So, James Somerton Tried (Another) Apology Video 

Somerton has memory issues, but he will never forget when the hbomb dropped

Vaush is wrong about the best possible way for him to handle this. The best way would be to title the video “leaving the left” and blame everything on woke trans activists trying to tear him down. Then in a month he’d be making short films for the daily wire.

"why did i do a mountain of plagiarism? well, for that... we have to go back to the beginning... my mother's dying wish-"

For someone who forgets everything, he certainly managed to remember all the excuses.

As a member of those who have the specific combination of antrograde amnesia, epilepsy, and having our mothers dying wish being for us to become indepentant filmmakers while taking care of our bed-ridden fathers, we do not claim him.

If james sommerton says good morning, check your watch

Congrats to Tommy Tallarico for being the first American to apologize. I’m sure his mother is very proud

“I stole from black artists because I can’t represent them” “I tried to represent everyone” Hmm

Somehow Somerton has returned

If he had any balls he would have plagiarized the Colleen Ballinger apology word for word.

That autistic tangent about film grain shows more knowledge of cinema than anything James has ever put out

When we got jump-scared by his his pasty ass face, and Vaush immediately screamed, "TOO CLOSE! GET AWAY FROM ME!" I felt that.

I honestly thought he was going to be one of the very rare cases of awful people who are exposed and then just completely quit the internet and maintain radio silence forever, but he just had to come back for more embarrassment. He should've pulled a Virgil Texas.

> just gets done finishing a rant about james's ""memory issues"" claim > unpauses > "...because of a head injury from when I was young" my fucking sides

He literally starts off by saying "so I am making money off of this, but don't worry! I'm giving the money to someone else so they can take care of the people I've wronged for me." And then he frames it as THEIR fault if they don't take it??? Total blame shifting. Disgusting.

Okay so... 1. He has adhd 2. Memory issues 3. Childhood injury 4. Mom died 5. Something something diabetes 6. Grew up poor 7. Just wanted to help 8..Just forgot to add citations 9. Was instructed by mom to blow dead mom's money on pretending to be a film maker per her request. Plagerized there too. I guess it's in the will. blah blah blah...

i really hope it comes out that he plagiarized a point of the apology video

James Somerton is the generative AI of video essayists is a CRAZY insult and it’s even better how right it is

Fun fact, Hbomerguy recently tweeted that James has not reached out to either him or his team

Dear editors, this was like only 5 hours ago. You work fast and are great.

I have epilepsy and try to be an advocate for it since it’s a very misunderstood condition. This dude has taken an already misunderstood condition and made it that much worse. Epilepsy does make you forget an appointment or an assignment to turn in. It does not make you forget to cite authors over multiple years. And us epileptics are not these weak smol beans who have to work from home bc we might bonk our head. Yes, employers are assholes who drop disabled people like a hot plate, but people like James aren’t doing the disabled community any favors either. We are firefighters, teachers, engineers, and so many other things. Not only am I insulted as a queer person, but also someone who advocates for people with this disability

Funny enough, Canadian businesses can get insurance for epileptic employees just fine. They just can't insure James Somerton specifically and we can all agree that that's perfectly understandable.

I love how he didn’t address the misogyny allegations against him at all lol

I have ADHD and a learning disability that prevents me from remembering things I've read or studied, yet I'm halfway through a 4-year communication degree, and I've never felt the impulse to plagiarize. This guy is the eptitome of "woe is me."

The reason the color looks like this is because he's using a professional cinema colorspace coming off the camera (LOG) and doesn't realize you're supposed to convert it to linear color in your editor. Peak dunning-kruger, he thinks he's being professional by having his camera set up that way, but doesn't know enough to do it correctly.

Someone pointed out on the Hbomberguy video that Telos is an anagram for stole and I haven’t been able to get that out of my mind since.

It's sad that Doug Walker is more of a legit filmmaker than James Somerton.

In memory of James im going to steal a comment from the video. Man thought he could get away with using goku's backstory as a baby as to why he steals shit

Omg you know he tells people he meets that he's a 'filmmaker' and has no response to the follow-up "what film did you make?"

I’m less upset about James’s plagiarism and more upset about his _violent_ bigotry. His comment about how all the good artists died of AIDS in the 80’s and the survivors were the “boring” gays and that’s why art in the 80’s sucked is something that genuinely tempts me to break RU-vid TOS.

