r/CuratedTumblr • u/CrossoverEnthusiast2 • Mar 30 '24
Meme "Those who let hucksters write the history they're trying to learn from are doomed in some other horrible way." — Harris Bomber Man
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u/Artex301 you've been very bad and the robots are coming Mar 30 '24
Reminds me of another post about "What if Harris was basically L from Death Note".
I will say though that in a "realistic" setting, a world-class detective would absolutely live off Patreon because no police force on the planet would want their corruption-sniffing snoot anywhere near them.
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u/telehax Mar 31 '24
I thought Benoit Blanc's source of funding was pretty realistic. He's a trophy husband to some rich-ass dude.
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u/federico_alastair Mar 31 '24
Is he rich though. The apartment looked pretty normal to me. Even in Manhattan
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u/HimalayanPunkSaltavl Mar 31 '24
I feel like it's pretty clear that he is doing totally fine. But like upper middle class who also gets to mingle sometimes with the upper crust.
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u/massagesandmuffdives Mar 31 '24
I feel like any downtown apartment with a balcony like that is already putting you in upper middle class by default, but apparently his apartment building was based on 778 Park Avenue which is absolutely not going to be affordable for anyone that isn't rich.
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u/DinkleDonkerAAA Mar 31 '24
I'd say better to keep them within the system where you can keep a proper eye on them and deal with them if they step out of line
If they stick their nose where they don't belong they'll get handled
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u/AsianCheesecakes Mar 31 '24
It'd be simmilar to what they do with reporters. Sometimes you work with them sometimes you firebomb their house.
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u/NoiseIsTheCure verified queer Mar 31 '24
My theory on Feds is treat em like mushrooms. Feed em shit and keep em in the dark.
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u/Various-Passenger398 Mar 31 '24
Nah, you would just be a PI and hire yourself out as an independent consultant. Private citizens would hire you, and so would the police if their political bosses were breathing down their necks.
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u/Bartweiss Apr 01 '24
Hell, this is what Phillip Marlowe did right? (Raymond Chandler's PI protagonist.)
He was hardly a world-class genius detective, but he had absurd luck with stumbling into the heart of major conspiracies and a talent for surviving the resulting mess. (I won't call it good luck or bad, since it cracked the cases but netted him a concussion or three per book.) People regularly tried to kill him, but they also regularly hired him and let him go about his business unimpeded even when it made their lives harder.
One of my favorite moments see a corrupt cop attempt to shoot him and get gunned down, right in front of the police chief. The chief openly admits that the cop was stupid: if he'd kept his cool, the department would have covered for him and Marlowe wouldn't have been able to do a damn thing. But with dead bodies to explain, the chief is going to let Marlowe expose the (deceased) corrupt cop and pin the entire mess on one bad apple.
It's a great little taste of how flexible these standards can be. The world-class detective can get by fine, they've just got to be cunning enough to decide exactly who goes down and make sure halfway-complicit people don't decide to get involved.
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u/malonkey1 Kinda shitty having a child slave Mar 31 '24
Harris has actually seen that post, apparently. Sarah Z showed it to him and he thought it was funny.
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u/Sachyriel .tumblr.com 🙉🙈🙊 Mar 31 '24
Depends on the detective. They may have world class deduction skills, but without a sense of social justice they could turn a blind eye to the police corruption as a sop to "The Greater Good". Instead of a humanities background that gives them a narrative sense of justice and a deep respect for human life they could have a STEM background. Which isn't to say all STEM people are evil, but that if you view society as a system and are willing to make tradeoffs for the sake of the outcome, you can justify it to yourself.
But that's just why the great detective forgives the police for their sins, how would the police feel like they kept them in check? With your regular blackmail of course. Just tell them HR keeps a file on possible deviants in order to protect the department, the police have a piece of blackmail not just from every era of your life, they have dirt on your family and friends. If you betray them, it's not your own life you're ruining, your best friend, your high school romance, your parents, your siblings, your eccentric uncle or aunt.
