#my meta: yellowstone
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When a 'pathetic little meow meow' wants to be left alone, just LET THEM BE yonder (in the bunkhouse, in Númenor) where they want to be.
Don't try to convince them they are destined for something greater, nothing good will come out of it.
#yes this is about#Jamie Dutton#and#Sauron#Yellowstone#The Rings of Power#probably many others too ;)#shall we tag this meta?#let's#yellowstone meta#my meta: yellowstone#trop meta#my meta: trop#(nvm these are just rambling of a tired mind)
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The Sunnydale Herald Newsletter, Sunday, January 21st
REAL-ESTATE MANAGER: And we'll be asking for first, last, security, and a small cleaning deposit.
~~The Replacement~~
[Drabbles & Short Fiction]
Stirring Trouble by veronyxk84 (Buffy/Spike, PG-13)
Клин клином by B_E_S (Buffy/Angel, T, in Russian)
Inner Sanctum by MadeInGold (Willow/Giles/Angel, T)
The Bunny Issue by cmk418 (Xander/Anya, G)
Words by sparrow2000 (Oz, G)
A Hopeful World by Pinkperson (Buffy/Angel, T)
Stirring Trouble by VeroNyxK84 (Buffy/Spike, PG-13, anthology rated R)
[Chaptered Fiction]
The Fox's Cry Chapter 6 by madimpossibledreamer (Persona 4/Angel Crossover AU, Gunn, Cordelia, Teen)
Who are You in Twenty Years? - Chapter 8 (COMPLETE!) by StrangeBint (Sandman and American Gods crossover, Faith, M)
Marry Me on Monday - Chapter 2 (COMPLETE!) by Jess_Ann_Perreault (Giles/Jenny, G)
but I’m bending the light connecting you to me - Chapter 12 (COMPLETE!) by winterlovesong (Buffy/Spike, T)
Let me rest in peace - Chapter 9 (COMPLETE!) cauliflower666 (Spike/OC, Explicit)
The Master and her Court - Chapter 1 by TheClowniestLivInExistence (Buffy/Angel/Darla/Drusilla/Spike, Explicit)
The End of Destiny - Chapter 1 by ConstantCommentTea (Angel, Cordelia, Connor, brief Doctor Who crossover, T)
It's Easy Time, Until It's Not, Ch. 31 by hulettwyo (Buffy/Spike, Adult Only)
Wayward Girl, Ch. 3 by ClowniestLivEver (Buffy/Spike, NC-17)
To Boldly Go, Ch. 3 by Lady Emma (Buffy/Spike, PG-13)
Cherry On Top, Ch. 25 by Maxineeden (Buffy/Spike, NC-17)
Pack My Box with Five Dozen Liquor Jugs, Ch. 21 by honeygirl51885 (Buffy/Spike, NC-17)
Afterburn, Ch. 7 by Melme1325 (Buffy/Spike, NC-17)
Surviving Together, Ch. 13-14 by ionlylikebadboys (Buffy/Spike, Adult Only)
The Yellowstone: A Safe Harbor, Ch. 3 by Buffyworldbuilder (Yellowstone crossover, Buffy, FR7)
To Boldly Go, Ch. 3 by Lady Emma (Buffy/Spike, PG-13)
Rules of Engagement, Ch. 7 by all choseny (Buffy/Spike, NC-17)
Pack My Box with Five Dozen Liquor Jugs, Ch. 21 by honeygirl51885 (Buffy/Spike, NC-17)
A Waxy Gent Chuckled Over My Fab Jazzy Quips, Ch. 21 by violettathepiratequeen (Buffy/Spike, PG-13)
Ready for it? Ch. 2 by Lilacsandorangeblossoms (Buffy/Spike, NC-17)
To All We Guard, Ch. 1 by simmony (Buffy/Spike, NC-17)
I Do! Ch. 19 by Dusty (Buffy/Spike, NC-17)
Clean Slate, Ch. 6 by hulettwyo (Buffy/Spike, Adult Only)
Wayward Girl, Ch. 3 by ClowniestLivEver (Buffy/Spike, NC-17)
Coming Through, Ch. 2 by hulettwyo (Buffy/Spike, Adult Only)
[Images, Audio & Video]
Drawing: they're going to in n out by genericaces (Angel, Cordelia, Fred, Wesley, Lorne, Gunn, worksafe)
Playlist: Dean and Buffy's car radio by waywardfallenone (Supernatural crossover)
a few quick doodles of some of my favorite early-season willow fits by cheerio-fujisnacki (worksafe)
[Reviews & Recaps]
Season 7 was my least favorite, but I just started appreciating it by Usernamelesses
Grave S6 E22 (Buffy and the Art of Story Podcast) - Lisa Lilly
[Recs & In Search Of]
Spotlight Saturday: Sparla (Spike/Darla fic recs and vid recs) by februaryfangfest
"Weight of the World" Score? - question by Big-Restaurant-2766
OhHeckBois is selling a season 8 and 9 comic collection
DarshDarker is looking for a song from "Get it Done"
[Fandom Discussions]
What kind of shower do you think Spike really has in his crypt? by am-i-the-one
[this is how I think Buffy characters would feel about Taytos] by xandersrailcrash
The methods of dealing with the big bads in Buffy are so funny by aingeal98
One thing I love about Willow is how aware she is in a meta sense by aingeal98
S2 EP 5 - Bangel and Buffy's Depression by olliedollie1204
Would Angel and Cordelia have sided with Buffy in "Empty Places"? by Agent Z and others
Xander calling [Riley] "teutonic" in the Initiative? by NowMindYou
Amy's mom is hot (Name your hottest 1 off villain) by Jwyldeboomboom
You get Jeff Pruit and Sophia Crawford back for three episodes... by Brodes87
Confused about the whole Ben/Glory thing [not a joke post] by Suspicious-Thing5215
Was there a different plan originally for Angel's S2 finale? by Nostromo87
[Articles, Interviews, and Other News]
Buffy Revamped is back on tour in the UK in February
Submit a link to be included in the newsletter!
Join the editor team :)
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New Year's Resolution: Fewer Celebrity Interview Podcasts
Remember the good old days on TV and radio when celebrities were interviewed by people trained to ask questions in a public forum? Ah, the old days. A troubling and annoying trend in podcasting is the growth of celebrity interview shows. These shows are like Japanese Barberry, Purple Loosestrife, and Kudzu.
That leads me to the announcement that "Television personality" Rachel Leviss, together with iHeartPodcasts, are premiering “Rachel Goes Rogue” on January 8, 2024. Rachel Goes Rogue will be executive produced by iHeartPodcasts and Bethenny Frankel and the “Just B” Podcast Network.
The people at iHeart wrote this: "After navigating through a tumultuous year of intense public scrutiny, Rachel has emerged resilient and committed to personal growth. As the host of Rachel Goes Rogue, Leviss will lean into her journey and connect with listeners in a whole new way."
To be fair, the show could be terrific, yet does podcasting truly need another show with a Reality TV celebrity oversharing about their randy, chaotic and overdramatized life?
It's just that every celebrity with a little time on their hands has plunged into the interview podcast pool, and all that splashing has listeners wondering how they ended in the deep end of this ego-stroking pool.
Celebrity podcasts have overwhelmed the sea wall built to protect listeners from celebrity self-love, self-absorption, and self-actualization.
We had the heavy hitters like Meghan Markle in Archetypes and Michelle Obama, who were here and are now gone. Then, we have the lesser-known celebs like Justin Long, Gwyneth Paltrow (Goop -- Heaven help us), and Seth Rogen.
