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MFW I’m about to score my 31st point I was always more of a college basketball guy, growing up as I did in Lawrence, Kansas. But in recent years I’ve been becoming more of an NBA head, largely because I now have a hometown team in the Oklahoma City Thunder. This has been made easier by the fact that the Thunder have been really fun to watch lately – they’re currently in contention for the first seed in the brutal Western Conference, and are probably a consensus top-4 team in the NBA at least, as of the time I wrote this....

🎶 I’m in love with the shape of OU 🎶. Except that bit at the end. Intro I was thinking about the AP Top 25 poll recently (as one does in early August) and I wondered what it might look like if we visualized the poll results of a given team over the course of multiple years, to create a sort of visual representation of their program’s story arc over time....

Ugh. Shoulda been literally anyone else in the final four. I’m NOT mad. Unfortunately, the incredibly fun and chaotic 2023 Men’s College Basketball tournament had a real stinker of an ending, as UConn went berserk en route to their fifth championship and third since 2010. And not only did they beat everyone, they absolutely demolished the hell out of everyone, notching double-digit victories in all six games of their run....

Intro: College basketball Reddit game threads “wow worst refs i’ve ever seen in my life” – someone, every single game thread ever made Reddit is a bad website you can go to if you want to waste some of the precious, distressingly finite time you have on earth. I, apparantly, want this on a fairly consistent basis, and this time of year, one of my favorite places to do it is reddit’s college basketball forum, /r/CollegeBasketball....

I like the manga / anime One Piece. In the world of One Piece, notorious pirates and outlaws are given bounties by the sinister World Government. A number of characters went up in value in the most recent chapter (ch. 1058), so I decided to make a little chart showing each character’s most recent bounty. I didn’t feel like manually searching through every chapter for the bounties, so I figuerd it would be easier to scrape them from a fan wiki, thereby profiting by the work of some nerd who has already done so....

Crypto crash got you down? Do you love the thrill of watching a line go up and down, but hate losing all your money to scams and hucksters all the time? Try “Number go up simulator”! It’s the R Shiny app that allows you to buy and sell intangible bits of nothingness just like Bitcoin, except there’s no need to connect your bank account or credit card. Start with $100,000 cash, click “Market Open” to get started, and see how much profit you can make!...

Here’s a quick R script that will retrieve and graph the closing price of BTC-USD every day since its peak. # create a function to retrieve daily data retreive_daily_data <- function(pair, start, end) { url = glue("https://api.pro.coinbase.com/products/{pair}/candles?start={start}&end={end}&granularity=86400") columnNames <- c('unix', 'low', 'high', 'open', 'close', glue('{pair} volume')) mydata <- fromJSON(url) df <- as.data.frame(mydata) colnames(df) <- columnNames # rename the columns return(df) } bitcoin <- retreive_daily_data(pair = "BTC-USD", start = Sys.Date() - days(300), end = Sys....

This was one of the earlier Shiny apps I ever made. It uses the Twitter API to generate word clouds of the most frequently used words from a given Twitter account. You can try any public account, so go nuts! The code is actually quite tidy as well, so I’m not too embarrassed to include it. [Update | August 18, 2023:] It looks like Elon ruined this shiny app with his changes to the Twitter API....