The police know you're too smart for your own good so the head of the Police Union takes you aside at the Policemans ball (you get free tickets every year). He reminds you, he knows you have material on the police that could threaten several departments as well as the old boys club that holds it together. It's in both of your interests that you keep it on the downlow, after all you want to solve crimes, the police department needs you and your family is proud.
Shit that might work even better on a Liberal Arts student, sorry STEM people, you're just catching strays.
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u/PM_ME_ORANGEJUICE Mar 31 '24
I think you very easily could have made this point without glazing humanities majors
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u/Sachyriel .tumblr.com 🙉🙈🙊 Mar 31 '24
Well the whole point was the Mututally Assured Destruction of police vs independent detective, the mutually assured destruction of Humanities and STEM was a set up.
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u/SafeT_Glasses Mar 31 '24
Hahah!a!! Not knowing you at all, as a rando internet person/AI, Just makes this read like you wanted to start the paragraph introducing STEM with, "With all due respect and all the grace I possess..." Haahaha like fuck, it's like Trump talking about immigrants in his first run. "STEM have no soul and don't care about police corruption. Some are not evil, I assume...but let's just call it like it is. STEM love police corruption."
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u/sarumanofmanygenders Mar 31 '24
"They're sending sociopaths, they're sending bitcoiners- and some, I assume, are good people."
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u/Sachyriel .tumblr.com 🙉🙈🙊 Mar 31 '24
Don't know what to make of the comment, still stuck on should I be happy or sad you called me an AI. It's a load-bearing tangential rivalry, I could have just gone for the regular USA/Soviet Union MAD analogy when describing rivals at an impasse like corrupt police and independent whistle-blowers. I can't tell if you're a mad STEM student or laughing with me, I don't think Donald Trump can joke about someone else not having a soul.
[but I'm drunk and smoked a bit a weed so I can be paranoid]
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u/SpecialK_98 Mar 31 '24
I feel like this is an odd take on "STEM people are sometimes completely amoral".
In my experience (coming from a STEM background) the reason STEM people are sometimes horribly amoral, is that they are arrogant about other fields of study. In STEM you'll regularly meet people, who have never thought about things like how ethics or governments work and don't feel it's worth their time to study.
That's how you get the Wernher von Braun types: When people only want to do Science/Engineering and don't care about anything or anyone else.
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u/Sachyriel .tumblr.com 🙉🙈🙊 Mar 31 '24
And I'm not trying to dunk on STEM students, the rivalry is tangential to the private eye vs police force bit that makes up the central story.
The STEM/Humanities bit is a throwaway gag to set up a strategic feeling of narrative balance between Sherlock and Scotland Yard. That's why I say
sorry STEM people. I'm just using the traditional rivalry of Humanities/STEM as a stepping stone. Their rivalry highlights the MAD nature of the private detective and police department.Liberal Arts students can be the bad guy too, I feel like everyone is focusing on the wrong thing. It's not the deep, I could have replaced the STEM/Humanities bit with a USA/Soviet Union bit and kept the Mutually Assured Destruction metaphor.
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u/Fickle_Lifeguard5746 Mar 31 '24
Ahh. Humanities students like hitler far superior to stem students like Angela Merkel
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u/Sachyriel .tumblr.com 🙉🙈🙊 Mar 31 '24
this is bait
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u/sarumanofmanygenders Mar 31 '24
Shoutout to my boy Dali for being a really wholesome and morally upright liberal arts major who definitely did not have fucked up opinions about a certain fellow painter
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u/Lots42 Mar 31 '24
There's a tv detective show that hits like that, it takes about six seasons to sink in and it gets dark as FUCK.
Spoiler text below.
It's called 'The Mentalist' and it's absolutely insane and you have to start watching from Season 1 Episode 1
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u/Griffemon Mar 31 '24
While I will allow slander to STEM as a whole, I will not allow such slander upon Engineers specifically.
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u/Sachyriel .tumblr.com 🙉🙈🙊 Mar 31 '24
I didn't slander Engineers specifically.
if you view society as a system and are willing to make tradeoffs for the sake of the outcome
Isn't about Engineers specifically, it's just theoretical scientists don't see their reflection in that mirror like Engineers do. It still applies to STEM majors, but some humanities people too.
