. Here are some for your inspiration. On Dreamwidth, see communities for Art and Crafts. Note that get_knitted makes regular checkin posts for your craft projects.
You can pick whichever challenge(s) you want to set as a goal in 2026 and reply with a comment. Below the list of challenges is a short form for listing which you have chosen. Make a post in your blog like "I signed up for the Arts and Crafts challenge in goals_on_dw" -- or list the specific challenge if you're doing an official one somewhere else instead of a personal one here. Then make a tag for it like "Arts and Crafts Challenge" and put that on the post; it should stick that way. Check your Interests page to see if you have Art, Crafts, Crochet, Painting, etc. listed there, which helps people find you. You don't have to sign up to participate, it just helps spread the word and attract more readers.
There is a Bingo Card Generator if you want to make your own using premade lists or whatever prompts you want to paste in. Various sizes and styles are available.
See also the Fannish 50 challenge, which simply aims to post fifty entries on any topic in fandom. If you want to crochet the crew of the Enterprise, sew a complete capsule wardrobe inspired by hobbits, or carve a replica of Hogwarts, go for it. Either writing about or posting pictures of your progress will count. You can even double-count anything that applies to two or more goals, e.g. stashbusting, crochet, and Fannish 50.
Do you know of any other arts and crafts challenges in 2026? Share a link so they can be added to the list of options.
Cats have an extra special way of burrowing into human hearts. Oftentimes, they make us earn their affections, but once we are invited into the exclusive Kitty Friendship Club, that cat will love and trust us for the rest of their days. However, sometimes our soul-cats are taken from us too soon, and like the cat lover in this next story who lost her beloved best friend at only 2 years old, it's tough to replace their meows, their cuddles, and especially their special purrsonalities.
However, only 3 weeks after her cat crossed the rainbow bridge, she discovered a helpless meowing kitten in the snow, literally submerged in the cold. Without her help, the kitten would never have survived, so naturally, she had no choice but to scoop the kitty up. But after inviting the cat into her home, she started noticing unusual behavior from the rambunctious feline.
This cat wasn't just an ordinary stray, but a near carbon copy of her other cat.
Without a shadow of a doubt in her heart, she believed this cat came to her for a reason. Not because he was cold in the snow, needing a home, or because he knew the woman inside was a cat cuddler, but because this cat had been here before.
Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.
Over the last week...
Posted & commented on bnha_fans. Final episode of the anime aired. Main series is truly truly over now!!!
I have a burning question (that came to me while putting my socks on), so I made a poll.
Feel free to wax poetically about the topic in the comments. What about your characters? Sonny Crockett famously does not wear them. Rico does, but to tell you the truth, I haven't paid them much attention (I'll have to fix that).
Everything I've previously read by M.T. Anderson emotionally devastated me, so I despite the fact that Nicked was billed as a comedy I went in bravely prepared to be emotionally devastated once again.
This did not happen .... although M.T. Anderson cannot stop himself from wielding a sharp knife on occasion, it it turns out the book is indeed mostly a comedy .....
Nicked is based on a Real Historical Medieval Heist: the city of Bari is plague-ridden, and due to various political pressures the City's powers have decided that the way to resolve this is to steal the bones of St. Nicholas from their home in Myra and bring them to Bari to heal the sick, revive the tourism trade, and generally boost the city's fortunes. The central figures on this quest are Nicephorus, a very nice young monk who had the dubious fortune of receiving a dream about St. Nicholas that might possibly serve as some sort of justification for this endeavor, and Tyun, a professional relic hunter (or con artist? Who Could Say) who is not at really very nice at all but is Very Charismatic And Sexy, which is A Problem for Nicephorus.
The two books that Nicked kept reminding me of, as I read it, were Pratchett's Small Gods and Tolmie's All the Horses of Iceland. Both of those books are slightly better books than this, but as both of them are indeed exceptionally good books I don't think it takes too much away from Nicked to say that it's not quite on their level: it's still really very fun! And, unlike in those other somewhat better books, the unlikely companions do indeed get to make out!
I did end it, unsurprisingly, desperately wanting to know more about the sources on which it was based to know what we do know about this Real Historical Medieval Heist, but it turns out they are mostly not translated into English. Foiled again!
