our lady of sorrows

*Rp blog!* Mun is 25+, so 18+ only, please! I generally prefer 20+, though! I have a side blog for my male muses now! I'll post the link at a later point. For now, feel free to ask for it :) “He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.” -Douglas Adams

[in--somnium]

Hello! Welcome to my rp blog!

(Last updated: 3/20/2024)

THIS BLOG IS ON A SEMI-HIATUS. I intend to come back eventually, but right now I’ve had basically no free time and I would like to focus on the two blogs that I have more muse for in the few moments that I can actually write.

LINKS:

Rogue’s Blog  Cassia’s Blog (These two are my most active blogs <3)

Muses (*under construction; ages and sexualities to be added as I go!* This is a google doc, so mobile friendly! Please note that there are extra muses listed in this doc- not all of them have made it to the muse pages on tumblr yet! Feel free to ask questions about any of the muses, especially the ocs!)

Rules

Open Starters (Open to anyone, even non-mutuals (unless otherwise stated)!)

Here are a few things to know (Feel free to read just the bolded stuff if you’re in a hurry, the unbolded just elaborates):

Mun is 25+ and will only rp with those who are 18+! If you aren’t 18+ please don’t interact. I’m just not comfortable with it.

My X-Men muses are my main muses and they’re the ones I always have muse for! Just wanted to add that as a heads up- sometimes if you see me writing, it’ll mostly (if not exclusively) be my X-Men muses (especially Rogue, Bobby, and Kitty). Don’t take it personally, I’ve just been reading a lot of X-Men comics and it’s been my hyperfixation (again) for the last few months.

I don’t write much smut, so I apologize if things head that way and I end up dropping the thread without warning (I don’t usually drop threads intentionally, it’s probably just stuck in my drafts until I’m in the headspace to write it, but that day might never come, so I apologize). I try, but I’m really not confident in my abilities to write smutty stuff. And sometimes it just makes me feel entirely uncomfortable, especially writing from a male perspective. Please don’t take it personally or anything! I’m just not good at it.

I have a separate side blog for nsfw content! I'll reblog anything smutty over there, though in general I prefer to write it on discord.

All of my muses are multiship unless otherwise stated.

I’m super slow with replies most of the time. Totally feel free to give me a nudge if it’s been a while since I’ve replied. I lose track of stuff so easily and then feel like I’m not allowed to reply to it when I remember it because it’s been a while. Anxiety is a bitch and I probably assume you hate me for taking too long to reply.

I’m technically semi-selective, but mostly not selective at all. Aside from the rule of only writing with muns who are 18+, I’m actually not particularly selective. I just have a few face claims and such that I avoid. Check my rules page for more info!

I’ll ship just about anything with just about anyone, but I still reserve the right to not ship with a character, especially on first interaction. I’m also fairly selective about ships when it comes to my general ocs.

I write f/f and m/f ships, but am highly selective about m/m ships. I’m just a little wary about it and only ship m/m ships with people I feel super comfortable with. Write what you want, of course, but I’ve been in rp for about 15 years or more, tumblr rp for 10-11, and I know, as a wlw writer, I’m not always comfortable writing m/m ships. I love m/m ships in general, I just don’t always like writing them much. Also, if you try to push a m/m ship on me it’s only going to make me wary of writing with you in general, just as a fair warning. I’m selective about them for a reason and I don’t want to be made to feel bad if I have trouble / feel uncomfortable writing it. (If you have questions, feel free to ask and we can talk about it!)

*Just a little addendum- although most of what I write ends up being m/f ships, please understand that I’m selective about pregnancy plots (and writing with child muses). I’ve had them kind of pushed on me in the past and they’re really not my cup of tea, so to speak. Not that I don’t want my muses to have families, of course! But just... it’s not something I usually care much for writing. So please be respectful of that.

Please specify what muse you’d like to write with when sending asks! Or at the very least, give me a couple options or a mention of who you /don’t/ want to interact with. If you don’t mention a specific muse, I’ll still reply but you’ll get a random muse, usually a female. So please give me some kind of idea of who you’d like if you have something specific in mind!