It's not that all of these celebrity podcasts are bad -- except for Snooki & Joey -- but like true-crime podcasts, there are just too many of them.
There are so many of these podcasts that there is a podcast called the Celebrity Podcast Podcast that covers celebrity podcasts. Talk about meta.
So I know what you're saying? What's your problem?
After all, broadcast TV has lovable trash like The Bachelor and Bachelorette and The Masked Singer. Discovery has an entire channel dedicated to skewering humanity with shows like 1000-lb Sisters and MILF Manor (jeez).
No problem. To each their own. But TV also has Abbott Elementary, Ghosts, Yellowstone, and 60 Minutes.
My problem is that I'm frightened that podcasting will be the recycling plant for celebrities disgraced and seeking redemption, or those with fading careers inundating the medium. Podcasting already has a problem with the conspiracy theorists, misinformation mavens, and true-crime obsessives overwhelming podcast feeds.
Take, for example, the new podcast by T.J. Holmes and Amy Robach, formerly of ABC's Good Morning America. The podcast premiered on December 5 on the iHeartPodcast Network. In addition to hosting and executive producing their own podcast, Robach and Holmes will also collaborate on a full slate of upcoming programming for iHeartPodcasts.
Here's the marketing promotion from iHeart: "Hosts and executive producers Robach and Holmes are a formidable broadcasting team with decades of experience delivering headline news and captivating viewers nationwide. Now, the duo will get behind the microphone to explore meaningful conversations about current events, pop culture, and everything in between. Nothing is off limits"
Does the off limits include interviews with their ex-spouses so they get to tell their side of the story? So, the duo are temporarily persona non grata on television, and some agent said, "I know. Start a podcast."
Podcasting, like TV and radio, is a zero-sum game. We are definitely seeing that now in streaming TV, where execs just woke up and realized streaming isn't a moneymaker. Suddenly, streamers like Netflix and Max are canceling or removing shows faster than Taylor Swift can take over the entire world.
In podcasting, there are some terrific interview shows. Fresh Air, WTF with Marc Maron, How I Built This, Vox Conversations, Jemele Hill Is Unbothered, The Jordan Harbinger Show, and so many more.
How about Shannen Doherty? The “Beverly Hills, 90210” "Charmed" actor, 52, debuted the new iHeartRadio podcast “Let’s Be Clear with Shannen Doherty” last month, which covers many aspects of her life, both professional and personal. Doherty has stage four cancer.
Doherty told People Magazine in an interview published on Tuesday that those aspects will include her experiences living with cancer, and that it will “explore all the different phases and stages” of the disease, including “what it’s like to lose your hair (a) multitude of times, (and) how to stay authentic to yourself.”
Doherty, in that People Magazine interview, explained that doctors will be among the guests she speaks to, and that the podcast is encouraging her on her journey, calling it “invigorating” and saying it “helps me for sure.”
Now, that's a celebrity podcast that has value because it's about a life we may someday face ourselves, and the courage displayed in the battle.
With Spotify and other networks pulling back on money and resources for podcasting, every new celebrity podcast means one less potential quality podcast from a person listeners have not yet heard of.
How many is too many? Sometimes, it seems like every celebrity has a podcast. Does a celebrity on a reality show who became famous for "Karen" behavior really deserve a podcast? And isn't that podcast going to crowd out the aspirational podcasters who start their own interview shows without the spotlight of having received a rose ten years ago on a reality TV show?
Marc Maron was not a celebrity when he started his podcast out of his garage. Believe it or not, Joe Rogan was simply a former reality show TV host when he started his podcast.
Are all those celebrity podcasts flooding the podcasting space, crowding out the potential for unknowns to surface and become household names? Is podcasting becoming Kardashian-ized like reality TV?
It's bad enough that Dr. Phil has a podcast. So, no more TV castoffs and celebrity laughingstocks on podcasts. If celebrities are sliding into podcasting, please make it people like Julia Louis Dreyfuss, Lupita Nyong'o, and Emma Watson.
For me, the best celebrity podcast is Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda. Smart, intellectually curious, and far-ranging, the show is, as one reviewer commented, "The perfect mix of insightful and humanistic conservation."
On the latest episode, Alda interviews Steve Inskeep about his new book about Abraham Lincoln. The new book takes a fresh look at Abraham Lincoln’s life by recounting sixteen face-to-face encounters Lincoln had with people who differed with him, sometimes vehemently. The book not only reveals his skills as a master politician in a deeply divisive time, but also has lessons for today.
Hey, I understand if you are fascinated by the sexual goings-on with Good Morning America or Vanderpump Rules. Human beings are naturally curious, especially about other people's business when other people are getting busy with each other.
But are these frolics worthy of a podcast? Maybe a few episodes, and then you move on to some terrific podcasts that are gossipy, creepy, and trashy by definition, and they're by indie podcasters.
Try Trashy Divorces or What a Creep. You can still get the dirt without getting dirty.
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With everything we learn about fcg I fear for what dancers like considering she probably programmed all of this into him, and considering what she made him for is “to help” is even more concerning
Okay, I have a possibly spicy Thought about this, because yes, in this lens, thats unnerving. BUT CONSIDER, the other aspect of this lens, which is that: It could be that Dancer wasn't particularly awful, it's more that F.C.G is the product of inflexible judgements and guidelines in a flexible world.
It's not that I'm assuming Dancer was good, per se. But if she was something more like our lovely protagonists, morally flexible, generally not trying to be awful, maybe a bit of a hot mess. And then you've got a little machine you give instructions to, and guidelines to, and like- you make a robot to heal you, and maybe your life is largely battles and disasters and maybe you're someone who needs to hear positive affirmations more than you need an attentive listener.
There isn't any real reason to teach a personal robot meant for healing about how different people need different approaches if they're struggling. There isn't a real reason to teach a robot about the nuances of "good" and "evil" and humanity and empathy of individuals outside of specific guidelines. Its your therapy robot. Toss a self help book at it, make sure it can heal you and will gladly take damage for you.
Or- to get a little too real world- when discussing AI, there's a concept of "overfitting", in which you train a model on a particular data set, and it gets VERY good at that data set, but if you start changing the data input even a little, it all falls apart. Contextualizing, the ability to infer, to take your understanding and amend it to what you're seeing, rather than just continuing to apply your same set of rules to a changing world- is something that is. Extremely hard to teach to a robot. Artificial Intelligence is all about pattern matching, but sometimes looking for the same patterns in new info blocks you from seeing the actual events that are playing out.
So. Yknow. Maybe Dancer was terrible. Or maybe she made F.C.G with a very specific dataset in mind and then suddenly a little helper robit is out and about and trying to apply a VERY narrow ruleset to a big, broad world.
... then again, maybe she was a Flat Exandrianer and therefore was terrible after all.