1. To find out my insurance changed coverage and I owed money on a script (not much, just enough to be annoying AF)
2. That CVS doesn't have my insulin. Again. I know why. They have a fucking dorm fridge to store all insulins, GPL1s and vaccine (plus other meds surely that I don't know but need refrigerated)
3. taking a half hour to get thru the CVS line and the line to the car wash was even longer so I had to skip it (I had a thing I had to get to) which sucks because I was on the ground floor of the parking garage yesterday and the level above me is outside and they salted it and it dripped everywhere.
4. There was an 18 wheeler on its side and I was thinking that is going to take me forever to get home but they did something I've never seen before. About 5 miles north of the accident they put up 'accident head' signs and moved everyone over there and there was no back up.
5. My olive oil brined garlic leaked in the pantry bin. I was digging through to find the food part of my parents' holiday gift and it didn't just leak, it coated everything in at least an inch of oil. It took over an hour to clean off every can and bottle and toss out things in boxes. Ugh. Ruined my clothes in the process.
6. My vascular surgeon never called in my meds.
At least I got the car partially packed. I still have to clean the kitchen in the morning since the damn pantry issue took up too much time.
Still half ready to cry. But I had my writers zoom thingie and I'm 4K into a story.
What I Just Finished Reading:
Death at the Door - paranormal mystery wanted to bitch slap the protagonist
What I am Currently Reading:
To Die Once - a Maisie Dobbs mystery which I haven't read one of these in a while and this is...slow. It's way more about the effect of war on the English people (who were still recovering from WWI) than it's a mystery
Tell Tale Treat - another paranormal mystery with another protagonist ripe for being bitch slapped
What I Plan to Read Next: Poorly Made and Other Things
(OK, the books aren't celebrating Hanukkah, they're celebrating Walpurgisnacht if anything, but I am. Quick takes, I don't have too much to say.)
The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard. Readaloud and reread, in honor of Tom Stoppard's death. It was very cool having an actual classics grad student read the part of young A. E. Housman, though ultimately I feel like I don't quite connect with the play, perhaps because of not being a classicist or not being sufficiently attached to Housman's poetry. (I do find it interesting to compare A. E. Housman to his Cambridge colleague G. H. Hardy, who mentions Housman a few times in his Mathematician's Apology, but I'm not sure I can fit into the context of this play.)
The Tempest, William Shakespeare. Also a readaloud, and of course a reread, as this is a play I know very well. Everyone agreed this time that Prospero is a jerk, but the language is still fantastic. Also, having read the role of Ferdinand that guy doesn't seem so great either.
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by Walter Arndt. I've previously read three modern abridged translations of Faust (MacDonald, Brenton, and Clifford) that were designed to be performed on stage (partly to judge their suitability for readalouds), and then I ran across this in a Little Free Library and thought I would try a more literary/scholarly translation. Anyway, so I know how things go, but it's still interesting to see the things that get cut from the other versions, and will probably be more interesting once I get to part II. It makes an interesting comparison to The Tempest (which it is explicitly referencing by reusing the character of Ariel), but unfortunately as well as having to read it translation, I've also missed out on the opportunity to have imprinted on it at a younger age as I did with Shakespeare.
It is, indeed, fuckin wimdy right now. (Current peak gusts have been over 100mph!)
Our local power company enacted some preventive power cuts (Public Safety Power Shutoff) to help minimize the potential for downed lines sparking wildfires. I am in favor of this, as much as it sucks, because we have had some extraordinarily awful and destructive wildfires. (No one wants another Marshall Fire.)
While (*knock wood*) so far we haven't had more than the briefest of power flickers at home, my office was within the PSPS area. These areas were announced yesterday, originally slated to start at noon, and later moved up to 10am. While yesterday it was still couched as them "maybe" cutting power, by later yesterday and certainly by this morning, it was definite: they would be cutting power at 10am for the announced areas.
A mildly annoying timeline:
- On Tuesday afternoon, the power company announces the *potential* for a PSPS on Wednesday in light of wind and fire risk forecasts, probably around 12.
- Many local schools and county government offices announce schedule adjustments, planning for early closures.
- My manager called me in the afternoon: my company had made the decision to cancel all appointments on Wednesday afternoon in preparation for the wind, and office staff would be going home at noon Wednesday in order to beat the wind and since we anticipated losing power.
- Into late afternoon, the PSPS announcements are tending more toward this IS a planned action, no longer just a potential.
- Government offices declare they will close for the entire day.
