An interesting realization from this video is that Illuminaughty and James Somerton are both creators who I watched, but failed to keep my attention. As you pointed out, they’re boring, but as a viewer who doesn’t know it’s plagiarism, you can’t tell exactly why. The subjects they present are so eyecatching and suggest an interesting story, but when you watch the videos, they feel like soulless lectures. This is why creatives are so important. It SHOWS when people who aren’t writers try to create things for engagement. They don’t understand the amount of effort that goes into writing a compelling story.
This is such a good observation! I was kind of feeling this myself but wasnt sure how to put it into words. They're both creators that would occasionally pop up in my recommendations and I'd watch a bit of their stuff, but was never really interested or impressed enough to actively watch anything else of theirs. You can definitely feel their lack of actual passion in their "craft".
This is so freaking interesting to read because I went through the exact same thing I subscribed to Illuminaughty cause I found out about her through one topic and the click but never managed to finish one of her videos, and I found Somerton because I basically wanted more contrapoints content and got a little bored from it when I realized that wasn't quite what I would get, but I could never put my finger on why their videos never resonated with me, always attributed it to my ADHD...
@@sailorncho I had basically the same arc as you! Subbed to James Somerton for about a year and I noticed I was only watching the videos about halfway before moving on. I assumed it was my ADHD but looking back, it’s odd that I assumed that when far longer videos have held my attention the entire time, and I usually go back to videos that were genuinely compelling. I feel like when creators are actually passionate about what they’re talking about, they’ll relay the information in a way where they replicate the emotions they felt while discovering every facet of information. The creators that plagiarize, on the other hand, are more focused on the way that THEY look as writers.
I made a similar comment about Iiliminaughtii. At first I thought it would be interesting content to listen to while working on stuff, but then it just seemed so impersonal. I'm not saying I felt the lack of engagement, it just seemed pretty flat to me.
Literally same. I'd tried a few Illumi vids just as they popped up on play next (usually after me watching creators like Atrocity Guide), and despite it being similar, interesting content, I just found the delivery so dry and the video feeling weirdly stilted in comparison to similar content. Meanwhile I subbed to James after watching a few vids of his a year or so back, i found the content pretty interesting, but every time I tried to go back to his vids after the first few, I had the same problem again; the videos felt weird, and his delivery was dry and weirdly over dramatic, like he was trying to add something that wasn't there. I especially didn't like some of the side comments he made (like the misogyny and weird jabs at lesbians), funny to learn that was the only content he wrote himself. Figures. Real proof right there that reading content that's not your own, ie audiobooks, is a genuinely hard skill and the creatives who can do it successfully are skilled as all heck.
hello, all--and thanks for having my back, I very much appreciate it. Harris, I very much appreciate your plans to divvy out whatever funds you may accumulate from this video with those who you mention that have been plagiarized. It's an incredibly honorable thing to do. Please take whatever might be my portion of those funds and divide that up among the rest. I am doing fine financially, and would rather have the money sent to those who may truly need it. (And, if anything, the spread of this video will likely spur sales of "Tinker Belles and Evil Queens"!). All the best
I'm genuinely so sorry for your book, you were directly stolen from and used for profit and I can't begin to muster up the words for why that's wrong. Currently going through a rough patch, financially, but I'd very much like to read Tinker Belles and Evil Queens when I can. I'd love to hear your insight, from you. Here's hoping this changes how we engage with media.
Hi as a transwoman I love seeing queer authors get recognition. Thank you! And thank you for posting this here! It's nice to see that we queer people aren't alone! Also I might possibly order your book but I already have a lot to read. Regardless I'm glad that these authors are getting recognition! At the least this is a good reading list!
I think I think i saw that one, actually. It was one of the many sources i used in my 4 hour long plagiarism documentary. There was this annoying stuff in the corner i had to blur out though
This is like my 4th watch and somehow I still keep mistaking "the sad story of rocket raccoon, the drunk who knew batman's identity, after homelander lost his mind" is one sentence
lol why on earth would you watch this cringe fest even one time, let alone multiple times. Hes incapable of forming a single argument. He makes a claim, then moves on before he proves or explains it. This is just an opinion piece with literally no evidence or explanation to back up any of it. This is one of the best examples of an inferiority complex on the internet. So are all his fans honestly. Seek therapy. Also I posted a video explaining.
yeah! if you see this, hbo: it's never felt like a weird phrase to me at all, even used so frequently. it comes off as a natural expressive hallmark of your style. (if you'll let me cook) it gives the impression you're just passively observing and drawing connections along with us as you present info, always returning the personal reaction to the public story unfolding; you leave your agency in the way you investigate and uncover info, and the way you reflect on the implications of people's behaviour, but you let the facts and patterns of people's behaviour just 'turn out'. I think people sometimes overemphasise style, when most of us are really craving substance, idk. I often ramble insufferably (as above) and I get that as a public creator you're concerned with being easy to parse, but the real quality of good writing is being able to convey your perspective in a connected way. hbomb comes off as a real conscientious, careful guy and that goes a long way imo. hm, makes me think, though - about the genre of 'video essays'. they don't generally have very good writing... obviously there are loads of dogshit video essayists, but even the 'good' (imo) ones aren't great at making cogent, connected points and theses. they're more loosely connected interesting observations and incomplete explorations; fodder for you to idly absorb. the tropes everyone makes fun of are exactly to do with this lol. careful composition that's reluctant to just make a clear point.
I'm in the middle of exam season as a university student and this has been oddly reassuring. My essays might be shit, but at least they're my, properly cited shit.
literally just turned in my 10 paged research paper 3 days ago and still feel it wasnt enough. Happy to know what I wrote was at least out of my own efforts update: my professor liked my paper so i passed the sem knowing ive done more for my own benefit than james somerton ever could 🎉🎊🥳
This! Like, I get all anxious about whether the sentence I wrote sounds maybe very slightly a bit like something else - I can't comprehend the audacity of these people!
So I was trying to find info on what ever happened to Telos Films and I wound up on wikitubia. At the bottom of Jame's page under trivia there is one thing. "He is Gay. [citation needed]" I don't know why but that is the funniest fucking thing I've seen all day.
this video was amazing for my mental health, because no matter how shitty i'm feeling and how strong the imposter syndrome is, i can at least look into the mirror and say with 110% confidence that i'm not james somerton
That’s a really great insight! I usually rewatch the Spider-Verse movies to help with my imposter syndrome, but they haven’t been that much help lately.
I rewatch this video sometimes and every time I wonder the exact same thing! I'm so curious whether she was literally just listening to the documentary and repeating it into her microphone? Or if she'd watched it multiple times beforehand and did this subconsciously? oddly fascinating
I’m pretty sure Hbomb edited the clips to synchronise them and highlight how similar they are. No shade to him - it’s a very good way to show that Illuminaughti copied Deer verbatim - but I sincerely doubt the two had the exact same cadence and speed.
@@Halucygeno yeah there were definitely certain pauses that were edited in by Hbomb just to match them for the video, but also her tone and cadence was very similar in a lot of ways too. it's likely that she was subconsciously doing it since she was just remembering what Deer said
What really strikes me is how much she clearly doesn't know what she's talking about. She is constantly fumbling over her words, because she's just reading from a script she didn't write.
I used to be subscribed to James Somerton. During one of the few times he admitted that he "accidentally" plagiarized a chapter from a book, I wrote a comment wondering how exactly someone accidentally copies an entire chapter without realizing it. I will never forget what happened next. One of his fans replied to me and asked, "What? Do you want to spank his willy?" I think about that comment often.
The funny thing about 'Man in a cave' is that if he had made a collaboration with the author to animate the story, everyone would have enjoyed it all the same.
I don't get this hate though. He's saying IH stole the article and reworded, but also that IH got stuff wrong even though it was in the thing IH was stealing from. Doesn't make sense. But I think this is heating up, one of these two may fall
The "I'm not an academic, I don't know the proper way of citing a reference" when you have a college degree is bewildering to me. The first time I went to college it was drilled into me over and over again the importance of citations, and how to do them. And I was a computer science major, not, like, english or history.
Exactly. Even if you (JS) don’t have whatever writing handbook you had to buy for school still in a box somewhere, you know it exists. Heck, you know citations are a thing because they are the things you would have to delete when copying Wikipedia articles into your script.
Heck, it isn't uncommon for it to be a thing in high school either. And the very fact that one knows the phrase 'citing a reference' means knowing in broad strokes about the concept and thus what to google, if nothing else.
@@PhotonBeastI learned about and was told that bad stuff would happen if you plagiarized in middle school, hell in the 6th goddamn grade. Granted, it was a very light sort of "If you plagiarize you can get in legal trouble and lose money" in a very simplified way for 12 year olds, but *still*, c'mon man it aint hard to understand
The blaming of "women" from his comment section seems like the classic discrimination spiral: Someone does something you don't like -> assume they belong to a group you don't like -> hate that group more -> assume they'd do worse things -> repeat with worse things. If shown to be wrong it is chalked up to being an incident/bad apple in another group. If coincidentally true it is taken as proof of the pattern. Really sad.
The lack of self-awareness of an hbomberguy fan saying this is hilarious. You all have zero-self esteem, to you misogynists, women are children that need to be babied and can do no wrong. If I mention; -Donna Hylton is a rapist and a torture worshiped by feminists -most common use of the no true scotman fallacy is to excuse feminists; 2nd wave, 3rd wave, terfs, etc. -in the UK men cannot be legally raped, this is such an extreme form of oppression that no woman in any first world country experiences You'd all be very, very upset. Go into a mentally ill spiral, assuming I'm a conservative, because I'm not some cringe lord with an inferiority complex like you.
Little "five hours later" update: James nuked his discord and Twitter, and then posted on Patreon that he was under attack again for "Something we already cleared up". A good chunk of his patrons were not pleased.
underrated gag in this video is hbomb labelling the sections with roman numerals but pronouncing them all "eee", making it utterly incomprehensible to anyone listening to this in the background
"What teenage girl did this to you in highschool James, and why are you inserting fanfiction about her into an article you stole instead of going to therapy?" is easily my favourite quote of this entire video
I rewatched this with my mother and she had this to say, "I just want to send him a sweater so he doesn't have to wear that fucking ugly jacket anymore, its distracting and I just want to rip the sleeve off... but other than that he was very smart!"
I can't believe straight white women held poor James at gunpoint and made him plagiarize a ton of stuff and make up a bunch of bullshit and present it as historical facts 😭😭😭
this is a small thing but James calling the show “Arthur” instead of “Merlin” more than once is even more evidence that he’s never seen it bc absolutely no one who has seen the show would think of Arthur as the main character. wild behavior all around from that man
That was especially egregious. Like, I have never seen a single episode of Merlin, but I was on Tumblr in the 2010s, so I'm vaguely familiar with its broad strokes. I can't imagine anyone who did any kind of looking into the show to make that kind of mistake
@@fishtank39 right lol never watched the show either but grew up on tumblr seeing fangirls of it and even I know how ridiculous it is to have called it Arthur
One of my favorite things about this video is the shot at 2:30 when Harry sets down a copy of Analog on top of some other books, those books foreshadowing the instances of plagiarism he'll be talking about
I think you deliberately added jokes referencing your sexuality to the video to make sure your bisexuality was established to the viewer ahead of time. I didn't realize you were bi until you made those jokes and I thought to myself "huh. Is he gay?" Well done, real subtle, no joke. Makes the clear anger and frustration you feel about James Somerton feel even more 'real,' somehow.
yeah lol I only realized he was bi when he straight up said it. then when i rewatched this video for the second time and then the first jokes made a lot more sense
@@FirstnameLastname-bn4gv not sure why you thought that other than just, being homophobic? he also didn't say that he would have sex with him, he said Luke looked like a "fuckable twink" i.e. that he is effeminate. this was intended to be jokingly pushing back at Luke telling Hbomb to get testosterone shots.
@@larissabrglum3856 He definetly does, Brian Deer contacted Kat(Hbomber's producer) after the video to thank them for making the video and how thanks to them his book had gotten more sales.
Not sure if it's better or worse that most business majors (not sure where he graduated from) actually do take ethics classes as part of the degree program.
"But where did the mistaken weight for the rock come from!?" lol ... I am genuinely curious though. Dear hbomberguy, please make a follow up video if you find out, thanks.
@@SnakebitSTIif you convert pounds (the currency, not weight) to dollars, you get 33. This is information that I definitely found out myself and didn't plagiarise from another comment that I can't find anymore.
HBomberguy is the little Red Riding Hood, his videos are the basket for granny (We are granny). His one braincell is the Wolf saying "Hey wouldn't granny like some of those nice flowers over on the meadow?". As he picks one, he finds another, prettier one deeper in the woods. Granny must have this flower! And there! Another one just a bit further in... (Kat might be the hunter reeling everything in in the end)
Every time I watch this again it hits me that James couldn't even be bothered to define homosexuality in his own words. James, a gay man, couldn't even write a basic definition of his own sexuality off the top of his head. He can't even put into his own words what it means to him to be gay. He had to steal that from an encyclopedia instead. Astounding.
“James never did any work” Let’s be fair here, he did put the stolen work into a program and hit “export”. As Tommy Tallarico taught us, that’s a huge part of the creative process!
I mean, I really don't want to defend Tommy Tallarico, but at least he actually owned oof sound. He also owned Guinness records. (although he fabricated titles for all awards) James never REALLY owned anything in videos that made him famous. It was all stolen.
@@leileyaravencroftNot quite, the channel still technically remains, but it's been wiped of everything except its name. No videos, no community tab notes, not even a profile picture. I think he's also deleted or made private pretty much every bit of the rest of his online presence as well.
After watching this for the nth time now, i've come to realize how HBomb sprinkles in little elements of what James did throughout the other chapters. In the beginning setting up the book like how James did it with Disney Wars, any means necessary with Blaire, the weird fans with Internet Historian, weaponizing hate from Filip and a bunch of other stuff i don't remember yet. Very good story telling, connecting all his different points
The bit where Somerton is basically setting up his co-writer to take the fall for plagiarism allegations made me go from "this guy's an asshole" to "this guy is actually evil".
Genuine sociopath behavior, gradually developing a relationship with someone he always intended to ruin if things got hot. Watching him deliberately set Nick up whenever plagiarism was mentioned is chilling. I’m deeply glad HBomb went out of his way to show that Nick was going to be scapegoated so Somerton doesn’t get to play that card and Nick doesn’t get his career ruined.
