~ kerry ~

I think a corollary to this is I don't want my fandom experiences to be unique, I want them to be sincere

That's why I enjoy reading the same tropes over and over again. Those authors are writing those stories from a genuine love of both the tropes and the characters.

It's why I enjoy 17 gif sets about the same 3-second interaction on screen. Each one of those sets was pulled and recoloured and captioned and adjusted because each one of those gif makers wanted to capture that moment and celebrate it.

It's why every "I'm glad you enjoyed it" reply makes me smile when I get one on a comment I left. Because I know replying to comments is hard and kind of awkward, but I also know that the author really *is* glad and I'm happy that I could let them know I enjoyed their work.

Skill: Gender-fluid EX

You never feel as young as you are, because you’re always the oldest you’ve been. You can only look back and equate childhood with ignorance and silliness, because there were things you didn’t know then. But there are things you don’t know now, too, that someone older is looking down at you for.

I promised myself I would never forget that, growing up. I put it in a time capsule when I was nine because I wanted to be certain. And sometimes it slips away, and I catch myself scoffing at people younger than me, but you have to fight that. You have to hold on. You have to keep a little bit of your younger mind inside you, so you don’t forget.

I think that’s important.

It's not. The daydream is a fuzzy thing. There are gaps that you don't need to fill in a daydream, because you already get the emotional point. A lot of it is emotion. And because it makes you feel like a complete story would, your brain is tricked into thinking that's what you have.

Then you sit down to actually write the thing and you realize you're trying to write a Space Opera without actually inventing any planets or space ships. You don't even know if the characters start out on the same planet. If they're on a planet at all. You didn't bother to check.

Now you will vaguely reference this in first-second person in any writing guide you make up for the rest of time.

When you write, you're building something. It's not a pale imitation of what you have in your head- what you have in your head can't exist on the outside. This is a whole new beast. It's going to ultimately look different and this is a good thing.

Also the internal critic is dumb.

The idea in your head is wonderful because it gives you all the emotions and ideas without pesky things like concrete details and logic getting in the way. Trying to write it down forces you to decide those things, which makes it a different story from the one that exists as a pure cloud of imagination. Story ideas can have multiple conflicting ideas happen at once--you just know the general gist and it doesn't matter what order things happen in or which exact words are said. When you write it down, that cloud of possibilities collapses into a single reality--if Character says this line first, that means they can't say it later; if they say Funny Line A, they can't also say Funny Line B at that same spot in the conversation; if they go left that means they can't also go right at that moment. Infinite possibility becomes reality, and those choice can be hard. And that's not even getting into the fact that the moment you try to nail down a concrete timeline, issues like, "No one would react this way" or "That actually makes no sense" or "What is the mystery they're trying to solve?" pop up and wreck the beautiful little thing in your imagination.

First, figure out what you want as a cursor. I'm going to be changing mine to a Skyrim mouse.

So first you get a picture of whatever you want, as clean as possible:

Open your favorite art program and clean it up, then save as a png:

Then go here and convert it to a .cur file. Make sure there's no gap between the corner of the arrow and the corner of the png.

Next you go to Control Panel:

Select Mouse from the list:

Then go to the Pointers tab and pick whichever mouse cursor you want to replace.

Click "Browse..." and find the .cur file you made earlier:

And voila! I now have a Skyrim cursor.

You may have to tinker with the size a bit to get the point to be accurate. If that happens, just resize your png and convert to .cur again.