Bert Vandecasteele

Category: Blog

  • 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?

  • Gentleman

    You can never be too polite! Like the guy currently standing in front of me at the Lidl cash register, who is saying sorry in advance by buying a single tulip with his sixpack of cheap beer.

  • Hear that? That was the sound of the fourth wall breaking.

    I’ve never really been a fan of the Call of Duty games. It’s not gamer snobism (after all, I still play WoW after nearly ten years) – I’m just not really invested in realistic shooters. The stories never really seemed to click with me, just like war movies don’t click. Yet the newest game in the CoD franchise did something I find very interesting.

    This fascinates me beyond belief. How could anyone think this was going to work? I mean, the idea is right – press button, get emotionally invested – but the execution is just laughably bad. The whole trick of writing a moving story is never telling your audience it’s moving at all. Stories are emotional manipulation, sure, but you don’t want the audience to realize that. Suspense of disbelief, people!

    Imagine watching the Lion King (and I’m taking this example precisely because the movie already borders laying bare its extreme means of manipulation). Mufasa dies. Simba cries. Violins play, the choir sings some notes in flat.

    Then, suddenly, one of the wildebeasts halt and goes “Whoa, dude, your dad is totally dead, that’s like, super sad.”

    Sure, you think of these things when you’re writing a screenplay. You know you’re going to manipulate the audience to the moon and back. In fact, these are usually the moments I find first, because they supply the emotional grounding for a project. But if you’re any bit decent at telling stories, you’ll be subtle about it.

    Narration in video games is taking baby steps. I mean, there’s games like Bastion or Braid, who try to use the medium to tell adequate stories, and I think we’re really going places. But then there’s sequences like this – sequences in productions that cost so, so, so much money. Sequences that fall flat because they break universal narrative rules that have been around for millenia in the dumbest manner possible.

    Hey, at least we learned something, right?

    (P.S.: Giantbomb did a great piece on this – clickie!)

  • German Hugs

    I’ve lived in Germany for eight years now. Some of the German mysteries have unfurled in front of me. I know why “Schmetterling” is the cutest word in the world. I know why vampires should turn me on. And I even kind of know why Hitler jokes aren’t really funny.

    But here’s something I don’t get: When and how is it okay for one dude to hug another dude?

    Seriously, guys, if you’re gonna make dudes hugging into a regular thing, you’ve got to lay down some ground rules so things don’t get messy. The system you’ve got in place is chaotisch, unüberschaubar and inkonsistent – in general: very undeutsch!

    For instance: Do we use the ritual shaking-of-hands before we pull each other in? Or do we not use said shake and create momentum out of nowhere? Do we pat each other on the back or not? And if do we, are we talking about a pat as in what we do to babies to make them burp or are we talking more about a pat as in what the doctor does when you’ve got a cold?

    Do doctors actually do that in Germany?

    Fuck. I can never get a cold.

  • Youtube

    Sometimes I think I should do a vlog on Youtube.

    I mean I have stuff to say. Things to talk about. Opinions and such.

    But then I look at my face as I talk into the webcam and think

    nope!

  • Funkstille

    “Just update a lot. If you update a lot, you’ll have lots of visitors.”
    — Random Friend

    “No visitors today”
    — My blog

    Just a quick head’s up: There’s things currently on my mind. As always, one half is writing-related while the the other involves teaching. Both these things require my full attention at the moment, and I seem to jump through mental hoops on a daily basis getting everything done.

    I’d like to be a pro and tease my next awesome next project, but unfortunately that only works for well-known people who keep getting money thrown at them and know their projects will end up getting made. I am not one of these people. Yet?

    So let’s just leave it at a tease for a tease – a metatease: Yes, I am working on something awesome. And then I’m working on something else that’s really awesome. And then there’s something awesome I should be working on but I’m drawing a blank.

    It is during this time I play World of Warcraft.

  • The fault in our stars

    Sometimes, the universe has a funny way of bringing things together. It’s the premise of every movie involving a car crash — and it’s how I ended up reading John Green. I had watched hundreds of Youtube videos of him explaining the history of the world, eyerolling every time he started talking about “his books”, thinking that this guy must be a pretty poor writer if he needed a Youtube history channel to promote his novels, yet somehow failing to realize his book is lying right next to me and it is friggin’ awesome.

