missizzy

I have started reading a volume of letters and poems by Veronica Franco. I'd heard about her, even seen a few minute's worth of Dangerous Beauty, which apparently was much more melodramatic than her real life story was, back in grade school, when a classmate did a presentation about courtesans in Renaissance Italy. So far, I've mainly been struck by how ridiculously elaborate her prose is. I haven't read enough Renaissance Italian writings to know how typical that is, but even so. Still, for all the flowery sentences and extra turns of phrase, I don't actually find her that hard to understand, which makes her an improvement on too many of the more elaborate prose writers I've read.
Have now made very real progress on Baldur's Gate 3, reaching the Underdark, and Shadowheart was right: it is a beautiful place, however dangerous and deadly. I am still not proving the best at figuring out things on my own while playing, but maybe I've gotten slightly better at navigating. I think I may even write fanfic at some point. I'm starting to understand why so many people write about their Tavs. Though the whole Lae'zel/Shadowheart dynamic intrigues me, too. Had them both in the party for the first time this week, and wow, were they chatty. Not at all friendly, but it's early goings yet.

I am now forty years old. My sister said, not too long ago, that contrary to what people assume, your forties in when life starts to get better. I'm hoping she's right, but I've got the feeling I've got a lot I need to figure out to manage that.
So far, the day I took off for it has involved me going out into DC for the first time since my mom came home(aside from Awesome Con), and then stopping at a Trader Joe's to get basmati rice, since we can't get it delivered from the local supermarket, and she's very fussy about what kind of rice we cook. Also I ended up having to reload my Baldur's Gate save for the first time, after my Tav finally got fed up and tried to kill Kagha, and it didn't go very well. I've actually been blogging some details over on my tumblr, and another thing I've done today is create a masterpost for the entries.

So I have heard-and also now seen, that Baldur's Gate 3 is a very excellent game, and also one extremely difficult to play, even for experienced players, which I am certainly not. But after watching a bunch of other people play it on Twitch, I have now decided to have a go at it anyway. Except I'm afraid the difficulties started even before I could buy it. First, I had to get one of the PC platforms it's on. I went for Steam, since it was the one I'd heard of. I spent half an hour continually clicking through the Captcha, and it kept. not. working. A little bit of googling revealed this is apparently a common problem with Steam. I tried on both the program and the website. I tried flushing the DNS cache, as advised. When that didn't work, I finally gave up and went for Gog. There, thankfully, the Captcha worked, and I was able to make the purchase. After I confirmed with my bank it was not a fraudulent one, with them rejecting it even after sending a verification code to my phone! It's now 14% installed. At least the slow installation gives me time to finish drano-ing the bathtub and help my mother make her lunch?