Who Is Mr. Darkside?

I don’t know what to say.

But I know what to sing.

If the above confused you, let’s catch you up.

The 2000’s Bangers Bracket has been the subject of much drama. On its very first day, the bracket was assaulted by an unknown collection of seeming Train fans spamming the Google Form. On its very last day, the bracket was assaulted by presumably the same people buying robot votes on Instagram. Then, in the comments to our post about the Instagram attack, the perpetrator(s) appeared, calling themselves Mr. Darkside.

What do we know about them? Well, taking them at their word:

• They seem to hate Mr. Brightside. Really do not like that song. Expended a lot of energy, a lot of time, and a little bit of money to make that clear.
• They may be more than one person.
• They also liked 1985 and cast quite a few votes for that (something I couldn’t cover during the three-question Q&A in the comments yesterday, and was more in aligment with because that song rocks).
• They call me Mr. Crow.
• They and I are one degree of separation apart, and they say “we both swim in the same clear waters,” which could be a reference to my hometown, Crystal Lake; my Sunday afternoon leisure this weekend, swimming at Barton Springs here in Austin; or maybe something else, like the subset of Twitter that tweets about crows.
• They are not a threat to any of us at The Barking Crow on a personal level, nor do they intend to attack future brackets.

That leaves a lot unknown. A tormenting amount. Our air conditioning wasn’t working last night and Fargo was panting and I spent multiple hours pacing the house, letting Fargo in and out, trying to fix the thermostat and trying to figure out who Mr. Darkside is. I stood outside under a yellow light, whispering at my dog to pee. I sat on the edge of the bed, cracked windows not cooling the room, praying for relief. My mind is in tatters. Mr. Darkside has won. I am a wreck.

There are other mysterious elements at play: A ghost-ish Instagram account lurking in our story views, some failed attempted back-channel communications (I tried emailing them Train lyrics in the hopes to get a response), the questions of how much they paid for the Instagram bots, and other things which we will keep private in case someone claims responsibility and we want to test them to see if they’re really the perpetrator. We don’t even know if Mr. Darkside from the comments is Mr. Darkside from real life. We are bewildered. And again, tormented.

But we press on. We pick ourselves up. We move forward. Hoping, just hoping, that Mr. Darkside really is the friend they claim to be, and merely very much opposed to The Killers’ fifth or sixth-best song. Will we stop trying to identify them? No. Do I need to start living my life again alongside that search in order to avoid descending into madness? Yes.

The results from yesterday, having enforced the Be Cool rule and cast Google Form votes ourselves to even out the 100 bot votes on Instagram and the thousand or so spam votes on the Google Form (determined to be spam by timestamp sequencing):

“Everytime We Touch” by Cascada defeats “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers, 1,462-1,434

Instagram: Everytime We Touch 149, Mr. Brightside 46
Twitter: Everytime We Touch 32, Mr. Brightside 7
Google Form: Mr. Brightside 1,381, Everytime We Touch 1,281

The final determination, based on checking verified human votes, was that Everytime We Touch was the winner even without Mr. Darkside’s interference. Congratulations to Cascada. But congratulations as well to Mr. Darkside, who seems to have accomplished their goal of…I don’t know, proving a point?

Here’s the final bracket:

And here, as always, are The People’s Rankings, in which we take the different margins of victory/defeat and compare them against one another. It’s an imperfect way to stack things up, but it’s the best way we have of giving “Bye Bye Bye” its due for a solid performance that fell far short of the championship, and it enables us to lump all the brackets together into one big mess at the end of the summer in which the rankings mean just about nothing but we can say things like, Wow, Complicated and spaghettini—neck and neck.

See you tomorrow for the beginning of “Don’t Cancel Me, Bro!” – our bracket of who you least expect to be canceled.