#got a little tooo technical there sorry#critical role#cr spoilers#c3e21#fcg#character meta#meta#my meta#spar speaks#ask away!#i got a little lost in the weeds but basically i feel like fcg is MAX *minimal context maximum rules applying to everything with 100% conf*#and when thinking about ai's it... makes a lot of sense actually#see also: the yellowstone wolves AI overfitting on the backgrounds. and fcf drawing all sorts of wild conclusions about the world#i actually really like this line of thought. hmmm.#faves#(so i can find it later)
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Okay here’s my MCU Alpha Flight casting choices, if they ever decide to do so…
(I say if since they gave us Eternals and Inhumans, they should give us Alpha Flight, I’d take it has a piece of Logan’s backstory tbh)
Aurora: Lola is a fun actress who is a bit of a chameleon, she plays both hapless student and reckless girl very well (know for Mozart in the Jungle and Gone Girl)
Northstar: Cody is another chameleon who I think has the right features and is gay irl and I think the MCU needs lgbt cast member representation. I think JP and JM need to be cast young. (Know for American Horror(crime) Story)
Guardian: Hugh Jackman because meta
Snowbird: Julie is because I think Snowbird should be indigenous and I love her work (Known for Twilight Saga and the Mandalorian)
Puck: Kyle has played action before and can beef up and I think with some facial hair he could work imo (known for the Mandalorian)
Sasquatch: Russell is a deaf actor and I think that would be an interesting new layer to the character (Know for Fargo (TV) and There Will Be Blood)
Shaman and Talisman: Tokala (correction for his name, he now goes by Black Elk) and Jamie are newer actors to the scene and are promising indigenous talent (know for Yellowstone and the Veil respectively)
Marrina: Aislinn is a newer Canadian actress that has previously played superheroes ( Know for Heroes Reborn and Freakish)
#mine#fancast#MCU#alpha flight#avengers#X-men#Northstar#Cody fern#lola kirke#aurora#guardian#hugh jackman#Julia Jones#snowbird#Kyle pacek#Tokala Clifford#Jamie Loy#aislinn paul#russell harvard
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30 Questions
Of dubious honesty...
Answer 30 questions and tag some people you’d like to get to know better!
Tagged by @dragonnan
Name: It the internet. I leave you with a nickname of Dex and/or Red
Gender: Female
Star Sign: Virgo
Height: 5’8″ (we think)
Time: 12:20PM EST
Birthday: September
Favorite Bands: The Beatles, The Highwaymen, Queen, Fall Out Boy, Imagine Dragons and probably a dozen others
Favorite Solo Artists: Barns Courtney, Dorothy, Johnny Cash
Song Stuck In My Head: The soundtrack for Muppet Treasure Island, for absolutely no rhyme or reason whatsoever
Last Movie: Hidden Figures? I think?
Last Show: Some combination of X Company and Endeavour
When Did I Create This Blog: I’m not entirely sure how to look that up.
What Do I Post: A whole mess of nonsense - fanfic, fanart, fandom meta, personal thoughts, and whatever else catches my fancy (shamelessly stolen, because it’s not wrong)
Last Thing I Googled: Greener Pastures Behr Paint or possibly the year Space Cowboys was made.
Other Blogs: ....other blogs what? Did I look up? Um. The last person who followed me, whoever that is
Do I Get Asks: I do, and I love them, except for the nonny twit that I blocked the IP address to.
Why I Chose This URL: I think this was my AOL instant messenger name, but I think it was from an episode of Batman Beyond.
Following: No idea
Followers: Less of idea
Average Hours Of Sleep: Probably 4?
Lucky Number: 13
Instruments: The clarinet, a terrifying rendition of someone playing the violin, and at one point, the piano
What I’m Wearing: What looks like a costume from the Sandlot - red sleeved raglan shirt, blue jeans and barefeet.
Dream Job: Travel photographer. Hands down.
Dream Trip: Back to Greece for the Greek Islands and so I will actually have PICTURES THIS TIME AROUND. In lieu of that, Newfoundland for whale watching and iceberg season
Favorite Food: Home made pizza on Friday nights, or some variation of bread - I actually really dislike making recipes more than once, so I don’t really have a go to food, but more like...go to ingredients?
Nationality: Technically, United States. Go back a total of one generation, and those waters get muddy with a quickness.
Favorite Song: At this very moment? Dark Side by CeCe and the Darkhearts or Brother by NEEDTOBREATHE, or my go-to Forever in Blue Jeans by Neil Diamond.
Last Book I Read: I think it was either Where the Crawdads Sing or This Tender Land - though I am somewhere in the middle of The Moonspinners - which, FYI, if you thought that the Disney version was whumpy, it really toned it down from the book.
Top Three Fictional Universes I’d Like To Live In: Yellowstone, Heartland, and Road to Avonlea. Nothing really terrible ever happens in the last two, and in Yellowstone, you get bonus points for being batshit crazy and hard to kill, which would make me QUEEN OF THE WEST.
Tagging: @waitingforthestarstofall, @brambleberrycottage, @amandagaelic, @rohanrider3; @mmorgan317 - or anyone else who wants to play, but I haven’t talked to you directly and I would feel like I’m being a dick just randomly pulling you in to something like this.
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I know you like that good sweet worldbuilding, sooooo if you could add just one thing to amnesty canon, what would it be?
JUST ONE THING? JESUS FUCKING CHRIST YOU CAN’T DO THAT TO ME. THAT’S NOT FAIR. I’ll give you options and then, in a hypothetical universe, I’ll pick one and Make It So for amnesty canon. it’s almost 1:30 in the morning where i am rn, so bear with me.
If i may, for the first one, i would do a switch: i would remove the reconciliation in its entirety, and make the villain some sort of political intrigue/antagonistic force within Sylvain, making the light figures from there instead. I’m basically just spitballing all the things that I am going to do in TCOS here, but like.
Okay, by keeping things centered on Sylvain, that would be a powerful thing to add. It could have been a possible domino for Griffin to push to do more Sylvain worldbuilding, and make them more fascinating as a society for the protagonists to interact with. Griffin called Earth and Sylvain sister planets, and then didn’t follow through on that connection at all, making it an artificial bond by fantasy space America trying to start a puppet war. Christ. You can’t reduce an entire planet down to one culture and set of political ideals. By making the villains have a more direct relationship to Sylvain, you might get a hell of a lot of nuance.
That’s not to say i didn’t like the Reconciliation plotline; i think it was really thematically interesting and had a lot of symbolic weight. I just feel like it superseded a lot more interesting potential ones in Sylvain, which got abandoned. Like! The exiles thing! Dani canonically has parents and a brother-- what’s up with them? The drama surrounding that! How do the councilmembers relate to each other? What are their individual politics? Alexandra’s dead fucking father - what kind of society puts a child in charge, unless it’s a dire fucking emergency? What happened to her dad? What’s their technology like? Their culture? Their music? What has Sylvain done to try and stymie the quell in the past, before they got to where they are today? Why has that failed? A gateway to all of this could have been opened if Griffin had decided to make Sylvain as a whole more significant, and while the “these two forces are actually being threatened by a third greater power” thing is cool, i wasn’t entirely convinced.
And if i couldn’t remove the reconciliation, i would add this: there are other sylvan communities all over earth like the lodge. The lodge is a microcosm for a much bigger sociocultural migratory phenomenon that crosses galaxies. The two planets have been connected for centuries, if not millennia; you cannot look me in the eyes and tell me that there aren’t sylvan communities embedded near major geothermal hotspots the world over.
“wait tin don’t they need energy to survive -” Barclay and Indrid had those crystals, and those kept them alive well enough. I specifically cite Indrid because that guy never once showed up at the hot springs for a dip, and seemed to be just fine living off his crystal - whereas the exiles who didn’t have a crystal had to make do with the springs. Like. Just imagine a whole society of crystal-wearing sylphs operating a society in the woods near a ski resort in Colorado, or a few miles from Yellowstone. Or a bunch of sylphs who’ve wired crystals to [throws dart] Manhattan’s power grid, and have created a gentle web of pseudo-sylvan energy over the whole city to give the sylphs and their descendants there sustenance. The idea of there being sylphs who were exiled to earth and formed their own communities - or sylphs who left lawfully and formed their own communities near gate locations, having children and settling on earth - is fascinating to me, and is completely in line with the lore griffin already has set out given how the gate travels.
