Monthly Archives: April 2026

Gau Ji

Another horror podcast movie. I have a lot in a row right now, it turns out. But anyway, this one’s scare was magic, and style was foreign language. So I watched Dumplings, a Chinese[1] movie from 2004 about a lady who sells specially made dumplings[2] mostly to other women, because of their implausibly effective age-defying and even restorative properties. And about the actress who is approaching the hill and doesn’t want to lose her shitbird husband, but is also maybe more curious than she should be about the cooking process employed. Or, more precisely, about the ingredients.

I think I want to say basically nothing else because of the spoilers, even though there’s really a lot to cover. I should say this, though. I have not been scared by a movie for a long time, and even then only by very isolated scenes. The film student standing in the corner in Blair Witch. The head-on mirror hair-brushing scene in Ringu[3]. The lady standing over her husband for like 6 hours straight without moving in Paranormal Activity.

However, there are movies I find disturbing. Hostel springs to mind. Human Centipede as well, solely in prospect, because I still haven’t got up the gumption. My point is, Dumplings was a hard watch. Lotta “oh no, they’re actually doing that” combined with virtually no sympathetic characters, and no good outcomes for anyone who is. Yikes.

It’s not per se a bad movie, but I think I must disrecommend to almost anyone who has not read the above and thinks they absolutely have to know / affirmatively want to feel disturbed.

[1] Well, Hong Kong. Technically the same thing by that time, but still, I think the distinction could be relevant?
[2] who could have guessed
[3] I know how they did it. But if you accept the premise within the movie, that’s some real life ghost shit.

Rökkur

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I’ve made it to December 2021. I think this means I’m still catching up? Who can say, really. The scare was (I’m pretty sure) psychological, and the style was queer, and thus I watched Rift, a movie out of Iceland about gay dudes breaking up but then talking about it for the rest of the movie while other things also happen.

The deal is Einar is posing as maybe suicidal and then a couple of days later… no, let me go back. They’re standing at a balcony, post-breakup, and Einar is wobbling his beer bottle on the railing, and says, “This bottle is me. If I fall, do you think you could save me?” And then the bottle falls to the pavement. And then a couple days later, Gunnar gets a 3am voicemail about how he’s out in the sticks and there’s maybe someone with him. So he leaves his new boyfriend and drives out into the sticks to check on Einar, and, well, things are immediately weird, and they stay that way.

It has a tiny cast. There’s Einar and Gunnar (who if it was not clear already initiated the breakup), there’s the new boyfriend but he’s only in the prologue, and then there’s a) the helpful neighbor keeping an eye on the place, b) the creepy old farmer down the road who is introduced as probably a sexual predator, c) the girl at the convenience store who says not to pick up hitchhikers, and d) the Icelandic countryside, full of wind and emptiness and dry December grass, and bends and folds from all the volcanoes off in the distance, and abandoned buildings in states of decay. Oh, and I forgot e) the creepy red car that keeps showing up everywhere.

So yeah. The movie is 100% atmosphere, which unfortunately leaves no percentage points for making a lick of sense. But still, it’s a creepy, immersive atmosphere, and that makes up for a lot of sins, you know?

Attack the Block

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I watched the new Mario movie with my kids a couple weeks ago, and it was a) not nearly so bad as to deserve the hate I’ve seen it get, but also b) I dozed a few times and thus cannot give it the defense it deserves. All that said, early this week when I was trying to decide if I should review it without a rewatch, I was accidentally notified that my site, this one here on which you are reading this post, had been hijacked by SEO storefront people. So I wrote no review, and instead spent half a week chasing down and patching issues, and breaking things, and fixing the things I broke, plus also it appears that Shards of Delirium (again, that’s this site here) is not indexed by Google, and probably has not been for years. Which explains why the site used to feel [extremely low-key] popular, and then felt like I was the town crier to a ghost town instead, with approximately two regulars. So maybe I fixed that too? Too soon to tell.

But I was talking about the hackers. It seemed like I was playing whack-a-mole with these guys, for hours at a time. Did I plug everything up? I sure hope so, but honestly only time will tell. First I locked them out. Then I found a bunch of hijacker code and got rid of it. Then I turned everything back on, and yes it was working and looked right, but also yes I was getting just astronomical attack vectors, like multiple per second. So I locked it down at the external provider firewall level, and, oops, too much. Then I opened it enough to be usable by other people, and, oops, all attackers. So then I locked down some code internally, and now the CPU is not constantly spiking, and I get a lot less spam than I’ve been getting for the past 3 or so months, and… well, we’ll see.

Which brings me to Attack the Block, the[1] story of a band of hoodlum teens led by Finn from the new Star Wars movies, who pick Guy Fawkes day[2] to mug a nurse who will someday go on to become The Doctor, only there’s something falling out of the sky that is going to disrupt everyone’s night. So it’s Moses and his gang against pretty much everyone. The ever increasing horde of aliens who are just really laser focused on our antiheroes, and the local drug lord, and the cops, and nurse Sam who they done dirty, and their girlfriends, and… well, okay, the two little kids are mostly always on their side. But everyone else? It’s just a neverending series of obstacles that crop up again and again, and every time they fix one issue, two more pop up, and in conclusion the movie basically mirrors my fight with the SEO spammers. …except that my fight involved fewer buckets of blood and alien sword fights and above all fewer fireworks.

Alas.

I have this to say about the movie, all in all. It starts out with Moses and four or five other boys mugging a nurse, and by the end of the movie, I liked them. It was a pretty deep hole to climb out of, so, bravo! Also, though? Turn on the subtitles. I promise you’re gonna need to.

[1] I should not say “sensitive” here. It’s probably trademarked.
[2] Because the style of the randomly generated movie was “set on a holiday”. (The scare was “alien”, of course.)