fandom things, pictures of pretty people, general dumbassery. find me as 51stCenturyFox on AO3 and earth. i like fic, caffeine, alcohol & i own too many pairs of sunnies. ask me whatever you like. ... ... ...
My mother and maternal grandmother spent most of my childhood determinedly never reading the manual and then wondering why the appliance in question was so bafflingly complicated. I'm pretty sure it was the undiagnosed ADHD (Gran) and the reading-related disability not diagnosed until her forties (Mum) but life got radically less complicated for all of us when I showed up with early onset literacy and a deep passion for diagrams and instructions. I'm not necessarily good at remembering to follow them (or where I put the manual after I was done with it) but by god I at least know what they are.
I have a tip for people who misplace manuals. You COULD put them in a folder or drawer full of manuals, but then you still have to leaf through all the manuals. I put mine in a large ziplock bag and tape them under or near the item. (So the dishwasher one is under the sink, but also protected from damage, the HVAC one is taped up in the furnace cabinet, the lawnmower one is tacked up on the wall in the garage.)
Most of the time you just need to look up a code or whatever and it really saves time having them next to the thing!
People who are hard on yourselves: may I humbly offer you the 100 floors of frights philosophy?
In the SNL David S. Pumpkins sketch, a couple is on a ride called "100 Floors of Frights," where they see a different scare on each floor, and at one point they complain about many of those floors being lame. And then Kenan Thompson delivers this line of deep philosophical wisdom: "Hey look—it's 100 floors of frights, they not all gonna be winners."
My husband and I use this line all the time to give ourselves grace. For instance, I'm a good cook, but when I make a dinner that doesn't turn out well, I will literally say out loud, "It's 100 floors of frights—they're not all gonna be winners," or just "Look it's 100 floors of frights."
It just means when you do a thing a whole lot, there's bound to be some instances that are bad. You don't have to be good at the thing 100% of the time. You can't be good 100% of the time. Some of the 100 floors are gonna suck. It doesn't negate your skill at creating the rest of the 100 floors.
You can use this for anything: art you make, performances, school assignments, days at work, outfits, sex sessions, literally anything that you are too hard on yourself about when it doesn't go great. Listen to Kenan Thompson and remember that it's impossible for them all to be winners, and that's okay.
once I did an Americorps position & I won’t get into exact details but two months in my one other coworker & I were rly frustrated bc we weren’t doing anything in our job description or the contract we signed whatsoever & instead we were basically being used as extremely underpaid retail staff and slowly the ppl in charge of us were cornering us more and more into that until I was finally like okay….what the hell? I opened up the work contract I signed and realized I hadn’t done a single thing listed in my role so I sent a long (professionally worded) complaint email to Americorps and they called me an hour later in total outrage because it turned out the work we were being made to do was explicitly prohibited by the program and we were being 100% exploited for cheap labor and the very next day we got a new supervisor and spent the rest of our year doing what we signed up to do and it rocked.
”#it is very easy to confuse yourself with a Karen, #trying to shoulder on and not make a fussc #but sometimes Complaint is Necessary or else nothing will get better, #for anyone”
"Nobody likes a complainer but they're needed for a functioning society. You know how humanity gets compared to frogs in boiling water and everything is getting bad so gradually we won't even notice? Not if l'm around". End of ID.]
I have often been asked: "Why do Scandinavians complain and criticise so much? You have it so good!"
Answer is: "To keep it being good and push for even better. If you stop complaining, the greedy and the power hungry will slowly remove more and more of the good ideas."
Show me a boss or manager of any sort who says "No negativity! No complaining! Good vibes only!" and I'll show you a boss or manager who's abusing their employees.
one thing i adore about fandom is the “[bad parent]’s A+ parenting” tag on ao3. it’s so universal and so sarcastic and it makes me giggle every time i see it
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 there.
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.
PLEASE check my later versions of this post via my main page to make sure you have the latest version of this post before you reblog. All the information I’ve been able to gather is in my reblogs below, and it's frustrating to see the old version getting passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.
I just found the Fanlore article, and it looks like while Basingstoke invented the format, Strangecreature, a Torchwood writer, might be one of the first to have used “five times and one time.” But the original prompt was Basingstoke’s. And it’s definitely fanfiction only in origin.
I love it when conversations about this come around again! How cool is it that I know people in fannish history! (and how uncool is it that I never know it was Bas who invented this until recently – where was I, under a rock?)
I haven't abandoned this story. I just put it on the back burner for now. The story is just on a small vacation. It is currently out of office. It can't come to the phone right now. It just fell under my bed to sleep with the monsters. It never left my head. It is everywhere - except on paper.