James Somerton always Aspired to inspire before he expired. Unfortunately he no longer holds his audience' desire, which must surely cause him to perspire, for he is a liar, hence his pants are on fire.

He was just as surprised as everyone else, when the HBomb video dropped, because he didn’t even knew he plagiarised. He has memory issues you guys,

no guys the epilepsy explains everything, he had to spend the US Dept. of Defense budget on dumbass studio lights in order to not die instantly

Did anyone check if he copied someone else's apology?

The bit about nb and ace reprentation feels so performative it wasn't because you presented one person's experience as universal, James, it's because you did things like missgendering and deadnaming some of the most famous nb creators in all of media, James. And since we are here let's not forget about "all the good and talented gays died from aids" and only the "boring" survived, or the constant hate on "straight women" fetishizing gay men (note the use of straight instead of cishet, if you read between the lines he's often talking about trans men and bi women) or the misogyny in general, constantly calling openly bi people only straight or gay. You can't come crawling back and hope the people that you shat on will forgive you just because you are also gay. You literally went after all the letters on the LGBTQAI+, that is a lot even by conservative pundit standards.

the part where he indirectly fucking blamed his mom's death on his plagerism angers me on a PERSONAL level.

Sir a second apology has hit RU-vid

Colorist here: It looks like he made his video in uncorrected log and uploaded without doing anything with the colors. He has done this because he has learned somewhere that shooting with a camera's log profile is something professional filmmakers do, but he doesn't know that real professionals convert log footage before it even hits the timeline. Longer explanation: Log is short for logarithmic - it refers to the 'gamma curve' of an image. It has the low contrast look because the dark parts of the image are pulled up in the camera, so there is greater flexibility in the grade - The image retains the most color information, this way. The thing is, shooting in log is something newbies think they should be doing, even when they aren't doing anything interesting in post - they only know it's what professionals do. In proper post production, an editor will convert footage from log to a 'normal contrast' image in the bucket, so as to not effect editing decisions. Nobody should really be laying eyes on it. Fuck, this guy sucks

Vaush definitely touched on it, but yeah it's insane that a supposed tryhard indie filmmaker would give up on a production because "of the weather" or "three thousand dollars being too cheap". Hell, it's embarrassing he couldn't just... wait a year? Making movies takes FOREVER, even for Hollywood. Says a lot about what James knows about cinema! Some of the most famous and brilliant productions were messy nightmares, but the passion of creation carried them on. Apocalypse Now comes to mind, Evil Dead 1 was made on a shoestring budget and changed horror forever... I could go on; many such cases.

To paraphrase the wise words of Todd Nathanson, “Don’t listen to James Somerton. He lies.”

Has he deliberately desaturated his visage to make him appear more pitiful? Like they do to pictures of homeless people in charity leaflets? Or does he just suck at colour balancing?

In a week we will hear back from Hbomb that Somerton never contacted him and never sent a penny

the Telos thing is especially crazy because at the time i remember him promoting his Indiegogo and (me, teenager who thought James Somerton was my personal twink messiah) thought “wait, aren’t Indiegogo campaigns usually super sketchy because the backers can’t get their money back?”

His "oh no poor Nick has lost so much of his hard work" fails doubly hard given that while Somerton's "research process" was "that looks nice, YOINK", Nick's was "It came to me in a dream" where he would get random thoughts pop into his head and then would include them in the script as a fact. He might then look for things to support that being actually true, but if he didn't find any then no biggie. There was no real "research work" involved on this end either, just in an entirely different way.

Vaush is 2 minutes into this video and I already know somerton won't adress anything properly. I feel awful for this judgement, but he's already obfuscating. Edit to add- trying to blame Nick for the blatant acephobia and sending his fans after people who spoke up about it is absolutely awful. I may need a comment chain for everything I catch.

10 to 1 odds that James Somerton is alive and well, but very busy managing the GoFundMe for a memorial event dedicated to himself.

Vaush glossed over this, but did he really say he started plagiarizing because the constant copyright issues were taking up too much time??

If an honest person was contrite, he would tell his audience how to give their money to people he wronged, directly into their hands, without going through his pockets first. Somerton, the thief who stole other people's work, super seriously promises that money you give to him will get funneled to his victims and won't just pad his pockets...

He's so close to the camera, high up, with washed out lighting, and the microphone is pushed so far up into his chin. He has NEVER filmed any of his other videos like this, it looks like a deliberate framing to make him look like he's drowning. Probably to try to subconsciously create sympathy for his difficult situation.