    So you could say that that book – The Fault in our Stars – is my Amores Perros, my Crash, my Thelma and Louise (or wait, no, that one’s an entirely different car crash).

    Go read it. Even if it’s about fifteen year-olds with cancer, has no violence and features the worst kind of Americans in the world: The ones visiting Amsterdam. I know there is no possible pitch that will make you voluntarily read this book – but if the mind control powers I got by achieving rank 7 at my scientology meetings work, that should be no problem.

  • Oh, the places you will go!

    Now here’s a scary link. Just log on there and click a date. You’ll see all the places you visited on that day (but only if you have location services enabled on your phone, which I haven’t for the last few months, so hah!).

    Sure, we all knew this was happening, but seeing it – and seeing it on a page made by Google – makes it both very real and surreal at the same time.

    So yeah. That surely is something.

    Are you there Google? It’s me, Bert.

     

  • Jetlag

    So I’m back from the USA. “(AUDIENCE (Jeering) You’ve already told us that!”)

    Anyway.

    I had never traveled across the Atlantic in my life. Sure, I visited Iceland and went to Uganda, but those places were all in relatively cutesy time zones (there were other issues, with Uganda having no Winter, though, and Iceland nothing but).

    So then I went to Colorado. Smack in the middle of the US of A. At first I thought: Awesome! This is like some sweet time machine thing, where I get to extend my life by seven hours! Then I lay awake at night worrying for what seemed like an eternity. I worried about my job, my holiday, that cricketlike noise outside that turned out to be crickets. Was this what being immortal felt like, I wondered. And: How can I undo it?

    So after that we went to the West Coast. And then we came back. Suddenly, time snapped nine hours into the future. Nine hours! What a random number of hours! When I landed, apparently there was a new iPhone, wristwatches were back in fashion and the ice bucket challenge was over. It truly was the future!

    So now I lay awake in this so-called future, a Germany lost in time, where everything is the same yet somehow different. I lay awake and I worry. Only there’s no more holiday and no more crickets to worry about.

  • Books!

    I’m back from the USA — and apparently people want me to list books or else I’ll face the wrath of some sort of a bucket of ice or books or whatever. (I feel so out of touch with the internet.)

    In no particular order:

    – 1984: I read this on a long train ride and was so immersed I cried out when the conductor suddenly asked for my ticket.
    – The Stand (Stephen King): Read this sitting under a tree in Bourgogne, France, instead of getting drunk on awesome wine. While the ending is kind of meh, the first 700 pages are the best set-up to an apocalypse I’ve ever read.
    – Watchmen (Moore & Gibbons): The first time I connected fascism and superheroes. My world has never been the same since.
    – 20th Century Boys (Naoki Urasawa): My great obsession during university. Funnily enough, I cannot for the life of me remember who the enigmatic “Friend” turned out to be in the end, but the constant tension in this manga was awesome enough to make it on a list comprised of books.
    – Vallen (Anne Provoost): I read this for Dutch class when I was 14 and I still consider it one of the best Dutch books I’ve ever read. Oddly enough, when I read it nowadays it’s a completely different novel – I must’ve ignored the political side of the story back then.
    – Momo (Michael Ende): First book I read in German. It’s awesome (and so much better than the never-ending story – sorry!)
    – The Golden Compass (Philipp Pullman): While I think The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass veer too much into philosophical discussions, the Golden Compass is to me the perfect mix between religious critique and pulpy fantasy.
    – The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Michael Chabon): I think this is the best book I’ve ever read. Also it makes me feel smart because it won a Pulitzer.
    – Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (J.K. Rowling): What can I say? I love pulp! The moment Cedric Diggory dies was one of the greatest in the series – in two sentences, child literature grew up, with no forewarning. All the impactful plot twists of the later books never achieved the pure shock this moment caused.
    – Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom): Of all the books listed here, this one connects most to me personally. There’s something about the intimacy of Morrie’s slow descent that gets to me everytime. Together with Kavalier and Clay, this is the only book ever to cease to be fiction and to just turn real.

    So there you have it. You can put your buckets away.