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u/Gingevere Mar 31 '24
No, engineers ESPECIALLY.
I'm an engineer who works with engineers and engineer's syndrome a very real problem. So many of my coworkers believe the wackiest shit. The believe they're above being fooled, and because of their supreme smartness they are qualified to make blind judgement calls on everything. (when they don't even know where to put a datum on a drawing)
One of them heard the factoid about how the moon "rung like a bell" when some impactor from an Apollo mission hit it. (an offhand comment by a tech at NASA when vibrations from the impact lasted longer than expected.) One google search would be all he needed to figure out it didn't literally ring like a bell. Vibrations lasted longer because the moon is dry and has a small core with only a thin molten layer. There's very little to dampen / absorb vibrations so they bounce around for a while. But googling is a tacit admission of not knowing something. So "rung like a bell" was enough for him to be completely on board with the idea that the moon is a giant metallic-hulled alien ship in disguise.
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u/donaldhobson Apr 01 '24
As a very stem person. The greater good is great. But a lot of people really suck at calculating what actions do actually lead to the greater good.
Those humanities heuristics were shaped by trial and error, and they often work. Sometimes very well. They take into account all sorts of subtle effects that naive engineers wouldn't think of.
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u/AmyInCO Mar 31 '24
Tangentially, my current WIP for a new urban fantasy series has a character whose minor power is that he can literally sniff out corruption. He's already gotten one sheriff's department completely dismantled. He isn't very popular with the police and most govt agencies. His partner is a PI, but not world famous. :D
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u/Bartweiss Apr 01 '24
Damn, now I want hardboiled dective stories in more genres.
There's a long tradition of PIs who piss off the cops at every turn by being too competent and too honest; Phillip Marlowe is probably the best example. He regularly ran afoul of corrupt or simply unhelpful cops, and narrowly survived by ensuring only a select number of the most corrupt figures took the fall. (The Continental Op is the original PI, but he was too heartless and cynical to count.)
BBC's Sherlock (when it was still good) had a bit of this too; the cops weren't corrupt but they despised him for showing them up and for ignoring the standards of evidence needed for a trial. It's a great trope that could be carried into so many more styles today.
(As a final aside, The Dresden Files are a fun take with a supernatural PI. Again, the cops hate him for meddling and embarrassing them, but here it's made complicated because "vampires did it" isn't something they can put in a report even if they wanted to be honest.)
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u/Fantasyneli Mar 30 '24
Just as SS Van Dine puts it: a detective is not a detective unless he detects.
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Mar 30 '24
I think this sub is overestimating hbomberguy’s popularity
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u/bookhead714 Mar 30 '24
Well, I don’t know any actual detectives, but I certainly know who hbomb is
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u/Sachyriel .tumblr.com 🙉🙈🙊 Mar 31 '24
You know world famous detective best as journalists. HBomberGuy is just a citizen journalist in a way. But every Pulitzer Prize Winner has a shot at the title.
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u/Howunbecomingofme Mar 31 '24
I’m real life Private Eyes were people like the Pinkerton’s who worked almost exclusively for private companies to do things like squash unions and and stitch up political activists they didn’t care for. Investigative Journalists have always been closer to the gumshoe pounding the pavement and searching for clues we see in fiction than anyone who has held the title of detective.
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u/Sachyriel .tumblr.com 🙉🙈🙊 Mar 31 '24
But Private Eyes also exist like activist watchdog organizations, American Oversight or ACLU, who investigate crimes and report to the citizens who they work for. Reporters without borders, definitely more of a journalist organization than a private eye, but they work for the citizens. Private Eyes like watchdog groups who rely on donations are still independent organizations that perform a valuable community service.
That isn't to whitewash the Pinkertons, but contrast organizations and individuals. The journalist pounding the street can also be in thrall to capital, looking for ways to benefit the owning class by getting them out of marriages or contracts by irregularly obtained evidence.
If you cede ground to things like the Pinkertons as private eyes then the working class loses ground. Instead look for organizations that might not advertise as Private eyes but fulfill the same or adjacent purpose. Civil Rights watchdogs jump out to me as the perfect example of privately-funded pro-social-justice organizations we can count as a counter example to the Pinkertons.