The story has returned and it's staring at me from behind every mirror, inside every shadow, and I can hear it clawing at the windowpane when I'm trying to sleep.
last night i went to a really fun and informal fundraiser evening with jesse and lucy at westminster school, where they were interviewing each other. i got to ask a question which i’ve mused upon for some time about tom, shiv and greg. enjoy! full transcript under cut
Transcript
me: so i’m gonna have to look at what i wrote down.
jesse: that’s alright, you’re highly in credit since you know more about the show than us. more about john berryman.
(laughter)
lucy: tell us what we’ve done wrong so far!
me: god, no. i wouldn’t! so my question, this is a character based question, and one thing that probably got a bit subsumed in the fourth season just because everything was happening. but i’d like to know more about tom and shiv, and also greg. because my read on the situation between the three of them is that greg is a source of marital strife (laughter) that shiv never noticed, and what would it have taken for shiv to notice the depth of greg’s presence in their marriage.
jesse: uh huh.
me: and tom’s attachment to him.
jesse: uh huh. sometimes you get little bits in life or you see something and you’re like, i wish we were making the show, because i suddenly do want to hear shiv say ‘greg you’re a source of marital strife’.
(laughter)
jesse: that’s like, when you’re like, that’s gonna be in, we’re not gonna cut that.
lucy: absolutely.
jesse: (doing greg voice) wh-wh-what?!
(laughter)
lucy: yeah. well we enjoyed that, didn’t we. we had a scene in america decides, which was the only scene between shiv and greg.
jesse: oh yeah.
lucy: the election episode in the final season where she takes him into a little room and threatens him.
me: ah, but it’s jealousy over lukas, over the greg and lukas thing, and it’s like, have you forgotten your husband, who is also very attached to this limpet?
lucy: yeah. i would also say that there are marriages in which a third party is not an unuseful thing, as well. not in a forgiving way about infidelity, but i would say that there are things that tom can express with and at and on greg (laughter) as it were, to greg, that are useful because he’s both a - you know the great, the interesting thing about tom is that he’s both a courtier and a bully. he’s that rare combination of someone who you totally believe as being almost like (mimes bowing and doffing cap) ‘oh yes sorry thank you yes ma’am’ and also like, ‘i’m gonna kill you’ and that juxtaposition is what makes him so interesting.
but in his marriage to shiv he has no real way, until quite late i guess in the final season, where we explore it, to hold power over her and to use that part of himself. so he’s accepted the acquiescing, he’s accepted the role of courtier in that marriage, and greg is quite a useful place where he gets to express all of that, the bully in him so that maybe it doesn’t have to come out in the marriage. which might be bad, because perhaps it should do and then the marriage would’ve ended much earlier, yknow, when shiv would just be like ‘i’m not dealing with you challenging me in any way’. so it’s not until that balcony scene i think where he really challengers her much at all. possibly the beach scene, where he sort of says that he’s considered leaving her, and how that would feel. but with aggressive challenge? it’s all directed at greg, and greg is allowed to be the place where all those feelings go.
me: but the affection - there’s also affection between them.
jesse: YEAH. and i think that’s the other thing maybe you’re alluding to is like, she… i think, some things you know you’re putting in the show because you talk about them and other things just naturally occur, and audiences and people tell you what the show is and what you put in there and you didn’t even realise, but i think we were aware of this - she’s oblivious. her obliviousness is a big part of her wealth and her upbringing and… so there’s something homoerotic going on between greg and tom.
me: i mean it’s not for me to say.
(laughter)
jesse: and does she… i think there’s two ways of reading that, either she’s oblivious, and that’s intriguing and possible. the other is that she sort of - there’s a scene in, you know that one, in the sun valley media conference in argestes, where we wrote a bit where shiv shows up unexpected and tom’s sort of flirting with someone, and it never really landed that much. i think we were like, oh this really gonna, shiv’s gonna spark up when she sees him flirting with someone. and it’s one of those things where you were like, you know what? i don’t think she gives a hoot, really, does she.
(laughter)
jesse: it’s like, she hasn’t got that, that’s not in her belly, that fear of loss.
lucy: no.
jesse: so i think that goes, that probably goes for a same-sex relationship or flirtation as much as it does for with a woman.
lucy: i think that’s true.
jesse: like she really… even if he was like - and this is not the way that tom would be like - ‘i think i’d like to sleep with greg’, i think she’d be like (mimes looking at watch) ‘when?’.
(laughter)
jesse: (as shiv) ‘not when i’m in the city, that’s weird, tom’.
(laughter)
jesse: i don’t think she’d have any fundamental objection to that.
lucy: that’s true. i think jealousy is quite a low status emotion.
jesse: yes.
lucy: and i think that she would struggle to feel it.
(jesse laughs)
lucy: even if it was present in some way, she would never be able to access it because it would put her too much at a disadvantage. so i think yeah exactly that, it would be like, ‘oh i guess you’re going to fuck that boring woman now are you, tom’ or do that, like… she has to be here (mimes one hand above another hand) so jealousy can’t really be accessed by her. so she might be irritated by greg, but in the way you would be by a mosquito.
