Is there a day in your life that you would want to live over and over again? I can think of one or two perfect days I’ve had, and at least initially I might be okay stuck in them in an eternal loop. But eventually, even a perfect day would get monotonous, and there’s the fact that the reason it was a perfect day was because you didn’t know it was going to be perfect when you woke up that morning. Knowing would take the shine off it. Also, you wouldn’t be able to replicate that day perfectly, over and over and over.
Like smelling a rose forever, eventually you would become immune to the charms of the day. You would get a repetitive strain injury of the soul, and eventually, that perfect day, eternally on repeat, might be a working definition of Hell.
Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is not having a perfect day in this film. A Pittsburgh weatherman, he’s slated to go to Punxsutawney, north of Pittsburgh, to take part in the town’s annual Groundhog Day celebration, a day where (for those you who have just beamed onto the planet), a large rodent forecasts how long winter will continue depending on whether he can see his shadow or not. Phil loathes Groundhog Day because despite his professionally genial nature, he’s a misanthrope and finds people and their quaint little traditions annoying. But it’s his job, so he heads up to Punxsutawney with his cameraman Larry (Chris Elliot) and his new producer Rita (Andi McDowell), and does a perfunctory and slightly nasty stand-up.
Then weather happens and the three of them are trapped in Punxsutawney, one of them more than the others. Phil wakes up and it’s Groundhog Day again. The day repeats, he’s weirded out, and then it happens again, and again, and again.
Why is it happening? We never get an explanation (rumor is Columbia Pictures demanded an explanation and the filmmakers made one up to make the studio happy, and then intentionally never got around to shooting it). Why is it happening to Phil? Mostly, because the jerk needs it. Many of us take years and years to deal with our shit and come out the other side a better person. Phil needs only one day, it’s just that this one day is going go on forever until he gets it right.
In this, Groundhog Day feels like A Christmas Carol turned on its head. Ol’ Ebenezer Scrooge needed the intercession of three ghosts and one night to realign his worldview; Phil Connors gets no ghosts but eternal recurrence to sort himself out. Given the choice I think I’d rather have the single night; it feels more efficient that way. But I suppose not everyone can do it all in a single night, and Phil doesn’t seem like the kind to take a hint with a single whack to the skull. He’s going to have to get whacked, again and again and again and again.
Which is fine, because it’s fun to watch Phil play the changes: first panic, then glee, then methodical trickery, then despair, and then… well, you’ll see (or have seen, this film is universally acknowledged to be one of the great film comedies of all time). At one point someone asks Phil, who seems to know everything because he’s well into the middle of his eternal loop, how he can know so much. Phil says, “Well, there is no way. I’m not that smart.” And you know what, he’s right. He’s in this loop because he’s just not that smart. He can’t learn his way out of this conundrum; he has to experience his way out of it, if he is going to get out of it at all. This isn’t a criticism of Phil, per se. I’m probably not that smart, either, and probably neither are you. If Phil could be taught to be a better and more decent human, he probably wouldn’t have been a candidate to be in that loop at all.
(This does bring up the question of why the universe or whomever thinks Phil, of all the pinched, unhappy people out there, merits a loop to sort out his issues. This is also left unanswered, and maybe there is no answer. The universe is weird and capricious, and if you or I or anyone could really understand it, we’d probably try to find a way out of it. As ee cummings once said, “Listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go”)
Groundhog Day is a tale of existential horror played for laughs, which is one of the reasons I think it resonates for so many people. It’s an easy way to approach the concept of how hard it is to turn ourselves around when we only have a single life to do it in. There are a lot of different theories about how long it is that Phil is stuck in his loop, ranging from ten years to 10,000. There’s only one correct answer: He’s in it for however long it takes to fix himself. There’s no escape before then.
The rest of us are not so lucky, or unlucky, depending on your perspective. We have to live with our mistakes and screw-ups and disappointments; there are no do-overs, only occasional second chances. I don’t want to be stuck in a time loop for years or decades or centuries, but hurtling heedlessly through time with no brakes or track-backs also seems not a great way to run a universe, at least for the humans in it.