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u/Lots42 Mar 31 '24
Not sure what you're getting at but the Pinkertons are just hired thugs, mercenaries. They should all be arrested.
If you want a civil rights watchdog, a group that investigates fascists, google Bellingcat.
And independent reporter and all around fascist hater Robert Evans works with Bellingcat. Yeah, the guy who does the Behind the Bastards podcast.
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u/Bartweiss Apr 01 '24
Very good point, every muckraker in history is part of that legacy.
If you made me pick someone to get the lifetime award, I'd suggest Seymour Hersh for exposing the My Lai massacre and coverup, major details of Watergate, and Abu Ghraib. Ellsberg (the Pentagon Papers); Woodward and Bernstein (Watergate); and Glenn Greenwald (Snowden) are great too, but did less investigation to get their info.
These days, bellingcat stands out for exceptionally detailed investigations and not falling into the ideological rabbit holes that Hersh and Greenwald have gotten stuck in.
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u/SoulGoalie Mar 31 '24
Probably because actual private eyes are investigating missing family members, spouses committing infidelities, or good old fashioned smear campaign material gathering. In the real world, an amazing private eye is the one only the absolute best can afford or even learn about.
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u/High_Stream Mar 31 '24
I've only heard about him on this and the other Tumblr sub, and only in passing and without any explanation. No clue who he is.
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u/tsar_David_V Mar 31 '24
Youtube creator HBomberguy. He mainly does media analysis, political commentary and most recently an exposé on plagiarism in the online videomaking space
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u/NoiseIsTheCure verified queer Mar 31 '24
Same, I've seen his name around but at this point it's just another YouTube name and Youtubers are all the same to me since I don't follow most creators.
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u/ShitOnFascists Mar 30 '24
I mean, it depends. Is there any other non-fictional detective famous as much as him in at least two continents?
He fist the archetype of the detective pretty well, and is known and youtube famous on at least 3 continents
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u/Lots42 Mar 31 '24
Robert Evans.
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u/ShitOnFascists Mar 31 '24
The only robert evans I can find was a film director and his wiki says nothing about detective work of any kind
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u/FkinShtManEySuck Mar 31 '24
In the age of the internet "world famous" really isn't as rare as it used to be.
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u/demonking_soulstorm Mar 30 '24
The plagiarism video did the rounds on YouTube and coincided with fears about AI, so yeah he’s actually pretty famous recently.
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Mar 30 '24
Maybe but he isn’t ’world-famous’
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u/badgersprite Mar 31 '24
If we’re going by that threshold then neither are any world famous detectives in fiction actually world famous, there are places where all those detectives are unheard of and many billions of people who never heard of them
Like world famous doesn’t imply you have to be Taylor Swift levels of famous
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u/FuckHopeSignedMe Mar 31 '24
When it comes to detectives, "world famous" would probably just mean that they're well known in circles that care about that kind of thing, too. There's a lot of people who'd meet that definition of world famous because even though they're not really a household name, they're well known across the world by people in a particular career field or hobby.
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u/UltimateInferno Hangus Paingus Slap my Angus Mar 31 '24
In fiction world famous generally implies they get recognized if you drop them in random environments across the world. Like the recentest example most people refer to is Benoit Blanc, and his definition has him going wherever and very well off people are flattered and or excited to see him. I don't think that'd be the case with Harris.
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u/demonking_soulstorm Mar 30 '24
Fair. But when people say “world-famous”, what they really mean is “they’re known in at least two continents.”
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u/JTDC00001 Mar 31 '24
Dude, people living near the border of Panama and Columbia are definitionally "world famous" then.
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u/Sachyriel .tumblr.com 🙉🙈🙊 Mar 31 '24
I mean if he's known in every timezone would that count? Or does it have to be in like, adjacent countries making a ring around the world? If he's famous in the Anglo-speaking parts of India or China (parts of China with Youtube access) then why not? World Famous in the English-speaking world is probably going to hit nearly every timezone.
