Aight, since AO3 is down, and I’m HELLA bored, let’s start a reblog chain that may hopefully get some creative chops wagging.
What’s the most useless oblivious gay shit you’ve ever done? I’ll go first:
I was a dumb 20 year old who after going to the gym would stop at the same restaurant to eat dinner. There was a hot waitress who was always there, a tall, long-haired brunette, around 5’10, awesome tattoo on her calf through shear stockings, lovely face and absolutely GORGEOUS tits. She was bubbly, kept trying to get me to pay for a drink other than water (this is important).
After becoming a regular, I decided to get a chocolate milkshake with my meal. She was stoked, I sat at my regular table, and she brought me my milkshake with a skewed heart design on it.
She said “I tried to make it a heart, but it didn’t quite work,” and I, dumb little me, went “AWW, you’re so sweet, thank you!” and DIDN’T. ASK. FOR HER NUMBER!
I realised what she may have been implying after leaving the restaurant and was at my bus stop. I didn’t think I should turn around and go back because I was unsure (I never was hit on by someone who wasn’t a creep before so please have some mercy on me). I consulted my friends that night, asking if I should go for it and ask her the next time I saw her. They gave the all clear and so I went back as usual after work, but she wasn’t there. No drama, another time then.
But each time I came back, which was four days a week after four-on-four-off shifts, always at the same time or close to, I never saw her again.
And THAT, is the story of the one that got away, because I was a useless gay. (I’m technically pan, but that didn’t rhyme 😂)
So, can anyone else top that? Feel free to use my dumbarse story as inspo if you want
I think we, as a general community, need to start taking this little moment more seriously.
This, right here? This is asking for consent. It’s a legal necessity, yes, but it is also you, the reader, actively consenting to see adult content; and in doing so, saying that you are of an age to see it, and that you’re emotionally capable of handling it.
You find the content you find behind this warning disgusting, horrifying, upsetting, triggering? You consented. You said you could handle it, and you were able to back out at any time. You take responsibility for yourself when you click through this, and so long as the creator used warnings and tags correctly, you bear full responsibility for its impact on you.
“Children are going to lie about their age” is probably true, but that’s the problem of them and the people who are responsible for them, not the people that they lie to.
If you’re not prepared to see adult content, created by and for adults, don’t fucking click through this. And if you do, for all that’s holy, don’t blame anyone else for it.
Except this is the last line of consent before the actual work. So if you’re at this button you have already done the following:
1) chosen to go onto AO3 in the first place
2) chosen the fandom you wish to read about
3) had the chance to filter for the things you do want to see like a specific pairing or a specific AU
4) had the chance to specifically filter out any tags you don’t want to see like, oh I don’t know, incest and non-con and dub-con and paedophilia
5) had the chance to set the rating level if you wish to remove any explicit content at all
6) have read the summary of the story, which aren’t always great but are the only indicator of what the story will be like writing wise so something about it was good enough for you to click on it.
7) have read the tags of the story which will tell you what is actually in the story. If you have used filters to remove stories with things you don’t want then there shouldn’t be anything in here that’s a shock to you but maybe there is. That’s why the tags are there for you to check for yourself.
8) Then you have to actually click on the story. You cannot see anything other than the summary or the tags without personally deciding that you are going to open and read this story.
9) Only here, at step number nine, do you get to the adult content warning pictured above. You have been through eight different steps, the last six of which have also been opportunities for you to see that this has adult content. And AO3 has *STILL* stopped you to ask one last time “are you sure you want to read this because it has things that only adults should see in it”.
If after this point you are reading incest and paedophilia then it’s probably because you specifically went looking for it.
You can also TEXT "START" to 678-678 or go to their website! There are 700+ of you following me. You don't need to be from the US to reblog this. Reblog.
It’s been nearly another year since my last plea was answered, and it looks like I must ask again for the sake of the many that hope and dream the same as I.
@tripleburger - May we please get a new chapter of Ink and Honor? Us peasants are starving for more of your divine work, and I saw fit to remind you of this magnificent story as your profile AO3 says “No fics are abandoned; I just get distracted.”
If a sacrifice is to be made to make it so, then please give us your demands and let us commit your will!
