I Think In The Same Way There's A 90/10 Rule With Horror And Comedy (horror Works Best When It's 90%

Dragon Age Inquisition Tarot, HQ: 1/10

This is accurate also can help when discussing magic with other fantasy magic doesn't always equal fireballs, and everyone has there own thought on how magic in real life works

Linguistic analysis of "magic" is a shoddy Indiana Jones ass rope bridge over useless semantics-infested waters BUT it's a good place to start for like, what a culture means when they say "magic"

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 down 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.

I think one of the most profound forms of love is "I'll try that, for you. I may not like it, but I'll try it."

It's a confused middle-aged man in a pottery class, whose daughter is helping him with his clay's plasticity. It's a kid scrunching up their brow while listening to their mom's favorite music, trying to figure out why she likes it. It's a girlfriend who says "Yes, I'll go with you" and her girlfriend cheering and buying a second ticket for a con. It's a friend half dragging another friend through an aquarium, the one being dragged laughing and calling out "Wait, wait, I know we're here for the exhibit, but I haven't been here! Slow down!"

It's being willing to spend some of your time trying something new because it makes someone you love happy.

Does this story need to be written down? Is it not enough to have it simply live in my head?

anyone remember what these things are called like little cartoony expressive doohickies i think they have a real name but i can’t remember

Body language cues for a few emotions

Happiness:

Smiling genuinely, with crinkles around the eyes.

Open body posture, with relaxed arms and shoulders.

Leaning forward slightly towards the person or object of interest.

Making eye contact with a warm and engaged expression.

Anger:

Tightened jaw and clenched fists.

Furrowed brows and narrowed eyes.

Standing or sitting with a rigid and tense posture.

Pointing fingers or aggressive gestures.

Raised voice or speaking through gritted teeth.

Sadness:

Downcast eyes and a drooping posture.

Slumped shoulders and shallow breathing.

Avoiding eye contact and withdrawing from social interaction.

Sighing or a subdued tone of voice.

Tearfulness, with watery or red eyes.

Fear:

Widened eyes with dilated pupils.

Raised eyebrows and a tense facial expression.

Frozen or rigid body posture.

Backing away or seeking physical distance from the perceived threat.

Trembling or shaking, especially in the hands or legs.

Surprise:

Raised eyebrows and widened eyes.

Mouth slightly agape or forming an "O" shape.

Leaning forward or recoiling backward in response to the surprise.

Quick inhalation or gasp of breath.

Rapid blinking or blinking more than usual.

Disgust:

Curling the upper lip or wrinkling the nose.

Narrowing the eyes and raising the upper eyelids.

Turning the head away or physically distancing oneself from the source of disgust.

Covering the mouth or nose with the hand or a tissue.

Expressing verbal disgust through phrases like "ew" or "yuck."

These are just some examples, and individuals may display variations in their body language based on their personality, cultural background, and the specific context of the situation.

the suffering never ends

19 points

Writer Bingo

What’s your final score? 👀

What happened in Portugal in 1974 needs to happen in Russia.

Today, April 25th, is the 48th anniversary of the 1974 Portuguese Revolution. A group of junior and middle ranking officers in the Portuguese military overthrew a fascist dictatorship which had been in power over 40 years.

The Estado Novo régime came to power in the same era as Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco. However it had been less heavy handed than those other dictatorships; its first and longest lasting leader, António Salazar, was a fervent Catholic who was turned off by the “paganism” of his fellow pre-war dictators and ruled accordingly. Still there were secret police, limits on free speech and the press, and no genuinely fair elections.

By the mid 1970s, Portugal was the last European country to have a colonial empire. A non-stop series of wars in the colonies had taken a large toll on the country. Younger and more clear-thinking officers decided that a change in the country was long overdue.

BBC History Extra describes what happened.

In March 1974, General António de Spínola was dismissed from his position as deputy minister of the armed forces.

He had written a book in which he suggested that the Portuguese colonial wars should come to an end. He was critical of the current Portuguese regime, something that was regarded as heretical by Portugal’s right-wing establishment.

The Armed Forces Movement (MFA) was soon formed by dissident and low- ranking officers who supported Spínola. Captains within the armed forces were also unhappy with a law which would grant privileges to conscripted officers, to the resentment of professionally trained officers. The armed forces’ support for the government was rapidly deteriorating.

Just before midnight on 24 April, Portugal’s entry for the Eurovision Song Contest – ‘E Depois do Adeus’ (And After The Farewell) – was played by the radio station Emissores Associados de Lisboa, as had been arranged by the rebels. This was the first of two secret signals that the army was waiting for.

Tanks entered the centre of Lisbon in the early hours of 25 April and soon the airport, television and radio centres were taken over, as well as the Salazar Bridge over the river Tagus. Prime Minister Marcello Caetano, along with other ministers, had taken refuge in the Carmo barracks, which housed the National Republican Guard, and these were stormed by troops, armed with machine guns. With little resistance, Caetano surrendered to Spínola.

[ … ]

Radio appeals by the revolutionaries asked people to stay inside, but many flooded the streets and joined in, supporting the troops. By the time the sun had risen on 26 April, the MFA was in charge and promised to hold democratic elections for a national assembly as soon as they could.

In 2014 for the 40th anniversary, NBC News did a piece on it.

Portugal Honors April 25 Revolution, the World’s Coolest Coup

They took less than 24 hours to bring down Europe’s longest-lived dictatorship and signal the end of the last colonial empire in Africa.

“It was a coup like no other,” recalled Swiss journalist Werner Herzog, who reported on the revolution.

“The atmosphere was more like a party,” he joked at a conference on Wednesday. “None of us had ever heard of an army intervening to bring democracy, surely it’s normally the other way round.”

It certainly did turn out to be cool. By June of 1976 Portugal had drafted a constitution, elected a parliament, and installed a president – all peacefully and democratically. In just 26 months, Portugal had gone from a fascist dictatorship to a fully functioning Western liberal democracy. And it’s still doing fine today.

Portugal is one of the most stable and resilient truly democratic countries on the planet. It’s amazing what a success story it has been. It is proof that a difficult history doesn’t have to be a drag on a country’s present and future.

As for Russia, we can only hope that there are middle ranking officers currently plotting to remove their own fascist régime. They do have a much more difficult job than their Portuguese counterparts in 1974. The Estado Novo régime was fascism lite while Putin is a lot more like the hardcore Nazis of the late 1930s in Germany.

Anyway, the BBC excerpt above alluded to “the first of two secret signals” which were played on Lisbon radio stations to give the go-ahead for the revolution. The second was more important and is now a revered patriotic song in Portugal. Grândola, Vila Morena had been banned on radio by the government. So when it was played just after midnight on Rádio Renascença on April 25th, everyone involved knew there was no turning back.