We Ride The Backs Of Giant Cosmic Fleas

on identity

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

Your Decent Into Hell

I wanted to do this for a long time. a fic rec of our decent into hell for all our sins. so enjoy your decent miraculours :D

SAFE HEAVEN

Anything for a friend by babycougar Adrien would love it if fangirls left him alone for once in his life, but he knows that this will likely be a problem for as long as he’s single. Nino comes up with a potentially genius plan: just pretend to date a kindhearted classmate, and the problem will go away! Aka Adrien is oblivious and Marinette is too nice for her own good.

Mon dieu by Mooncactus “Kiss me, quick!"Not the words Marinette expects to hear from Adrien Agreste, especially especially prefaced with "I’ll make it up to you and explain it all later."But a girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do.

It’s complicated by konekat Chat Noir wants to confess to Ladybug. Marinette wants to confess to Adrien. Somehow, things just keep spiraling out of control instead.

Five steps by eLJay It doesn’t take much for Chat Noir to fall for Marinette.

the person that you’d take a bullet for is behind the trigger by asterbells He used Cataclysm, and the furthest his memory reaches is when he was sitting on top of Ladybug, likely to have been pinning her down.The pieces push together into a picture he doesn’t want to see.His pencil falls with a clatter against the table.

Someone to hold on to by Chebitz Chat Noir finds himself looking for comfort in places more likely than he’d think.

Honesty by panda013 (Amiria_Raven) “Well, if I’m wonderful,” he started, a teasing lilt in his voice causing her to look up and give him the ‘kitty don’t you dare’ look he so adored. His grin grew wider and he finished, “then you must be purrty Miraculous, don’t you think?”His honesty had given them this chance, and she would forever love that earnest part of him.

GOD WILL LET THIS ONE PASS

heartstrings by taylortot one of marinette’s rare unlucky days turns into something treacherous. thanks to a certain cat, the real danger passes, but there are other things to be more afraid of. her heart, for example, might be one of them.

Gently Into The Night by Lady_Lombax Even heroes need a pick me up sometimes. For Chat Noir, a certain Princess is just the remedy.

In Sickness and In Health by kali_asleep It’s not everyday you see a girl passed out on a roof in the middle of the night. But when that girl is a certain Marinette Dupain-Cheng, well, there’s not much else Chat Noir can do but help her, right?

YOU CAN STILL REPENT

Obsession by KryallaOrchid was meant to be only once but Marinette and her magic hands keep drawing him back. He can’t get enough.

Sunlight, Firelight, Starlight by AdJiT Adrien knows he shouldn’t do it. Adrien knows that there will be consequences to this action and Adrien knows this is probably a bad idea but Adrien is not here on this rooftop, Chat is, and Chat is tired of staring up at the girl who hung the moon and wishing, and every fiber of his being is telling him to leave that behind and take the chance to do something with someone who is with him, on his level. So he does.

Months Later by Inkkerfuffle somehow, this whole secret dating thing was working out just fine. It had been a couple of months, and they’d been working on getting to know each other and figuring out just how they worked together. There were some dates, but as far as school was concerned, the game was ‘how many kisses can one sneak upon the other’. And so far, the answer was plenty.In which there is secret dating, formal events and creepy classmates.Series

FORGIVE ME FATHER FOR I HAVE SINNED

That thing you do by mercy_angel_09 There were two possibilities for how this could end:1) Their friendship would be stronger than everor2) She’d never be able to look him in the eye again.He was willing to bet on the latter. (Or, the one where an akuma shoves Ladybug and Chat Noir into a tiny utility closet while it goes on its roaring rampage of revenge, and things get a little hard between them.)

It Had To Be You by mercy_angel_09 Sometimes the person you’re looking for has been right in front of you the whole time.Like. Literally. Five years you two idiots wasted. (putting it here cuz it’s sin yet sweet sooo)

The Ladybugs and The Bees by BullySquadess The Miraculous Ladybug and Chat Noir have survived many things together. Monsters, curses, hoards of pigeons…they’ve seen it all. But how will they handle one of life’s biggest challenges? ((What started as an awkward little puberty fic has slowly morphed into LadyNoir SIN))

Sin by BroadwayyyBabyy Just. Sin. (PURE SIN OMG)

I’M IN HELL…(WHY AM I NOT SURPRISED)

Dance in the dark by MisterDoctorProfessorPatrick Chat Noir decides to pay his princess a visit, but since black cats are hard to see in the dark, he overhears a little more than he might have expected.

Puppeteer by clairelutra (exosolarmoon) i don’t bite, but i heard you might so let me feed your appetiteChat Noir pays his princess a visit. (you sin more every chapter you read)

There is SOOO MUCH MORE but i couldn’t possibly put everything here cuz i also haven’t read everything…yet

ENJOY

Leucistic Red Tail Hawk

real.life.is.art

their dynamic in the riverclan firestar au

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.

EMILY PRENTISS in THE RED TANK in CRIMINAL MINDS 3x03 | 'Scared to Death'

I need everyone to know that the ship Götheborg, the world's largest ocean-going wooden sailing ship, answered a distress call the other day.

Imagine waiting for the coast guard or whatever to show up and instead a replica of 18th century merchant ship pulls up and tows you to the coast.

Hey everyone, I know it's going to be a busy day for a lot of people, but Google enrolled everyone over 18 into their AI program automatically.

If you have a google account, first go to gemini.google.com/extensions and turn everything off.

Then you need to go to myactivity.google.com/product/gemini and turn off all Gemini activity tracking. You do have to do them in that order to make sure it works.

Honestly, I'm not sure how long this will last, but this should keep Gemini off your projects for a bit.

I saw this over on bluesky and figured it would be good to spread on here. It only takes a few minutes to do.

Joy Sullivan, "Ghost Heart", Instructions for Traveling West

To my little slice of the Tumblr community: please help spread the word of the upcoming demonstration for science happening across the country. Science in the US is under attack by the current administration and the community will not take it lying down.

STAND UP FOR SCIENCE

STAND UP FOR SCIENCE

March 7, 2025. Washington DC and nationwide. Because science is for everyone.