26 / APR / 2022

Here's a fun fact I've never shared on this site: I'm a DJ for my uni's radio station! It's actually really fun, and believe it or not, it's basically the highlight of every week for me. My show's called "Odes to Obscurities," and as you can probably guess, I basically play lesser-known music from obscure artists. Admittedly, some songs I play aren't really that obscure, but the important thing is that they're obscure when put into the context of other songs on the radio. I'd wager that a majority of Net users know about Breakcore for example, but Joe Normie obviously hasn't even heard of it.

Which leads me to the most recent installment of my radio DJ show. This week, I was up for nomination for DJ of the Week, and incidentally it happened to line up with the week where I planned and rehearsed a whole intro for the show. It's not the best performance ever, and I probably could have practiced it a few more times, but it's the best intro I've done on the radio so far.

As for the DJ of the Week competition... Well, I was really anxious about it. When I was up for nomination last semester, the polling system on the radio station's website seemed to be rigged against me. I told my family about it, and they said that I should have gotten at least 20 votes, but the site only showed about 11. Pretty odd, but I know it's not uncommon for people to pretend to support someone else when they really don't care or have the time. Besides, I was just running a generic radio show without the "obscurity" aspect, so it makes sense that no-one would have particularly cared about my show.

But this semester was different in the complete opposite way. When I first checked, I had 7 votes, while the leading competitor had 74 votes and second-place had 33. I decided to share the news around with some online friends and gave them the link to the station's website Somehow, some way... this happened within one hour.

No clue where these votes came from. Family? Probably. Friends? Likely. But I don't have this many people in my corner, I can tell you that much. Were people actually enjoying my show, and somehow their votes only came in within an hour? I don't think so. As it turned out, a close friend of mine decided to share the link with all of her friends as well, which would explain the sudden income of votes...

...it WOULD.

And this is where the plot thickens

And this was all in about 6 hours. Now, am I saying there was some sort of rig? Nah, that's kind of a petty accusation to make, but it is really strange. And then this happened in 2 days:

Are 2,700 people really listening to college radio and splitting the difference between two people? Why does a show that's been on the station longer than the other two have the least votes? And why is it being dwarfed by them? Why do I and Brianna have so many fucking votes out of nowhere? What the Hell is going on here?

I talked to a friend about it, and with a little snooping we found that the voting system is through a site called "EasyPolls." It's a free service and, from the looks of it, it doesn't seem to be a widely-used program. My guess is that the system is just glitched somehow. Maybe there's an error in the way it counts or registers votes, and the actual number is somehow skewed because of it.

Honestly? I want to believe that I got 1,400 votes in the end, but the more I think about it, the less I think it's legitimate. Do I deserve this award, as small as it is? Would I have won if it wasn't for a buggy system? I dunno.

But either way, I'd be lying if I said that I'm not happy with the result.

Here's a victory pic, featuring my new Foxhound patch:

Oh, yeah! The station also put out a recording of my most recent show. You can check it out here, if you want.

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