Just throwing it out there for my US friends whom I am concerned about; I’m pretty sure your Second Amendment is there for a reason. I can’t specify what reasons, but there must BE one for your Founding Fathers to incorporate it almost straight away in the Constitution.
I have seen a resurgence of Avatar Korra hate and intense discourse in the ATLA/TLOK community, so here’s my two cents on the current conflict.
My biggest hot take is that people don’t realise that Korra’s spiritual growth, which is the point of TLOK as being the opposite narratively to ATLA, could not have happened WITHOUT her taking major L’s, and that she wasn’t really supposed to be liked at first.
Now, I kinda liked her to begin with - I found some relatability with her, but some parts still jarred harshly. I liked her strength and her desire to do good, but her inability to be a bit more patient and selfishness wasn’t appealing. If she remained that way throughout the entire series, the “spiritual growth” aspect of the show would be nonexistent and Korra would be extremely one dimensional.
An important factor is her isolated nature from a very young age, being told by masters of all kinds that she’s important and special, and aside from Naga, I don’t think Korra had any childhood friends to challenge her or help her grow empathetically. That would really mess up with a person’s perspective and self esteem. She’s been told that she will save the world one day, but no one told her how to, or that The Avatar wasn’t wanted by a portion of the populace, and that there was a bias against benders being developed in Republic City. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t even taught about politics at all, just trained to bend the elements to mastery and to meditate for spirituality.
Now, how to you change the spirituality of a stubborn, hot-headed beefcake with minimal social skills who is told their whole life that they are needed to save the world and not taught how to, into a calmer, more mature person?
She has to get her shit ROCKED.
Think about it: if she didn’t lose, she would still have the attitude from Book 1, with potentially more smugness and arrogance about her prowess. She more than likely would be too blind of the results to see the damage that could’ve been caused in her wake, and she may grow to not care about it. This would’ve been awful to watch, and it makes sense for a woman of action to learn her lessons through action. You saw that with her learning airbending movements best by using probending as an outlet. Learning a different way from traditional means doesn’t mean it’s of lesser value - it’s just how she learns.
So how do you rock her shit? You start by giving an outlawed OP ability to a couple of villains and remove the one drawback it has. You then get Korra betrayed by her uncle who manipulated her trust in her father and her teacher through bringing truths to light, and tricking her into releasing an all powerful anti spirit to become a Dark Avatar. You then have four terrorists break out of their prisons through spiritual luck of the draw, all cunning, all patient, and all of them strong. They have bested Zuko, Desna and Eska, Kya, Bumi (he was new to his power but still a military General), Tonraq and Tenzin (he nearly got Zaheer in HIS 1v1 but still lost in intervention). Then, after they poisoned Korra, she lost her ability to walk, regained it after two and a half years of therapy, and spent another half a year with immense PTSD and isolated from her loved ones. And when she finally meets them again, she’s thrown IMMEDIATELY back into a fight with a military dictator trained by the Beifong family, STILL with PTSD.
So yes, Korra loses a lot, because by design, she’s supposed to. Otherwise, the main narrative point of the show would not be able to grow organically. Could there be better ways to show that? Maybe. I would’ve loved to have seen Korra maybe learning through helping refugees or victims of the triads, but with the enemies she had, this was the only way she could’ve grown spiritually.
And with the romance side of things in emotional growth, I get she’s a lonely as fuck 17 year old, but that was done messily. Tbf, Nickelodeon stopped Bryke from their original wishes to have Korrasami throughout the show like they wanted since before Book 2, hence why they had to wait til the legit last minute to add it. That would’ve been AMAZING to have a solid relationship that only had a couple of minor hiccups here and there as opposed to the clusterfuck we got. That could’ve affected everything in a better way without wasting time on the messiness over Mako. But, I blame Nickelodeon for that more than Bryke.
Aang was likeable and worldly and was spiritual due to how he was raised as a monk. He had a singular end goal in defeating the Fire Lord to stop the war, so having him learn the elements to defeat him made sense. Korra’s enemies had ideals behind them who, in Toph’s words “took their ideologies too far”. It required an understanding that Korra had to understand, and learn to combat those ideals. This is why she had to learn to be patient, and empathetic, to learn to use words first, and she eventually was able to talk her final villain into surrendering.