"I don't even wear the two black turtlenecks that I own" is so fucking funny I had to subscribe

James Somerton really said “new year; same me”

Life Insurance would not pay out because their family member had diabetes? That's not how insurance works. It's life Insurance on you, not the other people. Your family member could have super cancer and they would still pay out on your death. That's like literally the point of life insurance being for you...

This is like if I copied "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg and when I got called out was like "Oh I couldn't tell it apart from my own poetry" like bro what!?!

"I tried to be a voice for the queer community, but I failed" sure is a funny way of saying, "I actively, knowingly, and willingly participated in the minimization of other queer voices for my own personal and financial gain". Even in his apology video, the guy can't stop burying the lead about what he did wrong.

For someone with terrible memory issues, he sure does remember a lot of details about every disease his family suffered from and how they impacted his life specifically.

*_Don't give excuses during apologies._* How to apologize: 1) State explicitly what you did wrong. 2) State how you plan to redress/mitigate your actions it that's possible. 3) State how you choose to avoid future transgression. 4) Provide the apology. 5) Stop. Do not: - reach out past a single apology. - give excuses as to why you did what you did. - stray from the apology itself. - blame anyone else for what you did. Now, there can be mitigating circumstances, but those are not a thing to include during an apology.

As a former fan of James... brother, you need to go home.

He could have just said that it wasn't his fault and that Tommy Tallarico wrote all of his scripts and I'd have forgiven him

If James came back and said “I plagiarized because I was lazy and wanted a lot of money and that was wrong” I would have so much more respect for him. It would still be a shit thing to do but he’d have the self-awareness to know it was wrong and do better.

The biggest reason i cant picture a James Summerton comeback is because hbomb showcased that almost every line in the majority of his videoes that Nick didnt write was plagiarism. So lets say James comes back with no more plagiarism and no more Nick.......what does that even look like? What is James by himself? What does his writing voice sound like? Does he even have one? What is his personality? What is his persona? Long time fans of his left because the found out that they weren't actually fans of his, they were fans of the people he stole from. There never was a real James Summerton in the first place, just a guy reading off other people's work and reposting other people's edits. Idk how something that never existed is supposed to return.

It’s revealing that homeboy thought “all the money going to the actors” was okay. That’s another way of saying “no money was spent on food or water”

I work in a grocery store and have two coworkers who suffer severe epilepsy - one of them had a seizure while coming down the stairs from the staff room. He was, fortunately, unhurt, and despite the hazards inherent to his condition, still works here. I am also Canadian, there are no laws against hiring epileptics up here. Sommerton is a damned liar.

If he does start doing 'documentaries,' I half expect Toddintheshadows is going to lose his mind cataloging all the mountains of facts he gets wrong. Great addendum/companion video, btw, dude lost a year or something to doing the research Somerton refused to, and Todd isn't even queer adjacent.

Holy shit, did James seriously imply that the plagiarism call outs are ableist?? That is so fucked up, oh my God

The rant about the various misfortunes of him trying and failing to start making a film makes him sound so incompetent, like he has no idea how film production works and didn't care to figure it out before taking money from people.

its impressive to me. he will say "i plagiarized" and it sounds like a good start, but he will make so many excuses so he doesnt have to admit that he actually acted maliciously. he cannot admit that he intentionally did something bad. he will say "yes it was bad, sorry, but heres 1000 reasons why i had to do it." i am genuinely impressed. hes like a cartoon character example of a narcissist.

Sir, a second apology has hit the algorithm.

"There should have been a bibliography, like in a Google Drive." Oh you mean the thing hbomberguy specifically called out when iilluminaughtii was doing it in the exact same video, because it's just plagiarism with an added step of obfuscation?

you can be cis, and white and even STRAIGHT and still manage not to trash trans, lesbian, ace and non-binary people (and that's probably not a full list of people he's manage to stomp on). just because you don't come from a certain experience doesn't mean you cannot present critique, analysis or opinions on other experiences , just don't be a sanctimonious dick about it, presume to be and speak as if you're a comprehensive and definitive authority and act as if your own form of identity somehow supersedes others. This was dishonesty, intellectual theft and being a bully. Somerton didn't do an oopsie and share some misinformation or miss some crucial aspects, he straight up ran roughshod over other people and personally and professionally shoved some of them into the dusty corners of the internet when he could have elevated them.