- My manager texts me in the evening, saying that despite the warnings only growing MORE emphatic, the company had decided that we will only close early IF the power went out; otherwise, we should plan to stay for the entire day, even though all appointments had been cancelled. Gotta answer phones.
- Relatively late into the night, county schools decided to close for the entire day on Wednesday (which is a pain at least for the high schools, since it's finals week!)
- By this morning, the PSPS announcement is a definite warning; power to the planned areas will shut off at 10:00.
- I go to work, starting at 9:30. No one else seems aware that the 10:00 time was a definite time; everyone is still operating on "maybe around 12:00."
- It is not yet windy.
- There is one group of appointments that was missed in the rescheduling flurry from yesterday, so we call them and ask them to move up to before 12:00.
- At exactly 10:00 the power goes out. Shock. Amaze.
- We are told by upper management to "wait and see." (FOR WHAT? THE POWER IS OUT AND NOT SLATED TO EVEN POSSIBLY COME ON UNTIL AFTER 6PM. WE CAN DO NOTHING.)
- Some of those students we called do come in; we do our best to handle their tests in the lobby, since that's the only room with windows, and to enter their results on our phones.
- My manager asks again how long we should stay. It's still not windy, but the power is, crucially, still out. No computers. No phones. No students. WE ARE JUST SITTING. In an increasingly hot office, because we have no fans or central air, and the sun comes directly in the windows. The answer is "Stay as long as you feel safe! :)" Which... no, it isn't unsafe right now, but THERE IS NOTHING TO DO.
- Finally around 12:30 my manager did let me leave, because we really had nothing else to do. I think it was mostly because she was annoyed that Alex was waiting in the parking lot (because he knew the power was out, and didn't want to go home just to have to come back to pick me up), but whatever.
- The wind really did not start in our area until later afternoon, and even then wasn't terribly severe. It was far worse earlier to the north, and by now it is very windy here, too.
No idea yet if we'll have power at the office tomorrow. There is apparently a risk that they'll do another PSPS on Friday for forecast winds, with the warning that some areas where those warnings overlap could be without power for 3+ days, as they may not restore power just to cut it again. If our power is NOT on, I don't know what the plan will be... I don't know if they'll ask me to go to a different office (hope not, since those are all pretty far from me and I don't have any of my stuff, so I don't want to do that...) or if I'll have the choice to use a PTO day, or if I'll have to just sit in a dark, empty office..?
Nostalgia is a trap. The people who indulge in it do so with selective memory, either their own or someone else’s. When I was a kid in the 80s, people looked back yearningly at the 50s as a simpler and better time, when families were nuclear, entertainment was wholesome and a slice of pie was just a nickel, conveniently eliding the segregation of black citizens, the communist witch hunts, and the fact that women couldn’t get things like credit cards or mortgages without a husband or some other male authority. Later people started looking at the 80s the way the 80s looked at the 50s, and they enjoyed the dayglo colors and the cheeky music and forgot apartheid, the cold war, leaded gas and smoking everywhere, or the fact that gay men were dying of AIDS and the US government (for one) couldn’t be persuaded to give a shit. I don’t feel nostalgia for the 80s; I lived in it. A whole lot of things about it were better left behind.
And still, nostalgia persists, because being an adult is complicated, and that time when you were a kid (or frankly, didn’t even exist yet) was uncomplicated. You didn’t have make any decisions yet, and all the awful things about the era existed in a realm you didn’t really have to consider. The golden age of anything is twelve, old enough to see what’s going on and not old enough to understand it.
Pleasantville is all about the trap of nostalgia and how its surface pleasures require an unexamined life. Tobey Maguire, in one of his first big roles, plays David, a high school student with a sucky home life who is obsessed with the 50s TV show Pleasantville, a sort of Father Knows Best knock-off where there patriarchy is swell and there is no problem that can’t be resolved in a half hour. For a kid from a broken home, whose mom is about to sneak off for a weekend assignation in a moderately-priced hotel, Pleasantville sounds like paradise.
That is, until David and his twin sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) are, by way of a magical remote control, whisked away to Pleasantville itself, in all its monochromatic 50s glory, and forced to take on the roles of Bud and Mary Sue Parker, the two kids of the series’ main family. For Jennifer, who is a Thoroughly Modern Millennial, this is a fate worse than death; she had plans for the weekend, and they didn’t involve dressing up like a square. David, on the other hand, is initially delighted. He knows the series inside and out, is excited to be in the highly delineated world of his favorite show, and assures his perturbed sister that as long as they play the roles assigned to them, everything will be fine until they find their way back to the 90s.