@@naten1570 I'm glad this video is getting as much attention as it is, him & others must be held accountable. It is not simply about plagiarism, these people are beyond toxic - dangerous even
Hey, aside from the actual content of the video, fucking shout-out to the HBomb team to subtitle the entire 4 hour video before release. I appreciate you, you're the best, that seems really really hard and you've done a great job ❤️
not only that, but the subtitles actually sometimes move out of the way of content, something youtube doesnt let you do from their editor edit 2: no they aren't. scroll down for the Fact Check edit: the subtitles are AI. check 3:32:41
@@CringePoop oh shit that was a typo, gonna upload a version with a couple corrections but we somehow missed this!! Our subtitler Kaylyn basically spent the week on this and I'm pretty sure she pulled an all nighter finishing this one (it's our fault because we did new edits, but we got subtitles up the day of I believe??) so I think she deserves the kudos. She even figured out how to do the fancy ttml subtitles that you need to move the text around the screen a little while back (and make it different colors apparently, but we're not doing that). There is NO way AI would be able to do these cool subtitles and I demand that you take that back. 😤
I plagiarized like this once. The difference is I was in 4th grade and it was for a report on sharks. I failed that assignment. Learned my lesson real quick.
In Denmark before submitting any high school exam you literally have to sign a legal document stating that this is all your original work and that you agree to be expelled if it isn't.
I met people who were upperclassmen in college who didn't understand that if they did not include in-text citations (which are VERY EASY TO INCLUDE, *especially* in APA style), they were effectively plagiarizing. The amount of peer-reviewing I did where that was an issue was astounding.
"Repackaging someone else's work and selling it as your own" is a phrase that really shows why people who do this don't think it's unusual or illegitimate to do. We live in an age of dropshipping. There are people who consider selling random garbage (products they otherwise have nothing to do with) through a tiktok shop to be a proper career, and this youtube plagiarism is just that, but with content.
With the death of Henry Kissinger, the last seal on Harris Hbomberguy’s power has broken and he has finally achieved his ultimate form: the 4-hour video essay
I listen to a podcasts called Behind the Bastards that talks about the very worst people of history and I like it a lot, but going there and being the show it is you just know the people there are the scum of the earth, it's not a slow discovery with a twist like hbomb's videos, but still fun to me. Most have one or two parts. Kissinger has SIX parts. So I went to their reddit sub the day Kissinger died and I was not disappointed lol fuck that guy
@@14ElmStreet28He needs to post the clips in full, to make an example out of them. He's criticizing Blair for not showing his full tweet video after all, if he turned around and went "Oh btw Internet Historian copied a whole article just trust me I won't show clips just trust me bro" he'd be a hypocrite
@@singulariteas i could tell instantly from her voice, they all have the same soulless, disconnected, anti-social drawl. i could perceive more empathy in the sound of a dial-up modem. EDIT: I understand having a dynamic and/or monotone voice doesn't correlate with empathy, but I never said she had a "monotone" voice, and never would have used that word, for the exact reasons people are apparently upset about ("soulless, disconnected, anti-social drawl" is an extremely specific kind of monotone, if anything, but in my mind a landlord voice isn't even necessarily monotone) ..I'm on the spectrum somewhere myself, not all of us have "monotone" voices - me thinking she sounds like a landlord really shouldn't be taken as an attack on fellow neurodivergents... I know a few that not only don't have monotone voices, but are fantastic orators.
Yeah his line "I took it from a highlight reel, y'know, to highlight the queerness" cracks me up every time cause like, no, James, that's not how that works-
Right? Like, even a highlight reel requires watching the show (or whatever) and snipping out the parts you like or want to use. Saying that a highlight reel snipped out clips not from the show itself but from another video just means that the highlight reel is ALSO doing a plagiarism and thus one is doing a second degree plagiarism by ignorance when using the highlight reel. But even THEN, if you KNOW that you're grapping from a highlight reel.... why not just go to source itself and grab your own clips that will probably fit whatever point you're trying to make better? Like, maybe if you were using an official highlight reel as a short hand for a point eg. 'this is what the show thinks is important', sort of way, but even then presumably, you'd want to cite that it's an official highlight reel in order to make your case. It seems to go back to the other excuse he seems to use a lot which is "Well, I didn't have time [and so I didn't want to/have to/didn't plan for it over and over and over again]" as if even that bit of work was too much. But deeper still... no one was forcing him to post videos that fast; he's has total control over his own schedule. Particularly at the scale of audience that he has/had, as Harry notes, even with expenses like a co-writer and the like, he's not really under the kind of time pressure of having to post a video every week or whatever.
"I love knowing that my audience ACTUALLY reads books. Thank you so much" You know, the bar isn't exactly high, yet it makes me so happy to hear it said in this way
“There’s a little bit of nothing in all of us, and we’d all like to fill it with something” goes incredibly hard, but I’m too paranoid to believe HBomb wrote it himself at this point, so I’d like to thank Tommy Tallarico for the creation of this line and every other line in the script 🙏
I'm not going to lie, I'm a little sad that he didn't plagiarize that from someone else (or himself in an earlier blog post or something). It seems like the kinda thing he would do as a goof.
(big ass comment incoming) Admittedly, it was a struggle to get through this video, because plagiarism/theft like James's deeply depresses me. I'm an artist who pours years' worth -- a _lifetime's_ worth -- of practice, character development, and narrative into what I create, and the thought of someone just snapping it up, using it as their own, and _getting paid_ while I rot in the dark unsettles me, and knowing that serial plagiarizers are out there collecting success after success, paycheck after paycheck, off the backs of numerous already-relatively-disenfranchised parties... ugh. UGH. On the plus side, don't worry too much about having created a "drama" video. That's not what this is -- this is a goddamn essay. A thoroughly, thoughtfully researched masterpiece. And, not only did you justifiably roast the absolute shit out of someone who needs his false success ripped away from him, but you did things drama channels often don't: 1. You went way out of your way to contact people you didn't even injure, both in search of truth for yourself (and your audience), and search of justice and restitution for them. 2. You platformed many other unmentioned or barely referenced queer creators. 3. You pointed out systemic weaknesses of technology and human behavior itself that went beyond just obliterating James. 4. You offered courses of action -- for plagiarizers, for the plagiarized, for unwitting plagiarizer audiences, and for platforms who may host plagiarizers. You didn’t just stamp someone into the dirt to point, laugh at, and have your audience join you in the schadenfreude; you did so much more. If James represents the dark pit of despair threatening to consume my soul, then someone as (apparently) well-intentioned, well-informed, and well-researched as you represents a tiny but bright spark of hope. Thank you.
This resonates deeply with me as well, especially with how it seems like grifting becomes more and more lucrative and accepted with each passing day. The only way I was able to continue attempting to create was to surrender to the fact that I would probably never make any real money off of my passion. I shouldn't have to, but that's the state of the world and the reality of trying to wedge capital into every single crevice of life. It's depressing in ways I don't have words for.
"I included Becky Abertalli in a section of straight authors but I never *said* she was straight" if only there was a concept describing audiovisual mediums that create a link between two ideas by placing them in close proximity without ever having to explicitly mention the link. Such as cutting from a person's intense gaze to a plate of delicious food back to the person. We could call it "structuralist film theory"; maybe James could talk about it in a video
Hey I doubt you will read this @hbomberguy but after watching until the end of this video I thought you might like to know that your video on the vaccine/autism scare inspired me to create a workshop at my job. I work in a neurodevelopmental research setting, and noticed that our interns didn't always know how to spot bad science. You said something to the effect of "this paper is an example of what not to do". I agree, and so did my supervisor and the head of the internship program and we have used Andy as an example of poor scientific literature. Reading (and tearing apart) his "early report" helps us teach undergrads how to spot problems in science articles.
my dad, a lecturer, caught me plagiarising in yr3. He made me rewrite my entire Tudors project from scratch. My point is that a 7 year old is held to higher standards than these bozos.
The rapid and constant cutting between your emotional performance and James Somerton's monotone lecturing was giving me actual whiplash. The difference in your intonations is monumental.
James has a very punchable voice. I inadvertently watched one of his videos (the one about killing stalking I think) and didn't finish it because I kept thinking that the way he was speaking was really condescending. Also, I noted at the time that he used the word "queer" and "LGBTQ" waaaaay too much which is funny in heinsight.
Blair does it too. I used to be a fan but stopped watching her a long time ago, long before this. (It was actually related to something on Sad Milk I believe? I NEED to source the info before I repeat it, though.) And hearing how monotone she is now is very jarring after getting to better essayists.
You can just HEAR how extremely little James cares and knows about whatever he's talking about, the most emotion he shows is either when he's trying to defend himself, or when he's complaining about women.
So far, after this video came out, James Somerton has disabled comments on his youtube channel entirely, deactivated his twitter account, privated his instagram, deleted his patreon discord server, and nuked the patreon too, after first making 2 posts there trying to explain/avoid responsibility/apologize, neither of which was well received by his patrons. Totally normal things for an innocent person to do, so I am sure this is all just a big misunderstanding :)
@@attackofveganpotatoes1074 I have the second one still open in a tab, first one was deleted before I had the chance to see it live but can be found floating around in tumblr at least if you happen to use that. Anyway, the second post goes as follows: " Hi everyone. I wanted to say that I’m very sorry. I’m in a terrible headspace right now so I don’t want to post anything too long because I don’t know where my brain will lead me. But I will say something more extensive once I’ve prepared myself emotionally. I know people want an immediate, detailed response but I’ve never found immediate responses to anything to be as fair and honest as they could be. Always more driven more by emotion than anything else. I will say more soon, though. But for now, I want to apologize. I’m heartbroken that I’ve lost your trust and just hope that someday, with a lot of work, I can get it back. " full credit to Mr. Somerton here, assuming he didn't plagiarize that too
@@attackofveganpotatoes1074 First one basically said Harry was trudging up old drama for clout and that the community is stronger than this. Patrons saw through that one. The second post admitted that he'd made some "mistakes", and that he'd be able to win everyone's trust back. They saw through that one also.
For everyone wondering why just hearing somerton's voice after all this sends you into a frothing rage, it's the revelation that he hasn't done *anything* to earn that condescending, 'bored professor' tone he used for his channel. You are being talked down to by an *_idiot_* wearing the wit of others as an ill-fitting costume. And he made _bank_ doing it, which everyone has a right to be pissed about. Especially the people who he kept tricking into paying him to fail to make a movie, and the author who unwittingly paid him to recite her ripped off material. I hope this weasel in a turtleneck went into hiding. P.S.- I apologize to weasels and the people who admire them for this unfair and insulting comparison
Yeah the guy scammed people with promising creating a web series or something similar that included ace representation but still to this day has not delivered anything for it. Not to mention how acephobic he is 💀
It's hard to tell for sure, because this video was the first time I ever heard of Somerton, but I'm pretty confident that I would hate his demeanor even without the context. He's not even "bored professor", he's like more... You know when people make fun of snobby aristocrat types, with a pretend-wineglass in one hand, talking real theatrically, putting the stress on all the wrong words? That's exactly what he does, but somehow unironically - like an actual parody of himself. This overt self-seriousness is what usually makes me not finish videos, even if I would normally enjoy both the topic and the writing.
There is a UA-cam video on “the books you’ll never be able to read”. Old books of the past, were often hodgepodge amalgamations of other works. That being said, however, there are clear reasons and examples of actual references. Knowledge can enable knowledge, or it can lead to further ignorance. Idk the whole thing is a farce. The whole James thing just upsets me.
On another rewatch, I just want to say, that as a lover of queer history and the written word, this was absolutely the right thing to do. This is important for the discourse surrounding queer art and unknown artists.
@@LDARit’s not really. unlike video essays, tests are a required thing everyone has to do and some kids are not and will never do well in a testing environment no matter how much they study lol
@@poppyonline4034 obviously not all kids who are struggling will cheat. but if a kid isn’t doing well on tests, and no amount of studying will change that (because the problem is systematic not individual), then they might cheat and it would be more understandable than plagiarism. because kids HAVE to take tests, but people DONT have to plagiarize.
James Somerton quoting the Encyclopedia Definition of “homosexuality” as part of his essay somehow transcends absurdity and almost eclipses into surrealism.
Never forget, when blair said she was getting a dog, people kept giving her advice. She told people to stop because shes too good a researcher to get scammed. Then immediately fell for an obvious puppy mill
I like how telling only one part of Blair’s scandal (“her” video style) makes everything else crystal clear. Why should I believe any of her arguments against the accusations when you’re just reciting documentaries word for word?
For some reason, every time it's time to clean my room, this comes up for background sound. I think it's the fourth time this year, so I guess I'll see you again in Spring.
for anyone wondering, james somerton has made every single video on his channel either unlisted/private, resulting in a loss of over 3.5 MILLION views in just a few days. he has also bled 68k subscribers in the same timreframe. This guy is among the worst on youtube plagiarists. glad you spoke out about it! edit: i think he deleted his channel LOL
The funniest thing with the Illuminaghtii and LegalEagle situation is the fact that she tried to accuse a law firm out of everyone on UA-cam, and cited crap evidence. Yikes
It's wild that she got away with not only so much plagiarism, but also all the abuse of people in her personal life and ironically shady capitalist efforts she managed, all unravelling because she decided to go after. A. Lawyer.
It was also such a hilarious non-issue too. Like girl, no, they did not steal your extremely basic visual technique and theirs looks slightly different!
Right? I watch Legal Eagle regularly. I have no idea what kind of person he is IRL, but he is one of the last people I'd suspect of UA-cam plagiarism. If he did something like that and got caught, it wouldn't just affect his UA-cam career, it would undoubtedly have a huge impact on his legal practice as well. People do dumb shit sometimes but plagiarism is an act of either laziness or desperation and Legal Eagle doesn't strike me as either.
I love how whenever I come back to rewatch this video I get not only the hbomberguy goodness, I also get to read the new comments and be updated on whatever shit is going on with James Somorton now.
its insane that every time theres a new, more insane devlopment. excited to learn he never even went to film school or somthing. or that he has a secret wife
@@xyrissavage4983 Mores likely, his secret wife went to film school. Also, his secret wife doesn't actually live with him since she's married to someone else. He just likes her relationship with her spouse and ya know, he doesn't have the time to cultivate a relationship. But that's okay, he says he bases his marriage on hers so, that's fine.
I don't think there's been any developments since the faked death while posting other people's porn on twitter thing. I wonder how he's going to top that.
@@mizushimoFor everyone's sake - even his - I hope he doesn't top that. While admittedly, the drama is amusing and karmic, at the end of the day, we can spent our energy and attention on more positive things while he can fade into history or find a way to become a better person and actually help who he claimed he was helping.
James Somerton: "I'm going to demonstrate how queer women have it easier in society by taking credit for a queer woman's work and SOMEHOW getting more attention for it somehow."
It's just misogyny, it's very common with male homosexuals for a whole laundry list of both traumatic and vane motivations. He probably thinks so little of women that he doesn't care that, that's what he's doing.
bro they do have it easier. Than _anyone_ You are literally crusading for them right now and don't even fuckn know it. Most demographics don't, in fact have an army of citizens protecting them from the basic social accountability the rest of society is held to.
