When was the last time you saw a movie that didn’t feature some kind of credits in the beginning as well as at the end? I’m willing to bet that you’ve never seen even one such film, unless we’re talking about obscure YouTube releases here.

Now, why is all this text necessary? Not only is it totally superfluos information for the overwhelming majority of the viewers who just want to watch the movie; even if people actually were interested in this information, why would you have to put it in the actual movie and not somewhere else, for example at a dedicated webpage?

Including text that reminds your viewers of the fact that they actually are watching a movie is not only a bad idea if you’re trying to create an enthralling experience for them, it’s also aesthetically questionable since it mixes up the real world with the film world. Would you have a speaker read a list of all the people involved in the making of a musical album on one of the tracks? (For the record, I don’t really like the practice where artists put their signature on their paintings either.)

I’d love to see a movie that cuts out all the excessive crap. Just show me the movie. Nothing else.

Kristoffer Borgli is an Oslo based film director who’s done some really (no, REALLY!) exquisit work. If you haven’t done so already, you really should check out some of his creations. I’ve posted what I consider to be the top three below, so just go nuts.

There was a time in video game history when pretty much all the mainstream games took quite a bit of effort to beat. You couldn’t even be sure that if you put in enough time, you’d see the ending credits role by. Game franchises like “Ghosts’n Goblins”, “Ninja Gaiden”, and “Castelvania” gave gamers nightmares, not because of the somewhat spooky content, but because of the freakishly hard difficulty level.

In comparison, today, when you go and buy the lastest Call of Duty instalment, you can be sure that you’ll have it beat within a week if you just clear out your schedule. I’m not saying that this necessarily is bad; an easier game where you don’t die and have to restart ad infinitum makes room for a more enthralling narrative experience. However, I find it somewhat sad that there aren’t that many mainstream games today that really focuses on skill and dexterity.

That’s why it’s so refreshing to see James Rolfe and Mike Matei, the persons behind The Angry Video Game Nerd (something I’ve written about before), sit down and play a classic game of Super C, which they do in the video below. It’s a captivating illustration of just what made these old games so great.

Yesterday, Google I/O 2013, Google’s own developer conference, got underway, starting with a grand keynote where a lot of new products and solutions were presented. For one thing, Google+ saw a big update; an update where Google got to show off a lot of their recently newfound ability to create tasteful and minimalistic designs along with their usual proficiency of handling big data.

It’s at times like these that I mourn a little bit that Facebook, rather than Google, are the uncontested leader of social networks when it comes to total number of active users. I would really want to use Google+ instead of Facebook, but as long as I only can connect with two or three progressive friends over there, I have to stick to the latter, which is a shame (even though I like the new chat bubbles), not only because of their total lack of how communication between actual people work, but also because of their inability to create understandable privacy settings.

Studio Ghibli don’t only produce amazing movies, they also have one of the best composers around, Joe Hisaishi, who creates all of the music for their films. One out of the many pieces that I really like is “The Girl Who Fell from the Sky” from the movie “Laputa: Castle in the Sky”. (Fun fact: The verse of this song has the same chord progression as the original Legend of Zelda theme.)

Yesterday evening, I recorded a somewhat improvised piano cover of this song, meaning that I already had decided upon the basic form beforehand (such as chords and overall length), but that I let the exact implementation of the piece be decided as I played it.

Now, it was quite a while since I really sat down and tried to play a piece perfectly (meaning without any blatant errors) from start to finnish, and while recording this, I noticed a strong internal sense of struggling with the music; a feeling that this was more a challenge, comparable to beating a hard video game, than a creative outpouring of my personal interpretation of the song. And I realised that this is often how I look upon my own musicianship: as a hurdle that one should get past rather than an aid that helps you accomplish something.

Of course, the feeling of struggle is intertwined with the difficulty level of what you’re doing. As things get easier for you, you can also divert more attention away from the activity of just avoiding to play the wrong notes and start focusing more on adding your own personal expression to the music.

This probably means that I’m most often drawn towards playing a little bit out of my comfort zone, which in turn takes its toll on how creative I can get. And as you can hear, in this particular piece, I’m quite focused on just navigating my hands around the keyboard, meaning that the music itself gets quite simplistic, unimaginative, and quite frankly emotionless (relatively to what it could have been, that is; it’s not terrible). However, if I would have gone for an easier arrangement, the piece would inherently have been more simplistic and uninteresting from the start.

It’s all about give and take, baby!

Barats and Bereta consists of two guys, Luke Pierre Barats and Joseph Daniel Bereta, who make sketches and posts them to their YouTube channel. What I find fascinating is how they manage to persistently put out pieces that actually in most cases invoke laughter on my part. Of course, this type of humor might not be for you, but if it is, and if you haven’t heard of Barats and Bereta before, I strongly encourage you to subscribe to their channel and let the awesomeness come to you on a regular basis.

