Sunday, July 08, 2018

The Ultimate "Get Psyched" Playlist

I am busily loading up a playlist for DefCon so of course I had to turn to "The Ultimate Get Psyched" Playlist as published by Barney Stinson as a starting point. 

 The problem is, there are three versions of the list with some substantial differences. I published a combined version before, but that wasn't quite doing it for me. 

 What I did to resolve my dilemma was to list out all three playlists and assign each song a get psyched coefficient - since barney believe that a playlist should start high and only go higher this was pretty simple, I just divided the song's position in the list by the number of songs in the list and that gave a number between 0 and 1. Then I averaged the coefficients of each song across the three lists. Unfortunately some songs seemed to be artificially inflated in importance. To solve that issue I weighted the average - If a song only appeared in one of the three lists it was by default less psyched than if it appeared in all 3, so I multiplied the average "get psyched" coefficient by a multiplier based on how many lists the song appeared in. The results, in order from least to most psyched, are below: 

 You're the Best Around - Joe Esposito
Tom Sawyer - Rush
I Wanna Rock - Twisted Sister
The Humpty Dance - Digital Underground
Free Bird (second half only) - Lynyrd Skynyrd
You Give Love A Bad Name - Bon Jovi
Change of Heart - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
Run Away - Slade
Don't Stop Believin' - Journey
Lick It Up - Kiss
Paradise City - Guns N' Roses
Come Sail Away - Styx
The Transformers Theme Song - O. Prime
Dancing with Myself - Billy Idol
Panama - Van Halen
Jessie's Girl - Rick Springfield
High Enough - Damn Yankees
Talk Dirty to Me - Poison
Thunderstruck - AC/DC
Hip Hop Hooray - Naughty by Nature
Dr. Feelgood - Mötley Crüe
Round and Round - Ratt
Rock You Like a Hurricane - The Scorpions 

 I'll let you decide if it worked out or not, personally based on my tastes vs the author of the original lists I would shift a couple thing, but I wouldn't hate it if this list came up on the radio.

(To answer two questions - 1) Yes I really am this bad at math, 2) Yes, this really is how I spend my Sunday mornings.  Church, drinking, or heroin would probably all be more productive but I do this.)

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