TLDR: Korra had to lose in order to grow spiritually, because if she kept winning, she would’ve remained cocky and hotheaded. The show could’ve been written better, but I don’t see how much better it could’ve been with the villains TLOK wanted to portray. The romance arc we got shouldn’t have happened (fuck you, Nickelodeon), as the original Korrasami idea would’ve worked much better and could’ve fleshed out both Korra and Asami better as individuals
It's funny and weird at the same time how some people call Caitlyn's Evil Cop, or Bad Character, or whatever. SHE IS NOT!!
Like let's be serious guys, we never saw her kill an innocent person, even when my friend saw the show he is not a fan of Arcane but he saw a lot of comments about it and I also urged him to watch it after all the excitement around it when I asked him about his opinion on the show and especially the character of Caitlyn he told me, he expected after all the posts and comments about her that she would go to Zaun and kill people with her gun he didn't expect that she just wears a costume that looks like a vampire and looks tough and mean, she would get this much hate. He even asked me why people don't talk or blame Ambessa isn't she the main reason behind most of the problems in this season and also Singed or even Silco and his allies?
I couldn't answer him except that people have double standards and are hypocrites because their criticism of Caitlyn's character is not because she did one bad thing but because she is from Piltover and an enforcer. I'm sure if Caitlyn was from Zaun and did worse things they would sympathize with her and love her, so their criticism is so hypocritical and has double standards. In short, their criticism of a character is not because she did bad things, but because of who she is and where she is from.
They forget that silco and his allies kills a lot of people and children, mainly people from the undercity, even kids and he was pay enforcers to kill anyone who opposed him. And in LOL have put a mini game on the clien and there you could find out that Silco use kids as lab rat to test the chem tanks.
If you're really mad at Caitlyn for her bad actions, so why do you sympathize with these criminals??
Btw, I'm glad Caitlyn took them down. They deserved it, for what they did to the Zaun people during Silco's 7 years of rule. He kills an entire family just to control Zaun and flooding an entire city with shimmer.
And I'm sure now someone will come and tell me that Caitlyn used the gas on all of Zaun and killed people with it. Seriously idiot where did you get this? Can you show me a picture from the show that people died because of grey, and if it's true then the characters must are talking about it, that Caitlyn uses grey to kill innocent people. So this claim is not true, we saw at the beginning of episode 3 how Caitlyn used the gas strategically and not randomly and Amanda confirmed that. So she used it to catch gangs there. Bc seriously, 5 people wouldn't go to catch hundreds of gang members that easily, and also if one of the people got hurt Ekko would have talked about it and we know that Ekko is the most loyal person to his people, so even Ekko himself didn't complain about using grey, he and Scar were talking about the gangs that were working with Silco, and they didn't care about gas, why? Because this gas didn't hurt them.
This is clear evidence. What more do you want? The writers confirmed and even in the art book, it is written that Caitlyn used it to take down the Chem-Barons goons and not to eliminate the Zaun people as some stupid claim.
Even if it hurt them and that using it was an evil act, why didn't you say this when Jinx used it on Piltover and injured innocent people, women and children, she didn't target enforcers for example, Jinx use the Grey randomly unlike Caitlyn, but is anyone talking about this? Of course not. And worse when I saw comments saying that Jinx should blow up Piltover again and eliminate the people of Piltover. Like some people have shown their true colors, that they don't care if a character did something bad or good, all they care about is who this character is.
And because Jinx is from Zaun and they have every right to do bad things, but Piltover doesn't even if they do good things they are still bad, what a shallow and ridiculous thinking. some Arcane fandom are probably the most stupid fandom nowadays, to them everyone from Zaun is a perfect angel who never do nothing wrong, everyone from Piltover is a monster with no feelings
The show is not black and white there is not one side is good and another side is bad, that only exists in Disney movies, go and watch it if you are this kind of boring and traditional storytelling.