Below is just a small selection of what I consider to be some of their best pieces. (I considered posting more than three, but let’s keep it classy.)

Some time ago, Facebook added a new “feature” to their chat: Whenever a person sends you a message and you click on it, a notification that you’ve read it gets sent back to the sender. This shows that Facebook (a) really doesn’t understand how human communication works outside of the highly idealised case or (b) doesn’t give a rat’s ass (which for me seems like the more plausible alternative).

For the receiver to pretend to not have seen a message sent to her is a great way for both the sender and receiver to save face in case the receiver can’t or doesn’t want to respond within the timeframe that the sender expects an answer (this can also include when the receivers preferred timeframe is “never”). It doesn’t even matter that much if the sender knows that the receiver is bullshitting; allowing both to get out of the situation without having to explicitly admit what’s really going on is one of the main pillars of human communication.

Think, for example, of the oh so trite question whether the other person would “like to come up for some coffee” that comes at the ending of so many first dates. Both persons know that “coffee” here doesn’t really mean coffee, but asking it this way than gives the other person a way to escape the situation without having to embarrass them both.

However, with Facebook’s new feature, you have to jump through hoops to avoid letting the sender now that you’ve read the message. You can avoid clicking pop-up chat windows on your computer, read through the live preview of the message in the same instance as you’re getting it on your Android phone, et cetera, but this leaves you with open chat windows and an unread message notification whenever you’re signed in to Facebook. And in many situations, you might not be attentive enough in the first place and simply forget that by clicking on that incoming message, you might inadvertently dig yourself into a social hole that you’ll have trouble getting out of gracefully.

That’s bullshit.

In case you haven’t heard of Diederik Stapel, he’s a dutch psychologist who recently have been admitting to fabricate pretty much all the data that he’s been using to publish papers in highly respected journals. In this article in the New York times, he is interviewed, and openly talks about the whole thing. It’s an interesting read, but the article itself doesn’t really touch upon the most important questions when it comes to research, funding, and fraud.

Towards the end of the article, Diederik states, when discussing his motives for doing what he did:

You cannot say it is because of the system. It is what it is, and you need to accept it.

I beg to differ. Of course, one could expect scientists to adhered to certain high moral standards something that Diederik obviously have failed to do here but we also have to admit that the incentives within the system are set up to make fraud pay off Big time!

The way I see it, the whole problem here is that university institutions and scientific journals alike today are extremely focused on results rather than on methods. That is, what counts are positive results. If you as a scientist come up with a couple of ingenious studies, where you strictly adhere to all the proper scientific protocols such as for example not go p-value hunting or shape the inclusion and exclusion criteria after you’ve already looked at the collected data, there’s a risk that you’ll come up short with respect to results. This doesn’t necessarily mean that your research ideas were any bad, just as going all-in when catching a full house on the river probably is the right thing to do even if you eventually happen to lose the hand in the end, or taking a shot from the centreline in basketball probably is the wrong thing to do even if it happen to go in.

Problem is, you cannot let the same person that carries out the research also be responsible for her own job evaluation, especially since the two things are so tightly intertwined. Of course people are going to cheat if the alternative is to be honest, get no positive results, stay unpublished, don’t get funding for the next project, and end up unemployed or (oh the horror!) having to teach full time.

I’ve already bitched about how much I hate the question “Will this be on the test?” when uttered by pupils in an attempt to distile the least amount of information that will be necessary to learn in order to pass the course and move on to the next one. It reflects a general attitude towards school and learning where knowledge isn’t seen as something worthwhile in and of itself (of course, nothing is worthwhile in and of itself except happiness but I’m speaking somewhat pragmatically here), but rather only as a means for passing an exam and getting a fancy grade on a piece of fancy paper.

However, I couldn’t have said it better than how John Green says it during the first minute in the first episode of Crash Course World History, the first in a series of medium ADHD paced videos posted on YouTube going through the history of mankind from the agricultural revolution to modern nuclear bomb dropping warfare. After imitating your general student and asking himself the question “Is this going to be on the test?”, John Green eloquently answers:

Yeah, about the test…

The test will measure whether you’re an informed and engaged and productive citizen of the world, and it will take place in schools, and bars, and hospitals, and dorm rooms, and places of worship. You will be tested on first dates, in job interviews, while watching football, and while scrolling through your Twitter feed. The test will judge your ability to think about things other than celebrity marriages, whether you’ll be easily persuaded by empty political  rhetoric, and whether you’ll be albe to place your life and your community in a broader context. The test will last your entire life, and it will be comprised of the millions of decisions that when taken together make your life yours.

And everything — EVERYTHING! — will be on it.

Richard Michalak is a cinematographer with over 30 years of experience working in the film industry. In this almost 40 minutes long video he goes through the very basics of things like framing shots, lighting scenes, and moving the camera. If you’re already somewhat experienced with film creation, this is pretty basic stuff, but if you’re new to all this, this video is just packed with useful information.