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ohnoitstbskyen · 4 months

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re: Somerton

Not for nothing, but I think we should remember that James Somerton's fans and subscribers are normal people, just like you. They are people who received his output in good faith, and extended to him a normal amount of grace and benefit of the doubt, which he took advantage of.

I don't think it's helpful to respond to the exposé on Somerton with sentiments along the lines of "wow, how could anyone ever think THIS GUY'S videos were any good, ha ha ha, how did he ever get subscribers?" because 1) you have the substantial benefit of hindsight and a disengaged outsider perspective, and 2) it's a rhetoric that creates a divide between you (refined, savvy, smart, sophisticated) and Somerton's audience (gullible, unrefined, easily taken advantage of, terrible taste), which is a false divide, with a false sense of security.

Somerton's success happened because he stole good writing. He found interesting, insightful, in-depth work done by other people, applied the one skill he actually has which is marketing, and re-packaged it as his own. He targeted a market which is starving for the exact kind of writing he was stealing, and pushed his audience to disengage from sources that conflicted with him.

Hbomberguy makes this point in his exposé video: good queer writing is hard to find and incredibly easy to lose. The writers Somerton stole from were often poor or precarious, writing freelance work for small circles under shitty conditions, without the means or the reach or the privileges necessary to find bigger markets. And, as Hbomb demonstrated, when people did discover Somerton's plagiarism, he used his substantial audience to hound them away and dissuade anyone else from trying to hold him accountable.

He stole queer writing by marginalized people, about experiences and perspectives that people are desperate to hear more about, and even if his delivery and aesthetics were naff, his words resonated with people because the original writers who actually wrote them poured their goddamn hearts and souls into it.

Somerton also maintained a consistent narrative of persecution and marginalization about himself. He took the plain truth, which is that queer people and perspectives are discriminated against, and worked that into a story about himself as a lone, brave truth-teller, daring to voice an authentic queer perspective, constantly beset by bigots and adversaries who sought to tear him down. As @aranock, who works with some of the people he targeted, writes in this post, Somerton weaponized whatever casual bias and bigotry he could find in his audience to reinforce his me vs them narrative (usually misogyny and various forms of transphobia), which is what grifters do. They find a vulnerable thread in a community and pull on it. And while you may not have the particular vulnerability that he exploited, you do have vulnerabilities, and they can be exploited too.

People felt compelled to support him, even if his work was sometimes shoddy, because he presented himself as a vulnerable, marginalized person in need of help, he pulled on that vulnerable thread.

Again, he has a degree in marketing, and just like propaganda, nobody is immune to marketing.

YouTube as a system is set up to push for more, constantly more. More content, more videos, more output, more more more more, and part of Somerton and Illuminaughty's success was their ability to push out large amounts of content to the hungry algorithm, even if it was of inferior quality. The algorithm rewarded their volume of output with more eyeballs and attention, and therefore more opportunities to find people who were vulnerable to their grift.

It is a system which quite literally rewards the exact kind of plagiarism that they do, because watch-time and engagement are easily measurable metrics for a corporation, and academic rigor is not. There is pressure to deliver, and a lot of rewards to gain from cutting corners to do it.

Somerton and Illuminaughty and Internet Historian are extreme and very obvious cases, so blatant that you can make a four hour video essay exposing what they've done, but the vast majority of this kind of plagiarism isn't going to be obvious - sometimes it might not even be obvious to the people who are doing it. Casual plagiarism is endemic to the modern internet, and most people don't get educated on what the exact boundaries are between proper sourcing and quoting vs plagiarizing. We had an entire course module at my university aimed at teaching students the exact differences and definitions, and people still made good faith mistakes in their essays and papers that they had to learn to correct during their education.

All of this to say: it is extremely easy in hindsight to call Somerton's work shitty and shoddy, his aesthetics flat and uninspired, and to imagine that as a sophisticated person with good taste and critical faculties, you would never be taken in by this kind of grifter. It is extremely easy to distance yourself from the people he preyed on, and imagine that you will never have to worry about your fave doing your dirty like that.

But part of the point of Hbomberguy's video is that plagiarism is extremely easy to get away with, and often difficult for the average person to spot and call out, and with the rise of AI tools blurring the lines even further, it is not going to get any easier.