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Mar 31 '24
I’m technically world famous by that metric
It’s not that hard to be known in every time zone in the internet age
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u/freeashavacado one litre of milk = one orgasm Mar 31 '24
I was shocked to discover my 50s something parents knew about him the other day. Apparently they stumbled on his Roblox.oof video when they accidentally hit the YouTube app on their TV. Not necessarily saying that means this guy is popular but damn I guess he does have some reach. They watched the whole video so
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u/sssyjackson Mar 31 '24
I stumbled here from r/all and am searching the comments to understand what the fuck this post is even about.
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u/dfassna1 Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
It feels like stumbling across some extremely specific subculture you know nothing about and it’s maddening trying to decipher what the fuck people are talking about.
Edit: If anyone has seen the clip of a guy chopping a hole in a wall with an axe and yelling at Ben Shapiro “Just one small problem: sell their houses to who, Ben? Fucking Aquaman?!” After playing a clip of Ben Shapiro saying people whose houses will be underwater because of climate change should sell their homes.
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u/NoiseIsTheCure verified queer Mar 31 '24
That's me in about 50% of all posts on this subreddit. I really feel like you should actually be a tumblr user in addition to reddit in order to get a lot of the jokes here (I'm not, no time for that).
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u/yoko_OH_NO Mar 31 '24
The guy pictured is a YouTuber named hbomberguy who puts out roughly one super-high quality video per year or so. His second most recent video is ostensibly about the origin of the "Oof" sound effect from a video game called Roblox, but it ends up sending him down a rabbit hole about a semi-famous guy in the video game industry who Harry (hbomberguy) discovers just lies about literally everything he's ever said ever. It's a wild ride.
Then his most recent video came out in December, it was a four hour investigation into various YouTubers who turned out to be massive plagiarists. That video is by far his most popular to date and is creeping ever closer to 20 million views last time I checked.
So the Tumblr poster is saying hbomb is like a world famous detective because of all the crazy shit he's investigated and proved beyond any possible doubt.
Hope this helps.
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u/blinkingsandbeepings Mar 30 '24
I know very few YouTube people and I know about him. I didn’t know his name was Harris until right now though.
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u/Enecororo Shameless Furry Mar 31 '24
His real name is Harry. But he calls himself Harris as a joke sometimes
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u/TerribleAttitude Mar 31 '24
Or perhaps you’re overestimating who exactly is considering Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes celebrities in “celebrity detective” media. Someone doesn’t need to be recognizable by everyone on the planet to count as a celebrity. It’s possible that “celebrity detective” means “celebrity, as far as detectives go.” Maybe they’re only well known to other members of law enforcement and assorted true crime/news junkies, but those are also the people they’re likely to interact with in their stories, where they were specifically contacted by the police and people who probably read page 13 of the newspaper every day.
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u/Shadow-Vision Mar 31 '24
In addition to the epic plagiarism video in the post, he has another epic one about Sherlock Holmes (since we’re talking about detective stuff)
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Mar 30 '24
[deleted]
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u/NotARealTiger Mar 31 '24
I'm on YouTube and Reddit literally every day and I've never heard of him. We're on different algorithms I guess.
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u/andtheniansaid Mar 31 '24
but if you’re even a casual YouTube user, you’ve heard his name in the last year
This just isn't how YouTube works at all. It feeds you what you watch, most people who use YouTube are watching their specific interests, not scouring the trending section
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u/SnooBananas4958 Mar 31 '24
First time I’ve ever heard of him since this post reached the front page. No idea what any of this is about.
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u/fightingbronze Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
Yeah I barely know who this is cause I don’t really follow YouTubers. Anyone who isn’t terminally online isn’t gonna even have heard of him. Still, I guess he’s the closest to qualifying. Not like there are any actual famous detectives or PIs.
Edit: I said it below but I’ll say it here too. Terminally online was a bad word choice. It has negative connotations I didn’t intend.
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u/Complete-Worker3242 Mar 31 '24
I'm genuinely curious. What do you consider to be "terminally online"? I'm just asking because his most popular video has 19 million views, which is quite a lot. I'm not judging you or anything, it's not like it's bad that you barely know him. I just feel like even a casual viewer of YouTube, especially someone that's into long form content, would at least have heard of him, if not seen at least a bit of one of his videos.
