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James Somerton - Blog Posts
The craziest thing to me to come out of the Hbomber video is finding out the James’s co-writer DIDNT READ OR DO RESEARCH.
Like this guy basically said “woah woah, hang on there guys, I’m a writer, not a reader. Don’t get all upset, common misconception.”
Youtubers need to stop making apology videos after they get exposed for their actions. Because it's one half assed apology in the first five minutes and after that it's excuse after excuse after excuse in an attempt to manipulate and guilt trip the people watching the video to make them feel guilty for their own actions.
Sources for Somerton's Plagiarism from Hbomberguy's Video (as much as I could get)
I went back through Harry's video, focused entirely on the sources James Somerton pulled from in the hopes of creating as much of a comprehensive list as I could--though my Google-Fu is not very strong. I did however find something I thought was forever lost and that made me very happy--specifically the magazine Midlands Zone containing the column by Steven Spinks that Harry poignantly used as an illustration of gay erasure... while Somerton uses it to sound like HE is waxing remorseful about the very subject.
This is not a complete list, I'm sure. For one thing, I was only able to attempt to pull sources that Harry himself mentioned in the video. Surely there's so very much more out there. I expect there to be a great deal more internet archeology to unearth just how much writing and culture Somerton has stolen like he's the British Museum of Natural History but for gay people.
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Harry's list of mentioned youtubers:
Alexander Avila - https://www.youtube.com/@alexander_avila Matt Baume - https://www.youtube.com/@MattBaume Khadija Mbowe - https://www.youtube.com/@KhadijaMbowe Lady Emily - https://www.youtube.com/@LadyEmilyPresents Shanspeare - https://www.youtube.com/@Shanspeare RickiHirsch - https://www.youtube.com/@RickiHirsch VerilyBitchie - https://www.youtube.com/@verilybitchie
Harry created a convenient playlist of videos by these and other people he wants to bring to everyone's attention.
Please give them your support.
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Midlands Zone Magazine - Column by Steven Spinks
After a great deal of searching, I found an archive of the "Midlands Zone" magazine, where you can read through past issues dating all the way back to February 2014. I have also found the issue from which Somerton took Spinks' poignant discussion of gay erasure: Overall archive Specific Issue - Pages 16-17
It will not allow you to download it, but you can read it exactly as it appeared in print form.
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My best effort to find the exact book or article Somerton lifted from to be able to get attention to the original writers
Tinker Bells and Evil Queens By Sean Griffin
The Celluloid Closet By Vito Russo Wikipedia article about the book Wikipedia article about the documentary My weak google-fu could not find where you can access the book or documentary. Check your local municipal or university library for book or documentary, or if you know a good source for one or both, please reblog with it added
Camp and the Gay Sensibility By Jack Babuscio
The Groundbreaking Queerness of Disney's Mulan By Jes Tom Personal site with links to social media accounts
Why Rebel Without a Cause was a milestone for gay rights By Peter Howell
Why "The Craft" is still the best Halloween coming out movie By Andrew Park
Opinion: From facehuggers to phallic tails, is 'Alien' one of the queerest films ever? By Dani Leever
Women and Queerness in Horror: Jennifer's Body By Zoe Fortier
[Pride 2019] We Have Such Sights to Show You: Hellraiser and the Spectrum of Queerness By Alejandra Gonzalez
Revealing the Hellbound Heart of Clive Barker's 'Hellraiser' By Colin Arason
Queering James Cameron's Aliens (1986) By Bart Bishop
Demeter and Persephone in space: transformation, femininity, and myth in the 'Alien' films By David Greven
Fears of a millennial masculinity: Scream's queer killers By David Greven (Scholarly site, unable to access original work, offers a way to request a full copy of the text in PDF)
Queer Subtext in Stephen King's It - Part 1: 'Reddie' Character Analysis By Rachel Brands Rachel is the very unfortunate lady who found out she was being stolen from because she supported Somerton through Patreon and saw one of his videos early with her writing--lacking any form of citation or credit
How 'It: Chapter Two' Leaves Richie Tozier Behind By Joelle Monique
When Horror Becomes Strength: Queer Armor in Stephen King's 'IT' By Alex London
Why Queer People Love Witchcraft By Amanda Kohr
'The Favourite' Queers The Past And The Present By Giorgi Plys-Garzotto