this aired before the stream ended wtf guys

"I wanna prove I can do it without stealing"

The beginning where he apologizes is in response to a youtuber couple who are ace, they talked how they felt reluctant to crowd fund his movie studio bc he was a gay man working on an ace project, and they tried to correct him on him making a comment about how ace people have it easier than gay men, but he ignored them, and kept ignoring every attempt for them to reach out to him

Even somerton can change, but he shouldn't be a public figure anymore. Go work at a car wash, go back to school, idk. You're just not allowed in the limelight anymore

on the "mom dying is a defensible excuse too" it reminds me of my grandma dying when I was in highschool, and many of my teachers were nice enough to give me extensions on projects and assignments for a week or two, which was quite nice (not all of them did, but eh)

It's really telling of the quality of most of the people in Hbomberguy's video when the _Sargon fan_ was the only one who actually apologized for plagiarizing him.

I guess Vaush isn't fully caught up on the Illuminaughti drama. Wrong choice for his "RU-vidr exposed for plagiarism can find redemption" example.

It's wild to me that in the video where he talks about never lying again and wanting to improve himself, he claims that he is actively working with Homberguy's people to donate the proceeds from his videos being monetized, but, as confirmed on Twitter, nobody has reached out to Hbomberguy about getting James Somerton's Ad revenue to anybody

2:15 This is exactly what I've been saying! The issue with James is not just the plagiarism within his videos; it's how he's treated previous plagiarism accusations. I found all the clips of James blatantly lying to be the most upsetting part of HBomberguy's video... And also why I found the total lack of James addressing those clips in his first "response" to be so upsetting. Not only did he fail to properly apologize for the plagiarism, but he acted like this was the first time he was ever truly addressing it. Unfortunately, the main topic of discussion surrounding James has stuck to the plagiarism (& misinfo) within his videos. When behavior outside of his videos *is* mentioned, it's usually about Nick or about Telos. This is unfortunate, because I find James so irredeemably disgusting *because* of how he handled his platform outside of his videos. All the lying & manipulation, how he treated anyone who dared criticize him. Even the plagiarism itself is so bad in part because of the context of how he's been called out in the past and how he dealt with it. It's also unfortunate that when anyone talks about 'James Somerton's first response to Hbomberguy's video' it's assumed they're talking about the awful video he posted...while that first Patreon post has gone totally forgotten, thanks to James being smart enough to delete it quickly, after only posting it on Patreon to begin with. If you thought James did a poor job in his first video response...oh boy. His initial statement to his patrons is in a whole other league of bad responses, and it showed his true colors. He tried to get away with going on the offensive, attacking Hbomberguy & his video, and totally lying about the contents of the video and the accusations. He had the gall to play the victim and claim that Hbomb didn't bring up *anything* new...and that he already had addressed the few accusations that were brought up, over a year ago. He wasn't crying and "sooo sorry," like in his first video...He was angry & offended, acting *very* confident that he was in the right and had done nothing wrong (and therefore Hbomberguy had done something wrong). That was the narrative he immediately tried to establish and push...and there is no doubt in my mind that he would have stuck to it if he could have gotten away with it...if enough of his community accepted it. It's not like he just realized his statement was wrong after enough of his patrons pointed out he was wrong. There's only one thing James realized he was actually wrong about, and that's thinking he could get away with pushing that false narrative. His only mistake was posting the statement and expecting his patrons to believe it. Which is why he deleted it and has been pretending he never posted it ever since, hoping those who know about it remain the minority and hopefully forget. Well, this gal won't be forgetting it any time soon!

He should've just gotten a ukulele.

I saw a video recently where a former cheater at a video game (super monkey ball speedruns) explains exactly how he cheated and how other people are cheating in similar ways. I found it very interesting, and I think it served pretty good as an apology. Vaush is right, I want to know hos mindset and his process for plagiarism.

Somerton needs to recognize that no matter what he does, the grift is over for him. He so desperately wants to go back to the way things were and have everyone forget about this whole debacle but no matter what he does he absolutely cannot, he’s been found out and the jig is up.

There are parts in Somerton's apology that sound like a Doofenshmirtz backstory.

I share your sentiment on the same ground - his horrendous treatment of the woman who first accused him, and documented it. There is simply no coming back from that - he can beg for forgiveness all he want.