I know you said just one thing, but i am still sitting here and thinking... If i wasn’t going to make it a worldbuilding thing, i would make it a character thing. I would dig the knife with stern to make him more of a developed character in arcs three through to the end - or at least make him more of a bad guy. I’ve talked about the “stern looks out the window during the post-arc-3 interlude, catches Boyd Mosche taking pictures of the lodge before his meetup with Ned, intercepts him, makes the mistake of hearing him out, and teams up with him in a quid pro quo effort to take down Ned in exchange for shade tree” AU at LENGTH. It is one of my favorite Amnesty AU concepts to think about. I still think that those two would be an absolute villainous powerhouse if they’d met in canon. (i have my own thoughts about them, related to the versions that show up in TCOS and TMWCIFTC, that i’ve been sitting on for longer than I’d care to admit, but, well. That’s for another time. Yes that’s an invitation to ask me to yell abt it if you’d like, their development in TCOS has taken a fucking U-turn that i’ve been excited about for a while and i like talking about my fic lskdjlskdjf)
But if not that, I would probably just make Stern quit the fucking FBI, man. Idk what to tell you, the only good cops are the ones that quit and the fact that he stayed an FBI agent, with a team there observing the gate, and was implied to be rewarded with a romantic relationship with his former prey, never sat right with me. I could accept it if he left the FBI and was shown to try and make up for his mistakes. Four good deeds for every bad, and all that jazz. But alas.
I know i listed three things but hey, these would not all be implemented simultaneously. It’d just be one. So it still kind of counts! A lot of this bitching boils down to the fact that Amnesty-the-story and Amnesty-the-DND-roleplay-podcast are not necessarily the same level of quality in my head; as an overarching story, I think Amnesty might have worked better as a TV show or book series, in terms of its narrative, even though the TTRPG aspects of its execution were awesome. A lot of things I would want to add would suit this podcast as a Balance-length epic or a piece of textual narrative literature, not necessarily a podcast. Sorry for the long answer, it is 1:30 am and i just think a lot about the holes in amnesty meta and What Could Have Been because my specific AU bread and butter is trying to patch them lsjdflksjdf
ask me anything! all asks will be answered
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meta asks: 1, 16, 17, and 20? 💖💖💖
1: Tell us about your current project(s)—what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?
So I have this post amaru Yellowstone road trip sethkate au I’m supposed to be writing for a prompt I got from @fortysevenswrites and I totally already made a moodboard for it but won’t be posting that until after I’ve actually written and posted the oneshot. I’ve barely started writing it, but what I love most about it is that it’s actually a winter blizzard bed sharing fic and it’s gonna have all the smut and maybe some bunk beds because Richie is a bitchy travel agent. XD
16: Tried anything new with your writing lately? (style, POV, genre, fandom?)
I’ve just been trying to write shorter projects more because it’s less pressure and I find a lot of enjoyment in them when working on the multi chapter things feels too overwhelming. It makes me feel like I can still finish things… which ngl has been my problem since I started writing.
17: Do you think readers perceive your work—or you—differently to you? What do you think would surprise your readers about your writing or your motivations?
I’m certain they do. lol I think people would be surprised to know just how much I’ve actually written out of spite. It’s probably the greatest motivator for me ngl. XD
20: Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)
Okay so! Cause I’m writing a culebra Seth fic, I feel like the canon rules we know about how culebras are made/function is so messily constructed. Like for example, they can eat food but do they get any nourishment from it? Is it simply for pleasure? It’s not really clear. And how come some culebras can withstand sunlight (i.e. Richie), but some others burn to death right away?? And in s3 Richie says he can’t sense other culebras? And don’t even get me started on how the shapeshifting thing works or why or how they can even do that. THERE’S JUST A LOT THAT IS SO VAGUE AND CONFUSING ABOUT THEM IN CANON. So I’ve found myself making up my own rules to make my culebra Seth story make sense. lol
My idea is that culebras are “alive” but also immortal since they do eat and have bodily functions in canon. They can shapeshift into someone but only if they’ve taken that victim’s life/soul while feeding on them. And it doesn’t necessarily need to be after they’ve completely drained the victim either, but only as long as the victim dies during the feeding. And ngl, I totally stole this idea from Vampire Academy. XD
Also, regarding when the culebras get their wayob powers: I like the idea that a personal sacrifice or traumatic event has to occur first in order for a culebra to develop this ability. Richie gets his shortly after Kate dies in s2, and technically we don’t see when Scott got his but it was sometime after that event too.
And I was talking to @yossariandawn about this last night about culebras and their offspring. And technically Carlos and Richie would be vampire siblings and they are all descendents of Malvado. But my idea now is that with each generation the strength of the venom they receive and pass on to others lessens. Which would mean culebras far removed from a lord such as Malvado are not as powerful and would, for example, burn up in sunlight more quickly than their parent.
And of course if y’all have read my fic, you’ll know all about the culebra vision I created for Seth. Lol I read up about snakes and how they actually view/detect their prey, and apparently it’s a lot like the Predator so at least for my story culebras track prey based on their heat signatures. When their eyes flash to the snake pupil, that’s when they “see” in snake. XD
meta asks for writers
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All I Want for Christmas Is….
Dear Santa,
First off, I know this is a little weird. I mean, what kind of mid-30s man still writes a letter to Santa Claus? Well, I’ve got news for your jolly old elf ass: I’m not asking for anything. No, this is not a summary of yearly requests. This is a list of demands.
Alright I’ll tone it down a bit, I’m sorry. Something about flies in the vinegar and honey and all that.
You see, I really need your help this year. I’ve reached the point in my life and career where all of my material needs are easily met, and often times exceeded by my desperate attempts to manufacture dopamine through consumerism. It’s gotten to the point where I am giving my parents (and in laws) a list of non-profits to donate to rather than material goods to gift me. Did I also do that to feel slightly superior to everyone else, especially my siblings who probably actually asked for things? Yes. But that doesn’t matter!
What matters is that there is something I want, and you’re the only one who can give it to me because it requires a little bit of magic.
So I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want. I want a, I want a, I want a…. DVR. No not really a DVR, like I don’t need a TiVo. Who watches linear TV anyway? So I guess I want a “DVR,” but instead of episodes of Blue Bloods or Yellowstone I want to be able to watch moments from my kids’ lives.
You know, it’s a double-edged sword right? Like, I try to put my phone down, I don’t over photograph or over record, I try to stay in the moment. I try to stay present, engaged, living my life instead of documenting it. But it’s not fair! I don’t get to relive anything! I don’t get to watch the first soccer games or funny moments where they laugh until they cry or when they say “daddy I love standing on a stool next to you, it brings us closer together.”
OK, OK, so maybe a magical DVR isn’t in the cards. But how about a VR headset instead? Like a Oculus, but instead of creepy Facebook (Meta I guess) tracking and spying I get pre-loaded memories that I can observe and watch and walk around. Find the details I missed the first time, the things that I didn’t realize were so important and meaningful the first time around. The way J scrunched his face the first time he had soda, the way V looked at me and laughed when I stole her ice cream, the sound of one saying “bagel pancake” when having a donut. If I could add a feature request, maybe some haptics and temp pads too? So that I can remember what it felt like to snuggle my now giant oldest child when he was the same height as my knee.
I’m really not asking for a lot here, Kringle. It’s not like I’m asking for world peace, or an end to hunger, or for Christians to actually understand and live the message of the Bible as much as they say they do, or a Falcon’s NFL title. We both know none of those things are possible. But, come on, I haven’t asked for anything in decades! Is it too much to want to be able to experience the best moments of parenthood again? Or even the not-best moments?
