The Kaiser's new Blog

Heya! The game my team and I have been working on now has an early demo live on Steam, and our Kickstarter campaign went live yesterday.

We could really use your support in sharing, trying the demo out and maybe having a look at the Kickstarter if you enjoy what you see ❤️

“creative people have trouble recognising their skills as skills, because eventually they feel like second nature. […] this stuff really is valuable. if it wasn’t, people wouldn’t be stealing it. creativity doesn’t feel special or unique until you realise people have to plagiarise it”

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.

"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.