@@ChadDidNothingWrong is it really easier to believe that queer people, a people that have been oppressed throughout most of recorded history, are now shadow puppeting society for their army so that they have it better than ANYONE else. OR the people that have held the dominant power throughout most of recent history have been making everyone else's lives worse for their own personal gain using their literal armies that they currently have right now
Opening a nearly 4 hour essay with a quote that includes the sentence "Tell us the story, briefly." is definitely one of the narrative choices of all time.
One of the _best_ narrative choices of all time. "The X of all time" implies that it's mediocre, like how people described Mobius as "the movie ever/of all time". Not being hateful, just letting you know
Yes! It’s also really funny in context too since it’s being said to Harlan Ellison. The man’s a legit great writer but he’s definitely prone to using 5 times more words than he needs to. That interviewer knew what they were doing.
When Cinemassacre tried to say it was 'accidental plagiarism', that just made me laugh. There's no such thing as 'accidental' plagiarism. It's either plagiarism, or it isn't, regardless of intention. I was once pulled up for plagiarism in one of my history papers because I had simply forgotten to reference the original work, event the professor knew it was a simple accident and there was no malice but it doesn't matter. Still plagiarism.
plagiarists getting facts wrong feels like they're getting a couple questions on the test wrong on purpose so the teacher doesn't think they're cheating
Or it is their version of Paper Towns, so they will know when someone plagiarizes them, because if Illuminati is an example, they REALLY don’t like people stealing the things they stole.
It’s absolutely insane to me how drastically Somerton’s tone shifts when he’s talking about women. The way he goes from the Snooty College Professor voice to sounding so vindictive and angry would be comedic if it wasn’t so damn disturbing. Literal cartoon villain behavior.
The way he is so fucking smug in his videos like “of course there’s quotes in it nyuhh” and without skipping a beat goes to this sad “if you want to unsubscribe from me for missing a source that’s okay 🥺” is insane
It's sad, too. I appreciate my gay friends because I can have safe, real friendships and community with them without the constant bs you get around the straights. So to realize just how deeply some of them still internalize misogyny has been hard. Some gay men still see women as sex objects, just sex objects they don't WANT and therefore worthless. Which is just the same way straight men treat women they aren't attracted to anyway. They aren't interested in a woman's perspective or opinion because it's not coming from someone they value in that way. I am lucky that a good number of my friends are still very cool people who have avoided this sort of energy, but I've definitely caught a lot of misogyny and misogynoir from some folks in the community.
i just love the adding of "white" in front of it as if it was a) believable in any way that he doesn't feel this way ab non white women too and b) that even if that were the case, it would somehow be less misogynistic? like dude you're also white don't appropriate genuine criticisms of poc people for your irrational hatred of women
Imagine, you're an online content creator, someone you know sends you a UA-cam link, "OMG you're in this video" you click on it, it's an hbomber guy video, it's 4 hours long
That's what happened to James Somerton and it was only 2 hours in and people who are watching are still in the process on watching it. He quickly denied it by saying that it was old accusations that was already resolved (in his eyes). Of course after it finally finished he really had no defense and had to nuke his presence.
And then it turns out you're mentioned 40 minutes in as a tangential side to someone else he's exposing, and you feel alright, but then he says, "By the way, this other guy? We'll get back to him later!" The part about you starts at 2:35:07 and goes for 90 minutes.
My composition teacher played the entire Illuminaughti segment of this video in class today. So glad this video exists as a crash course on how plagiarism works and why it's bad. I love when teachers throw a bit of edutainment into their classes.
Y'know, I wonder if James Somerton will fall down the gay right wing influencer grifter hole because that's like the only scam he hasn't used and exploited yet.
Eh? As for now, he finally deleted his channel and has not made an obvious comeback yet. Besides judging on his personal belief, it clash with many typical right wing agenda anyway. Plus unless he live like fake socialite in real life, all the money he had from all the patreon + sponsorship + revenue from youtube is probably good for a long while.
This makes me so uncomfortable as someone who was a proofreader for a small manufacturing website. This kind of plagiarism was absolutely rampant and basically all articles about niche topics like steel manufacturing parts are ripped and awkwardly reworded from each other with no credit. And as soon as ChatGPT hit the market, articles were getting sent in with terrible inaccurate information. I’m glad to see SOMEBODY noting that plagiarizing text by swapping words around is still plagiarism, because when I tried to point out how prevalent plagiarism was among our writers, I felt like I was going insane. Edit: I got to hbomberguy's line "It genuinely makes me think I've traveled to an alternate dimension where plagiarism is fine!" and this is exactly how it felt trying to go to work at this place every day.
it's not that hard even to just make a mindmap of the article you would plagiarize and just rewrite the article based on that couple of days later. though in your case, are the writers used for that stuff just professional writers and not people who would actually know about the niche topics? I've noticed in parts of software industry that management will put """"writers"""" to write things, but they don't know anything about how the stuff they're writing the advert-documentation for - the attitude is just that you can't let the person who knows about the thing write about it because it's not their "role".
@@lasskinn474 I do think in lot of places that is the problem. Hire writer that is not familiar with the topic and ask them to write about it without giving them enough time to do full research and learn about the topic. What probably should be done is having the person, who is in the industry and understands how things work, cooperate with the writer where they give them information and writer composes it, in a digestible way, but that would cost more money and time and if noones cracking down on the plagiarism why would you bother?
@@lasskinn474 Oh yeah, we definitely hired """"writers."""" One of my most notable coworkers (all the writers worked remotely) insisted that he had a Master's in engineering, but his work was a huge mess that definitely seemed bound to the information in the articles I found by googling the words he used. Our articles were largely used for SEO purposes, to put us at the top of Google's search results, so being informative, clear, original, and even wholly factual was less of a priority than getting the keywords on the site. The suggestions I had for reducing plagiarism (pairing up different writers like tereza mentioned, or starting to credit sources at the bottom of pages) would have been too much time and effort.
Unfortunately, this happens all the time everywhere, and it's only going to get worse now. The second marketers realized that content marketing works (content marketing is when you produce content people actually want to consume, and then that indirectly drives people to whatever it is you sell), a giant content mill industry popped up that basically consists entirely of people slightly rewording reams of existing articles to use as the "content" in content marketing. Now that LLMs are a thing anyone can trivially use to generate as much text as they want, a lot of this industry is probably going to pivot to just doing that instead, which I guess in a twisted way is kind of better (at least if you're doing that, you're not just directly plagiarizing other people's work), but that also means the internet is about to be completely flooded by AI-generated slop.
what makes illuminaughtiis case funnier is that she has been well known to diss any creator who quotes from wikipedia and even criticized other people for not doing as much research as her, even though all she was doing was just copying wikipedia anyways… jesus christ
Blair being so cutthroat about Cruel World Happy Mind's bashful approach addressing potential plagiarism brought to her by a viewer was clearly not an authentic response but making an example of her because she knew she would not be the last.
Quite literally one of the best videos on UA-cam. It's also been suggested to me SO many times, that I must account for over200 watch hours, because I've woken up to the video in its final chapters no less than two DOZEN times. That being said, i have ONE critique; At 20:37 you said "this is the LITERAL definition of content, its like it got squeezed out of a Nintendo branded tube somewhere...." - and I'm so EXTREMELY disappointed that you didn't take this opportunity to INSTEAD say; " this is the LITERAL definition of content, its like it got EXTRUDED froma Nintendo branded tube somewhere..." What a missed opportunity. That is all. 🎉 Congrats 🎉I look forward to everything you create going forward. 🎉
James has used the "yt took down/demonitized my video bc its too queer" excuse so many times I almost feel the need to apologise to yt for believing them
I discovered Somerton when he did his "confessions of a HP fan" video. I though he was raw and authentic in that video, and soon after he cried he needed support because youtube monetization, followed by a thank you for the support and announcing a successful patreon. Good for him I thought. I stopped watching his videos soon after, because they rubbed me the wrong way with all the casual misogyny, judgemental tone and stiff, robotic format. Never knew about plagiarisms allegations until now. I'm really in shock, and even wondering if those words he said in the first video I watched of him are even his. Wondering if he can even articulate any idea about the things he supposedly cares about.
Dude, yes. After watching this, I honestly feel kind of stupid for not suspecting that there may have been actual issues going on behind the scenes beyond "youtube think gay = bad"
Naw that's like apologizing to "the guy who breaks vases" after someone blamed them for breaking your loved one's urn, when this one time it was actually them. Unless so many other cases have been misrepresented as well. That said, malicious reporting is a nigh impossible problem to solve.
@@dopaminecloud I would agree, but if someone has a penchance for lying then it is only natural they would not be believed; if someone said creepy things about women and a woman got sexually assaulted, then it is perfectly natural for the creep to be the main suspect. If James Somerton wrote that later accusations of plagiarism in his future videos were the result of homophobia, most of us would be inclined to not believe him. It is not tribalistic, it is the consequences of some entity's, in this case UA-cam's, shitty actions in the past against the LGBT community. If you have done terrible things or have acted in bad faith before, do not be surprised when people assume the worst of you. Of course, we should retain some measure of skepticism, but there is no need to apologize to UA-cam when they themselves are responsible for having acted in bad faith before. I would argue that is even more tribalistic to take the side of UA-cam to such an extent (Siding with one presidential candidate simply because they are not X), rather than in acknowledging this one exception to the rule and still acknowledge the rule.
Subscribing to someone’s Patreon out of admiration, only to discover they’ve stolen your work without giving you any credit, is an entirely new level of betrayal. It’s incredibly frustrating and disappointing!
Hbom exposed a guy so hard he faked his own death about it, only to have an alt account defend himself and eventually just reveal he's still alive. What a wild journey
@@paranormeow Honestly at this point it's just kinda funny. The dude can not help himself stealing from other people. From reviews and videos to nudes, none of it is original
oh, i read the _crap_ out of this. i think he doesn't understand what makes certain types of lighting work. it's like that ebert quote about the guy who overused the dutch angle, "he's learned from better films that sometimes directors tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why."
My boyfriend sent me this because I asked him for a UA-cam video (preferably long that I can listen to cause I'm at work) this made me realize, 1. How big of an issue this is but 2. How actually useful and accurate our writing teachers were when they said things they did. And if someone suddenly starts doing it, you can tell because when you're trying to copy what someone else, you start changing words which not only can change the whole meaning of the sentence, it'll start sounding weird because not only does everyone have their own writing voice, cadence, etc., but also you're gonna start changing words and sometimes not really understand what that word means and if it fits with the topic you're trying to talk about; and if it suddenly changes there's you're cue. Also, people seem to not convey the same kind of passion that the original creator(s) like it feels like a fake happy, or like the persons like "here's this incredibly boring info" kinda monotone talking, i think you said something along the lines of this, but it's very true. I told this to my bf as I got about an hour and a half through as of posting this, and with how thorough some teachers were in explaining how to do citations and the different methods of citing, It gives the same energy of the kids who just half assed it, or just didn't care. It really is a super easy concept, you find a piece of information, don't take it word for word but ALWAYS cite where you got your info, you always make either an index or an ORGANISED way of citing your sources that won't give your reader actual nightmares trying to find more about a subject, or fact checked it. All in all, plagiarism literally feels like sheer laziness and I agree with it's low-key, REALLY disrespectful. Especially if you "respect" said person, like no, if you respected them you wouldn't jack their stuff and try and get paid for the information they found, wrote, put out, especially when it's something they're actually passionate about
Blair’s argument that she isn’t a plagiarist falls apart completely when you realize that her essays are so tightly congested with other people’s work that she herself cannot be plagiarized - you can only plagiarize her “sources” by proxy
isn't it funni how when i plagiarise the entirety of those documentaries, it just happens to be entirely the same as her "original" script? 😦 wait what's happening? did brain deer plagiarise blair? 🤬 lol
There's a line in here that really sticks with me: "when someone tries to use language to imply what they did happened by magic, they make it pretty clear they're trying to deceive you." I keep coming back to it because someone speaking to me like that was the switch that flipped in my brain and made me realize I was in an abusive relationship. I know that's kind of heavy for the comment section, but it's been echoing in my brain since I first heard it. Really hit home. Anyway, thanks
yup. passive voice vs. active voice. it's really poor writing, too. "joe changed the lightbulb" vs. "the lightbulb was changed." "i threw your dead mom's porcelain music box against the wall" vs. "your music box broke." "we started arguing and i demanded to see your phone, and you wouldn't show me, so i beat the crap out of you" vs. "an altercation that arose from a verbal argument." like the fight was born spontaneously as opposed to an action that was taken. active voice claims the action in a very literal way, and it can be _deeply_ uncomfortable to have to describe things you're not proud of that way. i think a lot of people honestly don't realize they're doing that. i recently went through a phase where i watched a lot of circuit court cases, criminal misdemeanor cases, bond revocation hearings, sentencing hearings, parole hearings, etc. over the course of several months, i can think of 2 times the defendant/parole applicant used active voice and didn't externalize the blame at all. even when they're pleading guilty or trying to explain what they learned from victim awareness classes - they're physically in the process of admitting out loud to what they did - they still really struggle with it. they frequently try to share blame to make it easier on themselves. "i was in the wrong because i shouldn't have allowed myself to be in that situation." what situation? the one where your son had a super punchable face? it's a dance of evasiveness. it's "the incident." it's "what happened." it's "what we [my victim and i] did." it's "we were fighting. i agreed to take the blame because she's pregnant." they also like to frame the victim as being unreliable by including extraneous, unflattering details. combined with passive voice, this very successfully obfuscates the actor in the situation. "my wife and i were fighting because of her drinking problem." "we got into a fight because she was jealous of my coworker, she thinks i was flirting with her." this is _technically_ correct, so when their wife almost inevitably gets her hackles up about it, _she_ looks and feels like the unreasonable one. and in a reality where she _is_ the unreasonable one, she is the reason he was cited for a domestic assault, or whatever happened. (i'm thinking of a handful of specific cases, but women can be abusers and men can be victims. just for the record.) anyway! you were really insightful to realize that's what was happening - it's a word game - and i'm glad you got away from that person. you deserve control over your own reality.
I’ve also noticed another context in which that phrase applies: assault. Sexual or otherwise, you see a lot of language that reframes instances of assault as almost being a force of nature instead of a decision made by a person. This basically always leads to victim blaming in someway. “If you hadn’t worn that/walked there/gotten drunk/hung out with those people, then that wouldn’t have happened to you” no, what you mean to say is that “if I hadn’t done something wrong, then a person wouldn’t have made the decision to assault me” but you can’t say that because you don’t know if that’s true or not. People love to pretend that assault is predictable enough to avoid. Get flood insurance if you live in a tidal area. Dress modestly if you’re around men. One of these sentiments can help you avoid something tragic. The other is trying to convince you that somebody’s actions were done by magic.
it's still fucking wild to me how james unironically did the "they dont treat you like a friend, they treat you like an item" speech from the snapcube 06 dub
Watching any other video that talks about Internet Historian and the plagiarism, then go to the comment section. Holy Jesus it’s just a bunch of his fans coping and god-defending him. Some of their “reasons” include 1. He put animations in it so it’s transformative 2. Viewers don’t care if it’s ethical or not 3. He brought more attention to the story And this is why I had UA-cam never recommend me anything related to his channel ever again. He’s herding a cult. It’s sickening.