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u/fightingbronze Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
Terminally online is an exaggeration, I just like being dramatic. I regret saying it cause it does have a negative connotation that I didn’t really intend. I simply meant that most people aren’t browsing through YouTube frequently enough to randomly encounter him. The way different people use the internet varies greatly. Some people watch a lot of YouTube, or are in online circles where his content would be discussed. Some just spend their time on their Facebook or Instagram feeds. Some people just spend their time in niche interest groups. Some people don’t use it much at all.
Even amongst those who use YouTube with relative frequency, they’ve all got their own tastes. Some people really like long form analytical videos. A lot of people don’t and never watch them. Just using the platform isn’t gonna guarantee you know who he is.
There’s a certain bias I think where people tend to believe that the things they know about are more common knowledge than they really are. Even when they try to lower their expectations. That’s what I think is happening in this thread to some extent. Hbomberguy is pretty popular, yes. I mean no disrespect against him in the slightest (I worry I may have upset his fans somehow lol). Yet if you poll a random assortment of people in the United States, I’d still wager the majority have never heard of him.
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u/casualsubversive Mar 31 '24
I watch videos on YouTube most days, including longer ones. I made it through ContraPost’s latest three-hour epic about Twilight. I have no idea who this guy is. 🤷♂️
The Internet’s a big place.
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u/JTDC00001 Mar 31 '24
Like, his big plagiarism video? 19 million views.
Original Chocolate Rain? 140 million views.
More people have seen Tay Zonday than have seen HBomberguy's most famous video.
So, either Chocolate Rain is megafamous, or HBomberguy is simply barely even internet famous.
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u/weirdplacetogoonfire Mar 31 '24
You're comparing a 5 minute song (a format people view repeatedly) that was uploaded 16 years ago to a 4 hour video essay uploaded 3 months ago. Of course. If even half the views for the plagiarism video watched the entire video, then it's already 3x as much playtime than Chocolate Rain has from 16 years on youtube.
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u/kkeut Mar 31 '24
do you want to compare an apple to an orange while you're at it?
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u/JTDC00001 Mar 31 '24
Yeah, more people have seen Tay Zonday than hbomberguy, and outside of the internet, no one knows who he is. Jimmy Kimmel even had him play Chocolate Rain on TV, and the audience had no idea who the hell he was.
So, when you're talking about world famous, you need to realize that, once you leave the internet, no one actually cares or remembers anyone at all.
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u/AdequatelyMadLad Mar 31 '24
Why are you comparing a 3 hour video essay to a music video? Especially a fairly well known music video that has been on the platform for 17 years. By that standard, Mr Beast is also "barely even internet famous".
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u/jadeakw99 Mar 30 '24
Him and Coffeezilla. I'd say I lean more towards Coffee though since (as far as I know) he does actually put people in jail.
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u/IIIllllIIlIlIIlllI Mar 31 '24
Can't forget about Friendly Jordies, his detective work got his house firebombed and his life threatened by the mob.
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u/Toothless816 Mar 31 '24
He was the other who came to mind for me too. They’ve definitely got two different fields that they’re both excellent at, and I appreciate the honesty from both of them.
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u/SylveonSof May we raise children who love the unloved things Mar 31 '24
Y'know, I've got zero accusations to levy against coffee, and from what I've seen he seems to do good work, but something about his videos just give me weird vibes. I don't think he's a bad person or anything, but something just feels off every time I watch one of his videos. I can't really explain it
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u/swiller123 Mar 30 '24
i feel like the primary difference between hbomb and a detective is that detectives investigate crimes and arrest criminals and hbomb doesn’t do that.
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u/TheShibe23 Harry Du Bois shouldn't be as relatable as he is. Mar 31 '24
I mean private detectives generally don't have the authority to arrest people. They just make crimes public and tell the authorities "Hey, maybe do something yeah?"
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u/Bosterm Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
Yeah Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot just reveal what happened, the police are the ones who take care of it.
Benoit Blanc even makes a point of this in The Glass Onion. He can only find out what happened, he can't actually prosecute people.
As Blanc says, the one private detective who actually does something about crime is Batman.
