Bert Vandecasteele

Category: Blog

  • (Smells Like) Teen Fiction

    I’m working on something. It features these two snippets:

    “Penny wanted to reply she would take Adele’s word for it, but before she could, a microphone screeched, and a crackling voice that sounded like it came from a can of peas echoed all around the pool.
    “Good afternoon! And welcome to the start of the new polo season.”
    The crowd burst into cheers. Penny smiled as she heard Marco’s familiar voice. Marco was a former Arndt student. He was twenty-one, studied radio at the free university and commented small-time sports events his free time. He felt as much a part of the team as any of the girls, and half the team had at some point had a secret (or not so secret) crush on him. Penny was ashamed to say she had been one of them. Marco had been charming and respectful as he let her down. Penny had never felt her heart break so gracefully. “

    And

    The girl knelt down in front of the wheel chair. Penny watched her wet hair drip all over the table. Drip, drip, drip. “I’m Freddie”, said the girl.
    Freddie. Penny would remember Freddie. She would find out where Freddie lived. She would come over to Freddie’s house. Pour acid on Freddie’s face while she was asleep. She would watch as Freddie screamed, her freckled skin smoldering to leather, her flaming red hair curling up and withering. Freddie would be beautiful no more. No more and never again.
    “Pleased to meet you”, Penny said.

    So yeah. Basic teenage fiction.

  • I made a thing.

    Lately, I’ve been wanting to learn something.

    Anything. Well, not anything. Nothing to do with writing.

    I tried learning how to draw or how to play the guitar, but those two creative activities are too similar to writing. I also considered learning Russian or Chinese, but living abroad and speaking a non-native language on a daily basis really sucks the fun out of language acquisition.

    Then, I stumbled on game development.

    Now, it should be no secret that I love me some videogames. So why not learn how to make them?

    So yeah. I’m doing some tutorial stuff with Unity. For instance this dumb little game I made myself. At the moment, I’m blindly following the tutorials on the Unity website, trying to wrap my head around the logic of writing C#.

    So yeah, to summarize: Writer wanted to do something different and ended up writing code.

    You can play the game by clicking the above link or by downloading the windows build here.

  • The Lion King

    The Lion King

    Hi kids!

    Today I wanna talk to you about the Disney classic The Lion King (or, as the Germans call it, Der König der Löwen).

    Now, Lion King and I, we go way back. It was one of the first movies I watched in the cinema, and the first time a  movie was an event rather than a timewaster on a rainy day. I remember getting up early, putting on some nice clothes, and then driving all the way to Brussels (the capital of Belgium, and, as far as my seven year-old mind knew, THE WORLD!) to attend the film’s premiere.

    I was stoked. I had gotten a Donald Duck magazine subscription a few months prior, my sister had gotten me a Goofy hat from Euro Disney, I had a Dale plushie and an Aladdin poster… I was a Disney fanboy, hardcore to the bone.

    Needless to say: I loved the shit out of the Lion King. And for years to come, I loudly proclaimed it one of the great Disney classics. The music! The art direction! The story!

    What a masterpiece!

    21 years passed – a little something like this:

     

    2015. Saddam Hussein was dead, Facebook had taken over the world, and I found myself in Hamburg, on a boat across the Elbe, on my way to watch the stage musical version of, you guessed it, The Lion King. I was excited. This was going to be epic.

    Only it wasn’t.

    Now, the musical was great! Brilliant performances. Great costumes. Incredibly creative design.

    But what the fuck, Disney?

    This isn’t a story about heroism, or growing up, or taking up responsibility and finding your place in the philosophical Circle of Life.

    This is the story about asshole lions who rule the land – “everything the sun touches”, so pretty much everywhere liveable – by preying on their powerless citizens and rationalize their debauchery by saying “it was meant to be”.

    The Lion King is 18th Century France.

    And Simba is the Sun King.