@@chud-of4yb I'm not sure a gay man ever said that, but "political lesbianism" is a thing in radical feminism and basically boils down to "I'm a lesbian because I hate men."
My heart sank when I realized he was gonna talk about James Somerton in this video. It sank even further after seeing just how bad his plagiarism and dishonesty was. Really loved "his" "work". Awful creator. Awful person.
I feel you on that. I actually said "oh no" out loud. I really don`t want all of this to be true but I am really glad that someone noticed it and told the whole truth
03:27:30 is this like the 3rd or 4th time Hbomb has randomly brought up a fictional white women victimization campaign? and weirdly including it as a joke when mentioning one of the few black creators in the space is peak white privilege and ignorance. What happened with Lindsey Ellis was bad hbomb we know you're angry about it but that doesn't give you the go-ahead to create this narrative that white women are under attack by queer and BIPOC liberals online it's disgusting.
You can add James Somerton's video on Our Flag Means Death to the plagiarism list. That was the one video of his I realized I had actually seen and enjoyed at the time since I'm a fan of the show. Did some very fun phrase googling for about ten minutes and found him plagiarizing at least two articles in Part Three of the video: "Gay seniors come out late, start second lifetime" by Matt Sedensky and "Coming Out Later in Life: A How-To Guide" by Nick Levine. Hilariously, after quoting Nick Levine’s piece verbatim for a while, he skips over the part where Levine praises “Love, Simon” for being a good mainstream piece of LGBTQ representation. I’m sure there’s a million more bits of plagiarism in that video alone but I’m not about to spend any more time looking, even though this was kinda fun to try for myself.
Hey, not sure if you use Reddit ever, but Kat (producer) started a thread on the Hbomb subreddit for people to report further plagiarism on. It might be a good idea to post your detective work there too if you’re able, as I’m betting Harry and Kat are going to have a hell of a time scrolling through comments on this video.
I haven’t watched a ton of his videos, but I was subscribed and really enjoyed this one. Glad the proper authors are getting some credit for it now and looking forward to looking more into them.
I was honestly got one of her popped up and it was about 'traditional builder exposed' and 'cutedodo' exposed. She looks real. Then she reappears again with drama on her video then gone to obscurity At least now I know why
I'm not sure what she expected, because taking a reputable lawyer to court (even if it's the court of public opinion) sounds like a great way to embarass yourself in the most expensive way possible.
@@brendaleelydon very. not to mention the effect in question was not that. and the editor only want to use the effect he asked (not the highlight or paper thing) for his own personal video. And lets pretend that he wanted to blatantly copy video effect. Was accusing his boss for plagiarizing on public forum the best way to do it? Doubly stupid when that person is a lawyer and triply stupid when you realize said lawyer specialize with copyright law.
I’ve no idea how my algorithm brought me to this, I normally just through long videos on to sleep too most nights, but jeez every time I woke up I scrolled back to where I remembered to catch up what I missed, honestly I’m saving this and I’ll watch it in full. New sub here !
“I didn’t think UA-cam videos could have souls but now I’ve experienced ones that don’t” is such an incredible line and so accurately describes such a specific feeling lmao
The combined voices of Brian Deer and Illuminaughty at 49:56 saying "and injected the stuff into pregnant goats" in unison was a religious experience for me
Second channel video HERE (finally):
ua-cam.com/video/403eGkWv4MA/v-deo.html
thank you burger guy
Lmao
Thanks Hbbomberguy
Thank you Harris Bomberguy
Nice. Looking forward to the donut in the next one.
An interesting realization from this video is that Illuminaughty and James Somerton are both creators who I watched, but failed to keep my attention. As you pointed out, they’re boring, but as a viewer who doesn’t know it’s plagiarism, you can’t tell exactly why. The subjects they present are so eyecatching and suggest an interesting story, but when you watch the videos, they feel like soulless lectures. This is why creatives are so important. It SHOWS when people who aren’t writers try to create things for engagement. They don’t understand the amount of effort that goes into writing a compelling story.
This is such a good observation! I was kind of feeling this myself but wasnt sure how to put it into words. They're both creators that would occasionally pop up in my recommendations and I'd watch a bit of their stuff, but was never really interested or impressed enough to actively watch anything else of theirs. You can definitely feel their lack of actual passion in their "craft".
This is so freaking interesting to read because I went through the exact same thing I subscribed to Illuminaughty cause I found out about her through one topic and the click but never managed to finish one of her videos, and I found Somerton because I basically wanted more contrapoints content and got a little bored from it when I realized that wasn't quite what I would get, but I could never put my finger on why their videos never resonated with me, always attributed it to my ADHD...
@@sailorncho I had basically the same arc as you! Subbed to James Somerton for about a year and I noticed I was only watching the videos about halfway before moving on. I assumed it was my ADHD but looking back, it’s odd that I assumed that when far longer videos have held my attention the entire time, and I usually go back to videos that were genuinely compelling. I feel like when creators are actually passionate about what they’re talking about, they’ll relay the information in a way where they replicate the emotions they felt while discovering every facet of information. The creators that plagiarize, on the other hand, are more focused on the way that THEY look as writers.
I made a similar comment about Iiliminaughtii. At first I thought it would be interesting content to listen to while working on stuff, but then it just seemed so impersonal. I'm not saying I felt the lack of engagement, it just seemed pretty flat to me.
Literally same. I'd tried a few Illumi vids just as they popped up on play next (usually after me watching creators like Atrocity Guide), and despite it being similar, interesting content, I just found the delivery so dry and the video feeling weirdly stilted in comparison to similar content. Meanwhile I subbed to James after watching a few vids of his a year or so back, i found the content pretty interesting, but every time I tried to go back to his vids after the first few, I had the same problem again; the videos felt weird, and his delivery was dry and weirdly over dramatic, like he was trying to add something that wasn't there. I especially didn't like some of the side comments he made (like the misogyny and weird jabs at lesbians), funny to learn that was the only content he wrote himself. Figures.
Real proof right there that reading content that's not your own, ie audiobooks, is a genuinely hard skill and the creatives who can do it successfully are skilled as all heck.
hello, all--and thanks for having my back, I very much appreciate it. Harris, I very much appreciate your plans to divvy out whatever funds you may accumulate from this video with those who you mention that have been plagiarized. It's an incredibly honorable thing to do. Please take whatever might be my portion of those funds and divide that up among the rest. I am doing fine financially, and would rather have the money sent to those who may truly need it. (And, if anything, the spread of this video will likely spur sales of "Tinker Belles and Evil Queens"!). All the best
hope he sees this, bless yahs
I'm genuinely so sorry for your book, you were directly stolen from and used for profit and I can't begin to muster up the words for why that's wrong. Currently going through a rough patch, financially, but I'd very much like to read Tinker Belles and Evil Queens when I can. I'd love to hear your insight, from you.
Here's hoping this changes how we engage with media.
I did in fact order your book because of this video, it looked really interesting
Hi as a transwoman I love seeing queer authors get recognition. Thank you! And thank you for posting this here! It's nice to see that we queer people aren't alone!
Also I might possibly order your book but I already have a lot to read. Regardless I'm glad that these authors are getting recognition! At the least this is a good reading list!
@@DroolRockwormHis book did, which did not fall upon this earth fully formed.
I suddenly have a great idea for a four hour long video on plagiarism
Be sure to do stuff like mispronounce Somerton and just say the wrong word entirely here and there
just came up with a fantastic four hour long video idea for plagiarism
something came to my mind to produce a four hour long video speaking about plagiarism
I think I think i saw that one, actually. It was one of the many sources i used in my 4 hour long plagiarism documentary. There was this annoying stuff in the corner i had to blur out though
@@SylviaRustyFae Jamie Somérton
This is like my 4th watch and somehow I still keep mistaking "the sad story of rocket raccoon, the drunk who knew batman's identity, after homelander lost his mind" is one sentence
I keep getting blindsided by the tight edit that makes James sound like he's saying "medical shmee"
@@1998_MIN”medical shmee” makes me giggle every time
lol why on earth would you watch this cringe fest even one time, let alone multiple times.
Hes incapable of forming a single argument. He makes a claim, then moves on before he proves or explains it. This is just an opinion piece with literally no evidence or explanation to back up any of it.
This is one of the best examples of an inferiority complex on the internet. So are all his fans honestly. Seek therapy.
Also I posted a video explaining.
@thedailyshowCondorCalabasas did you miss all the stuff he showed as proof?
*homelinder
hbomberguy being hard on himself for overusing "it turns out" but it turns out that with the topics he covers IT DOES REPEATEDLY TURN OUT
first I wasn't not sure, but it turns out that this is actually a good comment
yeah! if you see this, hbo: it's never felt like a weird phrase to me at all, even used so frequently. it comes off as a natural expressive hallmark of your style.
(if you'll let me cook) it gives the impression you're just passively observing and drawing connections along with us as you present info, always returning the personal reaction to the public story unfolding; you leave your agency in the way you investigate and uncover info, and the way you reflect on the implications of people's behaviour, but you let the facts and patterns of people's behaviour just 'turn out'.
I think people sometimes overemphasise style, when most of us are really craving substance, idk. I often ramble insufferably (as above) and I get that as a public creator you're concerned with being easy to parse, but the real quality of good writing is being able to convey your perspective in a connected way. hbomb comes off as a real conscientious, careful guy and that goes a long way imo.
hm, makes me think, though - about the genre of 'video essays'. they don't generally have very good writing... obviously there are loads of dogshit video essayists, but even the 'good' (imo) ones aren't great at making cogent, connected points and theses. they're more loosely connected interesting observations and incomplete explorations; fodder for you to idly absorb. the tropes everyone makes fun of are exactly to do with this lol. careful composition that's reluctant to just make a clear point.
This is a gold star comment.
hbomberguy wasn't lying
That it really do turns out
People dont think it be like it is but it do
I'm in the middle of exam season as a university student and this has been oddly reassuring. My essays might be shit, but at least they're my, properly cited shit.
Thank you for this lovely comment! As a fellow university student, I wholeheartedly agrees
too true. And my sentences are so grammatically questionable and convoluted that it‘s clear ChatGPT didn‘t write them either lol
same lol
literally just turned in my 10 paged research paper 3 days ago and still feel it wasnt enough. Happy to know what I wrote was at least out of my own efforts
update: my professor liked my paper so i passed the sem knowing ive done more for my own benefit than james somerton ever could 🎉🎊🥳
This! Like, I get all anxious about whether the sentence I wrote sounds maybe very slightly a bit like something else - I can't comprehend the audacity of these people!
Say what you will about Tommy Tallarico, but even he was able to properly cite his sources on the topic of who was proud of him (his mother).
Joey Kuras: The one person James Somerton HASN'T stolen credit from
@@Sedric-and-Charlie*yet
Oof
his mother is very proud!
@@no1legobatmanfanTHERE IT IS
So I was trying to find info on what ever happened to Telos Films and I wound up on wikitubia. At the bottom of Jame's page under trivia there is one thing. "He is Gay. [citation needed]" I don't know why but that is the funniest fucking thing I've seen all day.
At this point I don't know if James Somerton is even his real name! He could be Armin Tamzarian for all we know
James could tell me the sky was blue and I’d still have to double check to make sure he wasn’t lying.
@Jaxymann You would be talking to him on a sunny day, he tells you the sky is blue, and the instant you look up to check, the entire sky is overcast
Help this made me choke
Subbing to someones Patreon because you admire them only to realize they stole your work without crediting is a whole new level of fucked
Yeah that part hit like a mack truck
I missed this part. Whos Patreon?
@@Peapodzilla2:30:45 you'll get the info there.
@@Peapodzilla someone who subs to James Somerton's Patron found out that he literally stole her intellectual property
I actually gasped out loud.
this video was amazing for my mental health, because no matter how shitty i'm feeling and how strong the imposter syndrome is, i can at least look into the mirror and say with 110% confidence that i'm not james somerton
Ah me too!! I'm glad I'm not the only one hahaha!
That’s a really great insight! I usually rewatch the Spider-Verse movies to help with my imposter syndrome, but they haven’t been that much help lately.
I have a feeling being gay is his whole identity and has nothing interesting about him.
You sure? Check again.
And you have a disco elysium profile picture so you are already a gigachad, love
Catching James having the AreTheyGay video on his timeline is the most actual detective work BBC Sherlock has ever been involved with.
Underrated comment
My farts are better than hbomberguy’s farts 💨
@@p-__i will piss in your petrol tank
@@p-__how do these bots not realise that they're just helping hbomberguy get more engagement with their spam
@@dhruvtukadiya My guy please don't respond to the bots
What's still fucking me up after 10 months is how Blair's cadence could be _exactly matched_ to Brian Deer's in _many_ places; pauses included.
I rewatch this video sometimes and every time I wonder the exact same thing! I'm so curious whether she was literally just listening to the documentary and repeating it into her microphone? Or if she'd watched it multiple times beforehand and did this subconsciously? oddly fascinating
I’m pretty sure Hbomb edited the clips to synchronise them and highlight how similar they are. No shade to him - it’s a very good way to show that Illuminaughti copied Deer verbatim - but I sincerely doubt the two had the exact same cadence and speed.
@@Halucygeno yeah there were definitely certain pauses that were edited in by Hbomb just to match them for the video, but also her tone and cadence was very similar in a lot of ways too. it's likely that she was subconsciously doing it since she was just remembering what Deer said
We could check ourselves tbh
What really strikes me is how much she clearly doesn't know what she's talking about. She is constantly fumbling over her words, because she's just reading from a script she didn't write.
I used to be subscribed to James Somerton. During one of the few times he admitted that he "accidentally" plagiarized a chapter from a book, I wrote a comment wondering how exactly someone accidentally copies an entire chapter without realizing it. I will never forget what happened next. One of his fans replied to me and asked, "What? Do you want to spank his willy?"
I think about that comment often.
well, do you?!
This is one of those questions that give you an existencial crisis, both for the question and why it was asked
Lol
Well shit, that's going to be my reply to everything now.
Destroyed with facts and logic
The funny thing about 'Man in a cave' is that if he had made a collaboration with the author to animate the story, everyone would have enjoyed it all the same.
