Váli Lokabur, they (system)/he (host), he(n)/han. Profile pic by qianjibahe. Languages: mostly ENG / NNO. Drøymer um Landsmålspartiet Dei Skeive. Glory to Ukraine! DNI anti Ukraine and supporters of Putin
ok so. i'm not really planning on updating this blog anymore however i majored in german literature in undergrad and have a lot of feelings on this.
german is a beautiful language, both in sound and in writing. rilke's "liebes-lied" is one of the most beautiful poems i've ever read. there is so much beautiful german music. a lot of the harsh, gutteral sounding german in media is exaggerated mostly do to post-WI/WII stigma against the germans. anything will sound bad out scary is shouted with great anger.
but anyway relating this back to the game i don't think udmildhe would have a german accent as manley and volfred are more german-coded than she is but if she did i would love to hear her go sssscheißßßße after losing a match.
Gumbo – From Bantu kingombo (okra), brought by enslaved Africans and became the name of the Creole stew thickened with okra.
Goober – From Kikongo nguba, the Bantu word for peanut that entered American English via enslaved Africans.
Yam – From West African languages (e.g., Wolof nyami, "to eat"), brought over during the slave trade and adopted into Southern cuisine.
Banjo – From a Bantu root (mbanza), the instrument was crafted by enslaved Africans based on West African string instruments.
Bogus – Likely from Hausa boko-boko (deceitful, fraudulent), entering American English through African American speech in the 19th century.
Juke (box/joint) – From Gullah juke (rowdy, disorderly), derived from Wolof dzug (to live wickedly), later attached to roadside bars.
Tote (to carry) – From West African languages (e.g., Kikongo tota, "to pick up"), recorded in Gullah before spreading to mainstream English.
Dig (to understand) – From Wolof degg (to understand), popularized by jazz musicians in the 1930s after entering English through AAVE.
Jazz – Possibly from West African or Creole slang for energy/sex, first documented in AAVE in Chicago around 1912.
Okay (OK) – Though its origin is debated, strong evidence traces it to West African languages (e.g., Wolof waw kay) via enslaved Gullah speakers.
Hip/Hep – From Wolof hipi (to open one's eyes, to be aware), entering jazz slang in the early 1900s before going mainstream.
Hepcat – A compound of "hep" + "cat" (jazz slang for a person), literally meaning "one who has his eyes open" in West African-influenced jazz culture.
Jazz, Blues & 1940s–60s Era
Cool (as in fashionable/calm) – Originated in jazz circles, likely from saxophonist Lester Young, and entered mainstream via West African aesthetic concepts of composure.
Cat – A jazz-era term for a skilled musician or cool person, derived from West African-influenced jive talk.
Crib – Jazz slang for a house or apartment, popularized in the 1940s before becoming mainstream in the 1990s.
Hokum – AAVE slang for nonsense or BS, used in blues and jazz before being adopted more widely.
Diss – Short for "disrespect," coined in AAVE and popularized through hip-hop in the 1980s and 1990s.
Bad (meaning good) – From AAVE, where inversion of meaning creates emphasis (something so "bad" it's actually good), used since early jazz era.
Jive – AAVE slang for deceptive talk or a style of jazz dancing, used by Cab Calloway in his 1930s Hepster Dictionary.
1970s–90s (Hip-Hop & Pre-Internet Era)
Homeboy/Homegirl – AAVE for a close friend from one's neighborhood, popularized in hip-hop and later shortened to "homes" in casual speech.
Dope (meaning great) – Shifted from "stupid" in standard English to "excellent" in AAVE during the 1980s hip-hop era.
Props – Short for "proper respects" in AAVE, used in hip-hop to acknowledge skill or achievement before entering mainstream slang.
Word (as in "I agree") – AAVE interjection ("Word!" or "Word is bond") meaning "I'm telling the truth," derived from Nation of Islam teachings.
Phat (meaning cool/great) – AAVE acronym believed to stand for "Pretty Hot And Tempting," though likely an invented backronym; popularized in 90s hip-hop.
The Bomb – AAVE phrase for something excellent or top-quality, widely used in hip-hop lyrics before mainstream adoption.
Def – AAVE slang for "excellent," popularized by Run-DMC's "King of Rock" and 80s hip-hop culture.
Fresh – AAVE for stylish or excellent, used in early hip-hop and 80s pop culture before spreading globally.
Wack – AAVE for "bad, inferior, uncool," popularized in hip-hop and later mainstream youth speech as the opposite of "cool."
Hella – AAVE intensifier meaning "very" or "a lot of," originating in Oakland/Bay Area AAVE in the 1970s-80s.
Cap / No Cap – AAVE meaning "lie" and "no lie," popularized by Bay Area rap in the 2010s, derived from "capping" (exaggerating).
