Conclusion: Empowered Ownership Over Your Content

I posted a long explanation of how Automattic's shenanigans (don't) affect your self-hosted Wordpress sites on the Leif & Thorn site.

And, in light of my previous post, a much shorter conclusion over on my "actually hosted by Automattic" blog.

Meanwhile, I made a new side account over on DA where all the posts are marked "authorized for inclusion in third-party AI datasets."

(I do flag them as AI-generated, though, so if your browsing settings include "don't show me AI works" I'm not shoving them in your face. That would just be rude.)

On the scale of "dumb" to "so dumb it's inspired", I genuinely don't know where this falls? Gonna just roll with it for a while, see what happens.

We found it…the worst Utena take

Never actually watched any James Somerton videos before the big callouts dropped. (If you missed them, and have some time to kill: Hbomberguy’s 4-hour video about plagiarism where half of it is just Somerton, and Todd in the Shadows’ 2-hour video about the sheer amount of blatant lies he told about queer history and media.)

But the other night I ended up watching this streamed commentary/breakdown of Somerton’s Utena video:
 

Watch on YouTube

 

2/3 of the way through, it’s mostly a sludge of reading off Wikipedia interspersed with lukewarm takes. Then, around 1:54:25, a line that made me stop cold and rewind to make sure I heard it right:

“…which I feel gives a lot of undue complexity to a work that is otherwise meant to just be straightforward.”

UNDUE COMPLEXITY. Utena!

Meant to just be straightforward! UTENA?!

I just

Wh

(For the sake of not spending an hour on this post, I am restraining myself from getting into the weeds about more specific stupid takes that the streamers didn’t call out already, but I can’t leave this out: He also goes on this big tangent about how Miley Cyrus doesn’t indicate anywhere in the music video for “Wrecking Ball” that the construction imagery is supposed to be symbolic? The song where, if you only know one thing about it, it’s the line about how the wrecking ball is a symbol)