I don't get this hate though. He's saying IH stole the article and reworded, but also that IH got stuff wrong even though it was in the thing IH was stealing from. Doesn't make sense. But I think this is heating up, one of these two may fall
the author might not be the rights holder, it’s probably the media company he’d contributed the material to; can’t see it happening
Visiting the video now, it seems the video does link the article as its source. Was it added recently or was it always there?
@@half.blightKeep watching this video to find out!
it got added after a while.
The "I'm not an academic, I don't know the proper way of citing a reference" when you have a college degree is bewildering to me. The first time I went to college it was drilled into me over and over again the importance of citations, and how to do them. And I was a computer science major, not, like, english or history.
Exactly. Even if you (JS) don’t have whatever writing handbook you had to buy for school still in a box somewhere, you know it exists. Heck, you know citations are a thing because they are the things you would have to delete when copying Wikipedia articles into your script.
Heck, it isn't uncommon for it to be a thing in high school either. And the very fact that one knows the phrase 'citing a reference' means knowing in broad strokes about the concept and thus what to google, if nothing else.
@@PhotonBeastI learned about and was told that bad stuff would happen if you plagiarized in middle school, hell in the 6th goddamn grade. Granted, it was a very light sort of "If you plagiarize you can get in legal trouble and lose money" in a very simplified way for 12 year olds, but *still*, c'mon man it aint hard to understand
Yup. This was all in my very first required class.
It was drilled into me in high school English. Granted, I took AP English, but still...
The blaming of "women" from his comment section seems like the classic discrimination spiral: Someone does something you don't like -> assume they belong to a group you don't like -> hate that group more -> assume they'd do worse things -> repeat with worse things.
If shown to be wrong it is chalked up to being an incident/bad apple in another group.
If coincidentally true it is taken as proof of the pattern.
Really sad.
mysoginy is a poisonous ideology
The lack of self-awareness of an hbomberguy fan saying this is hilarious.
You all have zero-self esteem, to you misogynists, women are children that need to be babied and can do no wrong.
If I mention;
-Donna Hylton is a rapist and a torture worshiped by feminists
-most common use of the no true scotman fallacy is to excuse feminists; 2nd wave, 3rd wave, terfs, etc.
-in the UK men cannot be legally raped, this is such an extreme form of oppression that no woman in any first world country experiences
You'd all be very, very upset. Go into a mentally ill spiral, assuming I'm a conservative, because I'm not some cringe lord with an inferiority complex like you.
Describing hbomberguy and his fans without realising it.
@@thedailyshowCondorCalabasas you gonna.... elaborate?
@@hotpocketsat2amHe will not.
Little "five hours later" update:
James nuked his discord and Twitter, and then posted on Patreon that he was under attack again for "Something we already cleared up". A good chunk of his patrons were not pleased.
delicious
Glad to see his former fans aren't putting up with his bullshit anymore.
Let's gooo another career successfully ruined by our guy of the hbombs
He seems to have lost ~6K subscribers so far, if Social Blade is reliable
That post has now been deleted and a new one is up saying he is sorry and taking a moment before responding.
underrated gag in this video is hbomb labelling the sections with roman numerals but pronouncing them all "eee", making it utterly incomprehensible to anyone listening to this in the background
He always adds a slight jab to the audio only listeners. The one from Pathologic video springs to mind
@@apatshe8188 blind people are in shambles 💀
The "Party Time" line always gets a chuckle from me
"What teenage girl did this to you in highschool James, and why are you inserting fanfiction about her into an article you stole instead of going to therapy?" is easily my favourite quote of this entire video
It's probably plagiarized
what a huge snub to "most fuckable twink"
what is?@@SomeMaoriDude
@@Sorreltail768 The quote mentioned above
I think calling Lukiepoo “the most fuckable twink,” might’ve been an even better line
I rewatched this with my mother and she had this to say, "I just want to send him a sweater so he doesn't have to wear that fucking ugly jacket anymore, its distracting and I just want to rip the sleeve off... but other than that he was very smart!"
It's a very mom thing to think you're wearing ripped clothes because you don't know you can wear other nicer clothing and not a style choice.
@@SoulDevouredshe prob does and was just joking
I can't believe straight white women held poor James at gunpoint and made him plagiarize a ton of stuff and make up a bunch of bullshit and present it as historical facts 😭😭😭
It was me. I was just so angry at. Uh. Gamers
@@JonathanSicoligaming racists
@@JonathanSicoliis it because they're going woke and shoving the woke agenda down your throat?
It's always the straight white women!
@@judyh3707 damn we used to have just gamers or racists, what a world 2023 is where you can have them both!
this is a small thing but James calling the show “Arthur” instead of “Merlin” more than once is even more evidence that he’s never seen it bc absolutely no one who has seen the show would think of Arthur as the main character. wild behavior all around from that man
That was especially egregious. Like, I have never seen a single episode of Merlin, but I was on Tumblr in the 2010s, so I'm vaguely familiar with its broad strokes. I can't imagine anyone who did any kind of looking into the show to make that kind of mistake
Imagine you were watching that livestream at the time as a fan and thinking he was talking about Arthur, the children's cartoon
@@fishtank39 right lol never watched the show either but grew up on tumblr seeing fangirls of it and even I know how ridiculous it is to have called it Arthur
Also, calling it “Arthur” could make people confuse it for the kids PBS show, lol.
That jumped out to me too.
Every time I listen to this, there's a new part in the first half that just makes me think "FORESHADOWING IS A LITERARY DEVICE IN WHICH-"
Oh thank god I thought it was just me
My farts are better than hbomberguy’s farts 💨
I'm still waiting for the video where he makes a doughnut (if you don't know what I mean stick around after the credits)
One of my favorite things about this video is the shot at 2:30 when Harry sets down a copy of Analog on top of some other books, those books foreshadowing the instances of plagiarism he'll be talking about
@@maddieS117 oh man I didn't notice that, that's so good
I think you deliberately added jokes referencing your sexuality to the video to make sure your bisexuality was established to the viewer ahead of time. I didn't realize you were bi until you made those jokes and I thought to myself "huh. Is he gay?"
Well done, real subtle, no joke. Makes the clear anger and frustration you feel about James Somerton feel even more 'real,' somehow.
yeah lol I only realized he was bi when he straight up said it. then when i rewatched this video for the second time and then the first jokes made a lot more sense
Telling someone who stole from you that you'd still have sex with them is an iconic power move
Also super clever since Somerton loooooves to call homophobia on anyone who calls him out. Preemptive defense XD
@@1998_MIN
I felt it was pretty weird and inappropriate, honestly.
@@FirstnameLastname-bn4gv not sure why you thought that other than just, being homophobic? he also didn't say that he would have sex with him, he said Luke looked like a "fuckable twink" i.e. that he is effeminate. this was intended to be jokingly pushing back at Luke telling Hbomb to get testosterone shots.
Man, I feel really bad for Brian Deer. The man does humanity a service and his payment is everyone else stealing his work and acting like they did it.
I wonder if he knows about this video
@@larissabrglum3856 yeah he does. He made a tweet about it when it was released
Capitalism working as intended
@@larissabrglum3856 He definetly does, Brian Deer contacted Kat(Hbomber's producer) after the video to thank them for making the video and how thanks to them his book had gotten more sales.
@@larissabrglum3856 considering that hbomberguy has talked to him, he probably knows to a degree
Every single subject in this video is the epitome of “Why would I need to take an ethics class? I’m a business major”
Not sure if it's better or worse that most business majors (not sure where he graduated from) actually do take ethics classes as part of the degree program.
@@Terratops474im convinced they use them to get around actually using ethics
@@DeathbatOfSpadeswe do
I dunno, maybe if they paid attention in high school English, they may have caught enough to be less shit.
@@Terratops474 Lots engineers do as well, but then the Department will basically be financed by the Military Industrial Complex anyway.
You can tell hbomberguy wrote this script because he constantly tries and fails not to go down rabbit holes in it
"But where did the mistaken weight for the rock come from!?" lol
... I am genuinely curious though. Dear hbomberguy, please make a follow up video if you find out, thanks.
@@SnakebitSTIif you convert pounds (the currency, not weight) to dollars, you get 33.
This is information that I definitely found out myself and didn't plagiarise from another comment that I can't find anymore.
@ville__Did he steal the milk your father was looking for too?
@ville__ The only content you have is is posting that repeatedly lol
HBomberguy is the little Red Riding Hood, his videos are the basket for granny (We are granny). His one braincell is the Wolf saying "Hey wouldn't granny like some of those nice flowers over on the meadow?". As he picks one, he finds another, prettier one deeper in the woods. Granny must have this flower! And there! Another one just a bit further in... (Kat might be the hunter reeling everything in in the end)
Every time I watch this again it hits me that James couldn't even be bothered to define homosexuality in his own words. James, a gay man, couldn't even write a basic definition of his own sexuality off the top of his head. He can't even put into his own words what it means to him to be gay. He had to steal that from an encyclopedia instead. Astounding.
Makes you wonder if he's actually gay or if that's just another level of the farce.
Beta
Because "I'm gay" is enough. It doesn't mean anything.
I mean, I’m straight and I probably can’t put it into words either beyond “I like girls”
It may be that his sexuality is "buisness" and the only attraction is to money after all
“James never did any work”
Let’s be fair here, he did put the stolen work into a program and hit “export”. As Tommy Tallarico taught us, that’s a huge part of the creative process!
💀😭
his mother ought to be very proud
Many more have done far less...
(also that's the one part that we know for sure Joey did)
I mean, I really don't want to defend Tommy Tallarico, but at least he actually owned oof sound. He also owned Guinness records. (although he fabricated titles for all awards) James never REALLY owned anything in videos that made him famous. It was all stolen.
Watching Somerton say "if I had been plagiarizing, I wouldn't have a channel" after he deleted his channel feels real good.
Oh, he finally deleted his channel?
@@leileyaravencroftNot quite, the channel still technically remains, but it's been wiped of everything except its name. No videos, no community tab notes, not even a profile picture. I think he's also deleted or made private pretty much every bit of the rest of his online presence as well.
Ah, nature is healing
A man of his word!
@@Ehh.....well, someone's words anyway.
Imagine being caught plagiarizing by a guy who half-assedly listened to your video while he was building an ikea bookshelf. Beautiful.
not even an ikea bookshelf. an *argos* bookshelf. that's a whole new low
this youtube also got busted for plagiarizing the same way so that is some irony
Imagine being caught plagiarizing by someone who quarter-assedly listened to your video while he was building a bookshelf. Fantastic
@@jesseerven4859 ?
@@jesseerven4859 hbomberguy? Where have you read this?
After watching this for the nth time now, i've come to realize how HBomb sprinkles in little elements of what James did throughout the other chapters. In the beginning setting up the book like how James did it with Disney Wars, any means necessary with Blaire, the weird fans with Internet Historian, weaponizing hate from Filip and a bunch of other stuff i don't remember yet. Very good story telling, connecting all his different points
FORESHADOWING IS A LITERARY DEVICE...
The man's a treasure.
Only after reading this did I realize that fact
It was only on this rewatch that I noticed he had a shot of Tinker Belles and the Celluloid Closet in the intro as foreshadowing
The bit where Somerton is basically setting up his co-writer to take the fall for plagiarism allegations made me go from "this guy's an asshole" to "this guy is actually evil".
Genuine sociopath behavior, gradually developing a relationship with someone he always intended to ruin if things got hot. Watching him deliberately set Nick up whenever plagiarism was mentioned is chilling. I’m deeply glad HBomb went out of his way to show that Nick was going to be scapegoated so Somerton doesn’t get to play that card and Nick doesn’t get his career ruined.
@@naten1570 I'm glad this video is getting as much attention as it is, him & others must be held accountable. It is not simply about plagiarism, these people are beyond toxic - dangerous even
The way he was always so darkly, eerily lit in his videos seems very fitting in retrospect.
I'm surprised how fast he turned off comments and deleted his social media.
@@Skelath lol he took the flight response instead of coming up with one. far easier than writing an explanation, i suppose.
Hey, aside from the actual content of the video, fucking shout-out to the HBomb team to subtitle the entire 4 hour video before release. I appreciate you, you're the best, that seems really really hard and you've done a great job ❤️
I miss back when you could volunteer to manually subtitle videos, if the creator allowed it. There are so many I'd be willing to help out with.
It wasn't before release. It was soon after.
I heard the plagiarized all the subtitles, just copied everything from a video.
not only that, but the subtitles actually sometimes move out of the way of content, something youtube doesnt let you do from their editor
edit 2: no they aren't. scroll down for the Fact Check
edit: the subtitles are AI. check 3:32:41
@@CringePoop oh shit that was a typo, gonna upload a version with a couple corrections but we somehow missed this!! Our subtitler Kaylyn basically spent the week on this and I'm pretty sure she pulled an all nighter finishing this one (it's our fault because we did new edits, but we got subtitles up the day of I believe??) so I think she deserves the kudos. She even figured out how to do the fancy ttml subtitles that you need to move the text around the screen a little while back (and make it different colors apparently, but we're not doing that).
There is NO way AI would be able to do these cool subtitles and I demand that you take that back. 😤
I plagiarized like this once. The difference is I was in 4th grade and it was for a report on sharks. I failed that assignment. Learned my lesson real quick.
I plagiarized a poem about fish in elementary school and got an A. Still learned not to do it by middle school
In Denmark before submitting any high school exam you literally have to sign a legal document stating that this is all your original work and that you agree to be expelled if it isn't.
For me it was in 2nd grade on a report about some kind of flower. Now I am ass about my citations
I met people who were upperclassmen in college who didn't understand that if they did not include in-text citations (which are VERY EASY TO INCLUDE, *especially* in APA style), they were effectively plagiarizing. The amount of peer-reviewing I did where that was an issue was astounding.
Same here. I was in 2nd grade and for my essay I just copied a portion of a Crash Bandicoot 1 walkthrough. lmao
"Repackaging someone else's work and selling it as your own" is a phrase that really shows why people who do this don't think it's unusual or illegitimate to do. We live in an age of dropshipping. There are people who consider selling random garbage (products they otherwise have nothing to do with) through a tiktok shop to be a proper career, and this youtube plagiarism is just that, but with content.
Late stage capitalism turns us all into either grifters or wage slaves
Good point
@@anzaia2164 There's just not enough of an incentive to *not* grift these days
With the death of Henry Kissinger, the last seal on Harris Hbomberguy’s power has broken and he has finally achieved his ultimate form: the 4-hour video essay
Don't forget the expulsion of George Santos from the US House of Representatives
As if I needed more reason to be thrilled about that fucking GHOUL finally biting it
I listen to a podcasts called Behind the Bastards that talks about the very worst people of history and I like it a lot, but going there and being the show it is you just know the people there are the scum of the earth, it's not a slow discovery with a twist like hbomb's videos, but still fun to me. Most have one or two parts.