Reasons I might not follow you / unfollow you (none of these are meant to say you can’t do these things, they’re just things that I don’t want on my dash): You reblog nsfw images without tagging it. Your blog is primarily smut based (you do you <3 but I just don’t care to write much smut on here and I don’t want to see it all the time). You use deceased face claims (outside of the characters they’ve played in media ie: using Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia is fine; using her for an oc makes me a little wary) and you don’t tag (example: after Jonghyun from SHINee passed away, I still followed someone who used him as a fc and every time I saw a gif or icon of him being used, I had a weird sense of suspended reality where I’d go google if he was alive because I sincerely thought maybe I’d made it up or something- I can’t do that again, it’s scary)- again, use the fcs you want! That’s fine! It’s just a weird experience for me sometimes. I’ll usually just block a tag instead of unfollowing, though! You’re causing drama/bullying or are actively participating in it (I just want a nice, drama free, space). Also, character / fc hoarding. I know that sounds dumb, and it doesn’t happen often- sometimes people’s characters just have the same fc and I’m not gonna shame you for writing with, like, a few of the same fc! But I’ve been rp-ing for almost 2 decades and it never fails that there are some people who just hoard characters or fcs, writing with any and all of that one chara/fc they can. It’s fine and, for the thousandth time, you do you and don’t let me or anyone else make you feel bad about it <3 But I want to know that my rp partners care about my muse, not just the face of the muse... you know? I might also just unfollow you because I don’t feel comfortable following you anymore for some unspecified reason. I want it to be known that, if I unfollow you / soft block you, it’s nothing against you, personally! (And I won’t be upset if you refollow because you didn’t realize you were soft blocked.) It’s for my own sake. I also am not obligated to give you a reason for unfollowing. I extend the same courtesy to you- feel free to unfollow, soft block, or block if you don’t want to see me on your dash! No hard feelings and no need to explain. I just want you all to be comfortable and have fun! I expect the same decency from you, please <3

REBLOG KARMA: I try to be respectful and reblog things from the source or from a meme blog or whatever bc I understand why people don’t want to be feel like they’re being used as a meme source. If I ever reblog something from you that isn’t a reply, I’m sorry. I try not to let it happen, but sometimes it does.

That said: REBLOG WHATEVER YOU WANT FROM ME. Seriously, it doesn’t bother me at all. You don’t even have to send me a meme to reblog it. Just... go ahead. Reblog it. It’s totally fine by me <3

This isn’t a rule so much as just something to be aware of: my male muses can be extra finnicky. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to write them, and it doesn’t mean I don’t want to write with you, but sometimes I feel like my boys get all the attention and then it makes it hard to write them. I know, I know, that sounds dumb, but it’s true. You don’t have to write with my girls if you don’t want, that’s fine. But I extra appreciate if you do write with them because I almost always have muse for my girls. It also makes me feel like I’m appreciated for more than just my male fcs. Again- totally not a rule! Just something I wanted to make note of so if you see me answering other stuff / replying to other stuff you know it’s probably just an off day for my boys :)

OOC conversation can be really hard for me. I try and usually I’m fine when it comes to plotting, but I drop the ball a lot or come off as cold a lot because I just don’t have the energy to talk ooc a lot of the time. Please don’t take it personally, it’s just that my social battery is usually at 40% or less in general oTL

If we’re shipping something together and you’ve decided you don’t ship it anymore / don’t want to write it anymore- please just tell me. Like, we’re both adults here, I can take it. There are few things that suck more in rp than when you can TELL that someone doesn’t really care about a ship anymore (especially considering I get really invested in my ships) but you don’t want to just ASSUME that the other person isn’t interested anymore, so you just keep, like, clinging to the hope that they’ll eventually like the ship again? It’s happened to me plenty of times, especially with my female muses (because, I get it, more people want to ship with the boys than the girls and, generally speaking, they’re likely to get more invested in the ships with my boys, too) and it really, really, fucking sucks. BUT I want us to both be having fun! So just... straight up tell me if you want to drop a ship. It’s fine. Please don’t be that partner that keeps someone hoping that you’re gonna write with their muse again only to continuously sideline them :\ And if you ever feel like I’m doing that? Tell me! Tell me you want to write more of that ship! I promise I’ll be up for it! <3

That’s really about all! Please give my rules a quick read, though! And like this post if you’ve read (or at least skimmed through) my rules and would like to interact! Totally not a requirement, of course, just a courtesy :)

Thanks for your time!