How would one identify one's sexuality in Korean? Are there common (respectful) words for "gay" and "lesbian"? And do English idioms about queerness like "coming out of the closet" translate?
Good question! Here’s a short list:
게이 = gay
레즈비언 = lesbian
동성애자 = homosexual (as in a person who is homosexual -- 동성애의 can mean homosexual as in the adjective.)
양성애자 = bisexual (as in a person again. 양성애의 can be the adjective version)
이성애자 = heterosexual (이성애의 is the adjective) (I think it’s also possible to drop the 의 in all cases and that would still be correct as well.)
Here are some examples:
게이 운동가 = gay activist
레즈비언 커플 = lesbian couple
저는 게이 / 레즈비언이예요. = I am gay / lesbian.
양성애의 / 동성애의 사람 = bisexual / homosexual person
If you want to say something like “coming out,” you can use any one of these!
커밍아웃을 하다 = (loan word) to come out [about smth such as your sexuality]
밝히다 = to reveal (ex. 동성애자임을 밝히다 = to come out as gay / to reveal that you’re gay)
털어놓다 = to reveal / to confess
This was just a short list and I’m sure there are other words for “coming out” and such. I’m not quite sure how you would say something like “closeted” or “open,” but please share if you know! Hope this helped!
*Also to my knowledge none of these words are inherently offensive. Naver Dictionary uses them as just normal terms in its sentences, so I’m pretty sure they’re not derogatory. But ofc if I’m wrong please let me know!
The whole "the brain isn't fully mature until age 25" bit is actually a fairly impressive bit of psuedoscience for how incredibly stupid the way it misinterprets the data it's based on is.
Okay, so: there's a part of the human brain called the "prefrontal cortex" which is, among other things, responsible for executive function and impulse control. Like most parts of the brain, it undergoes active "rewiring" over time (i.e., pruning unused neural connections and establishing new ones), and in the case of the prefrontal cortex in particular, this rewiring sharply accelerates during puberty.
Because the pace of rewiring in the prefrontal cortex is linked to specific developmental milestones, it was hypothesised that it would slow down and eventually stop in adulthood. However, the process can't directly be observed; the only way to tell how much neural rewiring is taking place in a particular part of the brain is to compare multiple brain scans of the same individual performed over a period of time.
Thus, something called a "longitudinal study" was commissioned: the same individuals would undergo regular brain scans over a period of many years, beginning in early childhood, so that their prefrontal development could accurately be tracked.
The longitudinal study was originally planned to follow its subjects up to age 21. However, when the predicted cessation of prefrontal rewiring was not observed by age 21, additional funding was obtained, and the study period was extended to age 25. The predicted cessation of prefrontal development wasn't observed by age 25, either, at which point the study was terminated.
When the mainstream press got hold of these results, the conclusion that prefrontal rewiring continues at least until age 25 was reported as prefrontal development finishing at age 25. Critically, this is the exact opposite of what the study actually concluded. The study was unable to identify a stopping point for prefrontal development because no such stopping point was observed for any subject during the study period. The only significance of the age 25 is that no subjects were tracked beyond this age because the study ran out of funding!
It gets me when people try to argue against the neuroscience-proves-everybody-under-25-is-a-child talking point by claiming that it's merely an average, or that prefrontal development doesn't tell the whole story. Like, no, it's not an average – it's just bullshit. There's no evidence that the cited phenomenon exists at all. If there is an age where prefrontal rewiring levels off and stops (and it's not clear that there is), we don't know what age that is; we merely know that it must be older than 25.
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.
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.
Have you ever met someone on the internet that you liked so much that you sometimes sit there and think “Oh man there are people who are lucky enough to see this person IN THE FLESH ON A REGULAR BASIS and I wonder if they realize how LUCKY they are”
i think some of you guys are insane 👍 it's actually possible for a 16 year old to be online friends with someone in their 20s. source: teenagers are actually people who can talk to other people about shared interests.
like, the moral panic about age gaps in dating is one thing but this reddit thread was literally about Being Online Friends. you can be online friends with a teenager. they are actually people you can talk to. i promise.
it's very easy to not be a creepy adult when talking to a minor. step one: don't act creepy. that's it. that's all you need to do.
When I was sixteen, I and my boyfriend (eighteen) and his little brother (fourteen) all belonged to the same gaming group, which had been started by his father's friend Steve. We played twice a week with a bunch of people twice and even three times our age, and we learned that adults weren't aliens, they were people with their own feelings and fears and they weren't always right about everything.
Those years at Steve's table were incredibly important to my development as a person. And we had something in common: the game.