Kissinger has SIX parts. So I went to their reddit sub the day Kissinger died and I was not disappointed lol fuck that guy
It's kind of funny since the whole reason it's so long is because he keeps playing clips in full, instead of just summarizing them
@@14ElmStreet28He needs to post the clips in full, to make an example out of them. He's criticizing Blair for not showing his full tweet video after all, if he turned around and went "Oh btw Internet Historian copied a whole article just trust me I won't show clips just trust me bro" he'd be a hypocrite
To be fair to Blare, she was very busy abusing her boyfriend and collaborators.
Being a landlord is very time consuming, she barely had the time to not do plagiarism
God forbid women have hobbies /s
@@Sugarman96not her being a landlord too… the more i learn about this woman the worse it gets 😭
fr@@singulariteas
@@singulariteas i could tell instantly from her voice, they all have the same soulless, disconnected, anti-social drawl. i could perceive more empathy in the sound of a dial-up modem.
EDIT: I understand having a dynamic and/or monotone voice doesn't correlate with empathy, but I never said she had a "monotone" voice, and never would have used that word, for the exact reasons people are apparently upset about ("soulless, disconnected, anti-social drawl" is an extremely specific kind of monotone, if anything, but in my mind a landlord voice isn't even necessarily monotone) ..I'm on the spectrum somewhere myself, not all of us have "monotone" voices - me thinking she sounds like a landlord really shouldn't be taken as an attack on fellow neurodivergents... I know a few that not only don't have monotone voices, but are fantastic orators.
My favorite part of the Alexander Avila bit is the defense that he didn't steal from Avila, he instead stole from someone's highlight reel.
Yeah as if he was not aware that the problem was not who he stole from but rather the act itself was awful.
Yeah his line "I took it from a highlight reel, y'know, to highlight the queerness" cracks me up every time cause like, no, James, that's not how that works-
Right? Like, even a highlight reel requires watching the show (or whatever) and snipping out the parts you like or want to use. Saying that a highlight reel snipped out clips not from the show itself but from another video just means that the highlight reel is ALSO doing a plagiarism and thus one is doing a second degree plagiarism by ignorance when using the highlight reel. But even THEN, if you KNOW that you're grapping from a highlight reel.... why not just go to source itself and grab your own clips that will probably fit whatever point you're trying to make better? Like, maybe if you were using an official highlight reel as a short hand for a point eg. 'this is what the show thinks is important', sort of way, but even then presumably, you'd want to cite that it's an official highlight reel in order to make your case.
It seems to go back to the other excuse he seems to use a lot which is "Well, I didn't have time [and so I didn't want to/have to/didn't plan for it over and over and over again]" as if even that bit of work was too much. But deeper still... no one was forcing him to post videos that fast; he's has total control over his own schedule. Particularly at the scale of audience that he has/had, as Harry notes, even with expenses like a co-writer and the like, he's not really under the kind of time pressure of having to post a video every week or whatever.
“I didn’t steal from this fairly popular fellow UA-camr! No, no, no. I stole from a much smaller creator who is much less likely to fight back!”
friendly reminder that james stole a legend of korra shipping amv for another plagiarized video
"I love knowing that my audience ACTUALLY reads books. Thank you so much"
You know, the bar isn't exactly high, yet it makes me so happy to hear it said in this way
Every time he says it I feel a little embarrassed that I don't read books as often as I should 😅
I love that the release of an hbomb video basically now means a death star firing test that kills exactly one person
This comment rules
The "stop, he's already dead!" Meme comes to mind.
It's certainly thorough.
this comment goes so fucking hard
Or a few Guinness World Records.
“There’s a little bit of nothing in all of us, and we’d all like to fill it with something” goes incredibly hard, but I’m too paranoid to believe HBomb wrote it himself at this point, so I’d like to thank Tommy Tallarico for the creation of this line and every other line in the script 🙏
His mother must be very proud 🙏
He was the first video game to ever work at an American Sonic
I'm not going to lie, I'm a little sad that he didn't plagiarize that from someone else (or himself in an earlier blog post or something). It seems like the kinda thing he would do as a goof.
The video script was so incredible, you just know Tommy Tallarico is going to get his seventh world record for writing it.
This absolutely sent me 🤣@@ninjoshday
Thank you, Tommy Tallarico, for creating this 4-hour long video about plagiarism.
I'm sure his mother is very proud.
Clearly hbomberguy stole this whole thing from Tommy 😤 he needs someone to tell him that plagiarism is not cool
He owns the world record for the most watched UA-cam video, his mother is very proud.
@@davidmcgirruntil he walks around the water fountain in his Egypt room.
I was literally relistening to the tommy tallarico video by chance just before i got the notification for this
(big ass comment incoming)
Admittedly, it was a struggle to get through this video, because plagiarism/theft like James's deeply depresses me.
I'm an artist who pours years' worth -- a _lifetime's_ worth -- of practice, character development, and narrative into what I create, and the thought of someone just snapping it up, using it as their own, and _getting paid_ while I rot in the dark unsettles me, and knowing that serial plagiarizers are out there collecting success after success, paycheck after paycheck, off the backs of numerous already-relatively-disenfranchised parties... ugh. UGH.
On the plus side, don't worry too much about having created a "drama" video. That's not what this is -- this is a goddamn essay. A thoroughly, thoughtfully researched masterpiece.
And, not only did you justifiably roast the absolute shit out of someone who needs his false success ripped away from him, but you did things drama channels often don't:
1. You went way out of your way to contact people you didn't even injure, both in search of truth for yourself (and your audience), and search of justice and restitution for them.
2. You platformed many other unmentioned or barely referenced queer creators.
3. You pointed out systemic weaknesses of technology and human behavior itself that went beyond just obliterating James.
4. You offered courses of action -- for plagiarizers, for the plagiarized, for unwitting plagiarizer audiences, and for platforms who may host plagiarizers.
You didn’t just stamp someone into the dirt to point, laugh at, and have your audience join you in the schadenfreude; you did so much more.
If James represents the dark pit of despair threatening to consume my soul, then someone as (apparently) well-intentioned, well-informed, and well-researched as you represents a tiny but bright spark of hope.
Thank you.
This resonates deeply with me as well, especially with how it seems like grifting becomes more and more lucrative and accepted with each passing day. The only way I was able to continue attempting to create was to surrender to the fact that I would probably never make any real money off of my passion. I shouldn't have to, but that's the state of the world and the reality of trying to wedge capital into every single crevice of life. It's depressing in ways I don't have words for.
"I included Becky Abertalli in a section of straight authors but I never *said* she was straight" if only there was a concept describing audiovisual mediums that create a link between two ideas by placing them in close proximity without ever having to explicitly mention the link. Such as cutting from a person's intense gaze to a plate of delicious food back to the person. We could call it "structuralist film theory"; maybe James could talk about it in a video
Underrated comment
He tried pulling a Kyubey
Amazing
You should seriously consider a career in law.
This reads almost like a Colombo monologue lol
"If I was plagiarizing people all the time, I wouldn't... have a UA-cam channel."
- James Somerton, guy who no longer has a UA-cam channel
wait what srsly??? i just finished this video and know no follow up
@@sylvan-dreams He deleted everything and ran the day after this video came out.
@@glyph1869 In his apology video that just came out, he says he wants to bring it back. 🍿🍿🍿
@@cadekachelmeier7251 I hope he gets flooded with copyright claims
@@cadekachelmeier7251Lol. Lmao
Hey I doubt you will read this @hbomberguy but after watching until the end of this video I thought you might like to know that your video on the vaccine/autism scare inspired me to create a workshop at my job. I work in a neurodevelopmental research setting, and noticed that our interns didn't always know how to spot bad science. You said something to the effect of "this paper is an example of what not to do". I agree, and so did my supervisor and the head of the internship program and we have used Andy as an example of poor scientific literature. Reading (and tearing apart) his "early report" helps us teach undergrads how to spot problems in science articles.
That’s badass!!!
You're doing good work.
That's truly amazing, thank you for being a guiding light in your community! 😊
spotting "bad" science is an increasingly undervalued skill.
Holy shit this is so cool
my dad, a lecturer, caught me plagiarising in yr3. He made me rewrite my entire Tudors project from scratch.
My point is that a 7 year old is held to higher standards than these bozos.
The rapid and constant cutting between your emotional performance and James Somerton's monotone lecturing was giving me actual whiplash. The difference in your intonations is monumental.
James has a very punchable voice. I inadvertently watched one of his videos (the one about killing stalking I think) and didn't finish it because I kept thinking that the way he was speaking was really condescending. Also, I noted at the time that he used the word "queer" and "LGBTQ" waaaaay too much which is funny in heinsight.
Blair does it too. I used to be a fan but stopped watching her a long time ago, long before this. (It was actually related to something on Sad Milk I believe? I NEED to source the info before I repeat it, though.) And hearing how monotone she is now is very jarring after getting to better essayists.
You can just HEAR how extremely little James cares and knows about whatever he's talking about, the most emotion he shows is either when he's trying to defend himself, or when he's complaining about women.
He literally has the same voice I do when I talk to myself when working on an essay or school assignment that absolutely bores me
James Somerton has the power to do the funniest thing in the world by making an apology video entirely plagiarized from other bad apology videos.
He'd never think of something that original
TOOT TOOT Toxic Gossip Train pulling into the station yet again!
@@surpriseandterror9698i was JUST going to say that I hope it includes a ukulele 😂
"I'm not a plagiarist, I'm just an archivist!"
he has a second channel called gays behaving badly and the comments are still open.
So far, after this video came out, James Somerton has disabled comments on his youtube channel entirely, deactivated his twitter account, privated his instagram, deleted his patreon discord server, and nuked the patreon too, after first making 2 posts there trying to explain/avoid responsibility/apologize, neither of which was well received by his patrons.
Totally normal things for an innocent person to do, so I am sure this is all just a big misunderstanding :)
Anyone got the Patreon posts? Or is able to at least paraphrase them? Just curious!
@@attackofveganpotatoes1074 I have the second one still open in a tab, first one was deleted before I had the chance to see it live but can be found floating around in tumblr at least if you happen to use that. Anyway, the second post goes as follows:
"
Hi everyone.
I wanted to say that I’m very sorry. I’m in a terrible headspace right now so I don’t want to post anything too long because I don’t know where my brain will lead me. But I will say something more extensive once I’ve prepared myself emotionally. I know people want an immediate, detailed response but I’ve never found immediate responses to anything to be as fair and honest as they could be. Always more driven more by emotion than anything else. I will say more soon, though. But for now, I want to apologize. I’m heartbroken that I’ve lost your trust and just hope that someday, with a lot of work, I can get it back.
"
full credit to Mr. Somerton here, assuming he didn't plagiarize that too
@@attackofveganpotatoes1074 First one basically said Harry was trudging up old drama for clout and that the community is stronger than this. Patrons saw through that one. The second post admitted that he'd made some "mistakes", and that he'd be able to win everyone's trust back. They saw through that one also.
@@66Rosesif you somehow werent convinced James is willfully manipulative after watching the video, his responses sure sealed it.
Thank you for this update. I was really interested in the reaction and response to this
I still rewatch this video often. It’s my emotional support video essay
I know I've been depressed lately because I've been listening to the same 10-12 video essays on repeat every day 🥲
this is my go-to video when i need to concentrate on some chores
For everyone wondering why just hearing somerton's voice after all this sends you into a frothing rage, it's the revelation that he hasn't done *anything* to earn that condescending, 'bored professor' tone he used for his channel.
You are being talked down to by an *_idiot_* wearing the wit of others as an ill-fitting costume.
And he made _bank_ doing it, which everyone has a right to be pissed about.
Especially the people who he kept tricking into paying him to fail to make a movie, and the author who unwittingly paid him to recite her ripped off material. I hope this weasel in a turtleneck went into hiding.
P.S.- I apologize to weasels and the people who admire them for this unfair and insulting comparison
I liked the one video he made about the holocaust but the bored professor thing turned me off from the rest of his content. It seemed contrived.
Nicely put
The more I learned about this Somerton guy, the less I liked him. Also, he might be a pathological liar.
Yeah the guy scammed people with promising creating a web series or something similar that included ace representation but still to this day has not delivered anything for it. Not to mention how acephobic he is 💀
It's hard to tell for sure, because this video was the first time I ever heard of Somerton, but I'm pretty confident that I would hate his demeanor even without the context. He's not even "bored professor", he's like more... You know when people make fun of snobby aristocrat types, with a pretend-wineglass in one hand, talking real theatrically, putting the stress on all the wrong words? That's exactly what he does, but somehow unironically - like an actual parody of himself. This overt self-seriousness is what usually makes me not finish videos, even if I would normally enjoy both the topic and the writing.
James took the "If you copy from one book, that’s plagiarism; if you copy from many books, that’s research" quote literally.
Maybe business school should teach people about metaphors.
@@timothymcleanand academic research
@@timothymclean Business school just teaches you to fuck people over and get yours, unfortunately.
There is a UA-cam video on “the books you’ll never be able to read”.
Old books of the past, were often hodgepodge amalgamations of other works. That being said, however, there are clear reasons and examples of actual references.
Knowledge can enable knowledge, or it can lead to further ignorance. Idk the whole thing is a farce. The whole James thing just upsets me.
But not even that, though!
not often do you see a UA-camr say to another 'delete your channel' and then see the other guy actually do it
😭😭😭
Yes, but then again, not often does youtuber put 4 hours of dedication to tell you so.
Wat, which youtuber?
@@hannibalburgers477James Somerton has mysteriously vanished
@@hannibalburgers477hbomberguy is the UA-camr that said ‘delete your channel’
On another rewatch, I just want to say, that as a lover of queer history and the written word, this was absolutely the right thing to do. This is important for the discourse surrounding queer art and unknown artists.
It's funny I watch this and think, "Why don't they work harder to hide their plagiarism?"
And then I remember that avoiding work is the point.
hah! i didn’t put that together either until i just read your comment.😅
It’s literally like the kids who spend their time engineering new ways of cheating on tests instead of studying
@@LDARit’s not really. unlike video essays, tests are a required thing everyone has to do and some kids are not and will never do well in a testing environment no matter how much they study lol
@@lord_ozymandiasSo they cheat? Only a certain type of person will cheat, don’t put that on all kids who have trouble with standardized tests.
@@poppyonline4034 obviously not all kids who are struggling will cheat. but if a kid isn’t doing well on tests, and no amount of studying will change that (because the problem is systematic not individual), then they might cheat and it would be more understandable than plagiarism. because kids HAVE to take tests, but people DONT have to plagiarize.
James Somerton quoting the Encyclopedia Definition of “homosexuality” as part of his essay somehow transcends absurdity and almost eclipses into surrealism.
he's doing the contraponts bit but without a single shred of irony. Huh.. I wonder if he intentionally tried to rip that off without getting the joke
I guess you could almost call it... borderline experimental.
