#misadventures in python

[sprinklecipher]

The Postal Service Songs & Fic Titles

inspired by this post, I made a graph about how many fics on Ao3 have Postal Service song names in their titles:

Method info/additional details below the cut

Data notes:

The counts are the number of fics on Ao3 that contain the song name somewhere in the title (i.e., the full fic title could include other words in addition to the song name), as of 9/8/2025. I used the Ao3 “Any field” search with the modifier “title:” added, since the “title” field search didn't seem to support exact phrase filtering, for some reason. The counts don't include restricted fics

To be clear, I'm not claiming the counts equal the number of fics named after the songs (especially for the songs with shorter, more generic names) :)

Notably, there’s at least 1 fic on Ao3 with an exact title match for every single song on Give Up except for “Clark Gable”, although there is a single fic that mentions Clark Gable in its title

Also, here's the graph again but sorted by album order, because why not:

[sprinklecipher]

What places have the happiest bird names

One of my favorite things about birds is that a bunch of them have delightfully upbeat-sounding names, like consider these gems:

I got curious whether certain regions might have more happy-named kinds of birds than others, so I (naturally) crunched the numbers and made some graphs about it:

Data/method details and full species name lists below the cut

All of the bird photos from Wikipedia, with species labels added by me

Bird name and (breeding) location data is from the AvianLexiconAtlas. To find “happy” species names, I ran all bird species’ common English names through the VADER sentiment analysis tool, and filtered the list to species with a nonzero “positive” score. Then, I manually reviewed that list and excluded ones that didn’t fit what I was going for. In particular, I excluded species that were only flagged for including the term “great”/”greater” (very subjective of course, but to me, such names read in context as obviously referring to the birds’ size, and I wanted names that to a layperson feel more like complimentary descriptions), a bunch of swift species (since “swift” feels too situationally positive to me), and some herons that I have no idea why they were initially flagged in the first place.

Here's the full list of what I categorized as “happy” bird names (also available in Google Sheets here):

The South American numbers are heavily bolstered by my decision to include the various species of “brilliants”, which I was a bit on the fence about, since they are the only ones where the positive aspect is coming from the noun part of the name rather than the adjective. If you take out those names, South America drops to just 16 happily-named birds (still 2nd-most, but giving Australia a decisive lead), or 5.1 / thousand bird names when standardized (6th-most, just behind Eurasia).

This post was partially inspired by this post about fairywren species names and partially inspired by my observation that hummingbird species tend to have adorable fairy names. I originally wanted to look at whether tropical birds have more cheery names compared to non-tropical birds (with the expectation that hummingbird names would pump up those tropical numbers), but getting the “tropical” vs non classification was going to be a ridiculous amount of work with the data I could find, and hummingbirds ended up being a much smaller part of this list than I expected anyway, so my prediction that tropical regions have happier bird names likely wouldn’t have panned out regardless.

[sprinklecipher]

The Sprinkle Cipher

I came up with the ‘sprinkle’ part of my username in a pretty arbitrary way, but ever since I picked out the username, I’ve thought about what a sprinkle-based cipher might actually look like. Combining different types or colors of sprinkles seemed like the most logical approach, so I came up with a simple substitution encryption scheme that can encode letters using specific combinations of five different sprinkle types.

Each sprinkle type (1-5) could theoretically be any kind of sprinkle, although it would be best for each type to be as clearly distinct from the others as possible to reduce the possibility for confusion. The best application of this cipher would be to use different combinations of sprinkles on a set of cupcakes or cookies to encode the message (so each individual cupcake/cookie would correspond to one letter, based on which combination of sprinkles it had on it), but the same principal could be applied to other things as well.

Here's a chart depicting the sprinkle-combinations that are associated with each letter using my encryption scheme.

I assigned the sprinkle combinations to letters so that the most frequently occurring letters would only require one or two sprinkle types. With that in mind, here’s the chart again, but sorted to letter-frequency order:

To help visualize what it might actually look like to use a cipher like this, I wrote a script to make images of “cookies” with the appropriate combination of sprinkle types to correspond to a letter. For this visualization, I went with pink, blue, red, lavender, and dark purple sprinkle colors to represent the respective sprinkle types, but, again, the specific kind of sprinkles can be varied. The resulting “cookie” pictures may be ugly MS paint-looking abominations, but I think they convey the general idea well enough. Here’s an idea of how the cookie-alphabet would look:

Letters A-O

Letters P - Z

And here’s an example of the cipher being applied to form a message:

I probably could have selected better colors, but I think the proof-of-concept is promising enough that I could see actually using this IRL at least once (although I recognize that that position is very much a “me” thing).

In conclusion, here’s my 100% objective evaluation of this new encryption method:

Pros of the sprinkle cipher:

Cute

Potentially delicious

Plausible deniability—the fact that there’s an encoded message at all is not obvious (see steganography for more on this kind of thing)

Can be used to wish your weird cryptography friend a happy birthday in a way that they will appreciate

Great way to passive-aggressively vent frustration towards people you dislike but have reason to provide food for. You could encode a snarky message on cupcakes for a potluck attended by bad coworkers, for example

Cons of the sprinkle cipher:

Poor communication potential. Difficult pattern to remember for both encoding/decoding purposes

Requires five visually distinct types of sprinkles to implement, which may be impractical (although counterpoint: sprinkle shakers that have 6 different sprinkle types are not all that uncommon)

Possible message length may be limited by the number of cookies/cupcakes/etc. that you are able to bake for the occasion

If your bad coworkers begin to suspect that you have taken out your frustrations on them via the cupcakes you brought to the potluck, they will probably not consider that you have done so using a sprinkle-based substitution cipher and may instead believe that you did something more serious, like spike the cupcakes with laxatives. This could cause problems for you