  • Writing

    A little quote from something I’ve been working on:

    And finally, just like that, lying in her mother’s arms, Penny started crying. Uncontrollable, wet sobs, not like the adult she would never become, but like the child she was. The child that just realized no matter how hard it fought, nothing would ever work out, because life had fucked it over.

    Stay tuned! Or don’t!

  • What is a Photocopier?

    Sometimes, life can be better than the best comedy. Take this dramatized transcript of a legal disposition, for example. Six minutes of absolutely absurd, hilarious and at times downright existentialist dialogue about the true nature of a photocopier.

    Enjoy!

  • Moleskine

    Moleskine

    So I got a Moleskine for my birthday. You know, one of those superfancy notebooks with a leatherlike black cover and a little ribbon for a bookmark. Classy shit – especially for someone who’s been using the cheapest ring notebooks on the planet.

    It was so classy I was afraid to use it. After all, Moleskines are the Apple of notebooks! This was not the notebooks to make soap character sheets or keep studio count or hand out to my pupils to write their math homework in.

    Whatever was going in there – it had to be me.

    So I took a pen (a cheap bic, I mean, a man has limits) and I got to work. Now, two weeks later, it’s filled with the crazy ramblings of a madman – ramblings about pirates, trips through the desert and switchboards inside people’s heads. That’s right: I’m continuing my work on Caravan!

    Caravan is a weird project. I’m completely enthralled by the idea, but I haven’t managed to write anything fluently yet. It’s very unlike me – I usually write like a freight train. This project is different. It’s hard. It’s long. It’s complex. And one of the scariest, most paralyzing things: For the first time since I wrote my graduation screenplay in 2012, it’s a story I really really really want to tell.

    Usually, I start up Word, write half a page, stare at the words for a bit, loudly exclaim “NOPE!” and then delete everything.

    If only there were a way to not be able to delete everything, I used to think.

    Some way I can write the words down and they’d be permanent, I used to think.

    Well, past me, think no more. Just take a pen and jot it down in style. Whatever you have written will be on the page forever, and ever, and ever.

    Unless you burn it.

    Maybe you should burn it?

  • Short update

    Short update

    Hey guys!

    Yes, I’m alive! I’ve been on the road a lot, traveling between multiple places in Belgium and Germany more than *insert terrible World War joke here*. Work has been all-consuming, so there’s little time for lengthy, in-depth blog posts about unimportant things.

    That said, here’s some short, shallow blog posts about unimportant things.

    • Shaun the Sheep: Hilarious and unpretentious. Refreshingly silent.
    • The Shield: Fuck yeah Vic Mackey.
    • Bob’s Burgers: Best use of men in female roles since Shakespeare.
    • Hotline Miami 2: Music was my first love. And it will be my last.
    • Phoenix Wright: Yelling “objection” at no one in particular is still as awesome as ten years ago.
    • Chrono Trigger: I tried to resist. But … the future refused to change.

    That will have to do!

     

     

  • German TV

    Here’s an interesting article I found on German TV.

    I’m just going to leave that there and silently back out of the room.

     

     

  • Mia goes LA

    Hey everyone!

    Or everyone from L.A. who wants to see Mia, some other Belgian shorts, hear directors talk, and drink a Belgian beer.

    Your wish has just been granted.

    Click this link!

    You lucky dog you.

  • Losing Sleep

    Losing Sleep

    So I’ve got this zit. It’s on my head, precisely where my hair parts. It’s swollen so much I can’t sleep comfortably anymore, no matter how I lie. I feel like I’m pregnant with a disgusting mucus baby.

    When I was a teenager, my mom used to give me 20 francs (half a euro) for five minutes of zit-pinching. These five minutes usually occurred when I was on a particularly tough boss in a nasty video game, so I got annoyed fast.

    But boy, after my fifth consecutive zit-induced bad night rest, I would give her 20 francs to get rid of this thing.

    So basically I need a time machine I guess?