Another reason the film resonates so much is that Bill Murray is the perfect person to play Phil Connors. Like his character, Murray’s a funny and acerbic fella who is also, if the various stories about him on set and in his personal life are close to true, fully capable of being a real asshole. There’s a “biting on tin foil” edge to Murray that makes it easy for him to sell Phil as a person who doesn’t much like people, or himself, and it’s a toss-up on any given day which he likes less.
The production of this film had Murray butting heads with director Harold Ramis to such an extent that the formerly close friends had a falling out that lasted nearly until Ramis’ death in 2014. Apparently Murray wanted the film to be more philosophical; Ramis, who was the one who had to deliver a hit to Columbia Studios, needed it to be more comedic. In the end, they both got their way, so I think it’s a shame this was the film they fell out over.
In the end, though, who else could have been Phil Connors? Of all the actors in Hollywood at the time, I can only think of one on a similar tier of fame who could have pulled it off: Tom Hanks, who despite his current reputation as “America’s Dad” was capable of some real acidity and anger back in the day (see the movie Punchline for a Tom Hanks character who is basically a talented asshole). But even Hanks would have been second best here; Hanks doesn’t teeter on the edge of being unlikeable as well or as long as Murray. Murray makes you believe in Phil’s redemption arc.
Early in the film, when he had only recurred a few times, Phil remembers a day where he was in the Virgin Islands, met a girl, with whom he drank pina coladas and got busy, and wonders why he couldn’t be repeating that day. As you might imagine from my first paragraph, when it all came down to it, I don’t think he would eventually like recurring on that day any more than on Groundhog Day. Eventually the pleasure of it would stale and he would end up the same place (metaphysically) as he was in Punxsutawney.
That’s because, as the noted philosopher Buckaroo Banzai once said, no matter where you go, there you are. The problem was not Punxsutawney, or Groundhog Day, and never was. The problem was always Phil, just as the problem would be, inevitably, any of the rest of us in the same situation. Phil gets as much time as he needs to solve himself. Groundhog Day reminds us, however, that we just have the time we’ve got, and we better get to it.
Eight days out from signups, we're celebrating with our 2018 banner! Purimgifts 2026 will be here before you know it, so don't forget to mark your calendars for next week when signups start!
SIGNUPS & NOMINATIONS 2-9 Jan (anywhere in the world) DEADLINE 23 Feb (anywhere in the world) REVEALS 2-4 March
AO3 wranglers have processed a lot of new fandoms; in the main collection, the 992 that appeared on the fandoms page at reveals have become 1065! Thanks to everyone who has helped make wranglers' jobs easier by using canonical tags, tags from the tag set, or other recommended tags, as appropriate in each case.
If you've written in a new fandom that isn't wrangled yet, we encourage you to use Unspecified Fandom as a tag to help people find your work; many works originally tagged this way now have wrangled fandoms, in which case, you can take the tag off if you wish.
As in the last post: Commenting Please comment on your gift(s) to let your writer know you appreciate them. Please also comment on anything else you enjoy!
Problems If there is something wrong with your gift or you have another concern, please contact the mods at yuletideadmin@gmail.com.
Anonymity Yuletide is designed to be an anonymous exchange until January 1. Please don't give away what you've written. When logged in, you can, if you want, reply to comments on your own works, and you will show up as Anonymous Creator until the authors of the collection are revealed.
The Yuletide event concludes at 9pm UTC, 1 January 2026. At that time we will reveal creator names at both the main and Madness collection, and also open the new New Year's Resolution collection.
Day 22 Today for #DecRecs I want to talk about Saint Cavish a Chinese food youtube channel run by Christopher St. Cavish https://www.youtube.com/@saintcavish I'm always a little careful about media by white dudes about China but I was intrigued by the series of videos where Italian chefs visit "China's Noodle Homeland" -- which turned out to be really good! I've since watched a lot more of the channels videos The videos are thoughtful, never treating the food as too weird or exotic and do a good job of putting stuff in context both historical and with regard to modern China
Day 23 Today for #DecRecs I want to rec fancy seam finishing for sewing projects! I mentioned in an earlier rec that this year I've been sewing a lot of garments for myself. For all of those I've used either french seams or flat felled seams and they are so nice to look at and so stratifying to make!