(Wuko) Crush (Mako x Wu) By MoonFlower on YouTube
5 Terrible Movies With Awesome Hidden Meanings By J.F. Sargent
The Radicalization of Sexuality: The Queer Casae of Jeffrey Dahmer By Ian Barnard
Netflix's 'Dahmer' backlash highlights ethical issues in the platform's obsession with true crime By Shivani Dubey
The Possible Disturbing Dissonance Between Hajime Isayama's Beliefs and Attack on Titan's Themes Original Article by "Seldom Musings" (Author has made all posts not related to Attack On Titan private and has retired from the blog)
Everyone Loves Attack on Titan. So Why Does Everyone Hate Attack on Titan? By Gita Jackson
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The following people are otherwise named in the video. There are no direct citations of articles or books by them in said video. I am unable to guarantee that I have identified the correct individual.
Darren Elliott-Smith Michaela Barton David Church Claire Sisco King Amanda Howell Jessica Roy
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Telos announced and cancelled a film likely based on this book: The Final Girl Support Group - By Grady Hendrix
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I refrained from including certain sources.
First off only focusing on Somerton's work.
Secondly not including anything that might be visible enough to not require amplifying their voice (I cannot speak for all of those I have found links to, but journalism is frequently a thankless job).
Thirdly any source that is of a nature that is antithetical to the very existence of the queer community, such as the right-leaning source that didn't make it into Somerton's video, but Harry was able to identify as a source he had considered using.
If you feel I have missed a mentioned source--or you know of a source from material that was not covered in Harry's video--please do not hesitate to reblog with added details.
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Please share this information far and wide, and please add to it if you find more material that can be positively identified and linked to the creator/writer.
All the drama and exposing aside Hbomberguy's video on plagerism really is insightful on the mentalities of people who plagerize
In school they always emphasized how plagerism is bad because you're stealing words and ideas and if you do it we will give you a severe punishment.
But Hbomberguy really opened my eyes to the disrespectful aspect of plagerism. That when someone plagerizes someone else's work they're basically saying "you are so insignificant I can get away with this" and that these ppl will not hesitate to spit in the face of those they stole from.
Plagerism isn't like stealing food. The risk of expulsion and or losing your integrity is far greater than the risk of failing a class or missing a deadline. It is always better to not to commit plagiarism.
I feel like the Hbomberguy plagiarism video has a lot of really good lessons about building an argument. Like, the thesis of the video isn't just "Plagiarism is rife on Youtube", although that point was certainly well made, it was specifically about James Somerton, who isn't mentioned until about halfway through the video. Before then, Hbomb goes through several creators who are already widely discredited as plagiarists, and in each section he introduces concepts that are later incorporated into the final takedown of Somerton, but each section also stands on it's own. Like, he starts with Filip, the game reviewer, which he uses to introduce the format of how he will discuss and expose plagiarists. Specifically, the graphic of displaying the source material while the plagiarist's voice plays, and marking up said source material every time the plagiarist changes some wording slightly. This is the method that Hbomb uses across the entire video. With Illuminaughtii, Hbomb introduces a few major concepts 1) The idea of Insufficient citation. Illuminaughtii "Cites" her sources by putting a plaintext pastebin link in her video descriptions with no indication of how each source was used. Technically, her source is CITED, but not in any relevant or useful way. She has a big list of stuff she read, and a random youtube link in there happens to be the source that she stole 90% of the video from. 2) He introduces the profit motive behind this approach. Putting out a lot of content very quickly is how one builds an audience, and therefore an income, out of making stuff on youtube. Plagiarism of this sort is a way to produce content very quickly and build a following. The Internet Historian section introduces two new concepts:
