80s v 90s

This is a stupid project I did in 2015. After I got in an argument with friends about movies, I used MATLAB to webscrape data off of IMDB to prove that 80s movies rule. Then I copy/pasted the .m file into a document, and put the rendered plots into the document to make a psuedo-notebook, like the cool kids who used Mathematica got to play with.

Here’s what I learned:

1. I was wrong, so wrong about the 80s being best.
2. A friend told me that I was an idiot to use MATLAB for this, and I should really look into this python & Jupyter notebooks stuff.
3. Manually configuring a webscraper is damned hard. Dedicated tools like Beautifulsoup are soooo nice!

If you want, the .m/.mat files are in this Github repo.

If for some reason the embedded pdf viewer above doesn’t work for you, just go ahead and click through to be awfully amused and saddened that someone wasted their time with this