Here's the truth: when you grow up, as you go through the various developmental stages, there are things which are vital to happen for proper psychological and cognitive development. For example, when you're very young it is absolutely vital that you are exposed to language. A lot of language. Of varying levels of complexity and formality. That's vital for the healthy development of the language centers of the brain and for early socializing. It must happen. If it does not, you see severe dysfunction as they get older.
This is basic psychological and cognitive development theory. It's taught in pretty basic level Psych courses. This is known science.
Socializing with adults, of various ages, both related to you and not related to you, in various social situations from social equals to authority figure, is one of those vital landmarks. And it comes up over and over and over during development. As a young child you must interact with adults, who care for you, so you can understand care and safety. And it gets more deep and more complicated as you develop.
Preteens and teens must interact with people older than them, significantly older, in various ways, up to and including casual friendly socializing as equals, or they will not develop properly. This is absolutely vital. Your ability to function in the real world socially depends on it.
We are fucking destroying our young people with this bullshit.
Source: Majored in Psychology with a focus on childhood development in university. This is what I went to school for.
I'd like to point out that those stages of development and crucial periods of interaction don't stop at some magical arbitrary definition of adulthood. Young adults, middle aged adults and senor adults, need to have interaction with children and teens and people who are younger than they are or they lose their grip on reality and ability to communicate with people who don't share their privileges and abilities. Source: can you fucking hear yourself?
The deliberate dismantling of intergenerational society by capitalism is one of the most damaging things to happen in the 20th century.
Humans evolved with alloparenting. You are supposed to have meaningful relationships (friendship, mentorship, tutelage) with extraparental adults and older kids.
All of this. And the fact that if a child is being abused it is statistically most likely to be a family member or close family friend. By telling children that they shouldn't interact with any adults outside the family or authority figures, you are giving them no one to turn to if their home isn't safe for them.
These kinds of attitudes don't protect children, they just help their abusers.
If you're arguing that children shouldn't be allowed to vote because they're "stupid, that's fine. But be consistent and also say that Republicans shouldn't be allowed to vote, or Flat Earthers, or people who have never been to college. Actually, just to be on the safe side, say with your chest that you think a PHD should be requirement for registering to vote.
I don't know if this was obvious to everyone else, but I just realised that one of the reasons why the Hobbit is so effective as a children's book is that while Bilbo is an adult, the skills that make him a hero are all those of a child.
By human standards he's child-sized, which makes him unobtrusive and light on his feet. He can slip by unnoticed where bigger people can't.
He's good at playing games, and even cheats (successfully!) in a way that - let's face it - is not so different to how children try to cheat at games. He's polite in a way that's fully comprehensible to children (rather than, say, being able to perform courtly manners). He's quick-witted, but the trick of keeping the trolls talking is also one that would be achievable for a child.
He doesn't have magic powers, he's not a great fighter, and he's not some kind of Chosen One. There's not much that he does that couldn't be done by a ten-year-old, but the story shows just how valuable all those skills and traits are. It's very empowering.
Here’s some positivity for systems with body focused repetitive behaviors!
Body focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs) such as skin picking, hair pulling, and nail biting can make life difficult for many systems. It can be a struggle learning to live and cope with behaviors that are challenging to control which ultimately cause harm to the system’s body! We hope that every system with BFRBs can find hope, peace, and recovery in their futures. And this post is for you!
🌟 Shoutout to traumagenic systems whose BFRBs are rooted in the trauma which causes their system to develop!
🌿 Shoutout to systems who are getting help with their BFRBs, whether it be from a therapist, support network, or something else!
💠 Shoutout to systems who have formed alters or headmates whose role is to help manage their BFRBs!
☘️ Shoutout to systems who use stim toys to redirect their BFRBs in positive or healthy ways!
✨ Shoutout to systems who try to educate others and spread awareness about BFRBs!
🌱 Shoutout to systems whose BFRBs are caused by neurodiversity, be it OCD, ADHD, autism, anxiety, or another neurodivergence!
🦋 Shoutout to systems who have split a new member as a result of pain or trauma caused from their own BFRBs!
💚 Shoutout to systems who have been told that they are weird, gross, or off-putting by others due to the BFRBs which are outside of their control!
🌙 Shoutout to headmates who are symptom holders for their system’s BFRBs!
If you or a member of your system struggles with BFRBs, we want to let you know that we feel for you. We hope that learning to manage these behaviors gets easier for your system with time, and you are able to find peace and happiness in your futures. Know that you’re not wrong or bad for struggling with BFRBs! You’re still special and lovely just the way you are.
Please do your best to treat yourself and your system with gentleness and compassion today. Rest assured, you are loved and you are a cherished member of both your system and the plural community as a whole! Our spaces simply would not be the same without you here. We hope that you can take it easy and have a lovely day today!
Váli median system @egerdumblr - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