1) The behavior of an exposed plagiarist, taking down and reuploading videos with minor changes, awkwardly trying to insert credit without admitting guilt. 2) That the plagiarists are stealing not just research, but STYLE. Previous sections go over how the plagiarists are reusing the same words, but this section oozes over how much of the final product's quality was the result of how well the source material was written. TIH didn't just crib the notes from the Mentalfloss article, he created a video heavily dependent on the original author's skill as a writer. When TIH tried his own hand at presenting the same set of facts, it came out much worse. So that when the time comes for the Somerton takedown, Hbomb has already laid the groundwork to bring these concepts back. Somerton takes down and reuploads videos when he's caught, he declares this his video is "based on" work by somebody else without providing proper citation. He's not just stealing research done by somebody else, he's taking their insights and talent as a writer and regurgitating it as his own, and he's doing so to churn out a vast wall of content that he can financially benefit from, and he doesn't need to tell you why this is important, because he's already done so. He already convinced you that Illuminaughtii hiding a line in a pastebin didn't excuse her plagiarism, so you don't need to be told why Somerton saying his video is "Based On" somebody else's book doesn't excuse it.
Hbomberguy's latest video is the closest thing to watching an actual murder without anyone getting physically hurt. Criminals are very lucky Harry didn't get into law.
Okay for real though can we also talk about internet historian and illuminaughtii?? Cause both those channels also suck and deserve at least a little of the vitriol Mr. Somerton is currently receiving. Illuminaughtii positioned herself as like an expert on bad businesses and exposing mlms and stuff, and internet historian makes dreck that appeals mostly to edgy teenage boys who think saying slurs is funny. The fact that both of them were also just ripping off other people’s work to make such desperately mid content is a little funny ngl. I hope this video tanks both their YouTube careers too.
EDIT: yes I am now aware that Blair’s channel has already tanked as a result of the dramas that unfolded a few months ago while Hbomb was working on this video (1 mil subscriber count but averaging 20k views a video nowadays. Brutal), but let’s still hope internet historian’s follows suit. Everyone has latched onto the James Somerton centerpiece, but internet historian has a Huge platform (and also sucks).
It would be extremely lame if the guy who got his audience by posting 4chan edgelord bait and anti-sjw cringe and is now pretending to be a respectable channel has the only career that survives this exposé.
James Somerton and Internet Historian
Hbomberguy
They mightve stolen other people's writing but he stole their subscribers
Gay pride happens in June and gay wrath happens whenever hbomberguy drops a 3+ hour video essay about a specific topic
If Hbomberguy made this image about me I'd simply walk into the fucking ocean my time on Earth would be over
i think the thing that is specifically bothering me about the conversation about the new hbomberguy video ("live your life in a way so that hbomberguy doesn't tear into you for 3 hours", "hbomberguy has figured out how to death note someone through video essays", "oh new hbomberguy video [incredibly dense paragraphs of text] i now despise james somerton") is that it really feels like people aren't paying attention to what hbomberguy was actually saying. like, as much as he wanted to make people aware of the plagiarism issue, he also very explicitly did not like the fact that he might even remotely have a financial incentive to make those sorts of videos. and rather than the last video, which was a "get mad about this" call to action, hbomberguy spent this whole video sympathizing with the people who were directly out indirectly affected, and wanted the focus of people's attention to be on uplifting small queer creators
but also, negativity drives engagement so i guess it's to be expected.
a second video essay has hit the james somerton
The swiftness and brutality of Hbomberguy’s complete evisceration of James Somerton’s career cannot be overstated.
"internet historian's alt-right anyways" "great day to have never liked james somerton" "never even heard of illuminaughtii before this lol"
that's great buddy but don't go around thinking you're immune to this. if you're not looking for plagiarism, you likely won't notice it unless its egregiously obvious. hell, you've probably consumed plagiarized content without even realizing it. even hbomb pointed out that these people disguised what they presented pretty well as long as you didn't try and dig deeper. don't come away just thinking of this as a callout piece, take this as an important lesson about vetting your sources. if googling scripts in quotes was enough to expose the original, we should all start doing that shit!!