You don’t have to be a devotee of 50s sitcoms to guess how long it takes until things start going awry. David and Jennifer, whether they intend to or not, are now the proverbial snakes in the garden, bringing knowledge into a formerly innocent world, sometimes literally (David tells other teens what’s in the formerly blank library books, and the words magically fill in) and sometimes also literally, but not using words (Jennifer introduces the concept of orgasms, and boy howdy, is that a game changer). As things get more complicated, some people get unhappy. And when some people get unhappy, they start looking for someone to blame.
Pleasantville is not a subtle film by any stretch: when people start deviating from their assigned roles, they change from monochrome to color, which allows the film to label part of its uniformly Caucasian cast as “colored,” which… well, I know what extremely obvious allusion writer/director Gary Ross was trying to make here, and the best I can say about it is that it is not how I would have done it. Also, any film where a nice girl character offers a nice boy character an apple right off the tree is not trying to sneak anything past you. The movie wears its lessons and motivations right on its sleeve, and in neon.
What are subtle, though, are the performances. With the exception of J.T. Walsh, who plays the mayor of Pleasantville with big smiling back-slapping friendly menace, no one in this movie is overplaying their hand. We notice this first with David/Bud and Maguire’s bemused way of getting both of them through the world, both ours and Pleasantville’s. But then there’s Bill Johnson, the owner of the malt shop Bud works in, who is initially befuddled when things are out of sequence, but gets progressively delighted the more improvisation gets added into his life. Bud’s dad George (William H. Macy) finds his role as paterfamilias slipping away and is befuddled rather than angry about it. Even Jennifer, who initially comes in as a wrecking ball, finds a lower gear.
But the true heart of Pleasantville is Betty, Bud and Mary Sue’s mom, played by the always tremendous Joan Allen. Like everyone else in Pleasantville, Betty starts off as a naïf, who only knows what’s been written for her. But the more she strays from what she’s supposed to be doing and saying, the more she understands that what she’s “supposed” to be doing and saying stands in total opposition to what she actually needs — when, that is, she finds the wherewithal to both understand and act on those needs. Her transformation is bumpy, not without backtracks, and deeply affecting. Joan Allen did not get any awards for this film, but it is an award-worthy performance.
(Also award-worthy: Randy Newman’s score, which was in fact nominated for an Oscar.)
It’s this dichotomy — high concept, deeply ridiculous premise, and heartfelt, committed character performances — that fuels Pleasantville and makes it work better than it has any right to. It would have been so easy just to play this film as farce, and you know what? If the film had been played as farce, it would have been perfectly entertaining. Watch the latter-day Jumanji films, the ones with Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart and Jack Black (and Karen Gillan! Whose comedic talents are underrated!) and you’ll see how playing a ridiculous concept almost purely as farce can be both amusing and profitable. There is a world where Pleasantville is one of those 90s comedy movies whose titles on the movie posters were big chunky red letters. It’s just not this world, and the film is better for it.
By now at least some of you may have figured out why I find Pleasantville so compelling and watchable. What Ross is doing in this movie is the same sort of thing I do in a lot of my writing: Take a truly ridiculous, almost risibly farcical concept, and then make characters have real lives in the middle of it. You’ll see me doing it in Redshirts and Starter Villain and especially in When the Moon Hits Your Eye, in which, you’ll recall, I turned the moon into cheese. A lot of people think doing this sort of thing is easy, which, one, good, I try to make it look like that, and two, if you actually think it’s easy to do, try it. It takes skill, and not everyone has it, and not every book or play or TV show or movie that attempts it gets it right.
Pleasantville gets it right. It looks at the pleasures of nostalgia and says, you know what, it’s not actually all that great when you think about it. It’s no better than the real world and the modern day.
It’s hard to believe it just now, but there will come a time when someone looks back at 2025 and thinks, what a simpler, better time that was. Not because their world is that much worse (I mean, shit, I hope not), but because by then all of this will be rubbed smooth and easy and someone who is twelve now will remember it as carefree. Those of us over twelve will know better what lies underneath pleasant nostalgia. So does this film. Nostalgia is never as great as you remember it.
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icanhascheezburger_feed) wrote2025-12-18 02:00 pm
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