brain! rot! hot! spot!

six (he/she) : random youtube recs! my main corners of youtube are video essays (media analysis, usually) and random kpop stuff—but I’ll be including a little bit of everything! : main blog @a-moth-to-the-light

[sciencemachines]

absolutely stellar youtube recommendation

[ladyknightthebrave]

LOTR Retrospective coming soon y'all. Also chapter 1 is up in full on my Patreon now 👉👉

[randomyoutuberecs]

SQUEEEEEE something something this blog loves pinely

[starlit-mansion]

listen. i honestly do try my best to not be bitchy about stuff. but if you not-joking-joked that you wanted to watch a video essay from hbomb on the kendrick-drake rap beef. i think that you are obligated to watch fd signifier's 3 hour video essay. i KNOW the watch time is not the issue.

[hearthfire-heartfire]

[grammarpedant]

I spent three and a half hours utterly immersed in a beef I was barely aware of from a scene I am not part of. This is a video about rap artists, of course, but also if you like hearing about scene drama, art history, Black culture, or if you just enjoy watching video essays, you gotta watch this video. F.D. Signifier is not playing around- this is documentary-level production covering decades of what rap means through the lens of a conflict between prominent artists, presented in a way that's both informative and engaging for a newcomer AND also deeply incisive and analytical for the seasoned rap purist. And aside from teaching me a fuckton about hip hop, this video also just made me feel excited about and open to nonfiction media once again.

Cannot overstate how HIGHLY I recommend this video essay.

[vaspider]

My wife and I watched this and basically didn't move for the entire run time. He's a fantastic essayist.

[randomyoutuberecs]

IDK WHY THIS MAKES ME SO HAPPY BUT IT’S MY COMFORT VIDEO NOW

[randomyoutuberecs]

Post from Entrapranure

August 2024 rankings are out. Get mad in the comments.

[randomyoutuberecs]

i’ve been missing jay exci making fun of bad cartoons, so this was just what the doctor ordered—and i learned a surprising amount about television history, too!

[randomyoutuberecs]

NEW PINELYYY

[randomyoutuberecs]

OH THIS VIDEO STILL HITS HARD

[randomyoutuberecs]

this one sticks in my brain & i think about it a lot!! need to actually read some kafka tho

[edgarallennope]

so sad that james somerton had to turn to plagiarism because he ran into a wall that was painted to look exactly like a tunnel as a child or something.

[violottie]

WE ARE SO BACK

[redbuddi]

Truly the apology of all time

[randomyoutuberecs]

I CANT BELIEVE THIS IS TWO YEARS OLD NOW ?? it feels relevant enough to have been released yesterday, but also much older since i’ve rewatched it so many times in the past two years !! already a youtube classic

[cacklingskeleton]

Death Note AU where hbomberguy makes a five hour long video about youtuber Light Yagami that's initially completely unrelated to the murders (Light would probably plagiarize or have really unhinged right-wing political takes if he was on youtube)

but halfway through he reveals that while researching he stumbled upon evidence that Light might be behind the Kira murders, and then spends like fourty minutes explaining the concept of a shinigami, an hour explaining how he thinks Light used one to commit murders, and then another hour explaining Light's ideology and why the concept of criminals being inherently evil is flawed

He finishes the video by addressing Light directly and telling him that he (Hbomberguy) had his name legally changed before uploading the video, to something that only he knows, making it impossible for Light to kill him

[cacklingskeleton]

you gotta be shitting me

[ladyknightthebrave]

Your videos have brought me a lot of joy over the years, and I recently rewatched all of them. Your work and ideas are so brilliant, and you also have a lovely, calming voice.

Aww that's lovely thank you so much 😊

[wolfnanaki]

The swiftness and brutality of Hbomberguy’s complete evisceration of James Somerton’s career cannot be overstated.

[mamapluto]

Can somebody give a tldr of what happened? I've only seen reactions.

[zwoelffarben]

James Somerton is a white gay business major who built a 337k subscriber, ~3,500patron career as a content creator (derogatory) on youtube by serially plagiarizing the work of other queer theorists.

The image you see of a lot of text on screen highlighted in a bunch of different colors is the script of one of his earliest and most important videos color coded by who a particular passage was plagiarizing as he read their words out loud as if they were his own without credit.

Hbomberguy and Kat together identified 18 distinct victims of somerton's creditmongering in this one video alone, as well as plagiarism of equal measure in at least half of his catalogue of videos with the rest of the catalogue still being highly suspicious but not yet identified as plagiarized.

In addition to the plagiarism, he's also being called out for misogynistic beliefs which tend toward being the only thing of his own which he injects inbetwixt the words of others, his use of identity as a shield from criticism, his darvo-ian tactics of denying a plagiarism occured (using the following he built to SLAPP in the court of public opinion), and his 'film studio' Talos has over the course of several years and $64K dollars donated to it expecting it to make indie films has produced NOTHING but movie posters created using stock image assets packs and more empty promises.

Hbomberguy decided to use his 1.3m subscriber base worth of clout to destroy the man's career with two hours of non-stop evidence and receipts (with a two hour preamble on the details of other plagiarists's activities to establish a baseline).

[phantomrose96]

zwoelffarben's summary is supremely good. I would like to add a few bullet points about the details that make this just so unbelievable to watch.

"Plagiarism" can cover a wide umbrella of pulling from sources without citation... This is in fact THE most egregious kind you're imaging. Verbatim, word-for-word reading out of articles written by small-time queer authors that James simply pretended were his own words, research, and opinions.

He stole the words of not one, but TWO different people who died of the AIDS epidemic. Stole their words and voices and gave none of it to their memory.

Nearly everything plagiarized was verbatim, save for a few intentional word-replacements: He would take "homosexual" and replace it with "queer". "Trans" and replace it with "LGBT".

He would occasionally skip over parts of articles while reading them verbatim if those parts were anecdotes that clearly did not belong to him, like one belonging to a trans writer talking about their trans experience.

He did, occasionally, interject his OWN few sentences... exclusively to include misogyny. In the middle of reading someone else's words about Ted Bundy, James interjects his own sentence about the "hordes of white women swooning over Bundy." He claims it's all "straight women" denying the gay rep in Yuri on Ice in the comment section of his YOI video. HBomb checked. There are no such comments. He has a "women have it easier" rant about ND Stevenson and Rebecca Sugar... who are transmasc and nonbinary respectively. (But hey, misgendering is cool if you don't respect their assigned gender right?) He repeatedly shits on the "straight woman" author of Love, Simon, despite her being bullied into coming out as bi due to exactly this, and when she gently asked him to stop deriding her as a straight woman fetishizing the gay experience, he continued to do it and acted like she'd blown up at him.

And maybe you're wondering "He copied so much verbatim. How did no one catch him?" They did. People did catch him. And he got them bullied into silence by claiming the people who noticed the plagiarism were sending death threats, were doxxing him, were anti-queer trolls, and were lying. The main person who caught him asked HBomb to keep her name out of the video and talk about her as little as possible due to the enormous harassment she'd been through.

He preached so much about being a voice for queer people, about how people needed to support him since he was doing this kind of work for queers no one else was... while stealing from, silencing, and squashing every small-time queer author doing the ACTUAL work that he lifted in order to fund his massively lucrative internet career.