Listen, St. Nick, I’m not even sure if you have children. (As an aside, if you do have kids, what exactly do you do to keep them from becoming spoiled? You can literally give them anything, how do you not do that?) Do the elves count as children? I mean I don’t think Lord of the Rings elves would, they’re tall and spritely, but the tiny short ones could. North Pole Oompa Loompas. Actually, just put me down for a follow up letter, I have tons of questions about basic elf biology and social structures.
Back to the important stuff. I don’t know if you have kids, hell I’m not sure anyone else who is reading this has kids, and if not then, well: 1) this probably won’t resonate for you and 2) why are you reading someone else’s mail? That a felony bro. I have kids, and since the first moment that first one popped out and looked me dead in the eye I have had only one important job. Making your children the most important, central aspect of your life and personality is a controversial subject, even among parents, and so the level of importance I place on these moments might not resonate with child free folks whose opinions are so eloquently summed up with the phrase “fuck them kids” or parents who insist that “I just need to make sure I still do my own thing you know”. For me, being a parent is my entire self. For me, there is nothing as important, enjoyable, or meaningful I could be doing.
For me, you bowl full of jelly belly having ass bastard, this is the only thing I want. I deserve it. I need it.
But. I guess. If we can’t do the DVR, and if we can’t do the VR headset, I guess there’s one last option.
Please just have it be enough. Remind me that being present and invested and paying attention is what matters, that the urge to record every moment so that I can remember and examine it over and over years from now is genuinely a selfish one. Remind me that even though plenty of moments will be lost to mefloquine brain damage, or old age, or whatever fun new apocalypse waits around the corner, being present for those moments will mean so much more to the kids. As the old proverb says, the tree remembers what the axe forgets.
Just make it enough, you cranberry mold of a mythical B&E artist. Help me remember that it’s the legacy that matters, not the details. Do this and next year we can talk about putting the good cookies out again.
Oh. And a new pair of slippers please. Fuzzy inside. Size 12.
All the best to you,
Lionel
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YELLOWSTONE BLORBOS, I NEEEEEEEEED.
blorbo (favorite character, character I think about the most): my badass broken beautiful HBIC Beth Dutton, of course.
scrunkly (my “baby”, character that gives me cuteness aggression, character that is So Shaped): Tate.
scrimblo bimblo (underrated/underappreciated fave): Teeter? Teeter.
glup shitto (obscure fave, character that can appear in the background for 0.2 seconds and I won’t shut up about it for a week): Angela Blue Thunder was so freaking awesome. Too bad the actress fucked up her own career.
poor little meow meow (“problematic”/unpopular/controversial/otherwise pathetic fave): Jamie Dutton, obviously. Most of the time I want to both strangle and hug him at the same time.
horse plinko (character I would torment for fun, for whatever reason): IDK, isn't everyone pretty much tortured enough on the show as it is? Maybe Evelyn, tho. (Although, I think she was tortured already by her own circumstances and she just perpetuated shitty parenting.)
eeby deeby (character I would send to superhell): Well, there are no good guys on this show really, but in particularly: those two fuckers known as the Beck brothers from S2, the bastards who kidnapped Tate, Jamie's bio dad, and I believe Caroline Warner will also shortly be on this list. Plus other shitty people whose names I forgot.
Thank you for the ask, Daisy! I hadn't looked at your answer before so as to not be influenced, so this is purely from my shitty memory. ;)
( Blorbo asks. )
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The Sunnydale Herald Newsletter, Saturday, June 25th
EVE: Charles agreed to let us enhance his mind with a comprehensive knowledge of the law.
WESLEY: Without asking us?
GUNN: Mother, may I?
FRED: Without telling us?
GUNN: 'Cause I knew you guys would freak. Look, it's me here. They didn't evil me up. All I got stuck in my head was the law. And for some reason, a messload of Gilbert and Sullivan.
EVE: Standard. Great for elocution.
~~Conviction~~
The Sunnydale Herald is looking for at least one new editor! Contributing to the Herald is a great way to get your Buffy on! Find out more here.
[Drabbles & Short Fiction]
Maybe by apachefirecat (Buffy/Spike, soft R/M)
I Am Not A Robot by Ifeelittoo21 (Buffy/Spike, E)
Reasons and Advice by glasswrks (Buffy/Willow, T)
“I missed you.” by nympheta (Spike/reader, M)
Comfort in Silence by sandy_s (Buffy/Spike, PG)
Raindrops by Dusty (Buffy/Spike, PG)
[Chaptered Fiction]
Centrality, Chapter 5 by shatteredstar (Xander/Harry Potter/Methos, Harry Potter and Highlander crossover, M)
Drusilla's Soul, Chapter 25 (complete) by DarkJanet (Angelus/Drusilla, Digimon and Blade crossover, M)
The Slayer and the Blinder, Chapter 22 by StoryQueen (OC Slayer, Peaky Blinders crossover, M)
Keeping Up With the Scoobies, Chapter 13 by Takara_Phoenix (Buffy/Spike, T)
Adaptations, Chapter 31 by Echo126 (Buffy/Faith, E)
Alternating Skies and, of course, the Hellmouth, Chapter 28 by Popsy (Buffy/Spike, E)
Sandy Places in Tomorrow, Chapter 18 by Raihne (Xander/Spike, M)
Yellowstone Protector, Chapter 5 by Buffyworldbuilder (Buffy, Yellowstone crossover, G)
The Contest of Champions, Chapter 14 by Aragorn_II_Elessar (Scoobies, Angel Team, multiple crossovers, G)
Stray, Chapter 7 by Feanix88 (Buffy/Spike, M)
Brotherly Love, Chapter 8 by TheologyDiscography (Lindsey/Eliot Spencer, Leverage crossover, E)
Different Lives, Chapter 3 by BuffyBot3000 (Faith & Tara, T)
Bad Bad Angel: The Beginning, Chapter 2 by TheologyDiscography (Angel/Drusilla/Spike, Xander/Spike, Harry Potter crossover, M)
Something Borrowed, Chapter 2 by Kyzaiah (Buffy/Spike, PG-13)
Stray, Chapter 7 by Feanix88 (Buffy/Spike, Adult Only)
Anything We Want, Chapters 16-17 by scratchmeout (Buffy/Spike, PG-13)
Sons and Daughters of Sineya, Chapter 21 by dogbertcarroll (Scoobies, Chronicles of Narnia crossover, FR18)
Anything We Want, Chapters 1-3 by scratchmeout (Buffy/Spike, PG-13)
[Images, Audio & Video]
S1 E1 - Welcome To The Hellmouth In the Bronze by Hastily Drawn Buffy (Giles & Buffy, worksafe)
Chosen three sheningans part2 by space-sheep08 (Buffy, Kendra, Faith, worksafe)
Fanvid: louisa (buffy x angel, giles x jenny) by Celia
Fanvid: Spike | Good Guy - Boyz II Men by PRIYA PINEAPPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Tiktok: Giles === Dad by Anna Long
[Reviews & Recaps]
Buffy Rewatch 2k22: 2.5 Reptile Boy by handsofabitterman
"The Book of Fours" (Buffy book) by oveliagirlhaditright
"Coyote Moon" (Buffy book) by oveliagirlhaditright
"Bad Bargain" (Buffy book) by oveliagirlhaditright
[Search]
Does anybody know the canon name of Buffy's aunt? by coraniaid
[Community Announcements]
Time to Get It Done - 2022 Round - Art Claims Round One Is Live! by wipbigbang
Welcome to Sunnydale After Dark: A Spike/Buffy Fanfiction Archive
The Grand Opening Event!