Since we're all talking about plagiarism now, I'd like to share this video which came out last year about a paper accepted at the CVPR 2022:
For the people not in the know, the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference is the biggest conference in computer science. Last year, in 2022, the paper featured in the video got accepted. A few days later, this video was posted. The first author, a PhD student, apologized and the paper was retracted and removed from the proceedings. Hilariously, the first reaction of the co-authors, including a professor at the Seoul National University, was to say that they had nothing to do with it.
My point here is that scientific papers are not rigorously checked for plagiarism, and a background in academia tells you absolutely nothing about whether or not someone will be diligent in avoiding plagiarism. The biggest difference is that there are consequences if you're caught.
I also don't want people to be too harsh on the first author of this paper, or to think the situation is equivalent to the whole Somerton debacle. For starters, you don't get paid for publishing papers, you (or more commonly your university) pay the publishers. But the phrase publish or perish exists for a reason, and everyone in the field wants to get published in the CVPR, because it's supposed to show that you're great at research. Additionally, the number of papers and the prestige of the venues they're published in criteria on which you will be evaluated as a researcher and a university employee.
The way I see it, there are basically two kinds of plagiarism that are shown in the video. The first one concerns sentences that are lifted completely unchanged from other papers. This is bad, and it is plagiarism, but I can see how this would happen. Most instances of this appear in the introduction and on background information, so if you're insecure about your mastery of English and it's not about your contribution anyway, I can understand how you would take the shortcut of copy-pasting and tell yourself that it's just so that the rest of the paper makes sense, and why waste time on phrasing things differently if others have done it already, and it's not like there are a million way to write these equations anyways.
Let me be clear. I don't approve, or condone. It's still erasing the work of the people who took the time and pain to phrase these things. It's still plagiarism. But I understand how you could get to that point.
The second kind of plagiarism is a way bigger deal in my opinion. At 0:37 , we can see that one of the contributions of the paper is also lifted from another paper. Egregiously, the passage includes "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first [...]" , which is a hell of a thing to copy-paste. So this is not only lazily passing other people's words as your own, it's also pretending that you're making a contribution you damn well know other people have already done. I also wasn't able to find a version of the plagiarized article that had been published in a peer-reviewed venue, which might mean that the authors submitted it, got rejected, and published it on arXiv (an website on which authors can put their papers so that they're accessible to the public, but doesn't "count" as a publication because it's not peer-reviewed. You can also put papers that are under review or have been published on there as long as you're careful with the copyrights and double-blind process). And then parts of it were published in the CVPR under someone else's name.
I think there's also a third kind of plagiarism going on here, one that is incredibly common in academia, but that is not shown in the video. That's the FIVE other authors, including a professor, who were apparently happy to add their name to the paper but obviously didn't do anything meaningful since they didn't notice how much plagiarism was going on.
That man's gatekeeping of homosexuality and his thinly-veiled misogyny drives me f*cking nuts - him equating queerness with his own experience as a media personality is just straight up disrespectful. A gay guy who wants the most "vanilla" life there is can be as fun to be around as a gay Broadway actor who goes to drag show every night.
Also his hatred for tween/early teen girls (Killing Stalking video) for, gasp, having emotions that are perfectly normal for their age and which every one of them will grow out of (if they don't then yes, there is a problem, but being 12 yr old girl and thinking "evil man can change" is the same as 12 yr old boy thinking he'd definitely stop bank robbery if it happened) is just pathetic... my dude, did those 12 yr olds bully you so hard?