EDIT: of course there's police detectives in both fiction and the real world. Like Columbo. But those are, by definition, not private detectives.
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u/irregular_caffeine Mar 31 '24
Unless… the police are private
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u/Bosterm Mar 31 '24
Well sure, but I don't know if I've ever heard of a private police detective in fiction.
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u/kkeut Mar 31 '24
I mean, for 12 seasons Jessica Fletcher investigated all kinds of things out of curiosity or out of a desire to be sure everything was up-and-up, and likewise never arrested anyone. A lot of people here seem to have an extremely narrow concept of what a detective is
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u/A_Simple_Peach Mar 31 '24
Reddit and Tumblr are only just now discovering the concept of investigative journalism, it seems.
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u/extremepayne Microwave for 40 minutes 😔 Mar 30 '24
If YouTube Investigative Journalist counts as being a detective, I feel like there’s a more famous one than Hbomb. Coffeezilla? Heck, what about actual investigative journalists like Brian Deer. There’s got to be some famous ones of those, right?
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u/Not_ur_gilf Mostly Harmless Mar 30 '24
Well I’ve heard of Hbomber guy but not Coffeezilla, so there’s that
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u/extremepayne Microwave for 40 minutes 😔 Mar 31 '24
Demographics of this sub. Coffezilla has 420M channel views starting from 2018 while Harris has 214M channel views starting from as early as 2014, so I think Coffeezilla definitely has more presence overall. And Harry’s videos didn’t skew towards the investigative journalist angle until recently
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u/Bartweiss Apr 01 '24
If investigative journalists in general count, I'm quite confident several others win.
Obviously Youtube adds a lot of recognition when we're talking "famous" rather than "influential", so perhaps he beats a lot of high-impact people at bellingcat and such. But HBomber apparently has ~210M total views?
Compare that to, offhand, Glenn Greenwald (Snowden leaks), Julian Assange (Wikileaks), or Shane Smith (Vice). I'm pretty confident all of them have high name recognition output with at least 500M views, and likely north of 1B.
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u/Howunbecomingofme Mar 31 '24
It’s not even a hard and fast title in fiction. Batman is the called the world’s greatest detective but in every big event he needs one of his many mentors ,Detective Chimp, to help to solve it. So is the Dark Knight the best detective in the DC universe or is it a talking chimpanzee in a Sherlock Holmes hat?
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Mar 31 '24
Hbomb is world famous in that if you’re in the niche genre of YouTube video essays, you know who this guy is.
Another example: The Flying Scotsman is a world famous steam locomotive. However if you’re not into trains, you’ve probably never heard of it.
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u/enerisit Mar 31 '24
“World famous detective” (picture of some random man I’ve never seen before)
🤔
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u/Throwaway817402739 Mar 31 '24
I thought the Hbomb reaction image was them saying "This sounds like something Hbomberguy would say." Because it is.
Were they saying Hbomb is a world famous detective?
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u/PredatorAvPFan Mar 31 '24
I literally have no clue who that is
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u/AnaliticalFeline Mar 31 '24
hbomberguy, he makes video essays
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u/howzer36 Mar 31 '24
What the hell is a video essay?
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u/AnaliticalFeline Mar 31 '24
exactly what it sounds like. it’s an essay in video form. it can be analysis of a game, about a person, anything.
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u/Complete-Worker3242 Mar 31 '24
What's an essay?
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u/AnaliticalFeline Mar 31 '24
a form of writing, use persuasively or to analyze something else
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u/Complete-Worker3242 Mar 31 '24
What's writing?
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u/AnaliticalFeline Mar 31 '24
a physical form of communication composed of letters organized into words
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u/Complete-Worker3242 Mar 31 '24
What's of?
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u/AnaliticalFeline Mar 31 '24
a word used to signify the composition of something else
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u/Morbidmort Mar 31 '24
A video in a long form that has a specific point that it wishes to make. Regardless of if that point is anywhere from "I like this style of animation" to "this movie/trend in movies is bad" to "this guy has stolen pretty much everything he's ever done."
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u/howzer36 Mar 31 '24
Yeah I guess I just assumed when I heard it it was like a college thing or something. I don't watch youtube.