[Fandom Discussions]
Review/Meta of Love the Way You Lie, Song by Emmene, Rhiannon, and Dr. Dre by shadowkat67
Buffy quite literally brings the best out of Angel by buffysummers
If Jenny came back from the dead, Buffy would be the biggest and most tearful calendiles shipper by dreadfulcalendarwoman
Jenny and Giles would be the Nightmare Couple to play charades/Pictionary/similar with on games night by Hal-1500
How the Slayer line came to be is similar and so different from how the Avatar [in Legend of Korra] came to be by isagrimorie
The reason Spike was extra spicy to Angel in ats s5 about him being a corporate sellout by kingbuffy
out of mind, out of sight and homecoming form a duology by mollyspeak
the funny thing about buffy and spike and their ending in btvs by mollyspeak
Something about Giles and the way he is defined his ability to impart knowledge by mollyspeak
Angelus has a serious case of Cryptomnesia and a good PR agent by pass-the-dynamite
Thinking about Giles (again) and how he reaches out for what he wants by Rachael Jurassic
Imagine - S4 AU where Faith ends up in Giles' care after Five By Five/Sanctuary by secretlyasummers Rachael Jurassic
If [Xander had been gay] what existing men in the show would you have put him with by jamalexlee and sulietsexual
btvs would be a very different show if vampires didn’t turn to dust when they died by vampir4te
How did Buffy shape you? continued by TamsinValencia and Joan the Vampire Slayer
I was really annoyed and disqusted with Lawson by AJ_Babe
Non-american folks,what references/characters from your country were in the show? by AJ_Babe
Ok, this might be an unpopular opinion on faith by Pleasant-Insect1264
Would you trust Faith after what she did to Buffy, if she did the same awful things to you? by Charlie678812
Unpopular opinion: I don't hate anything about the show, or any of the characters by V48runner
Angelus's Personality Makes No Sense by Dangerous_Olive9780
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Please Stop With The Celebrity Interview Podcasts
Remember the good old days on TV and radio when celebrities were interviewed by people trained to ask questions in a public forum? Ah, the old days. A troubling and annoying trend in podcasting is the fire hose of celebrity interview shows.
I love Julia Louis Dreyfuss. I loved her in Seinfeld and especially in Veep. She has a new podcast called 50 Women Over 50. It’s pitched as a “podcast for women whose personal confidence is borne of experience. Interviews with 50 women to learn how they see the world; what lessons they’ve learned; what advice they have for us all.”
It’s just that every celebrity with a little time on their hands has plunged into the interview podcast pool, and all that splashing has listeners wondering how they ended in the deep end of this ego-stroking pool.
Celebrity podcasts have overwhelmed the sea wall built to protect listeners from celebrity self-love, self-absorption, and self-actualization.
We have the heavy hitters like Meghan Markle in Archetypes and Michelle Obama and then the lesser-known celebs like Justin Long, Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop (Heaven help us), and Seth Rogen.
It’s not that all of these celebrity podcasts are bad — except for Snooki & Joey — but like true-crime podcasts, there are just too many of them.
There are so many of these podcasts that there is a podcast called the Celebrity Podcast Podcast that covers celebrity podcasts. Talk about meta.
So I know what you’re saying? What’s your problem?
After all, broadcast TV has lovable trash like The Bachelor and Bachelorette and The Masked Singer. Discovery has an entire channel dedicated to skewering humanity with shows like 1000-lb Sisters and MILF Manor (jeez).
No problem. To each its own. But TV also has Abbott Elementary, Ghosts, Yellowstone, and 60 Minutes.
My problem is that I’m frightened that podcasting will be the recycling plant for celebrities with nothing to do or those with fading careers inundating the medium. Podcasting already has a problem with the true-crime genre overwhelming the medium.
Podcasting, like TV and radio, is a zero-sum game. We are definitely seeing that now in streaming TV, where execs just woke up and realized streaming isn’t a moneymaker. On TV, for example, all those Chicago shows, NCIS spinoffs, or Law And Order franchises crowd out other potential shows that offer viewers quality programming at a similar cost.
In podcasting, there are some terrific interview shows. Fresh Air, WTF with Marc Maron, How I Built This, Vox Conversations, Jemele Hill Is Unbothered, and The Jordan Harbinger Show, and so many more.
With Spotify and other networks pulling back on money and resources for podcasting, every new celebrity podcast means one less potential quality podcast from a person listeners have not yet heard of.
There’s an old maxim in entertainment — and in life — that media execs will always destroy a good show, by giving the audience too much of a good thing.
In 2001, ABC put on its hit game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire with Regis Philbin four nights a week. At the time, the show was riding the crest of incredible ratings, societal ubiquity, and the public’s obsession with the latest shiny new object. So what happened? The show got canceled because viewers eventually got tired of all that overexposure.
Back to celebrity podcasts. How many is too many? Sometimes, it seems like every celebrity has a podcast. Does a celebrity on a reality show who became famous for “Karen” behavior really deserve a podcast? And isn’t that podcast going to crowd out the aspirational podcasters who start their own interview shows without the spotlight of having received a rose ten years ago on a reality TV show?
Marc Maron was not a celebrity when he started his podcast out of his garage. Believe it or not, Joe Rogan was simply a former reality show TV host when he started his podcast.
Are all those celebrity podcasts flooding the podcasting space, crowding out the potential for unknowns to surface and become household names? Is podcasting becoming Kardashian-ized like reality TV?
It’s bad enough that Dr. Phil has a podcast. So no more TV castoffs and celebrity laughingstocks on podcasts. If celebrities are sliding into podcasting, please make it people like Dreyfuss, Lupita Nyong’o, and Emma Watson.
For me, the best celebrity podcast is Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda. Smart, intellectually curious, and far-ranging, the show is, as one reviewer commented, “The perfect mix of insightful and humanistic conservation.”
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Experience Yellowstone National Park From Home - A Virtual Visit
Experience Yellowstone National Park From Home - A Virtual Visit. Are you looking for a way to explore Yellowstone without leaving home. From the comfort of your couch? A virtual visit may be exactly what you are looking for.
Have you ever wanted to visit Yellowstone’s Old Faithful? During COVID, a virtual visit to Wyoming and Montana’s national park may be a great option for you. Yellowstone is uniquely prepared for visitors to enjoy this park’s amazing features without even leaving your couch.
I know – the skeptics out there will say you have to visit Yellowstone to fully appreciate it. And while I agree,…
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By Michael Lanza
We emerge from our tents on a mild August morning to discover that the waters of the upper and middle Cramer Lakes, in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, have transformed overnight. Where last evening these lakes on either side of our campsite had been rippled by mountain breezes, now they lie perfectly still; they are glassy mirrors offering inverted, sharp reflections of the forest and jagged peaks surrounding the lakes. A few hours later, our backpacking party of three parents and six teenagers hikes across wildflower meadows and past alpine tarns to proudly reach a mountain pass at over 9,000 feet on the Cramer Divide, overlooking a turbulent sea of razor peaks stretching to every horizon.
It’s an inspiring panorama. But to me, there’s more to this pass than the view: We also happen to be standing at one of the highest points along the most remote and wild long-distance trail in the Lower 48—and the newest. And thanks to the help of some conservation leaders in Idaho, this trail has, metaphorically speaking, come a long way from a notion in my mind to fruition.
A few years ago, I brought an idea to my good friend, Justin Hayes, then the program director of the Idaho Conservation League and now ICL’s executive director. I told him that Idaho deserves to have a long-distance backpacking trail that traverses its three signature federal wilderness areas.
My son, Nate, and two friends backpacking to Cramer Divide in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains.