So I think we should resist the temptation to think of Somerton's audience as people with bad taste and poor faculties. We should resist the temptation to distance ourselves from the perfectly normal people he preyed on. Many times in your life, a modestly clever man with a marketing degree has fooled you too.

On a personal note, by the same token, I am resisting the temptation to assume that I am too good to be vulnerable to the systemic pressures that produced Somerton and Illuminaughty. No, I've never made a video by word-for-word reciting someone else's work, but I know for a fact that I could do a better job of double-checking my work and citing my sources. I feel the exact same pressure to get a video out as fast as possible, I have the exact same rewards dangled in front of me by YouTube as a platform, and I can't pretend it doesn't affect my work. To me, Hbomb's video felt like a wake-up call to do better.

#tb blog #james somerton #hbomberguy #todd in the shadows #plagiarism #youtube

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tbposting · 7 months

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As I get older I realize more and more how incredibly helpful it was for me to get exposed to queer erotica when I was young. Had some friends who were furries and through them I got to see various kinds of queer erotica, which sexualizes and loves the human body in such profoundly different ways than cishet porn and erotica does.

It was helpful because it helped chip away at the idea of normativity, the idea that there is one central ideal towards which all things must strive.

Not in a "queer porn made me enlightened!!!" kind of sense, but in the sense that once the time came that I was ready to start confronting my internalized self-hate and body shame and insecurities, I had some ammo to work with. I wasn't going up against it alone - I could point to this art - gay male art, lesbian art, furry art, art from the transgender perspective, all of it - and know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I still had to do some work to accept it, and internalize it, but I could know because I had evidence that, yes, there are people who desire bodies like mine, and who love those bodies earnestly and viscerally.

And regardless of whether I am attracted to those people in turn, whether I want to date them or sleep with them, it means that that insidious little voice which is drilled into the back of our heads telling us that our bodies do not meet the standard of quality that qualifies us for love is, quite simply, wrong. Beauty ideals are not a universal value, and they arise from no necessary truth or rational principle, they are a series of deliberate choices made by cultures, influenced by the culture's values.

And when that culture is struggling with a history of white supremacy, with a history of systemic sexism and homophobia, when that culture is dictated in large part by the whims and interests of billion dollar corporations intent on selling Products & Services™, the choice of beauty ideal is neither neutral or healthy, and you can unmake that choice for yourself, and find something better.

Anyway, I guess my point is that porn is good for you actually, especially the gay stuff. Replace all the Marvel movies you watch with filthy Ao3 fiction and furry smut.

#inb4: none of this is an argument that you should enjoy being fetishized #inb4: I am extremely obviously kidding with that last line leave me alone #give disney as little space in your head as you can though; they hate your body literally no matter what it looks like #also i do not want to hear any fucking thing about “evolutionary biology” on this post sit your asses DOWN when the humanities are talking #“um actually humans genetically prefer symmetry since it indicates fitness” no we literally do not have you ever met a real person #humans stumble ass-backwards into one another's orbits; we are at the mercy of our strange gravities #have a fucking experience; make yourself a person not a statistic #tb blog

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vinodkumar1972 · 1 year

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#tb blog

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i-am-going-to-skream · 1 year

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Wish john green would come back to tumblr :(

Why’d yall have to bully him? Now am sad :(((

#john green #please come back #i wanna see you blog about tb #shit post #shitpost #fyp

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thegazettejournalmirror · 1 month

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GREENDALE'S 1st TUMBLR ISSUE OF THE GAZETTE JOURNAL MIRROR!!

March 11 . 24. - a Quality publication of Greendale Community College

This issue's hot topics:

GLOW Party: Raging success, or total Dean-saster?

Elixirs, Potions and Me - Leonard Rodriguez rumoured to be in a cult for immortality.

An all-new update on the Winger-Perry wedding!

INCLUDES an exclusive interview of @prayingshirleybennett on getting the star couple engaged!

GLOW Party: Raging success, or total Dean-saster?

This past week saw the biggest, showiest party this year has seen so far - one anonymous attendee even suggested it was ‘reminiscent of those ragers people go to in the movies, you know, where they all get drunk and play beer pong.’ The party was nicknamed ‘GLOW Party’ in honour of the glowing cat owned by Troy Barnes and who is suggested to have been at the centre of the party’s inception. While it’s undeniable that this party was no disappointment in the wow factor, many will agree that the night became sour only a few drinks in.