[rocketbirdie]

and then i wake up.

[ekingston]

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 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.

Thank you all so much.

[ekingston]

Hey folks, I doubt many people will see this message or the comment I left about it down below, but if you’re reblogging this post with death threats or calls for physical violence against this man, I am blocking you. I want this post to reach as many people as possible, and if you carry on like that you’re not just incriminating yourself, you’re giving tumblr reasons to nuke this entire recap. Thank you.

[ekingston]

For the people coming in after Weitzman made the fanwork hidden to people who hadn’t signed up for an account beforehand, there does appear to be a way to see if your fic was lifted: searching for the fic title (+ your username maybe, if your title is a song lyric or something else used frequently) + wordstream will still bring up your fic if it was included in the theft:

Again, sharing this info is appreciated, because (understandably) I’m getting a lot of questions about this, and I will not be answering all of them individually. Share (and check back for) all additional info in the comments either here on on the latest Reddit thread if you can, because even useful additions in reblogs are difficult to keep up with. Thank you!

[shortandsweets]

sydney_sweeney: a glowy evening in venice wearing my armani beauty faves 

[geek-ramblings]

[amazingyoungwomen]

[giflizgillies]

[ohwhorea]

DISCORD HACK/SCAM

I've had a couple of friends have issues with this, and I nearly fell victim to this myself. If an account you're friends with messages you asking if someone messaged you something weird in a server, do NOT heed this. Block/report the account. They have been hacked. As a PSA. PLEASE, DO NOT MESSAGE ANYONE WITH THE HANDLE MIKESUPPORT_(random number) they will get your email and use that to hack into your discord account. It's also highly recommended you change your email. Please reblog this to spread awareness.

[scr33ncaps]

The Love Witch - Anna Biller (2016)

[in--somnium]

((Because I just got an anon sending me a link to an app in the Google Play store (that probably is actually just a link to a virus), here's your reminder to be super careful of links and to never click on ones sent anonymously, especially. Or if they look even remotely suspicious or whatever.

Also, as a heads up, despite reporting it and it no longer showing up in my inbox, it's still showing up in my notifications as if reporting it doesn't equate to deleting it. So... Just be careful about that, too, everyone.))

[rererereree-deactivated20241031]

[oceansprompts]

i'm okay with:

starting over - are you a little overwhelmed with where our thread is going? let me know, and i'd be happy to start a new one with you!

pausing - if you're feeling one thread more than another we have going on, that's perfectly fine! you're welcome to let me know if you'd like, but it's not a necessity.

multiples - if we have a ship that you love and you have many ideas for them, always feel welcome to throw them at me no matter what! while it may affect my reply speed due to having more, it doesn't affect my interest at all!

regrouping - maybe we initially had an idea that didn't pan out but you don't know how to say it? just shoot me a message and let me know you'd like to plot further/something else.

anything else - have we not talked and you want to? shoot me a message! send in a meme if you don't know where to start! ask for my discord! i may not initiate too often myself, but i love being able to love our threads together!

[ironmaidenhead]

CORDELIA Dir. Adrian Shergold (2019)

[weirdobarbie]

SKINS 3.05 "freddie"

[shadowandbonecentral]

#thinking about jessie mei li in the darkling’s kefta

[officialgleamstar]

character playlists always should have the following:

song that is pretty accurate to the character’s story

song that doesn’t fit the character at all but i was thinking about them while listening to it on loop

song that has one or two lines accurate to the character’s story

song that just kind of is the character’s vibe

song that i desperately wish they would listen to because i personally like it

song that fits the character so well that it’s scary

unsure why this song is in the playlist but it’s so ingrained in my mind as 'part of the playlist' that it would feel weird to remove it

[fuck-customers]

[strikedenko]

[ID: "Cold weather reminder. Do NOT plug space heaters into power strips or extension cords. Plug space heaters directly into the wall outlet. Power strips are not designed to handle the high current flow required by a space heater and can overheat causing a fire."

A photo is attached of a power strip with an extremely charred end. Part of the power strip's wire is also charred. End ID]

[thequeeninyellowlace]

My husband, an electrician, told me I have to reblog this.