Day 24 I had PT this morning and it wore me out so for #DecRecs have a pretty picture
I guess I can link this to the whole year in review theme of this year's #DecRecs by saying that this year I started a tumblr account -- I still don't understand tumblr culture so I just follow people I know and reblog pretty pictures
Day 25 For today's #DecRecs I want to share some of my favorite songs so far form the Chinese reality show Crush of Music which I'm part way through watching having just finished episode 4
Crush of music is a show where songwriters demo original songs and then through a mildly gameifed process are matched with a singer (or two) who then preforms the song. It's a really fun low stress show and features some of my favorite singers ! I can't really rec the show though because the subtitles are very very bad -- I'm just watching in anyways even though I can only understand about half of what people are saying Anyways on to the songs! Here's Liu Yuning having the best time rocking his heart out
Still working through old reviews, this one is mostly stuff I read for school, plus one tile for queer book club.
Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan This being the book club one. A trans woman in contemporary London feels trapped by mediocrity and inertia. She has a job she doesn't like but pays well enough. She has friends she more or less gets along with, but aren't great people. She writes poetry that does okay, but never really goes anywhere. She has tense meetings with her family, who love her but are bound by an inability to actually communicate. Meeting a new guy seems like it might nudge her into something better, but her overwhelmingly low standards and lack of ambition might sink that too. There are also flashback from the boyfriend's point of view, about a youthful trip to South East Asia, which ends in violence.
This book was a lot of people being mildly terrible, and everyone feeling like they ought to do something about improvement, then... not doing that. It was often quite funny, and Dinan has some great one-liners that cut through to the core of people's motivations. Though it's mostly about the failure mode of... pretty much everything, there were glimmers of the protagonist at least trying to work on the people around her, and maybe even herself. None of that was really enough to lift the book out of its mire of dreariness, though. It was a lot of time to spend with the grindingly unpleasant.
Death Threat by Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee I read this when it came out, and remember not being deeply impressed. I think I expected there to be more of a story, or perhaps more of a resolution. Rereading it some years later, I liked it a lot better. (Though several of my classmates had my initial "Is that all there is?" reaction.)
Vivek starts getting oddly poetic transphobic death threats via email, and becomes obsessed with the sender, paranoid it could be someone she knows, afraid it could be a stranger on the subway. She collaborates with artist Ness Lee (always shown drawn in her distinctive black and white line art, while everyone else is in colour) to make the novel we're reading, while still being haunted and possibly hunted by the letter writer.
This benefits from close reading, as the images are symbolically very rich, and the colourists do a lot of work with motifs and character themes. Literary graphic novels can be redundant, at times, with the pictures just showing you what the text is already saying, and a general feeling that this could've been an e-mail, but the art here is telling its own story, running alongside, underneath and through the text. It's very well done, and I'm sad that Shraya switches genres with every project, as I'd like to see more of this from her. Though she does great work in all the other genres, too.
Fun House: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel I hadn't managed to read this before, and it's a lot. Bechdel tells the story of her relationship with her father, including discovering he was gay, and his ambiguous death. She's based the story on her teenage diaries, found documents such as family photographs, newspaper clippings, dictionary entries, and maps, and a reading list she shared with her father. Each section takes on themes of one of the works mentioned (including In Search of Lost Time, Great Gatsby, The Importance of Being Earnest), going over and back over the events of her youth and her father's death. The whole thing sits inside a frame of the story of Daedalus and Icarus, though it's not clear which character is meant to be whom.
The text is dense and recursive, as if Bechdel is still unable to face what happened full on, and keeps sliding up to it sideways, keeps feeling the emotions vicariously through other stories. At one point, she talks about how in a childhood bout of OCD, she kept writing symbols over top of the names of important people and things in her diary, as a kind of ward against the evil eye. To some extent, the whole novel feels like that: as if she's writing over and over the events of her childhood to take a curse off them. It probably rewards rereading, but it's also a lot.
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde Second time through this, and it's still great. It's difficult to imagine the impact of this in the early 1980s, when queer lit was very much a thing, but also more siloed and less diverse. I should look up contemporary reviews, and see if this was indeed like a bomb going off, or was taken in stride. Incredible depth, incredible emotion, wonderful literary voice. I don't have a lot to say otherwise: It's great and you should read it!