The party invites were reported to have been sent out via a Tumblr post of student ‘Rayla Leone’ and by widespread messaging, word of mouth and Greendale’s official announcement Tumblr page, run by the Dean.

By the time day school was out only a few short hours later, the entire body was buzzing with the news, with the exception of the majority of the staff who remained uninvited and are still said to be ‘pretty darn pissed’ about the affair.

A member of staff who asked to remain anonymous commented; ‘It’s just rude. That study group and all their little friends just pick and choose who they like. Always running the school! Even the pets were invited. Huh. And what if I wanted to see a glowing cat?”

When asked to elaborate on the grievance with said study group, the member of staff refused to comment further and terminated the interview.

According to varied sources, there were few discrepancies when the evening’s ‘rager’ began in the apartment of student ‘Rayla Leone’. In fact, our sources went as far as commenting how seriously fun’ it turned out to be and how they had ‘needed the night off from mid-terms.’

The sources claimed there were drinking games, uno, spin the bottle, snooker, foosball and even a heated game of twister before the event turned bleak.

We know that there was originally a small amount of cheap alcohol on scene, but some basic information such as the strengths and quantities remain unknown. However, Tumblr posts claim that student ‘Britta Perry’, belonging to the aforementioned study group, was known to have brought in a good amount of ‘blue raspberry svedka’ which has been blamed for the extreme hangovers and blackouts party-goers experienced the next day.

There is also a strong likelihood that the party was mass-roofied, not unlike Greendale’s own Halloween party late last year, the events of which are still unknown despite intensive investigation and the shared experience of bite mark scars.

Many rumours are known to have arisen of a personal nature to many students and staff and yet the largest event of the night in question is a recent development in the ‘Evil Timeline Debacle.’ Troy Barnes’ glowing cat, named ‘Lightbulb’, the centre of the party, was reported missing the following morning. Not many had yet shaken off their hangovers and as such no action was taken until the later hours of the day.

The evil timeline members are said to have infiltrated the party and stolen Barnes’ ‘alien’ cat in exchange for a ransom of $1,000 and invitations to the upcoming Barnes-Nadir wedding. This wedding is allegedly platonic though evidence of this is still unclear.

The evil members were also suggested to have roofied the party in order to get away with their act.

Jeff Winger, student of law and close friend of Troy Barnes, was called upon to pay the ransom. Following his agreement the cat was returned safely to Barnes that afternoon.

In respect to the likely trauma induced by the sudden event, the Gazette Journal Mirror did not question Barnes on his experience.

Images were posted of the event but other than mere speculation no further rumour or scandal can be confirmed or denied at this current time.

Elixirs, Potions and Me - Leonard Rodriguez rumored to be in a cult for immortality.

Leonard Rodriguez (né Briggs, he changed his last name to garner the Hispanic vote during his campaign for Student Body President) has reportedly been endeavouring to attain immortality.

The evidence is finite, and his methods are unclear, yet it nevertheless remains apparent that there is certainly something occurring behind the scenes.

On his ask-blog, @leonardlikesthissite, Rodriguez often posts his Saturday events under the tag ‘Saturdays with Leonard.’

On a typical weekend, this includes activities such as swimming, clubbing, or jigsaws, (we particularly enjoyed this pizza review.) Once, he even posted about the political debate with his opponent and fellow student, ‘Magnitude.’

On this particular weekend however, Rodriguez alarmed many of his fellows and friends by posting ‘This Saturday Leonard is doing a ritual that may or may not lead to immortality!’ under his usual tag. When asked by another student ‘how’, Rodriguez denied details.

He did however hint that Greendale’s AC repair school had something to do with the ‘ritual.’

Here at the Gazette Journal Mirror, we cordially wish Leonard the best of luck with his ambitions. May our school's longest-attending student, in his own words, ‘Live, laugh love,’ for his new eternity.

An all-new update on the Winger-Perry wedding!

According to the official Greendale announcements page, run by Dean Pelton, the Winger-Perry wedding will take place in Greendale itself. This has been a source of great excitement for many of their friends and indeed those at the school, too.

Dean Pelton instructed that a repost of this statement would secure an invitation to the wedding.

There have been a few comments here and there about the current attendees and who is in the wedding party. This remains limited so we must stress that no invitations can be guaranteed in the reposting of the wedding announcement.

Further conversation about the upcoming nuptial of Winger-Perry has been unreported.

Exclusive interview with Shirley Bennett!

Interviewer: Hello there!

Bennett: Helloooo! So nice to be doing this todayy! And so exciting that the paper is making it to the interweb blogs, hehe!

Interviewer: Nice to have you. I agree, it is exciting. We’re all buzzing to go for the first release! Now, let’s talk weddings. Can you confirm that it was indeed you who incited the engagement in the first place?

Bennett: Oh yes! Of course I can, it was simply my duty to my Lord above and my friends, too. I didn’t want them to get sent to the burning place way down below all because they didn’t say a few little vows! Vows before God that is.

Interviewer: I see. And what does this union mean to you in terms of friendship?

Bennett: Well, from the start of being at Greendale I always used to say to Jeffery that two white people as cute and single as them should be together. I’m not saying I…stirrredd the pot…but I’ll say that maybe if I hadn’t said some things to Jeffery about Britta they might not even be together!

Interviewer: Would you share those details with us?

Bennett: OOooooh noooo! Heehe! It’s too personal, I can’t do that, it would be unholy. And unfriendly!

Interview: Well then, that wraps things up. Thanks for coming to our interview, Shirley!

Bennett: Thank you, and thank you, Lord and savior above!

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thewintersoldier · 2 years

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Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER (2014) - dir. Joe & Anthony Russo

#i will have ever second of this mans screentime giffed on my blog just u watch #buckybarnesedit #sebstanedit #marveledit #**#*tb #*bucky barnes #*catws #*marvel #*1k #ch: bucky barnes #film: catws #univ: mcu #f: marvel

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mecnun1cinar · 10 months

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#art #gök #gökyüzü#kesfet #keşfet #alıntı #bulutlar #yıldızlar #sevgi #love #sanat #sanatsal #sanatci #tablo #blog #tumblr #tb #rb #postlar1m #postlarım

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quaranmine · 5 months

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getting genuinely concerned my laptop won't have the storage space for the tumblr backup of this blog given it's already at 35 gb and the progress bar (assuming it's accurate) is NOT very far...

#hey so does firefox display the actual percentage progress in its little pie chart #or is it relative and that little pie slice might randomly jump to being larger #because if it's accurate. well. lmao #to put these concerns into context: i have 220 gb free space on my computer. im worried that isnt enough #to be clear i'm not gonna keep the backup on here i'm gonna put it on my tb backup drive #but like. can it TEMPORARILY store the blog backup? is it....THAT large? what goes into a blog backup #is it like everything i've ever rebogged? all 35k posts? all the photos? what #i might have created a monster

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sleeppaw · 7 days

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Authors and how they use their wealth

John Green: Uses his wealth to help fight tuberculosis

Rick Rhodian: Set up a publishing arm for Black, Asian, Hispanic and Indigenous authors

Andrea White: Campaigns for education and reading.

Many other authors have highlighted injustice.

Suzanne Collins: Disappeared into the woods

Then you have JK Rowling who is using her wealth to fund hate.

If I ever become a successful author, I would use my wealth to fight against injustice or pull a Suzanne Collins and disappear, only going out in public to promote a new book.

#sleepy's thoughts #bookblr #books and reading #anti jk rowling #Yes seriously the Fault Of Our Stars author is urging medicine companies to reduce costs of medicine used to fight TB #White worked in Texas' Education Compartment before embarking as an author #Even her debut novel had education as a plot point #Collins have a blog which she writes on once every few months #TERFS DNI

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had2bme · 1 year

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#gabriel boutin #emilien vekemans #tbs&tdh #tbsatdh #the bastard son and the devil himself #the bastard son & the devil himself #mine *#i made these for my writing blog but y'all can have them if you want.

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ohnoitstbskyen · 1 year

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The horrible emails in a YouTuber's inbox

I have a public contact email on my YouTube channels, which of course means it gets scraped by absolute hordes of spambots and mailing lists for crappy mobile games.

That's okay though, that's what filters are for, and I'm not much bothered by it.

Sometimes, though, you also get Legitimate Business Emails from real, actual companies who want to do real business with you. They market various services, multi-channel networks (no fucking thanks), SEO optimization and all the rest of the industries that perch on the side of influencer marketing and Content Creation™.

Most of these emails aren't worth talking about, they're just business. They're usually couched in excessively cheerful "Hello! My name is Content Influencer Specialist Assistant Manager, and we here at Influencer Service Provider absolutely love the content on your [[INSERT CHANNEL NAME HERE]] channel!"-language, pretending that they've watched even thirty seconds of anything you've made. It's annoying, but inoffensive, it's just how this kind of business is done.

Today, though. Today, my friends, I received a motherfucking EMAIL. A promotion for a service which seems to be motivated entirely by spite and contempt both for my work and for my audience as a whole.

There are two things I want to especially call your attention to here. First is the absolute 24 karat solid gold INGOT of a throwaway line, "boost channel stats and income without wasting your time on new content creation."

If I spent a whole week workshopping ideas, I don't think I could write a sentence that more completely communicates contempt both for my work and the ethics of my job, but also a single-minded drive for money as the only metric of any real value.

The other thing I want to draw your attention to is EIGHT FUCKING STREAMS?? EIGHT??? Four plus four goddamn motherfucking CONCURRENT streams, running 24/7 on my channel, constantly regurgitating my videos for no other reason except to game YouTube's recommendation algorithm and make the line go up?

Further down the email, they helpfully link a helpful and informative article they've written, which contains further magnificent wisdom:

I have stared into the Abyss too long, and this email is the Abyss staring back into me. This is an omen, a prophecy of the monster I could become.

If I ever become someone who runs eight continuous streams of re-runs, and who regularly shuts down and restarts these eight streams of continuous re-runs just to force them to show back up at the top of the YouTube recommendations, I beg of you, take me out behind the wood shed and put me out of my misery.

I summoned all of my powers of professionalism and politeness, and drafted a response:

Presumably, this is just someone whose job is entirely metrics optimization doing a very, very poor job of writing an email to a person who actually gives a shit about their job from an artistic point of view. Presumably it's just bad marketing copy.

But it thoroughly derailed my mind from getting any real work done today, so I am taking revenge by writing a blog about it, and hopefully you have... well, "enjoyed" might be the wrong word; hopefully you have been mildly fascinated by this peek into the garbage that populates the inboxes of YouTubers.

I'm serious about that wood shed thing, by the way. Like, whack! Just a quick, decisive strike to the back of the head, make it clean.

#tb blog #influencer #youtube #youtuber #behind the scenes #day in the life

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tbposting · 7 months

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I did a quick round of calculator app addition and found that tallied up across a full month's worth of videos, my shorts channel received something like 20.000 comments. 20.481, to be exact, not counting comments left on older videos that I uploaded before that month.

And I'm not gonna lie, that number knocked me on my ass a little bit. Both because, holy shit, that is a giant fucking number, that's a whole hell of a lot of words from a hell of a lot of people, but also because...

Something I've taken pride in ever since I started doing YouTube was that I actively moderate my comments sections. Like, I read as much of what's posted there as I can, I try to be receptive to feedback, I try to weed out and block the obvious trolls and online shitheads, and I try to create a bearable atmosphere where people can post their thoughts without getting dogpiled.

But I've been feeling worse and worse mentally over the past year, more and more stressed, and I've been getting more and more snippy and impatient. I have had less and less grace to extend to pretty much anyone.

Seeing that number... it occurred to me suddenly: hey, just a thought buddy, do you think maybe how you're feeling has something to do with trying to moderate TWENTY THOUSAND COMMENTS a month? Do you think maybe that has something to do with it? Could that possibly be affecting your mental state in a negative way maybe???

I have a less-than perfectly healthy relationship with YouTube comments already, I find it very hard NOT to rely on them for positive validation for my work, but...

jesus christ, twenty thousand comments in a month. twenty thousand.

There comes a point where what I'm doing constitutes some kind of digital self harm. I think I have to stop.

#tb blog

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imninahchan · 27 days

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nina por agora você só está escrevendo com o cast de lsdln e o twink francês ?

porque são as celebridades que estão me dando o gás pra escrever, me despertando interesse, porque são novos no meu mundinho de fã. Escrever com as mesmas figuras o tempo todo fica chato às vezes, e eu vivo de momentos😔🤌

#mas eu escrevo e converso sobre outros tb especialmente fora do kpop por enquanto #eu escrevo com kpop desde 2019 preciso de um break #não quero ser rude nem nada mas tb tem vários outros blogs que escrevem com idols por exemplo não é como se fosse fazer muita falta #enfimmmmm #🤗#[💌] fala comigo bebê

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berrys-spice-rack20 · 2 months

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LISTEN