A long time ago on a random modders forum, I was a part of a very small contest to judge mods at the end of the year. No prizes, just kind of a honorary showcase post which I guess was considered cool at the time.

It essentially fell down to just me to play about ~6 entries over the course of the month and then post the rankings.

Well I was having dire internet and computer issues at the time. My internet was bad but my average was suddenly dragging at 0.5kb/s on average and I had what I later learned was a failing HDD. I kept thinking it would eventually get better but it didn’t. I barely got a single mod downloaded.

Now the dumb part: Rather than be a sane person and admit I was having technical issues and would have to hand it over to someone else (which I was already running up on the deadline, leaving anyone I handed it to unable to complete it before then), but instead I tried to power through.

I kept expecting the internet to magically get better and then use the power of last minute energy to tackle it. When the magic never happened, at the last minute I simply ranked the mods based on vibe with the only one I played being in the number one spot.

No one seemed to dispute it until one contestant saw his entry didn’t have a single download and immediately figured out I never played it. Then it all came into question and soon enough the site Admins banned me from being a judge and canceled the whole thing.

That was the last contest the forum hosted until it ended up folding a year or two later.