From north to south, they are the 1.3-million acre Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, which by itself is larger than many national parks, including Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and Glacier; the nearly 2.4-million-acre Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness (aka “the Frank”), largest in the Lower 48 and bigger than Yellowstone; and the 217,000-acre Sawtooth Wilderness, protected as a primitive area since 1937, among the first places protected in The Wilderness Act of 1964, and now Idaho’s best-known and most beloved mountain range for its jagged peaks and hundreds of alpine lakes.
Taken together, these three very special places comprise nearly four million acres of almost-contiguous wilderness, a vast realm of mountains and canyons divided by just one rural highway (ID 21 outside the small town of Stanley) and two remote dirt roads. If these three wildernesses were contained within one national park, it would be America’s third-largest and the biggest outside Alaska.
I already had a name for this new footpath when I approached Justin and ICL: the Idaho Wilderness Trail. Not only do I like how it sounds, but that name speaks volumes about the quality of the backpacking experience the trail delivers.
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Linking up existing trails (requiring no new trail construction), the Idaho Wilderness Trail (IWT) crosses mountain passes over 9,000 feet and threads its way past peaks rising over 10,000 feet; follows three designated wild and scenic rivers, the Middle Fork of the Salmon, Main Salmon, and the Selway; traces the shores of innumerable alpine lakes; and meanders below dramatic spires from the Bighorn Crags in the Frank to the Selway Crags and the Sawtooths.
It traverses pristine backcountry that is home to mountain goats and bighorn sheep, elk and moose, black bears, hundreds of wolves (a population estimated to be at least seven times as many as live in Yellowstone), and abundant trout—and which offers some of the nation’s best remaining habitat in the Lower 48 for restoring a viable population of wild salmon.
Perhaps most uniquely, the IWT offers the kind of solitude you simply cannot find on most long-distance trails. In fact, many backpackers have never even heard of the wilderness areas the trail traverses.
Imagine that: Discovering a new long-distance trail that’s not just one of the best in America, but has been hiding in plain sight.
Now it’s ready to be explored by backpackers.
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Birth of a New Long Trail
Having backpacked through much of the Sawtooths and parts of the Frank and Selway-Bitterroot over the course of living in Idaho for 20 years—as well as many of the very best backpacking trips the country—I knew that a north-south trail linking those wildernesses would constitute one of the most spectacular, diverse, challenging, and lonely long-distance trails in America.
With the help of ICL staff, including Community Engagement Coordinator Lana Weber, who served as ICL’s point person on the project, and a couple of hard-working interns named Hannah Zimmerman and Johnny Whittemore, we mapped out a route following existing trails across the three wilderness areas.
We learned that while the 11 national scenic trails in the U.S. were created by acts of Congress, many established long-distance trails—including the John Muir Trail (JMT) and other well-known footpaths—have no official designation: They have simply, over time, come to be widely known by a certain name to backpackers. In other words, we could “create” the Idaho Wilderness Trail simply by making people aware of it.
Lisa Fenton hiking Idaho’s Middle Fork Salmon River Trail.
The IWT stretches for 285.6 trail miles through these three wilderness areas, between its southern terminus on the outskirts of the tiny town of Atlanta, to its northern terminus at Wilderness Gateway campground on US 12. It can be hiked as three or four distinct sections or thru-hiked in a month or less—a more-reasonable distance and time commitment for many backpackers than the AT or PCT. (See my tips and more information on backpacking the IWT in the Take This Trip section at the bottom of this story.)
I’ve backpacked the John Muir Trail and parts of the Pacific Crest Trail, Appalachian Trail, and other long-distance footpaths. The IWT matches them for scenic beauty, but far eclipses them in terms of solitude.
And while the AT, JMT, PCT and other long-distance paths are generally well-marked and well-maintained—and mostly beginner-friendly and popular enough that you’re likely to regularly encounter other backpackers who might offer help if you need it—the IWT poses significant challenges for its remoteness, dearth of people, and rough condition along some stretches. I’ve hiked through parts of the Frank, for instance, where trails go years without maintenance. I’ve seen footpaths that have essentially disappeared beneath overgrowth.
I can help you plan this or any other trip you read about at my blog. Find out more here.
Much of the Idaho Wilderness Trail is no beginner backpacking trip.
Among the unique qualities of the IWT are some that don’t always come immediately to mind when you think about backpacking. Camping in these wilderness areas, you will gaze up at one of the darkest night skies in America—the Milky Way looks like it was painted across the heavens. A 1,400-square-mile area encompassing the Sawtooth and neighboring White Clouds wilderness areas has been officially recognized for the untainted blackness of its night sky with the designation of the Central Idaho Dark Sky Reserve, the country’s first dark sky reserve.
Sunset at Middle Cramer Lake, Sawtooth Mountains, Idaho.
And those night skies aren’t just in the Sawtooths. I have also gazed up at night skies in the Frank and Selway-Bitterroot so dark that I’ve at stared for endless minutes, transfixed.
And nowhere else will you breathe as easily. Designated a Mandatory Class I air quality area by the 1977 Clean Air Act, the Sawtooth Wilderness has the clearest air in the continental United States. You can bet the air in the Frank and Selway-Bitterroot is nearly if not just as clean.
Beyond introducing more backpackers to these wildernesses, a primary objective of our effort is to use the IWT as a communication vehicle to promote wilderness values and, hopefully, gradually grow a larger constituency of people willing to pitch in to protect and maintain it. That support is desperately needed because these places suffer from decades of chronic under-funding that has created shocking trail-maintenance backlogs throughout the U.S. Forest Service.
Because loving anything isn’t enough by itself. You have to show the love.
Plan your next great backpacking trip in Yosemite, Grand Teton, and other parks using my expert e-guides.
True Wilderness
Twenty summers ago, I backpacked a roughly 160-mile, north-south traverse of central Idaho’s wilderness, from a remote, grass airstrip on Moose Creek in the Selway-Bitterroot—where a friend and I stepped out of a six-seater prop plane to begin our trek—to the end of a remote dirt road at the foot of Sleeping Deer Mountain in the Frank.
That friend accompanied me for the trip’s first week; I did the second week solo, until two other friends met up with me the last night before I finished. During those two weeks, I hiked through rugged, breathtaking mountains, and canyons thousands of feet deep that impressed upon me the scale and remoteness of these places.
Few backcountry experiences in my life, before or since, have given me such a powerful sense of wilderness and solitude as that trip. Just two Alaskan adventures come immediately to mind, in fact: backpacking in Denali National Park and sea kayaking in Glacier Bay National Park.
Much of what I hiked that summer long ago is now the Idaho Wilderness Trail.
The view from Johnson Point of the Middle Fork Salmon River canyon.
And the defining characteristic of that two-week hike—what made it feel so different from the many other backpacking trips I’ve taken in some of America’s signature wild landscapes—was the solitude. While I encountered rafters and kayakers along the Main Salmon and Middle Fork Salmon rivers (and was the grateful recipient of meals generously offered by them), I saw exactly two other backpackers in two weeks. And they were on the Middle Fork Salmon Trail. For several days of backpacking through the mountains between those canyons, I saw no one.
Where else in the Lower 48 can you backpack for two weeks in the peak of summer and see not another person for days?
More recently, in July 2015 and again in July 2019, I floated the Middle Fork of the Salmon through the Frank with my family and 20 friends (on each trip), guided by my favorite river company, Middle Fork Rapid Transit. (See these photos from our most-recent trip and watch for my upcoming story about it.) Besides running scores of exciting rapids on a wilderness river, one of the most unique features of floating the Middle Fork is the abundance of side hikes to waterfalls, hot springs, high points, along tributary creeks. We took several hikes on the Middle Fork Salmon Trail, which parallels much of that river, sometimes hugging its banks, sometimes meandering hundreds of feet above river level to afford long vistas of that canyon of indescribable beauty.
