![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat
[Above picture is of two skeletons talking to each other in front of a house in my neighborhood. One of the streets is very creative when it comes to Halloween displays.]
We're also getting lots of fall color finally in New York City, and flowers. The flowers are still blooming.
Flowers..
It's been a pretty but quiet Saturday for me. While I did get a restorative sleep - 9 hours and 37 minutes, as opposed to the 4 hours and 23 minutes of the previous night - I awoke with a sinus headache from hell aka the vestibular migraine, which I can't seem to completely dislodge. (The photos were taken on yesterday's walk not today's.) The anti-nausea bracelets that I picked up from Wallgreens ages ago (they are out of stock now), are keeping the worst of the vertigo at bay. So I can actually eat, definitely watch television, and walk a little. (Lying down and sleeping makes it worse - and I already slept 9 hours.) Not that far however. I took a brief trip to the local Eastern European and Latin American fruit and vegetable store ostensibly to get paper towels but in reality chocolate, fruit, and veggies, and realized - the headache had not in fact gone away, my balance was still more than a little bit off, and my inner ear ached (it always does with these migraines), and try as I might to dislodge it (with various items at my disposable many of which had worked in the past) my head was still congested and the vestibular headache had not dissipated. Probably an allergy induced migraine, but hey the doctor's disagree. [Oh well, this does justify the visit to the vestibular migraine specialist on Tuesday. I can at least verify that I do in fact get these damnable headaches twice a month ever since February of this year.]
Low-Cost Homeopathic methods that I've discovered which actually work?
Vertigo and/or motion sickness - Anti-nausea bracelets - they put acupressure on the wrists and this staves off the harsh effects of vertigo and motion sickness. No real side-effects, except after a while my right wrist starts to ache a little bit.
Constipation Kiwi - preferably with the skin attached - they really help with constipation and digestion. Also higher in potassium than bananas and much lower glycemic (sugar) index.
***
I went to the grocery store around 3:45, and got home around 4:30, just as the early trick or treaters began to pop up. There weren't many, and the streets for the most part were empty of pedestrian traffic. Uncustomarily dead for a Saturday afternoon. My guess? People were busy putting their costoms together. New Yorker's are particular about their costumes - and they are rather detailed. Also unlike other areas around the country, wearing a costume in NYC is not age specific. Everyone wears one.
Trick-or-treating starts at dusk in NYC. And Manhattan is actually the place to be this year - since Mayor Mamdani is closing 50% of the streets to anything but pedestrians. Plus the Village Halloween Parade. Although Brooklyn holds its own - there's a haunted house in Prospect Park, and a maze, and Halloween market apparently, plus a light show at the Botanical Gardens, and god knows what Greenwood Cemetery is doing.
I'm not doing anything outside of watching MCU movies. I'm not even going outside to watch the parade of trick or treaters or downstairs to see the building kids in costume partake of Halloween treats in the lobby. Due to the aforementioned Sinus Headache From Hell. I did run across three French teens sans costume (they are French), trying to do stunts with their scooters on our front stoop - understandable (it's big platform stoop away from foot traffic) but annoying. I wanted to stand there for a bit to look at the fall foliage and watch people and they keep getting in my way. I thought about screaming at them in French, but my French is horrible, and I was drawing a blank - in part due to the headache. I know they are French because they were speaking to each other in French, one of the few languages that I can kind of understand? The Super was glaring at them through the window - as if contemplating whether it was worth yelling at them in Polish.
***
Yesterday I got both the flu and the pneumonia vaccines. No, I don't think they brought on the headache. I think it's the shift in weather. But one never knows.
***
In between MCU movies, I've caught up on Vision Quest - which is a lot better if you've seen the MCU movies and Wanda Vision. (Not necessarily Agatha All Along, although Vision Quest tells us what happened to Tommy Maximov, and what powers he developed, while Agatha All Along tells us what happened to Billy and what powers he developed.)
Vision Quest is by far the best of the MCU television series that I've seen to date. It's up there with Legion in innovative storytelling and character development. I'd kind of rank them Vision Quest, WandaVision, Legion, Falcon and the Winter Solider, Loki (which I struggle with for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the series).
It's developed a romance between Ultron and Jocasta (an AI that the original AI developer created to download her consciousness into). Jocasta and the woman who created and eventually downloaded her consciousness into Jocasta is a nice corollary to Tony Stark, Vision and Ultron. Which is why it helps if you see the Iron Man films, along with Age of Ultron. Or a lot of it won't make sense thematically, and some of the dramatic irony will be missed completely. Marvel's films and series build off of one another.
Recently re-watched Avengers and Age of Ultron back to back. Age of Ultron, sigh, has all of Whedon's ahem characteristic flaws on display. Both do, but Ultron more so. Not quite as bad as Justice League (which is another discussion). There are character bits that go nowhere - most of them are with Banner and Natasha - whose budding romance is cringe. The film drags a bit in the middle. The dialogue often doesn't quite fit the characters - Don Chedal's War Machine keeps telling a joke that makes no sense and doesn't fit his character at all. Also Whedon is doing a lot of exposition dumping and explaining. The difficulty with the Whedon films is - Whedon is too wedded to his script. He's a screen-writer first, a director second. The Russo films work better - because the Russo's direct and someone else does the screenplay, and it's more of a collaboration. Also, when you aren't wedded to your own script, you can let go of sections that don't work - and just go with a visual. You trust your actors more. You let them improvise and find the characters, and say the line the way that character would state it. Writers' egos get embedded in their work - they can't handle a sentence or a line being delivered differently then how they envisioned it. They don't allow for improvisation. The actors have to say the line exactly the way they wrote it.
The difficulty with film - is it is a visual medium. A lot can be said in film with no dialogue. Some of the best scenes in the series have no dialogue. Whedon's Avengers films - have almost too much dialogue, and real moments are lost. It feels comic-booky, while other films don't. I can almost see the dialogue balloons in Whedon's Avengers films. By marked contrast the Russo Brothers films feel more organic to the characters, flow better, and drag less. It was the difficulty with Whedon's Justice League - there was too much dialogue and a lot of it did not fit the characters, and everyone sounded the same. I could feel and see the actors frustration with the lines. Whedon's dialogue, more than one actor has stated, is hard to remember and say. His lines often don't float off the tongue. It's a play on words. Which can work beautifully in television, on the small screen - which is in many ways more of a writers medium than a directors, but doesn't necessarily work well on film. I think that was among the reasons both Age of Ultron and Whedon's Justice League didn't work as well as they should have. Although Ultron is at least rewatchable, Justice League makes me cringe.
Next up in my binge, will most likely be Iron Man 3, closely followed by Captain America: Civil War.
***
I thought the headache had left while writing this, but I moved my head, and no, the vertigo, ear and head congestion, are still annoyingly present. Kind of kicked my plans (such as they were) to the curb - I'd planned to take some long walks today, around Greenwood Cemetery - thought it would be a cool thing to do on Halloween? But alas, no.
It's been a week. Work was difficult this week. And stressful. Less said about it, the better.
Anyhow, off to make dinner.
Here's more innovative Halloween decorations from one of the many side streets. This one kind of went all out? Inclusive of life size skeletons, skeleton baseball players, a monster bush, and alien with flying saucer.
no subject
Date: 2026-11-01 01:06 am (UTC)