Just a pathetic man....
love that james somerton tries so hard to sound smart but he just ends up with psychopath statements like 'its only the boring gays that survived the aids crisis'
Things I've seen tumblr memeing about James Somerton doing à la "How did no one see how bigoted he was!" as if those things haven't been a significant part of tumblr culture for over a decade :
Presenting untrue and bordering on conspiratorial versions of (queer or otherwise marginalised) history without any sources
Completely disregarding and disrespecting any expertise on socio-cultural topics/humanities and distrusting academics and historians (incl. acting as if no academics or historians could be queer or marginalised)
Downplaying the role misogyny played in the historical oppression of queer women and concluding that queer men must have been more oppressed than queer women
Bi women are, at best, not as queer as "real" queer ppl, and at worst, simply equivalent to straight women
Despite nominal trans inclusivity, transmasculine ppl are functionally women when convenient (combined with the above, bi transmascs are functionally straight women)
Despite nominal trans inclusivity (bis), shamelessly attacking, threatening and actively endangering any trans woman who questions them or smth they find important (often by unfairly presenting her as violent or as a threat)
Having absolutely fucking wild and reductive takes about ace ppl, the oppression they face and their place in the queer community
Stating that marriage equality is an assimilationist fight while completely ignoring its direct roots in the horrifying consequences of the AIDS crisis for partners of ppl who died of AIDS
Praising western media creators from the past for queer coding even under censure and in the same breath condemning current non western media creators for being homophobic bc their representation isn't explicit enough
Blaming China for all existing homophobic censoring in western media
Assuming all queer media would be better told by western creators and by western standards
Only out queer ppl get to tell queer stories
Heavily criticising almost all queer media created by women or ppl they see as such (see above points about trans ppl) or involving/starring a significant amount of women for any perceived or real amount of "problematicness", but fawning over and praising and negating criticism of queer media created by and starring mostly or even functionally exclusively men (even when it could be argued that, you know, not involving/seriously sidelining women is a pretty clear example of misogyny which should probably be considered "problematic")
And I'm probably forgetting stuff or there's stuff I have internalised myself and don't recognise as an issue
Like idk but I feel like the takeaway from Hbomberguy and Toddintheshadow's videos should maybe be "be aware of such patterns in your communities bc they definitely exist" and not "this guy is uniquely awful" and I feel like a lot of the discussion I've seen surrounding this has been severely failing at that. Most ppl who've spent any significant amount of time on tumblr prob either have internalised at least one of those thought patterns, have had to de-internalise them, or have had to be extremely vigilant to not internalise them (which is done by, you know, seeking out other sources, which also seemed like an important takeaway from the videos)
i understand wanting to share how much you always hated everything somerton has ever said, really i do, but you guys. a lot of the work he plagarized is, actually, you know. good. some of it is seminal queer theory. you don't have to agree with everything, but it's worth engaging with those writers/creators' work directly before dismissing it outright because you were introduced to it through the shitty lense of a james somerton video.
When he announced that he approached all the plagiarized with public emails to apologize (since he couldn't easily find all of the people) I, like a clown, believed him in good faith. Only for him to only have very public content creator Alexander Avila blocked. Fool me once indeed...
"I was lazy, I wasnt trying to be malicious"
My problem with the whole Somerton apology, is that his actions were arguably malicious! If you take several steps to hide what you've done, if you start vague-tweeting at people who later have to hide their presence online because of harassment, if you dismiss lgbtq+ creator's concerns by just deleting the bits of the videos where you stole from them, you're not being "lazy", you're actually putting in a lot of work so that your version of events remains the only narrative!
"I was lazy, I wasnt trying to be malicious"
My problem with the whole Somerton apology, is that his actions were arguably malicious! If you take several steps to hide what you've done, if you start vague-tweeting at people who later have to hide their presence online because of harassment, if you dismiss lgbtq+ creator's concerns by just deleting the bits of the videos where you stole from them, you're not being "lazy", you're actually putting in a lot of work so that your version of events remains the only narrative!
Pride Flags Colorpicked from James Somerton Theft Layout
(inspired by @princessofgames, @makky-mystery-ichor, and @f-ckingawful’s posts!)