The gifts from Tony and Pepper are nice, and Steve secretly likes showing off signs that he belongs to them -- until some offhanded teasing from Clint makes him wonder if they're gifts from his lovers or payment for services rendered.
flying (just far enough) from the sun by @sunspill
After the events of the film, Steve follows Tony home instead of Bruce. Steve/Pepper/Tony.
Come At Me by Closer
Steve gets a lesson in pop psychology, drives a roadster, fends off an aspiring killer robot, conquers Tetris, wins a quarter, buys pants, battles the undead, and falls hard for Tony Stark and Pepper Potts.
Just your average superhero stuff.
Safety Net by Instigator
Tony and Pepper aren't the type to stand idly by when they want something. As it turns out, what they want is Steve.
Make It A Triple by @51st
Tony’s lips are on his again, surprisingly soft and warm and his beard isn’t scratchy at all, but pleasant, and his mouth tastes faintly of scotch, and that’s Pepper’s other hand on his shoulder, between them, tightening there.
Steve pulls his head back, slightly. “Sorry,” he says, and he’s not sure which of them he’s addressing, but he’s had Long Island iced teas and Adios, Motherfuckers and he can maybe pretend later that he didn’t know any better.
Good Teachers by @impalachick
Wherein Steve learns that he doesn't have anything appropriate to wear to a dinner at Stark tower, Pepper is an extremely capable planner, Tony doesn't hate him, and date nights don't have to be between only two people.
Glamour Girl by @stickthisbig
This is Steve's indulgence.
Call me home by Cubicrot
“You need to stop feeling guilty, live a little.” Tony says carefully. “And I missed you.”
Steve’s heart beats like he’s in the middle of a leap and throwing his shield.
Tony coughs. “Also, Pep’s got a crush.”
Nowhere to Hide by @archwrites
In the wake of the Battle of New York, Steve dreams of caves and portals and a world he doesn't understand. Then he meets up with Tony and Pepper in California and discovers he's not the only one living someone else's life in his dreams.
Croquis by @saathi1013
In which the Avengers Tower is rebuilt, Tony attempts matchmaking, Natasha is scary, and Pepper may have ulterior motives. Also, there is Asgardian mead, which might be a problem.
Magnetic by @boombangbing
Tony and Pepper are in a committed relationship, everyone knows that. Tony still flirts relentlessly with Steve, though, and Steve doesn't know what to make of it. Then he starts having weird feelings about Pepper too, and he really, really doesn't know what to make of that.
Holding Pattern by @boombangbing
The first couple of weeks of Steve's relationship with Tony and Pepper leave him in a strange in-between state. Which consequently leaves him increasingly frustrated.
Living in the Present by EllyAvon
Steve has adjusted as well as can be expected to the 21st century, but he still can't predict things like this.
There's lots more kissing in the future than he thought there would be-- or maybe it's kissing in the present.
You and Me and Steve by Chaerring
The problem wasn't Steve, exactly, just that he was always around.
Vector by @setissma
"It's a great idea," Tony said.
"Fabulous," Pepper said. "I'll file it with all your other recent great ideas, like stealing cars from the Stark Formula One team and buying me a strawberry farm for my birthday."
'Til the Daylight Comes by GotTheSilver
As he turns to leave he hears Tony calling after him, and he ignores it, uncomfortable with—well. With Tony. Not because of what he’d been saying, but because he liked it. Because something about knowing that Tony notices him stirred something inside Steve.
But Tony’s with Pepper.
And that’s.
That’s fine.
Homecoming by amobisan
Pepper opened the door to her bedroom and found Steve sitting on their bed. He looked up at her, blushing and shirtless, and said "Tony told me you liked this?"
Middleman by @justanotherstonyfan
Pepper and Tony introduce Steve to restraints.
Taken by @musicalluna
Tony gets back from a business trip and finds out Steve is gone.
Three's Company by @serenailith
Did Pepper and Tony really ask him that? Or is this just some vivid dream?
Or the one where Pepper decides her curiosity has reached high enough, so she asks Tony to bring Steve into the relationship.
Surprise by @serenailith
For the past five months, Steve has been in an amazing relationship (of sorts) with Tony and Pepper. One night, he receives a text from Tony while the genius is at a charity event with Pepper, and Steve sets his mind to surprising the two of them with a better night when they get home.
a dusting of pink (makes you glow from within) by @bedtimestoriesformywife
Steve is pretty sure he’s got a hang of this future thing. Talking to women though? That he still needs to work on.
germansingergirl
snowghoul
vaporwave
ellievsbear
pixelskylines
jbbartram-illu
dailybridgerton
gummygunk