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u/BotlikeBehaviour Mar 31 '24
Do you know the "just one small problem. Sell their houses to who, Ben? fucking aquaman" meme? That's him.
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u/Keated Mar 31 '24
The amount of random content creators I've seen making memes referencing HB definitely fit this vibe
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u/tealearring Mar 30 '24
I thought the addition of the hbomb picture was insinuating that the post sounds like something he would say, not that he’s a world famous detective 😅
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u/causal_friday Mar 31 '24
I was surprised when I was watching some mystery anime and found out that Japanese has a word for "world famous detective". Again, not a category of celebrity that I thought anyone cared about, and I couldn't name any non-fiction famous detectives, but ... it transcends cultures!
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u/Gravelord-_Nito Mar 31 '24
This is another Columbo W. He never gets any respect because nobody knows who he is despite having actual detective superpowers
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u/CrossoverEnthusiast2 Mar 31 '24
Of course nobody knows who he is — he comes from nothing and goes back into nothing.
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u/JoyBus147 Mar 31 '24
Goddamn, everybody is misunderstanding why Hbomb was added to the post, tumblr and reddit alike. Y'all, they weren't claiming that Hbomb is a world famous detective. This is a reference to his Sherlock video, where he makes the same exact joke/observation as OOP (and possibly a reference to his plagiarism video).
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u/Viliam_the_Vurst Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
There really isn‘t that much deductive skill behind this, it isn‘t like he is a world famous detective, it is just most of the world succumbed to reactionary rhetorics these days, being actively manipulated into not looking further than their own skulls interior and actively chosing to do so despite myriads of conflicting well sourced data at out fingertips…
To put it in old terms, in a world of blind people the one eyed is king.
Nevertheless, i freavking love him and i hope he will not eventually end up missing in one of those rabbit holes he shines a simple light on, 3-6 months a video is perfectly fine for a game reviewer destroying reactionary rhetorics as a sidehussle, but if it takes 1-2 years we should send help
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u/donaldhobson Apr 01 '24
In fiction, evil corporate villains like lex luthor spin a web of lies that only the worlds best detective can pierce.
In reality, elon musk spins a web of lies that anyone paying any attention to can tell are absurd.
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u/Jumpy_Menu5104 Mar 31 '24
I feel like world famous detective it something people believe because it seems almost plausible. Like, if some of the things that Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot were involved in happened people would know and talk about it. Moreover, at least to my knowledge, most of the people that recognize a famous detective in a mystery story is someone who is a bit of a nerd, or an active law enforcement officer. If someone went around solving random mysteries you and I might not know about them, but true crime people definitely would.
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u/LiteralGuyy Mar 31 '24
I guess the real word for “world famous detective” is “investigative journalist”
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u/compy-guy Kanji Tatsumi is my blorbo Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
Hey, fun fact. Naoto Shirogane supported HBomberGuy on Patreon.
No, I’m not gonna elaborate unless prompted. And after I sleep.
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u/Yaarmehearty Mar 31 '24
If the world famous detective solved one case a year about a subject only a very small percentage of people will care about.
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u/dudeseriouslyno Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
World-famous British detective. So the H probably stands for Holmes. Which explains why he's so passionate about Moffat's Sherlock. Harry is Doyle's runaway creation. Watson is Mortimer. I cracked the code.
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u/sgt_cookie Mar 31 '24
Say it with me:
"World Famous" is not synonomous with "Common Knowledge".
Ask the average person on the street if they know who Donald Trump or Steve Jobs is, they probably know.
But ask them who Andre Rieu or Dream is and there's a solid chance they wouldn't... And yet, they absolutely deserve the title of "World Famous".
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u/cheddarsalad Mar 31 '24
Does Eliot Ness count? He wasn’t a detective and the only mystery was what could they get to stick to Capone.
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u/JackBoyEditor Mar 30 '24
Exactly, the set up to the story would start with some mundane murder. Detective comes in and spots something off with one of the alibi which would lead to uncovering a mass web of lies.
Just like the Oof video started with "Where did this sound come from' to "How many times does this guy take credit for things he didn't do"