Arcane proves every day that this show is not for everyone and if you want to enjoy it you have to open your mind well and be open-minded, and most importantly put politics and real life issues aside, and enjoy this fantasy world with flawed characters and good writing. (This show is not designed to solve political issues at the end of the day. It is a show based on a video game)
So there is no need to take this show seriously and insult people and spread false allegations about people who love a fictional character just to feel that you are morally superior, do not see that you look like asshole 🙂
I’d also like to add that whilst the initial “Cait’s a Fascist” joke was funny, like the “Homophobic Jinx” meme, people are apparently now believing it seriously. These people believe that Martial Law and Fascism are one and the same, and it’s not.
Martial Law can be declared by ANY government body. Martial Law can BECOME Fascism, but only if emergency powers aren’t released and is used to overthrow the government that put them there, or if there’s no governing body and they establish a Fascist regime.
Martial Law is only declared during civil or external war, civil unrest and collapse of civil government. Martial Law can be put in place when dealing with extreme natural disaster cases to provide humanitarian aid for instance.
Ambessa suggested Martial Law for her own ambitions, leading to her having Hextech and possibly a new nation. In Caitlyn and Piltover’s case, Martial Law was implemented to deal with a terrorist threat, which was Jinx and her supposed forces (Renni and her crew that attacked the memorial with Jinx style flares by Ambessa’s manipulations).
Fascism however is an ideology of extreme control. Militarism is very much a part of Fascism, but it’s used as only one method of that control. Propaganda, brainwashing and selective/tailored education are other methods used. Fascism is an ideal of CONFORMITY, to make sure everyone has a rigid and unswayable role in society. They have a place, and they will stay there and act that role. They must be heterosexual to provide future servants of the regime, they must be the same race as those in charge, and they must not have different beliefs from what the government believes in.
So it’s kind of hard for Caitlyn to be Fascist when she’s literally gay, mixed race, and a shown contrarian for starters.
You can look at how Piltover treats the Jinxers as Fascist, but the intent isn’t actually Fascist. Fascism disallows self expression, individuality and identity, and the Jinxer dressed like Jinx to show their support of her actions, and to show Piltover that they will never get Jinx. However, in the show, Piltover believes that Jinx has her supporters after Renni and her crew attacked the memorial. So the conclusion that Caitlyn and Piltover have drawn is that Jinx has chembarons working either with her, or working for her if she took over Silco’s position. And in Arcane, these chembarons have their crews, and their crews need a way to show who their affiliated with.
They dress similarly and unmistakably like their chembaron leaders. And that is a known fact to Caitlyn when she raided the chembaron HQs and factories.
So the logical conclusion that is made is “The Jinxers appeared after Renni the chembaron and her crew attacked the memorial. So Jinx needed her help to attack the memorial because she needed more people. Since then, Jinx has been gathering her forces, and they have become The Jinxers. The Jinxers need to be questioned, and if they attack, arrest them.”
So by detaining The Jinxers as accomplices of Jinx, the Zaunites are seeing Piltover as squashing their self expression in showing their support of Jinx. They see a fascist regime. However, the truth is Piltover genuinely believes that The Jinxers are working for Jinx, who very much has the power to lead the Chembarons and start a true revolutionary revolt against Piltover.
So long story short, Piltover acted within their reason for executing Martial Law: routing Jinx and her followers. They weren’t acting to suppress self-expression of civilians and take their freedom in an attempt to establish a Fascist regime.
People hate Fascism and for good reason. However if you don’t know the difference between Fascism and Martial Law, and you keep misleading people about what it means to be Fascist, you may be inadvertently redefining the word and that can cause further issues. It may incur panic if Martial Law is applied in your democratic country to deal with an extreme State of Emergency like a natural disaster. That could lead to misguided protests and subsequent arrests. But for now, it’s affecting your ability to understand the media you are watching, which CAUSES these debates online because people are quick to be angry, but have misunderstood what they’re watching.
Analyse first before you go about throwing out your genuine belief that a character is fascist when they’re hunting down a murderous terrorist that only has your favour because you’ve seen their tragic backstory. Also check your own biases before you post. I’ve said before, and I stand by it, that most people hate on Caitlyn because she’s rich and has the ability to enact revenge against someone who wronged her without recourse, unlike common people. People are also biased because they hate cops. Most of those people are American to be fair - their cops have caused many an issue. However, that doesn’t reflect the opinion on cops as a whole across the globe, and hating someone for their profession is, in my opinion, a weak reason to hate someone.