@@3ln2xnope it's been confirmed that he didn't
@3ln2x the rumor has been all over the internet, so it must be true, right?
@@el_fuckoI....clapped?
Never forget, when blair said she was getting a dog, people kept giving her advice. She told people to stop because shes too good a researcher to get scammed. Then immediately fell for an obvious puppy mill
Lol
I think she knew it was a puppy mill, she just didn’t care.
I like how telling only one part of Blair’s scandal (“her” video style) makes everything else crystal clear. Why should I believe any of her arguments against the accusations when you’re just reciting documentaries word for word?
blair is curremtly at 10% of her past views pee video and keeps her comments locked lol
@@charlesreid9337 ... Blair pee video?
For some reason, every time it's time to clean my room, this comes up for background sound. I think it's the fourth time this year, so I guess I'll see you again in Spring.
for anyone wondering, james somerton has made every single video on his channel either unlisted/private, resulting in a loss of over 3.5 MILLION views in just a few days. he has also bled 68k subscribers in the same timreframe. This guy is among the worst on youtube plagiarists. glad you spoke out about it!
edit: i think he deleted his channel LOL
WARRR IS OVERR
Harris status: bombin'
"if there was plagiarism, I wouldn't have a channel"
aaand his channel is completely gone now
At least he kept all his entirely original content up
The funniest thing with the Illuminaghtii and LegalEagle situation is the fact that she tried to accuse a law firm out of everyone on UA-cam, and cited crap evidence. Yikes
Someone should call a helpline on her behalf because she basically committed suicide with that move.
wtf I never considered that; not the brightest of choices
It's wild that she got away with not only so much plagiarism, but also all the abuse of people in her personal life and ironically shady capitalist efforts she managed, all unravelling because she decided to go after. A. Lawyer.
It was also such a hilarious non-issue too.
Like girl, no, they did not steal your extremely basic visual technique and theirs looks slightly different!
Right? I watch Legal Eagle regularly. I have no idea what kind of person he is IRL, but he is one of the last people I'd suspect of UA-cam plagiarism. If he did something like that and got caught, it wouldn't just affect his UA-cam career, it would undoubtedly have a huge impact on his legal practice as well. People do dumb shit sometimes but plagiarism is an act of either laziness or desperation and Legal Eagle doesn't strike me as either.
Coming back to this after James lied about killing himself to post hole and horny post on his side account is crazy
Also the hole pics were stolen 🙃
@@ConradTwigs AND THE HOLE PICS WERE STOLEN!!!
That’s the funniest shit I ever read.
This comment thread is like being repeatedly beaten with a brick
@@ConradTwigsplagiarising hole pics. Well I never 😅
I’ve watched this 4 times and only now noticed the subtle foreshadowing of placing the analog mag on top of tinker belles and celluloid closet. Genius
I love how whenever I come back to rewatch this video I get not only the hbomberguy goodness, I also get to read the new comments and be updated on whatever shit is going on with James Somorton now.
its insane that every time theres a new, more insane devlopment. excited to learn he never even went to film school or somthing. or that he has a secret wife
Same
@@xyrissavage4983 Mores likely, his secret wife went to film school. Also, his secret wife doesn't actually live with him since she's married to someone else. He just likes her relationship with her spouse and ya know, he doesn't have the time to cultivate a relationship. But that's okay, he says he bases his marriage on hers so, that's fine.
I don't think there's been any developments since the faked death while posting other people's porn on twitter thing. I wonder how he's going to top that.
@@mizushimoFor everyone's sake - even his - I hope he doesn't top that. While admittedly, the drama is amusing and karmic, at the end of the day, we can spent our energy and attention on more positive things while he can fade into history or find a way to become a better person and actually help who he claimed he was helping.
James Somerton: "I'm going to demonstrate how queer women have it easier in society by taking credit for a queer woman's work and SOMEHOW getting more attention for it somehow."
That is fairly typical of the misogynistic mindset, sadly enough.
It's just misogyny, it's very common with male homosexuals for a whole laundry list of both traumatic and vane motivations.
He probably thinks so little of women that he doesn't care that, that's what he's doing.
I watched this video so often i just love that there are regularly nrw top comments
So that i can read new stuff for my 14th warch
bro they do have it easier. Than _anyone_ You are literally crusading for them right now and don't even fuckn know it.
Most demographics don't, in fact have an army of citizens protecting them from the basic social accountability the rest of society is held to.
@@ChadDidNothingWrong is it really easier to believe that queer people, a people that have been oppressed throughout most of recorded history, are now shadow puppeting society for their army so that they have it better than ANYONE else.
OR
the people that have held the dominant power throughout most of recent history have been making everyone else's lives worse for their own personal gain using their literal armies that they currently have right now
Opening a nearly 4 hour essay with a quote that includes the sentence "Tell us the story, briefly." is definitely one of the narrative choices of all time.
Oh my god, I've watched this video so many times but never noticed that. That's so funny lol
One of the _best_ narrative choices of all time.
"The X of all time" implies that it's mediocre, like how people described Mobius as "the movie ever/of all time". Not being hateful, just letting you know
@@hwelse i think that's how the original commenter intended it to sound
Yes! It’s also really funny in context too since it’s being said to Harlan Ellison. The man’s a legit great writer but he’s definitely prone to using 5 times more words than he needs to. That interviewer knew what they were doing.
2:16:56 "None of us were really aware-" _cut to hbomberguy_ "James is dimly aware what he's doing"
When Cinemassacre tried to say it was 'accidental plagiarism', that just made me laugh. There's no such thing as 'accidental' plagiarism. It's either plagiarism, or it isn't, regardless of intention. I was once pulled up for plagiarism in one of my history papers because I had simply forgotten to reference the original work, event the professor knew it was a simple accident and there was no malice but it doesn't matter. Still plagiarism.
plagiarists getting facts wrong feels like they're getting a couple questions on the test wrong on purpose so the teacher doesn't think they're cheating
A good lesson taught poorly is worse than not being taught at all. A bad lesson taught well does more harm still.
Hah like they would put in that much effort
My farts are better than hbomberguy’s farts 💨
@@Pedro_Larroza I’m guessing these “friends” didn’t stay around long after?
Or it is their version of Paper Towns, so they will know when someone plagiarizes them, because if Illuminati is an example, they REALLY don’t like people stealing the things they stole.
It’s absolutely insane to me how drastically Somerton’s tone shifts when he’s talking about women. The way he goes from the Snooty College Professor voice to sounding so vindictive and angry would be comedic if it wasn’t so damn disturbing. Literal cartoon villain behavior.
The way he is so fucking smug in his videos like “of course there’s quotes in it nyuhh” and without skipping a beat goes to this sad “if you want to unsubscribe from me for missing a source that’s okay 🥺” is insane
Yeah, like, tell us how you really feel, James
It's sad, too. I appreciate my gay friends because I can have safe, real friendships and community with them without the constant bs you get around the straights. So to realize just how deeply some of them still internalize misogyny has been hard. Some gay men still see women as sex objects, just sex objects they don't WANT and therefore worthless. Which is just the same way straight men treat women they aren't attracted to anyway. They aren't interested in a woman's perspective or opinion because it's not coming from someone they value in that way. I am lucky that a good number of my friends are still very cool people who have avoided this sort of energy, but I've definitely caught a lot of misogyny and misogynoir from some folks in the community.
@@jazwhoaskedforthiswait until you discover the racism within the queer community
i just love the adding of "white" in front of it as if it was a) believable in any way that he doesn't feel this way ab non white women too and b) that even if that were the case, it would somehow be less misogynistic? like dude you're also white don't appropriate genuine criticisms of poc people for your irrational hatred of women
Imagine, you're an online content creator, someone you know sends you a UA-cam link, "OMG you're in this video" you click on it, it's an hbomber guy video, it's 4 hours long
That's what happened to James Somerton and it was only 2 hours in and people who are watching are still in the process on watching it. He quickly denied it by saying that it was old accusations that was already resolved (in his eyes). Of course after it finally finished he really had no defense and had to nuke his presence.
if that ever happened to me, if i were a content creator, i would fucking DIE
and you’re not in the first half
Cosmic horror
And then it turns out you're mentioned 40 minutes in as a tangential side to someone else he's exposing, and you feel alright, but then he says, "By the way, this other guy? We'll get back to him later!"
The part about you starts at 2:35:07 and goes for 90 minutes.
My composition teacher played the entire Illuminaughti segment of this video in class today. So glad this video exists as a crash course on how plagiarism works and why it's bad. I love when teachers throw a bit of edutainment into their classes.
Y'know, I wonder if James Somerton will fall down the gay right wing influencer grifter hole because that's like the only scam he hasn't used and exploited yet.
Eh? As for now, he finally deleted his channel and has not made an obvious comeback yet. Besides judging on his personal belief, it clash with many typical right wing agenda anyway.
Plus unless he live like fake socialite in real life, all the money he had from all the patreon + sponsorship + revenue from youtube is probably good for a long while.
Pull the whole ‘I was a leftist before the left turned on me for ~~plagiarism~~ being gay in the wrong way’
As we’ve seen with Ben Domenech and Benny Johnson, the right-wing griftosphere doesn’t care that much about plagiarism.
@@someguyonyoutube-b9w i mean they really don't care about anything as long as their opinions are being parroted back at them.
He already hates women so it wouldn't be that much of a pivot
This makes me so uncomfortable as someone who was a proofreader for a small manufacturing website. This kind of plagiarism was absolutely rampant and basically all articles about niche topics like steel manufacturing parts are ripped and awkwardly reworded from each other with no credit. And as soon as ChatGPT hit the market, articles were getting sent in with terrible inaccurate information. I’m glad to see SOMEBODY noting that plagiarizing text by swapping words around is still plagiarism, because when I tried to point out how prevalent plagiarism was among our writers, I felt like I was going insane.
Edit: I got to hbomberguy's line "It genuinely makes me think I've traveled to an alternate dimension where plagiarism is fine!" and this is exactly how it felt trying to go to work at this place every day.
it's not that hard even to just make a mindmap of the article you would plagiarize and just rewrite the article based on that couple of days later.
though in your case, are the writers used for that stuff just professional writers and not people who would actually know about the niche topics? I've noticed in parts of software industry that management will put """"writers"""" to write things, but they don't know anything about how the stuff they're writing the advert-documentation for - the attitude is just that you can't let the person who knows about the thing write about it because it's not their "role".
@@lasskinn474 I do think in lot of places that is the problem. Hire writer that is not familiar with the topic and ask them to write about it without giving them enough time to do full research and learn about the topic. What probably should be done is having the person, who is in the industry and understands how things work, cooperate with the writer where they give them information and writer composes it, in a digestible way, but that would cost more money and time and if noones cracking down on the plagiarism why would you bother?
@@lasskinn474 Oh yeah, we definitely hired """"writers."""" One of my most notable coworkers (all the writers worked remotely) insisted that he had a Master's in engineering, but his work was a huge mess that definitely seemed bound to the information in the articles I found by googling the words he used. Our articles were largely used for SEO purposes, to put us at the top of Google's search results, so being informative, clear, original, and even wholly factual was less of a priority than getting the keywords on the site. The suggestions I had for reducing plagiarism (pairing up different writers like tereza mentioned, or starting to credit sources at the bottom of pages) would have been too much time and effort.
Unfortunately, this happens all the time everywhere, and it's only going to get worse now. The second marketers realized that content marketing works (content marketing is when you produce content people actually want to consume, and then that indirectly drives people to whatever it is you sell), a giant content mill industry popped up that basically consists entirely of people slightly rewording reams of existing articles to use as the "content" in content marketing.
Now that LLMs are a thing anyone can trivially use to generate as much text as they want, a lot of this industry is probably going to pivot to just doing that instead, which I guess in a twisted way is kind of better (at least if you're doing that, you're not just directly plagiarizing other people's work), but that also means the internet is about to be completely flooded by AI-generated slop.
@@TurtleChad1 the internet exists irl and is populated by real people. But sure.
what makes illuminaughtiis case funnier is that she has been well known to diss any creator who quotes from wikipedia and even criticized other people for not doing as much research as her, even though all she was doing was just copying wikipedia anyways… jesus christ
"Rules for thee and not for me" as they say
Projection seems to be quite common among people who have a habit of knowingly doing shitty things
@@larissabrglum3856 Because they think everyone else is like them
Often people are the most critical of others what they think of themselves. Projecting.
Blair being so cutthroat about Cruel World Happy Mind's bashful approach addressing potential plagiarism brought to her by a viewer was clearly not an authentic response but making an example of her because she knew she would not be the last.
Quite literally one of the best videos on UA-cam. It's also been suggested to me SO many times, that I must account for over200 watch hours, because I've woken up to the video in its final chapters no less than two DOZEN times.
That being said, i have ONE critique;
At 20:37 you said "this is the LITERAL definition of content, its like it got squeezed out of a Nintendo branded tube somewhere...." - and I'm so EXTREMELY disappointed that you didn't take this opportunity to INSTEAD say;
" this is the LITERAL definition of content, its like it got EXTRUDED froma Nintendo branded tube somewhere..."
What a missed opportunity.
That is all. 🎉 Congrats 🎉I look forward to everything you create going forward. 🎉
James Somerton reportedly deep into writing the script of an in-depth four-hour take-down of James Somerton's history of plagiarism.
It'll be ready to upload in roughly 4 hours.
James has used the "yt took down/demonitized my video bc its too queer" excuse so many times I almost feel the need to apologise to yt for believing them
I discovered Somerton when he did his "confessions of a HP fan" video. I though he was raw and authentic in that video, and soon after he cried he needed support because youtube monetization, followed by a thank you for the support and announcing a successful patreon. Good for him I thought.
I stopped watching his videos soon after, because they rubbed me the wrong way with all the casual misogyny, judgemental tone and stiff, robotic format.
Never knew about plagiarisms allegations until now. I'm really in shock, and even wondering if those words he said in the first video I watched of him are even his. Wondering if he can even articulate any idea about the things he supposedly cares about.
Dude, yes. After watching this, I honestly feel kind of stupid for not suspecting that there may have been actual issues going on behind the scenes beyond "youtube think gay = bad"
Naw that's like apologizing to "the guy who breaks vases" after someone blamed them for breaking your loved one's urn, when this one time it was actually them. Unless so many other cases have been misrepresented as well. That said, malicious reporting is a nigh impossible problem to solve.
@@AbsolXGuardian Accurate case by case judgment > Tribalistic overall stance taking
@@dopaminecloud I would agree, but if someone has a penchance for lying then it is only natural they would not be believed; if someone said creepy things about women and a woman got sexually assaulted, then it is perfectly natural for the creep to be the main suspect. If James Somerton wrote that later accusations of plagiarism in his future videos were the result of homophobia, most of us would be inclined to not believe him.
