Yellowfang, I Wish You Were Here. My Sister Is Dying.

i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point

on identity

ojibwe / noah kahan / richard siken / unknown / elliott smith / oamisoa / cameron awkward-rich

This is not your Miraculous Ladybug blog but can you reccommend some of your favorite fan fictions for this serie?

Sure! 

I have a few that I really adore. If you know me, when I recommend something, I do it well (Come over to @miraculousturtle for my Ladybug blog!)

De La Chance &  Retrouvailles by @gigiree

Gigi will catch you with these lines, these metaphors that last pages long and they are just beautiful. She writes feelings and they seep into your soul. 

Rainy Days & Secret Santa by @thelastpilot

I’m still working on Rainy Days, but Secret Santa is so flipping cute. This is the ultimate fluff bomb. Pilot is a fluff bomb. You walk away feeling so much better than you did before you started reading. 

check yes juliet by @clairelutra

This was the first Ladybug fanfic I read and oh my lord, I feel in love. It is so good and I was just stunned. She writes them so in character and I just want to keep reading forever.

heartstrings by @seiyakanie

This is the classic. The fic that everyone reads and a whole fandom freaks out over. It is MariChat bliss. (Also, Taylor just writes really well and her drawings are amazing)

Honesty & Tikki’s New Friend  by @panda013

Do you really want to know how I feel about Panda’s writing? It is simple. Truly simple:.#goals. The way she world builds blows my mind and I’m just swept away. She is a true seamstress of words.

hourglass & Pose Reference by @unluckyfortunes

First off, read anything by Unlucky. They are a great writer who just uses amazing diction. And very wholesome. Second off, Unlucky takes huge risks and pushes boundaries and makes you think about the world a little differently. 

 sunlight, firelight, starlight by @polkadottedluckycharm

Allison here writes the cutest and most wonderful awkwardness ever. Just read this. It’s adorable. (P.S. I heard her read it over skype chat and I melted because she legit does Marinette so well)

lucky strike by @runningoutofink

Bee is amazing. Just amazing. This is also silly and fun and you should read it. She is someone I inspire to write like. 

These writers are all fantastic and all of their stories are so different. Check them out. Enjoy them the way I love them!!

(P.S. I have some as well he’s not a siren, wouldn’t call him a prince and missing you/moving on)

SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people on senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.

IN SHORT

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.

When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using 

his dyslexia; 

his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and 

a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,

as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.

When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer listed. 

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain; 

2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and 

3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again. 

The timeline, the details, the screenshots (behind the cut)

Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):

This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)

I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:

Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.

I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice. 

I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.

After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.

While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:

And then I went to bed.

By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:

@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.

That response came only an hour or so later: 

Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.

I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.

A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)

A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.

Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.

Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :

Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):

which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)

... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)

After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether. 

It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:

And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.

That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:

They were completed works;

They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and

They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.

If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!

I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.

I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.

Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***

That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.

Sooo—

We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them. 

This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:

Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.

Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.

THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):

*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that. 

**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation. 

***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.

Again, please, please PLEASE reblog this post instead of the one I sent originally. All the information is here, and it's driving me nuts to see the old ones are still passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.

Thank you all so much.

on friends and soulmates and that type of love that feels like it's going to burst right out of your heart

@/zmije / @/leptodiera / @/bichopalo / lyrics from two best friends by bb bean / animatedjames on youtube / @/killingmyselfbutnotdying / unknown / @/sadiekane / friedrich neitzsche / katfish draws / @/elytrians / @/wormbus-art aka @/angel-pond / @/mushysuggestion / the unsent project / mhairi mcfarlane / unknown

It's started, near my home. And I have words.

“What if the unsub sees a freedom in his victims he wishes he had himself”— JJ 3x17

I can’t stop thinking about JJ’s character being such a poignant example of comphet. I know in canon she is “straight”—though the above example happens to be directly from canon— and for those of us who ship Jemily she is generally portrayed as bisexual, however, to me she’s such a subtle but extremely accurate portrayal of a closet lesbian.

Will is a good husband and a great dad, I don’t want to discount that, but JJ being with him doesn’t discount her being gay, it might actually reaffirm it. For me the little clues like this scene above, her wearing Emily’s watch starting when Emily “dies”, her reaction to the conversion camp in “Broken” (8x15), her hallucinating Emily, all the way to the absolutely stunning and slightly heartbreaking delivery of the line “It gives me you” in 17x6 paint a totally different picture. It feels like a trail of bread crumbs for us to follow.

So let’s talk about how a woman who was married to a man for over a decade never loved him—not as she should have. She may have even thought she was bisexual for a long, long time, trying to reconcile her attraction to women with the life she ended up in—these might have even been feelings she recognized very early on but tried to push down because they were confusing. Maybe she even had strong feelings for a close female friend, but felt rejected and in that rejection bottled those feelings, that realization that she wasn’t quite ready to deal with, back up and rushed into the arms of a guy who was right in all the ways she had grown up thinking a partner should be. Because sometimes, especially when we feel vulnerable and rejected, it’s easy to confuse the desire to feel wanted, and liking male attention with attraction. And even though she recoiled from his touch, shrunk away at the idea of being with him all the time, didn’t want her friends to know, spent years terrified of actually committing to him she cared deeply for him and it was easy to ignore those signs. Something inside her was telling her that it wasn’t right, that part of herself, that fear was trying to speak to her—yelling stop. But they had a child she never planned, but loved with everything she had and she couldn’t imagine parenting that child alone. So life kept going on around her, feeling out of her control. And her relationship was hard—work— but that’s what it’s supposed to be right? When you grow up without real examples of what a loving relationship is supposed to look like it’s easy to think that actually desiring your partner, feeling giddy when they are around, wanting to kiss them or tell them about what’s going on in your day that’s a fairytale, that only happens in the movies. And living in parallel to someone you have developed a comfort with through years and years of togetherness is fine, until it’s not. Until you realize that it’s killing you inside and you need more.

Ahhh, there’s the obvious conclusion.

If we can de-extinct* species, surely there’s no point in worrying about endangered species anymore! We can bring them back anytime!

*depending on your definition of de-extinction.

Jennifer Saunders, from “When the Guest Speaker Told Us“

Has anyone done this yet?