TL:DR - Caitlyn isn’t a Fascist, Martial Law is used by any governing body. Martial Law was used by Piltover to arrest Jinx and her accomplices, not to crush Zaunite individuality to establish a Fascist regime. Check your biases at the door before you post - it’ll help you better analyse your media, even more so if you pick up a dictionary to quickly check if what you’re understanding is aligning to what’s being shown
I have a hot take, and I just wanna air it out here.
I’m going to be honest, I wonder if deep down people actually hate Caitlyn because of her wealth allowing her to act upon her grief. And I mean what she ACTUALLY did, not what she did plus huge doses of exaggeration (looking at you “she gassed the lanes and everyone suffered because of her” crowd - she gassed the HQs of two chembarons and the arcade where Jinx was. She didn’t gas the whole of the lanes and none of the innocents there).
If Caitlyn didn’t have the wealth and status that she has, she wouldn’t have been able to hunt Jinx, the Chembarons and the Shimmer factories with a strike force. She rolled up with her team to a secret council meeting and didn’t get locked up or thrown out because she had a cause to be there as the Kiramman heiress. She also more than likely wouldn’t have been chosen by Ambessa to rule under martial law if she was a commoner. Her convictions aside, no one of the ruling families would’ve respected that decision, and Salo would’ve been manipulated and given control instead.
If Caitlyn had no status whilst being an enforcer, and Cassandra was a lower class woman who died working in that building, it would’ve more than likely been a one woman rampage through Zaun, with or without Vi, trying to hunt down her mother’s killer. She still would be pissed, she would still be grieving, she may still try to get the Chembarons and Shimmer destroyed, and her quest for revenge would be seen as more justifiable and sympathetic to the average viewer. Her not being rich makes her “relatable” and “misunderstood”, whilst her being rich makes her “monstrous” and “not relatable”.
The difference is that it’s far harder to do so as a simple enforcer as opposed to someone with power. If you’ve ever hated someone that deeply - a drunk driver that killed a relative, a bully that drove your friend to self harm, a parent that abused you severely - you at your angriest would wish for the worst to happen to them, and those with power make it so.
Caitlyn’s wealth allowed her to achieve her desire for vengeance far more easily. She had the resources, respect and voice that Ambessa exploited and the elites listened to.
She had the power many of us wished we had when we were so terribly wronged.
Do I think she fucked up? Yes. Do I believe she deserves to be crucified and hated because of it? No. She still had lines she wouldn’t cross (the cells where Vi was kept we’re not allowed to be used, causing violence at checkpoints got her pissed at Rictus and Ambessa, improving prison food because of an off handed comment from Vi and still have it to her mother’s murderer etc), she didn’t want things to turn out the way they had, and actively tried to do better: not for the sake of redemption, but for the sake of doing what’s right (giving Sevika the Kiramman council seat, allowing Vi to free her sister and letting go of her hate, betraying Ambessa etc).
I believe in “do not turn people away from a better path even after they fall”, and many here grant that concession to Jinx, who has murdered, kidnapped and destroyed, some of that for years. Yet people say “she was traumatised so young and she deserves to be protected”. She does, but when a victim of hers - who got ambushed in her shower whilst naked, kidnapped, vandalised and lost her mother in the same night- needs the same, everyone cries “ShE’s a MoNsTeR and a FACIST! I HATE HER - Vi DeSeRveS BETTER!”
Like bruh … the fuck?
Tl:dr - Caitlyn haters may just subconsciously hate her for being rich enough to enact revenge against an unstable, possessive and murderous teen who killed her mother and assaulted her, and those same haters cannot comprehend that Jinx caused Caitlyn’s own trauma and don’t even care to acknowledge it because of her wealth and Jinx bias. You see “rich” as an insult (hell, it’s the first “insult” Vi flings at Caitlyn after reuniting with her), and a negative character flaw; even though we’d all like some level of wealth in our lives to make it easier.
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.
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.
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!
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