Hiking the Middle Fork Salmon Trail—which the IWT follows—gave me a fresh perspective on the magic of the Idaho Wilderness Trail. That now has me planning to backpack the IWT’s longest section, through the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness.
Accessorize wisely. See my “Review: 22 Essential Backpacking Gear Accessories.”
The Most Remote and Wild Trail
As the ICL team and I worked on creating the IWT, we settled pretty quickly on a slogan that epitomizes the IWT: “The most remote and wild long-distance trail in the Lower 48.”
Much of the IWT lies at least a day’s hike from the nearest road—in long stretches of it, multiple days. Even in the Sawtooths, the smallest and most accessible of the three wildernesses traversed by the IWT, backpackers must devote significant time and effort to explore the trail.
On that August backpacking trip in the Sawtooths that I described at the beginning of this story, our group left a wonderful campsite beside Edna Lake on our third morning and started hiking uphill toward Sand Mountain Pass. And within minutes, we turned at a trail junction and left the Idaho Wilderness Trail behind—having spent only about two days, cumulatively, of our four-day trip on it.
Edna Lake in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains.
But that illustrates the IWT’s remoteness: Even in the relatively accessible Sawtooths, the IWT traverses the most inaccessible corners of those fabulous mountains.
Take my advice: Walk this trail. You will discover some of the finest wilderness lands in America, and an experience every backpacker should have.
See all of my stories about the Sawtooth Mountains and the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness at The Big Outside.
Read all of this story, including my tips on planning this trip, and ALL stories at The Big Outside, plus get a FREE e-guide. Join now!
Take This Trip
THIS TRIP IS GOOD FOR fit, experienced backpackers with expert navigation and backpacking skills—not beginners—at least on the more difficult, remote, and in spots infrequently maintained sections of the Idaho Wilderness Trail, especially in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness and Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. On other sections, particularly traversing the Sawtooth Wilderness on the IWT, trails are generally well maintained, obvious, and signed at junctions—appropriate for beginner to intermediate backpackers.
Challenges include significant elevation gradients of 3,000 feet to more than 5,000 feet separating valleys and canyon bottoms from mountainous terrain; mountain passes reaching over 9,000 feet; possible thunderstorms and other weather; and the physical and mental rigors inherent to any long, remote trek. Some stretches of the IWT—again, mainly in the Frank and Selway-Bitterroot—lie multiple day’s walk from the nearest road.
Trying to figure out if you’re ready for the remote parts of the IWT? See my story “Are You Ready for That Outdoor Adventure? 5 Questions to Ask.”
See also my expert tips in “How to Prevent Hypothermia While Hiking and Backpacking” and my “8 Pro Tips for Preventing Blisters When Hiking.”
By Michael Lanza
We emerge from our tents on a mild August
morning to discover that the waters of the upper and middle Cramer Lakes, in
Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, have transformed overnight. Where last evening these
lakes on either side of our campsite had been rippled by mountain breezes, now
they lie perfectly still; they are glassy mirrors offering inverted, sharp reflections
of the forest and jagged peaks surrounding the lakes. A few hours later, our
backpacking party of three parents and six teenagers hikes across wildflower
meadows and past alpine tarns to proudly reach a mountain pass at over 9,000
feet on the Cramer Divide, overlooking a turbulent sea of razor peaks stretching
to every horizon.
Map and Guide See an overview map of the Idaho Wilderness Trail at drive.google.com/file/d/11GOZEV1ufser-wbHh9SniDkdXeJKyN2Q/view?ts=5ce5d90e. The Idaho Conservation League hosts a website describing the IWT at idahoconservation.org/events/plan-your-own-adventure/idaho-wilderness-trail. We are currently working with a cartographer to produce section maps of the IWT that will be available for sale online; more information to come when they are ready.
Want to make your pack lighter and all of your backpacking trips more enjoyable? See my story “A Practical Guide to Lightweight and Ultralight Backpacking.” If you don’t have a paid subscription to The Big Outside, you can read part of that story for free, or click here to download that full story without having a paid membership.
Find categorized menus of gear reviews, expert buying tips, and best-in-category reviews at my Gear Reviews page.
Guide/Outfitters/Rentals Various guide services offer backpacking, river float trips, climbing, fishing, and other trips in these wilderness areas, providing access to parts of the Idaho Wilderness Trail. My family has taken a couple of outstanding, six-day float trips down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in the Frank Church Wilderness with Middle Fork Rapid Transit (middleforkrapidtransit.com), an adventure that offers almost daily opportunities to hike parts of the IWT that overlap the Middle Fork Salmon Trail through that magnificent canyon.
Contact Idaho Conservation League, idahoconservation.org/events/plan-your-own-adventure/idaho-wilderness-trail/
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For the fic writer meta asks: 2, 3, 10, 15, 19! :-D
2: Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing – in your current project, or a future project
I’m real excited to finally make it to the smut in culebra seth. and the smut in losing my cool. and the smut in the post amaru touch series. and the smut in the sethkate yellowstone road trip oneshot. and the smut in—
3: What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway)
I feel like there’s probably a lot of things I’ve been meaning to write but couldn’t be bothered to work on yet… haha whoops. I think the sethkate lifeguard au totally falls in this category though. I don’t have much to share of it for now, but it involved Kate going on a trip to Corpus for spring break with Jessica and Scott and some of their friends. And Jessica flings a jellyfish at Kate accidentally while they’re swimming and she gets stung and Seth comes to her rescue and then for the rest of her trip she keeps running into Seth all over the island. And Uncle Eddie owns a beachside café called Fast Eddie’s Island Café that Seth works at sometimes. XD and idk where it was really going from there tbh but I guess it’s supposed to explore Kate’s college decisions after high school and probably Seth moving to Houston to be closer to her.
10: How would you describe your writing process?
I usually start with an idea and if I’m lucky I’ll think of some dialogue pretty quickly, and after that I just hope something spawns from there. XD If I do reach a point where I wanna pursue the story, I’ll write down all the notes to myself that I can think of and try to get the whole thing out. Knowing the ending or having a final image of an ending to work towards motivates me to actually finish the project. If I know the ending/final image and have some dialogue I’ll try to outline. I try to outline in as much detail as possible, but I still try to leave some room for changes as they come along. I’ll write several drafts in pieces because I can’t just get a thought out and have to put it together like a jigsaw puzzle. Literally, sometimes it’s like half a sentence and then I gotta come back to it later and finish the thought. I’m sorry, this is why it takes me forever to write anything. >_<
15: Which is harder: titles or summaries (or tags)?
I think titles are a lot harder tbh. Although I haven’t tried to give anything a proper summary in a while and I still always struggle with those. lol I usually just end up stealing some lines from the chapter or oneshot. A few lines that kinda encompass the theme of the chapter or story. I don’t bother trying to think of creative tags so much anymore because I’m just not that clever. :P
19: Is there something you always find yourself repeating in your writing? (favourite verb, something you describe ‘too often’, trope you can’t get enough of?)
Nothing really intentional… I’m sure there’s a couple of things though. I’ve gotten into this habit of using “as” all the time again which is a little annoying. lol And I think I might have repeated some dialogue by accident throughout some of my stories. XD Whatever, Seth is so predictable okay?
As for tropes, I live for Seth being a tad bit overbearing and worrying over and mother hen-ing Kate, so there’s a bit of that in some of my upcoming stories. And in the culebra seth story too lbr. It’s basically the entire reason I started the twins-verse stories. XD
meta asks for writers
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