It was interesting what I remembered from reading it a few years ago: the abortion, the execution of the Rosenbergs, working in the factory, not fitting in with the butch/femme lesbian bar scene, Kitty. I was surprised at how late in the book we meet Kitty, and how abrupt the ending was.
I have the kind of insomnia old-timey bards would write songs about, so I listen to boring audio books on these every night to keep my brain from spinning out of control. Lately I've been wearing them like a sleep mask - like the model here - and WOW, that's helped even more than when I wore them like a headband! These things have been a life saver: comfy enough for side sleeping, not too loud like some of my old speakers, and they only cost $20. Plus my original pair lasted a good 2 years before one of the wires went loose.
Please note that these do run on the big side, but that works out great if you have a big head like me. :D
Fandom: Metal Gear Solid Pairings/Characters: Snake/Otacon Rating: G Length: 13,779 (1:33:04) Creator Links:thelonebamf Theme: Amnesty, Ambiguous Relationships, Angst (With A Happy Ending), Hurt/Comfort, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Trauma & Recovery, Pre-Canon
Summary: Snake returns from Operation N313, lauded a hero and finds the latest shipment of Foxhound recruits already at the camp. Still struggling to sort out his thoughts about the mission, he finds his attention drawn to one rookie in particular, a scrawny, unassuming runt who can't seem to stay out of trouble.
Reccer's Notes: This just works so damn well as an alternate first meeting for these two! It's such a dismal, pessimistic setting - as expected with this canon - but the way these two forge a connection, finding some degree of comfort and caring and hope - makes me really emotional! And I love the use of the book, as well! (Also somehow even though I always knew the Hal connection to 2001: A Space Odyssey I never noticed how Dave fits in to it, too?! 🤦)
Unexpected bonus Christmas extract from Son who doesn't really do fiction.
After an hour's rest, they struggled on until noon. The tents were pitched and supper was issued: cold seal steak and tea - nothing more.
On the same night exactly one year before, after a festive dinner on board the Endurance, Greenstreet had written in his diary: 'Here endeth another Christmas Day. I wonder how and under what circumstances our next one will be spent.' That night he failed to even mention what day it was. And Shackleton recorded briefly all that really needed to be said: 'Curions Christmas. Thoughts of home.'
Wishing you all a happier time than being stuck in Antarctica, whether or not you celebrate Christmas.
Fandom: The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System Pairings/Characters: Luo Binghe/Shen Qingqiu Rating: T Length: 4,491 Creator Links:boomchick Theme: Amnesty, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Magic, Mythical Creatures: Demons, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Spells & Curses, Trauma and Recovery
Summary: Luo Binghe's healing powers falter in the shape of the wounds Xiu Ya once gave him. He does the only logical thing--HIDES IT. Shen Qingqiu knows something is wrong with his husband, but finding out what is going to hurt...
A sweet little post-canon fic about healing, plotted with and illustrated by the incredible Falcities for the SVSSS Gotcha for Gaza
Reccer's Notes: This is such a sweet, thoughtful fic! Binghe always tries so hard to be strong, and never really quite escapes the trauma reaction that he doesn't deserve help or that suffering is just something to be endured. In this post-canon fic, his husband gets the opportunity to tell him otherwise and show him just how much he loves all parts of him, including the demonic parts!
It also has quite possibly my favourite (and very appropriate to the themes!) no beta tag ever: No beta but we live regardless
Fandom: The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System Pairings/Characters: Luo Binghe/Shen Qingqiu Rating: T Length: 3,248 Creator Links:marquisguyun Theme: Amnesty, Character Development, Domestic, Happy Endings, Hurt/Comfort, Time Travel
Summary: Luo Binghe had suffered through numerous life-changing revelations since waking up on the floor of the woodshed. First he had thought he was dead and a ghost, then he'd been informed he was in the future, then they'd tried to tell him that he was a demon. But still, the most unbelievable thing this strange future version of his shijie had tried to convince him of was that he was married to their shizun.
Reccer's Notes: This was written for the prompt 'Time Travel - Character discovers future self is apparently happy in the MOST unlikely relationship', and truly I cannot think of a better canon ship for that than this pair 😄 This is so sweet, and baby Binghe's POV is so perfectly young and hurt and yearning and protective-instincts-inciting...! And then the canon couple themselves are just so very sweet and perfect... <33 Such love!!!
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzula![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan
