#YouTube blog

[foxboppin]

My Tears of the Kingdom review is out! This is my best video. It's my best thumbnail, my best writing in most parts, my best music work, and my best visually directed. But even still, I wish it were better.

I know I am my biggest critic and I should be focused on the fact that I am growing and getting better every video, but there is always that nagging feeling before a video gets posted that it isn't good enough or that people won't like it.

All self doubt aside though, I am really proud of some of the moments in this video, and I hope anyone reading this enjoys watching it as much as I enjoyed making it! Spent a couple weeks just spitballing ideas for this one to try to make it bigger and better than all the other ones.

Going to take my foot off the gas on the channel for a little bit though and enjoy the summer. I'll still be posting every week, but it'll likely be easier gameplay stuff and less review type stuff. That tends to get more attention anyways so that's probably what I should've been doing in the first place 😅😂

Anyways, thanks again for watching and reading and please feel free to like and comment on the video or DM me on here to let me know what you think 😁

[abyoutube]

Holy moly how does that make any sense 💀

The amount of not subscribed to my channel is over 100% ???? Damn...

Anyways, on a different note, where getting close to being up to date with the videos! And I appreciate all of y'all who been supporting me ⭐🍓

[quawnaime]

The New Years Special has been now released

[blue-1vy]

wip

revamping the blog for the new channel

hey im blue, doll/he/her pronouns, 20, i run a youtube channel with the same url and so far have nothing uploaded

intend to eventually upload asmr and my own music though!

[ecoamerica]

Watch the 2024 American Climate Leadership Awards for High School Students now: https://youtu.be/5C-bb9PoRLc

The recording is now available on ecoAmerica's YouTube channel for viewers to be inspired by student climate leaders! Join Aishah-Nyeta Brown & Jerome Foster II and be inspired by student climate leaders as we recognize the High School Student finalists. Watch now to find out which student received the $25,000 grand prize and top recognition!

[crumb-crumblet-s-crumbington]

WAIT ARE YOU ARE YOU CUPTOAST??????????????

euuummmmmm.... mauybe....

[typicalsimswhore]

Your favourite creators are raising money for Palestine !!!

["Creators for Palestine is raising money for Palestine Children's Relief Fund, a registered 501 non-governmental organisation established in 1992. With the current state Gaza is in, we are looking to raise $1M to address humanitarian needs and immediate relief, including providing essential medical treatment/supplies, food, clean water and other necessities for families affected by the genocide. Please donate and share now!"]

Some notable figures: Hasanabi, Kurtis Connor, Eddy Burback, and many more!

You can donate here -> https://tiltify.com/@creators-for-palestine/creators-for-palestine

When they reach their $750K goal, there will be a livestream to get to $1mil! Don't miss it!

Thank you for supporting Palestine <3

🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸

[rusty-courage]

Dancin!

[ohnoitstbskyen]

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.

[foxboppin]

Me and the boys are back at it again. This is the 3rd shooter I've gone in on for the channel after Warzone and Fortnite before it. Tbh I didn't really gel with Siege as much. Probably didn't help that I've been sick for the past week, but whatever. The video still ended up being pretty entertaining, despite my laughs ranging from hard breathing to hyena.

I've definitely fallen into a rhythm to make these videos, but I am currently working on some different videos this weekend. Going to put a video out for Cult of the Lamb, Final Fantasy 16, and Tony Hawks Pro Skater 1&2 just to name a few.

I also made a Facebook page for Foxbop but so far I have zero followers lol. It's weird commenting and posting as a "page" or "brand" instead of just using my real name. But that's networking baby!

The channel continues to grow slowly and I'm still having a fun time putting all the videos together. Hoping to get my buddy Josh back on the channel for some Pokemon stuff soon as well. Anyways, thanks for reading and watching and any support!! Hope all is well and have a great 4th of July! (If you celebrate that)

[abyoutube]

✧ New Video: {Oc} Norman Fadedlight ✧

[Oct 2020] Meet Norman Fadedlight!

He's another oc of mine haha! He's a fallen angel. Per usual, if you like the video, consider subscribing to me!

[quawnaime]

New video after four months

[ecoamerica]

Watch the American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 now: https://youtu.be/bWiW4Rp8vF0?feature=shared

The American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 broadcast recording is now available on ecoAmerica's YouTube channel for viewers to be inspired by active climate leaders. Watch to find out which finalist received the $50,000 grand prize! Hosted by Vanessa Hauc and featuring Bill McKibben and Katharine Hayhoe!

[girlwiththegreenhat]

team fortress 2 finally getting rid of the bots after 5 years

work on the team fortress 2 comic continuing after 7+ years

half life 3 development looking more likely than ever with legitimate code, file, and voicework leaks referencing a new non-VR single-player game from valve featuring a HEV suit wearing protagonist and Xen creatures and concepts

shoutout to the valve fan that found the genie lamp. you a real one