Sharks Gameday: Wordle

I have Iron Man listed as my 55th-favorite movie on Flickchart, but when I started thinking about it to write this gameday I realized that seems too high. It's a good movie, and I do enjoy it, but I don't really think it's better than some of the movies I've already talked about. I'll have to re-rank it on Flickchart until it gets to a more accurate rank. I liked the movie a bunch when I first saw it, but over time I've kind of forgotten about it and now I don't even remember what was so great about the film.

SPEAKING OF STUFF YOU LIKE A LOT AND THEN FORGET ABOUT! Have you guys seen this website Wordle? It's really cool. Here's how it works:

Wordle is a toy for generating "word clouds" from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

So you can paste in a bunch of text from song lyrics, a paper you wrote for school, or a website, and it will generate an amazing word cloud from the most frequently appearing words, with the relative size of the word indicating how often that word is used.

I used this website a lot years ago in college, making computer wallpapers and stuff. Then I forgot about it completely until they had a word cloud on the most recent episode of Parks and Rec.That was the inspiration for today's post.

I have created wallpaper-size word clouds based on the writings of Earl, Rudy, and myself.

I copy-pasted the text from our gameday posts and other writings, going back from the most recent post until around the middle of the most recent off-season. After I had my source text I manually removed common words (I know I missed some though) until we were left with individual clouds made up of our most frequently used words.

First up, here is mine:

Linked image because it's huge.

Observations:

1. I mention the Ducks and the Kings often, and about equally.

2. I say the names "Joe" and "Dan" a lot, for Thornton, Pavelski, Boyle, and Ellis.

3. Brent Burns has dominated a lot of my writing since the off-season, for obvious reasons.

Next, Earl's word cloud:

Link

Observations:

1. Words like "blog" and "logo" feature heavily, thanks to Earl's 37 (and counting) entries into his blog logo re-design project.

2. Words like "differential" and "TOI" are signs of Earl's occasional stat-splurges.

3. "Carlyle" is featured in Earl's top 100 words but, shockingly, "fire" isn't. It probably would have been if I went back to the beginning of last season though.

And finally, Rudy's cloud:

Link (warning: profanity)

Observations:

1. Rudy says bad words a lot. I thought I did too, but clearly he's the master of this.

2. Rudy's cloud is the only one of all three that features the words "love" or "hate." Rudy is a passionate guy.

3. Rudy talks about the "Ducks" a lot, but not the Sharks. This is because Rudy always goes for the easy joke.

If you'd like to try making your own word clouds out of our writings, here is the text I used:

Rudy source text

Earl source text

Meg source text.

I'm sure you could make a better wallpaper image than I did. Mess with the options, font, colors, number of words shown, or whatever, and share your creations in the comments!

Or, you know, do your real job. I know you're very busy, Mr. President.

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The Sharks face the Avalanche tonight and then again on Thursday. The Avs kind of suck, but lately so do the Sharks. Best-case scenario is the Sharks win both games and are able to start rolling again. Worst-case scenario is they lose both and continue their funk.

As the only team in the Battle of California not to fire their coach this year (so far) it's hard to get too upset about how the Sharks are doing right now. They started the season slow, then they had a long stretch of wins, now they're struggling again. Murray's hurt, Boyle's old, nobody is scoring like they are supposed to, and the penalty kill is STILL garbage - these things are all problems, sure, but nothing that's got me freaking out.

I'm cool, man. Chill.

If anyone needs me, I'll be over here playing with Wordle.

Prediction: The Avalanche suck harder than the Sharks. Sharks win 2-0, with goals from Couture and Pavelski.