It is not tribalistic, it is the consequences of some entity's, in this case UA-cam's, shitty actions in the past against the LGBT community. If you have done terrible things or have acted in bad faith before, do not be surprised when people assume the worst of you. Of course, we should retain some measure of skepticism, but there is no need to apologize to UA-cam when they themselves are responsible for having acted in bad faith before.
I would argue that is even more tribalistic to take the side of UA-cam to such an extent (Siding with one presidential candidate simply because they are not X), rather than in acknowledging this one exception to the rule and still acknowledge the rule.
Citing a pirating website as a source is the best thing I've ever seen
Hilariously incompetent
unfortunately a rare illuminaughti W
@@iphoneShothandit's actually pretty based because not everyone that wants to see the source materials wants to pay for a Hulu subscription
oh my god blair is on another level of making $hitty "documentaries". I love this material, love you Sir Harris
The fact that she did that is peak comedy
Subscribing to someone’s Patreon out of admiration, only to discover they’ve stolen your work without giving you any credit, is an entirely new level of betrayal. It’s incredibly frustrating and disappointing!
Hbom exposed a guy so hard he faked his own death about it, only to have an alt account defend himself and eventually just reveal he's still alive. What a wild journey
he was found out through a side account where he posted nudes that WERENT EVEN HIS. They were taken from a Grindr I think. He plagiarized nudes.
@@paranormeow the man cannot be honest to save his fucking life, or fake it in this case I guess.
@@fdragon77fk the one thing he's been honest about is the contempt he feels towards W̶h̶i̶t̶e̶ women
A lot of people were wary of saying it just in case but I was about as confident he was alive as I was that I was alive.
@@paranormeow Honestly at this point it's just kinda funny. The dude can not help himself stealing from other people. From reviews and videos to nudes, none of it is original
Ah yes, "If I replace all the words, is it really plagiarism?" the infamous Ship of Thesaurus argument
"Ship of Thesaurus" makes this comment so much better
A++
I actually read that as "theseus" twice before I finally noticed the pun
@@Demi_Purple
I had to read the first reply twice over to notice the pun...😅
I'd give you money for this comment if I could
I know no one will likely read this and its the most benign criticism of James. But a film grad having such poor lighting in his videos is maddening.
@@capnmnemooh, a new development
@@capnmnemoWith photoshopped images of his videos to make them look better might I add
Idk shit about filmmaking and the lighting is still pissing me off lmao
I have been thinking this since the video came out in December. It's either Argento or sterile dystopia, with no in-between.
oh, i read the _crap_ out of this.
i think he doesn't understand what makes certain types of lighting work. it's like that ebert quote about the guy who overused the dutch angle, "he's learned from better films that sometimes directors tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why."
My boyfriend sent me this because I asked him for a UA-cam video (preferably long that I can listen to cause I'm at work) this made me realize, 1. How big of an issue this is but 2. How actually useful and accurate our writing teachers were when they said things they did. And if someone suddenly starts doing it, you can tell because when you're trying to copy what someone else, you start changing words which not only can change the whole meaning of the sentence, it'll start sounding weird because not only does everyone have their own writing voice, cadence, etc., but also you're gonna start changing words and sometimes not really understand what that word means and if it fits with the topic you're trying to talk about; and if it suddenly changes there's you're cue. Also, people seem to not convey the same kind of passion that the original creator(s) like it feels like a fake happy, or like the persons like "here's this incredibly boring info" kinda monotone talking, i think you said something along the lines of this, but it's very true. I told this to my bf as I got about an hour and a half through as of posting this, and with how thorough some teachers were in explaining how to do citations and the different methods of citing, It gives the same energy of the kids who just half assed it, or just didn't care. It really is a super easy concept, you find a piece of information, don't take it word for word but ALWAYS cite where you got your info, you always make either an index or an ORGANISED way of citing your sources that won't give your reader actual nightmares trying to find more about a subject, or fact checked it. All in all, plagiarism literally feels like sheer laziness and I agree with it's low-key, REALLY disrespectful. Especially if you "respect" said person, like no, if you respected them you wouldn't jack their stuff and try and get paid for the information they found, wrote, put out, especially when it's something they're actually passionate about
Well said
Blair’s argument that she isn’t a plagiarist falls apart completely when you realize that her essays are so tightly congested with other people’s work that she herself cannot be plagiarized - you can only plagiarize her “sources” by proxy
isn't it funni how when i plagiarise the entirety of those documentaries, it just happens to be entirely the same as her "original" script? 😦 wait what's happening? did brain deer plagiarise blair? 🤬 lol
The irony of her plagiarizing her scripts is that she tried suing someone over an editing style she claimed to own recently
@@L337LYC4Nthat’s at 1:11:56 c:
I like your vibes, "serrated combat wife"
Ballmastrz pfp :)
There's a line in here that really sticks with me: "when someone tries to use language to imply what they did happened by magic, they make it pretty clear they're trying to deceive you." I keep coming back to it because someone speaking to me like that was the switch that flipped in my brain and made me realize I was in an abusive relationship. I know that's kind of heavy for the comment section, but it's been echoing in my brain since I first heard it. Really hit home. Anyway, thanks
Hope you’re doing well!!❤️
@@kinsey7894 I am, this was years ago, but thank you!
yup. passive voice vs. active voice. it's really poor writing, too. "joe changed the lightbulb" vs. "the lightbulb was changed."
"i threw your dead mom's porcelain music box against the wall" vs. "your music box broke."
"we started arguing and i demanded to see your phone, and you wouldn't show me, so i beat the crap out of you" vs. "an altercation that arose from a verbal argument." like the fight was born spontaneously as opposed to an action that was taken.
active voice claims the action in a very literal way, and it can be _deeply_ uncomfortable to have to describe things you're not proud of that way. i think a lot of people honestly don't realize they're doing that.
i recently went through a phase where i watched a lot of circuit court cases, criminal misdemeanor cases, bond revocation hearings, sentencing hearings, parole hearings, etc. over the course of several months, i can think of 2 times the defendant/parole applicant used active voice and didn't externalize the blame at all. even when they're pleading guilty or trying to explain what they learned from victim awareness classes - they're physically in the process of admitting out loud to what they did - they still really struggle with it. they frequently try to share blame to make it easier on themselves. "i was in the wrong because i shouldn't have allowed myself to be in that situation." what situation? the one where your son had a super punchable face? it's a dance of evasiveness.
it's "the incident." it's "what happened." it's "what we [my victim and i] did." it's "we were fighting. i agreed to take the blame because she's pregnant."
they also like to frame the victim as being unreliable by including extraneous, unflattering details. combined with passive voice, this very successfully obfuscates the actor in the situation. "my wife and i were fighting because of her drinking problem." "we got into a fight because she was jealous of my coworker, she thinks i was flirting with her." this is _technically_ correct, so when their wife almost inevitably gets her hackles up about it, _she_ looks and feels like the unreasonable one. and in a reality where she _is_ the unreasonable one, she is the reason he was cited for a domestic assault, or whatever happened. (i'm thinking of a handful of specific cases, but women can be abusers and men can be victims. just for the record.)
anyway! you were really insightful to realize that's what was happening - it's a word game - and i'm glad you got away from that person. you deserve control over your own reality.
I’ve also noticed another context in which that phrase applies: assault.
Sexual or otherwise, you see a lot of language that reframes instances of assault as almost being a force of nature instead of a decision made by a person. This basically always leads to victim blaming in someway.
“If you hadn’t worn that/walked there/gotten drunk/hung out with those people, then that wouldn’t have happened to you” no, what you mean to say is that “if I hadn’t done something wrong, then a person wouldn’t have made the decision to assault me” but you can’t say that because you don’t know if that’s true or not.
People love to pretend that assault is predictable enough to avoid. Get flood insurance if you live in a tidal area. Dress modestly if you’re around men. One of these sentiments can help you avoid something tragic. The other is trying to convince you that somebody’s actions were done by magic.
You’re welcome
it's still fucking wild to me how james unironically did the "they dont treat you like a friend, they treat you like an item" speech from the snapcube 06 dub
"Sometimes, I wish I could be more than just an accessory to these women." -Mephiles the Dark, Sonic 06 Snapcube Fandub
AINT NO FUCKING WAY
WHEN WE SEEIN HIS GAMER PAD
@@Toast-comMemphis Tennessee, you mean. And he's part lizard
@@malachiatkinson7245 He's also vape smoke and contained in the perfect shape
“That just makes you a beta cuck…”
Watching any other video that talks about Internet Historian and the plagiarism, then go to the comment section. Holy Jesus it’s just a bunch of his fans coping and god-defending him.
Some of their “reasons” include
1. He put animations in it so it’s transformative
2. Viewers don’t care if it’s ethical or not
3. He brought more attention to the story
And this is why I had UA-cam never recommend me anything related to his channel ever again. He’s herding a cult. It’s sickening.
It really is disgusting. Sucks that he's a closeted right-winger asshole 'hiding his power level' to try and gather an audience of normies.
the "shouldnt need to do this" segment gives "youre gay because you love men, im gay because i hate women, we are not the same" vibes
@@geekzombie8795 he is gay because he hates women that is true
Who said that?
@@chud-of4ybnobody, its a meme
@@chud-of4yb I'm not sure a gay man ever said that, but "political lesbianism" is a thing in radical feminism and basically boils down to "I'm a lesbian because I hate men."
@@chud-of4ybmostly its a meme
My heart sank when I realized he was gonna talk about James Somerton in this video. It sank even further after seeing just how bad his plagiarism and dishonesty was. Really loved "his" "work".
Awful creator. Awful person.
Same. Beyond shocked
James is not an "awful creator" at this point he is an "awful content stealer"
I feel you on that. I actually said "oh no" out loud. I really don`t want all of this to be true but I am really glad that someone noticed it and told the whole truth
I felt terrible initially also, makes me question why I didn't clock it earlier. But so glad this video is here to set the record straight
03:27:30 is this like the 3rd or 4th time Hbomb has randomly brought up a fictional white women victimization campaign? and weirdly including it as a joke when mentioning one of the few black creators in the space is peak white privilege and ignorance. What happened with Lindsey Ellis was bad hbomb we know you're angry about it but that doesn't give you the go-ahead to create this narrative that white women are under attack by queer and BIPOC liberals online it's disgusting.
You can add James Somerton's video on Our Flag Means Death to the plagiarism list. That was the one video of his I realized I had actually seen and enjoyed at the time since I'm a fan of the show. Did some very fun phrase googling for about ten minutes and found him plagiarizing at least two articles in Part Three of the video: "Gay seniors come out late, start second lifetime" by Matt Sedensky and "Coming Out Later in Life: A How-To Guide" by Nick Levine. Hilariously, after quoting Nick Levine’s piece verbatim for a while, he skips over the part where Levine praises “Love, Simon” for being a good mainstream piece of LGBTQ representation. I’m sure there’s a million more bits of plagiarism in that video alone but I’m not about to spend any more time looking, even though this was kinda fun to try for myself.
That was probably my favorite of his videos. I'd like to learn who actually wrote it.
Hey, not sure if you use Reddit ever, but Kat (producer) started a thread on the Hbomb subreddit for people to report further plagiarism on. It might be a good idea to post your detective work there too if you’re able, as I’m betting Harry and Kat are going to have a hell of a time scrolling through comments on this video.
lmao
I haven’t watched a ton of his videos, but I was subscribed and really enjoyed this one. Glad the proper authors are getting some credit for it now and looking forward to looking more into them.
@@chattychemist thank you for mentioning this! I've just posted a more detailed summary of the plagiarism I noticed on that thread.
Mr. Guy, it is nearly the end of the year, and I crave a new yearly video!
the war on christmas 2: krampus's revenge
Word on the street is one is coming soon
@@larissabrglum3856YAY
I like that "Telos" is an anagram of "Stole."
It's also solet backwards!
Oh my god,I never noticed it😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮.😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮😮
I bet he knew it already when he decided on making a company with that name
Ah, I hadn't clocked it!
AND it means "end" in Greek xD
"If I was doing plagiarism, I wouldn't have a channel" - Rare instance of James Somerton accidentally telling the truth, just a couple years early.
Foreshadowing is a dramat-
Sometimes, foreshadowing is relatively obvious.
Foreshadowing is a literary device in whi-
“If I was f*cking young girls I promise I would be arrested”
Foreshadowing is a literary device
Honestly Illuminaughti picking a fight with an *a lawyer in good standing* seems like a real act of hubris.
I was honestly got one of her popped up and it was about 'traditional builder exposed' and 'cutedodo' exposed. She looks real. Then she reappears again with drama on her video then gone to obscurity
At least now I know why
I'm not sure what she expected, because taking a reputable lawyer to court (even if it's the court of public opinion) sounds like a great way to embarass yourself in the most expensive way possible.
The Mea Culpa is real
A copyright lawyer at that! Like, how stupid do you have to be??
@@brendaleelydon very. not to mention the effect in question was not that. and the editor only want to use the effect he asked (not the highlight or paper thing) for his own personal video.
And lets pretend that he wanted to blatantly copy video effect. Was accusing his boss for plagiarizing on public forum the best way to do it? Doubly stupid when that person is a lawyer and triply stupid when you realize said lawyer specialize with copyright law.
I’ve no idea how my algorithm brought me to this, I normally just through long videos on to sleep too most nights, but jeez every time I woke up I scrolled back to where I remembered to catch up what I missed, honestly I’m saving this and I’ll watch it in full.
New sub here !
This video is some sort of mystical dream realm where millions of people find themselves while falling asleep
“I didn’t think UA-cam videos could have souls but now I’ve experienced ones that don’t” is such an incredible line and so accurately describes such a specific feeling lmao
It is these incredibly memorable lines that make Hbomb's long video-essays so immensely watchable.
Also a reference to the pathalogic video wherein he talks about his soul being trapped in said video essay
Man this video got around UA-cam lol
Kinda how null hypothesis works
That line is so good James Somerton might steal it and claim it as his own.
The combined voices of Brian Deer and Illuminaughty at 49:56 saying "and injected the stuff into pregnant goats" in unison was a religious experience for me
I think we should all have moments like that.
i'm curious about your religion
This is amazing!
Your religion is a War on Christmast! There is a video of Hbomberguy proofing this!
@@bridgetdunleavy3549 dammit you beat me to it
I try falling asleep to this video sometimes and always get woken up by Hbomb going "RIGHT? .....RIGHT? ...NO!!"
omg SAME 🤣
Release the sleep cut!
I am so glad I'm not the only one falling asleep to hbomb. It's comforting, in a way, to have some background noise
@@deeznoots6241 It's just the same video but he's whispering all the loud parts. lol
This video ALWAYS autoplays after I fall asleep. UA-cam always knows.