Seriously questioning if this man has ever actually been to college. I knew how to cite sources in MLA format in 6th grade. By the time I got out of my first year undergrad (with raging unmedicated ADHD) I knew how to keep track of, cite, and properly rephrase/quote sources.

This guy is only sorry that he got caught, And his so called apology video is nothing but a disingenuous attempt at damage control.

"This video is not about me promoting myself" - He says, while briefly remembering to not promote himself

He is a narcissist for sure! My mother is a narcissist so I know deeply this is how a narcissist apologizes. I've heard them all, their sorry always contains an explanation of how it's never actually their fault and how they tried so hard so you should pity them. It's like a puppet trying to pretend to be human but only read a book on what apologies should have in them but didn't read the part where you take responsibility for your actions. Sadly narcissists will rarely change cause they don't actually see a problem with themselves.

Sorry I’m still caught up on the money being sent to Hbomber to give to the people. Imagine making someone ELSE responsible for paying back the people you stole from

First Colleen now James. Apology videos by narcissists are a blossoming new genre.

I'm late to watching this but HBomb confirmed after this "apology" video came out that James hadn't reached out to him or anyone on his team so that was prophetic lmao

I happen to know someone who has 20+ years of experience in Ontario workplace health and safety. The no insurance because epilepsy is a thing but it's not health insurance. Basically, most businesses pay into a national health insurance and they say you cannot fire an employee for epilepsy. However, the labour laws, do allow you to fire an employee if their epilepsy would make the workplace unsafe and you have no other work for them. It's also legal for insurance companies for non-health insurance to deny a business insurance because they have an epileptic employee. Basically, it's the fire insurance guys saying "fire your epileptic employee or else you can't have fire insurance on your kitchen"

I love that his defence is that he meant to swap out the words in the articles he copied. Like that is still stealing! It's not the sentence structure, it's the content!

Watching this whole thing as a film student is so fucking wild. He worked on this without a producer, had only three thousand bucks, and did the thing where he got expensive equipment before even shooting a single fucking shot. Not even a mood trailer? A test scene? Anything? I'm not even a life action film maker (I'm in animation) and even I was soiling myself in dirt and rain in the middle of winter in the woods with a 60 year old bw film camera. Absolutely insane behavior.

Last apology he was sobbing about how the research was the most fun part and what he looked forward to.... Now he was totally disinterested in it and just wanted to film???? Ya, ok James

Feels like he believes his own lies. He's living in a separate reality

If James Somerton wants sympathy, he can find it somewhere between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.

23:50 ARE YOU KIDDING ME??! 💀 He's telling the same lie!? Vaush is correct: James didn't get permission to make or post "the Evil Queens video." He admitted that in his replies to the original tweet calling him out for copying the book. The first version of "Evil Queens" had zero mention of the book or author anywhere. After James got called out on Twitter, he added a brief mention in the description of the video. When it was made clear that wasn't good enough, he removed the video in order to replace it with a new version which directly mentions the book in the beginning title screen. Before uploading the new version, he also emailed the author and asked for permission. James only got permission to REUPLOAD a new version of the video. The original video was posted without permission, and without any mention of credit to the author...and it was never reposted once James took it down, *after* getting called out. Is James going to mention the other works he shamelessly plagiarized in his Evil Queens video? It's easy to focus on the author who he eventually got permission from (and who he already has admitted he copied a bunch of his script fom). But, part of that video "based on the Evil Queens book" wasn't copied from the book...the part about Mulan, remember?...It was copied from a totally different writer, who James can't pretend he got permission from or credited even for the reupload, because no one noticed until Hbomberguy identified the source in his plagiarism video. It was an especially disgusting case of plagiarism, because not only was it the free writing of an independent trans person, but the work was also sharing their personal experience. James had to go through and replace all the first person pronouns with third person pronouns, turning "my experience as a trans person" into "a common experience for many trans people," and so on...while he changed nothing else, actively hiding the identity of the trans person whose work he plagiarized.

This feels so disengenous, and i feel sliggtly gross about him dragging his parents up qpart of this rather than actually apologizing

James Somerton's fake crying in the first apology will never cease to make me laugh

I saw someone comment on his apology saying that they like James Somerton's videos and is looking forward to what he's gonna make in the future. And someone else replied "If you like his videos you'd probably also like the people he stole those videos from." Also: listening to James Somerton saying he's going to make videos on queer history makes me want to warn Jessica Kellgren-Fozard.