Hey folks!

At about 8am CST this morning, I officially closed the nominations for the forthcoming Best Album of 2001 tournament.

A huge thank you to all 197 voters who submitted ballots in the last two weeks. That’s 30 more than the last tournament!

And now… the counting begins.

What happens now is I collate all the individual album mentions in each ballot, and figure out how many mentions each album has. That’s the vote total for that album. Then I’ll enter every title into a spreadsheet, hit a few buttons, and then I’ll have a list of every album, from the one with the most to the ones with just one vote. Then (God, I explain this every tournament, it’s not a hard concept but it’s laborious to put in words), then I go and take the first 128 albums and those albums are entered into the tournament, as I only have 128 slots. HOWEVER, it’s almost never that simple — what usually happens is there will be, say 113 albums with (for example) 10 or more votes, and if I extend the range to 9 or more votes, now there’s like 150 albums. So what happens there (in this example) is that those 113 are entered, and the remaining 15 slots remain open to be filled in other ways (see below). So what is the vote threshold for the 2001 tournament? Don’t know! But we’ll find out soon enough!

HERE’S THE SCHEDULE FOR THIS WEEK! IMPORTANT!

• The Best Album Of 2001 Tournament Parade Of First Entrants: Wednesday, February 4Th, 6pm CST

• The Best Album Of 2001 Guessing Game: Saturday, February 7th, Noon CST

So there are two important events this week. On Wednesday, February 4th, at 6pm CST (4pm PST, 7pm EST, midnight GMT, eesh, sorry), I will livepost on Bluesky a parade of the albums officially entered into the tournament. Soon after, I will send out a newsletter with the complete parade for those won’t be able to attend.

Then, on Saturday, February 7th at noon CST (10am PST, 2pm EST, 6pm GMT) I will host the Guessing Game on Bluesky. The Guessing Game is simple — you saw what’s in the tournament during the parade, but what were the top three albums, in order, in terms of votes? When the game starts, each Bluesky account gets one guess, sent to @bestalbumbrackets.bsky.social of their top 3 guesses, in order. The first person to get it right wins the prize: the privilege to automatically enter any eligible 2001 release directly into the tournament. Some notes on the rules:

1. When I get a guess, and it’s wrong, I immediately repost it. This allows those who haven’t guessed yet to get a clue as to what not to guess. The longer you wait, the more clues you get, but the chance of someone else snagging the win grows.

2. If, after an hour, no one has won, I re-start the game, and everyone gets another guess. This time, I will note, Mastermind-style. I will repost the wrong guess, but with two digits, one for the number of correct choices in the guess, and one for the number of correct choices in the right position. So if I repost a wrong guess with (2/1), then two of the choices were correct, but only one was in the right position. This gets us a winner rrrrrrreal quick.

3. The Guessing Game prize is contingent on their being empty slots available in the tournament. If a slot isn’t available, no prize for that tournament. That’s never happened, although it’s come close a couple times. If there is only one slot available, it goes to the winner of the Best Album of 1989 Prediction Bracket contest, and the Guessing Game winner’s prize will be moved to the next tournament (as of this writing, 1988). Hopefully it won’t come to that.

BEHIND THE SCENES STUFF (Minor spoilers ahead)

So how does the vote counting work? First, I go to the Google Form that hosted the nomination entry form, and I download the .csv file of all the ballots. I open that .csv file in TextEdit, save it as a .txt file, and mark it as “DO NOT ALTER” in case something goes wrong and I need to restart. I then make a duplicate of that text file to do the actual work. The .csv (now .txt) file is a huge list of albums (see below) and other text ephemera that got caught in the mix. I highlight the entirety of it, then use a menu item from PopClip to automatically alphabetize it.

This groups all individual albums together, and so then I highlight each chunk and add numbers to them so I can immediately tell how many votes an album got. As I go through the list, I inevitably find albums and artists that are misspelled or mislabeled, or have album first then artist. No worries! I cut and paste those into their corresponding group.

Once this is done (and I’ve just started), I’ll fire up the spreadsheet, give each album a cell entry, and put the votes next to it. When that’s done, hit sort and we have (most of) a tournament.

Is there an easier, more automated way of doing this? Probably! However (and I’m only just now understanding this) working with it “by hand” is a huge dopamine factory for me. Seriously, I have other, more pressing things I have to do today, but I ended up accidentally spending like an hour on this, just because I reeeely enjoy it.

Hope that was interesting!

See you Wednesday!

Kent