Month: March 2024

RIP James Somerton…?

So l’affaire Somerton may have taken a somewhat… bleak turn, with the Internet’s favourite content thief having possibly offed himself.

From what I understand, this is still just a rumour at the time of writing, the source being, well, James himself apparently posting a suicide note on Twitter, though whether or not he actually has done himself in appears to be unconfirmed as of yet. Obviously this is not the end to the story anyone actually wants… but needless to say some are pointing the finger at one particular individual:

The idea that we should perhaps wait for confirmation of Somerton’s death or otherwise has evidently not occurred to some of us.
Also, ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED in making Hank Green swear, dickhead…

Peter Coffin is a Youtuber I dimly remember following years ago but for whatever reason I lost interest in them (Peter may be a shithead but I still don’t like misgendering) and they seem to have turned really shitty after becoming involved somehow with the dubious Caleb Maupin; indeed, Coffin fell so far off my radar that I’d practically forgotten them, until they responded to the now legendary Hbomberguy plagiarism video with a video called “Plagiarism is AWESOME” and complaining about Harry attacking Somerton specifically rather than capitalism in general because how dare he make a video about what HE wanted rather than what Peter thought it should be about.

At the time I think this was mostly greeted with scorn, as Peter was clearly trying to bandwagon Hbomb’s original video and he was pissed that he wasn’t getting millions of views like him. He seems to have made more videos in that vein, though, cos getting attention with good takes would be selling out or something I suppose, and, well, now this bullshit on Twitter… where the whole thing is turning into some culture war flashpoint cos THE BAD LEFTY drove THE GAY FELLOW to (supposed) suicide, as those rightoids would’ve given a fuck about Somerton before this and wouldn’t have wanted him dead.

On the plus (?) side, very few people otherwise seem to be buying Peter’s bullshit, and the sensible people in the discourse are basically saying that, if James did off himself, then that was his responsibility and his choice, and holding Hbomb or anyone else to blame is spurious. Which it is. And, of course, this is assuming James has left us, and I do see a few folks on the socials doubting that; I don’t know if I share the line of thinking some have expressed that he is the exact sort of person that would fake this, but it’s out there. I don’t know. I suppose we’ll have some news eventually one way or the other…

My turquoise waistcoat is quite out of sight

For some reason “Vegetable Man” seems to have been my song of the night. So here we go, with the (rather belatedly) officially released version:

Alternately, a somewhat different mix from what I presume is an older bootleg source:

And the Jesus & Mary Chain cover:

Parenthetically, it was on account of this song that I spent the most money I ever paid for a seven-inch single… cos this was the B-side of J&MC’s first single “Upside Down” and they persistently refused to give it a CD release for years (not even on Barbed Wire Kisses), so when I found the single at Red Eye some time in the late 90s I bought it for this. Fifty dollars for a seven-incher. I think it finally came out on CD about ten years later.

And finally, a mightily brave young man:

RIP David Bordwell

SHIT. One of the good guys of film criticism has left us. I was very much one of those film students who grew up on Film Art: An Introduction, the third edition of which was one of our assigned books when I did Theatre & Film Studies at UNSW back in the 90s; we never got assigned the film history book, though that’s only because him and Thompson didn’t actually write it until many years later… I was particularly delighted to discover that at the local library some years ago, and I still think it’s probably the best example of a general film history book out there. Matt Zoller Seitz offers a solid appreciation here.

In case you were wondering…

…Jurr Durr’s mental health death spiral continues:

Apparently not dying in traffic accidents is woke now. This is the story, for what it’s worth. But, if the person commenting on the Twitter post where I grabbed this is correct, there’d only been three deaths in the five years before this “daylighting” thing was introduced, so it’s not like it was the world’s most dangerous intersection anyway. This, at least, is what I read and I don’t know if it’s true or not, but if it is then I do wonder why none of those deaths provoked the change that the old woman’s death did…

Anyway, that’s the Peterson tweet drawing most of the attention from other online types, but it’s not the only one he’s made having a go at AP:

Taking care of children is woke too, evidently. Then again, this is the man we’re talking about:

…a man for whom being asked to use a bit less paper towel and then put it in the recycling bin constitutes “tyranny”. If he hadn’t always been an awful person, I could almost believe he was doing as some sort of comic performance art or something. He has, undeniably, committed to a bit. I just wish it were a less harmful and obnoxious one.

How the hell did it get here so soon

Only just discovered this video exists (thank you, Youtube’s “new to you” tab, you delivered me both this and the new Aamon video tonight). I remember the first time I heard Bone Machine, it got to this song and I thought “oh how interesting, Tom Waits covered the Ramones”… and then for some reason I found myself looking at the credits in the CD booklet and discovered I’d got it completely the wrong way round. And yet I think I can be excused? After all, it is such a Ramones song that I still can’t fully believe they didn’t write it…

Somerton AGAIN?!

I thought James Somerton’s arse had been so comprehensively handed to him after that Hbomberguy video last year that he would never have the temerity to show his face in public again (which, admittedly, he did briefly with that apology video he made, but he withdrew it so quickly it barely counts). However, it seems no one told Somerton that… cos he’s back with another apology and explanation video, full of excuses that I don’t think anyone is buying (though I am a little surprised that no one seems to be cracking jokes about who he plagiarised this from; maybe we got that out of our systems with the first apology). I offer here Mack Attack’s response to him, which is pointed and brutal and so it damn well should be; this dickhead is either delusional or else hoping the rest of us are…