a quick note because I'm wretched with social media interactions...
this year has been bad, not just for me, but for everyone. My mental health has seen way better days and the stress of my job, family illness and tension, and the weight of responsibilities that always seem to fall on my shoulders have simmered endlessly keeping my anxiety above normal and allowed the gremlinsin my head to run wild sometimes. My sleep has suffered and with that my creativity has stagnated.
I'm still madly in love with everything I've created, I just can't find happiness with what I'm trying to add. I catch glimpses of amazing things but find the words I put down fall short, leaving the whole idea lacking the vivid life it deserves.
There is new stuff coming though!
I've got a short fantasy piece that I finished and will be available on AO3 after the exclusive period is over. It was an idea I'd been playing around with for a while and was finally able to finish with a little courage and opportunity.
I've got a little under 4k of the next yuri on force chapter marinating but I've ran into a snag with inspiration for it. Namely, this chapter sets up the big arc and my anxiety over getting it right won't let me push past this moment of happiness the boys are sharing. (I'm also terrified my internal struggles with isolation and separation are going to bleed out into Yuuri's situating and although I know working through the issues are good, I don't really want that in my writing. Y'all deserve better than that)
I also have a new piece for the mdzs fandom crawling out of my skull that might see the light of day if I can wrangle it into some form of sensible dialog and interactions and, most importantly, not scare myself off from finishing it.
Anyways, I'm still kicking. Just not so high.
Stay safe, and if you have the capability to do so, reach out to friends or loved ones and see how they're doing.
How the fuck does Bill Nye expect this to happen? What do you want to do, force women to enroll in science courses, regardless of whether or not they want to do it? Just for the sake of having “enough” women? Why the fuck do these fractions matter so much? It’s not like people are holding guns to our head and threatening to kill us if we become interested in science.
Maybe, just maybe, a lot of us DON’T FUCKING WANT to be scientists. Is that a crime?
Hi there, princess-munchkin. Female engineering student here.
Bill Nye is not saying that you HAVE to be a scientist, and you are right that no one is holding a gun to my head because I am interested in science, but let me tell you some of the struggles of being a woman in the STEM fields.
1) Because I am a woman, I am not expected these fields. I first fully realized this when I was in high school, on my robotics team. See, although my robotics team was about 50% female, most of the women were part of the “business administration” side of things: finance, marketting, PR, membership, etc. Was this a problem? Absolutely not. But I was there to be an engineer, and specifically, to be the robot programmer. This was met with a lot of hesitation at first from some of the other students (all of whom happened to be male. This is not necessarily a bad thing.) You see, all of the robot programmers before me were guys. Computer programming is just a thing that guys do, or so they thought. Even after I had proved myself to the mentors on the team, many of the students still underestimated my abilities. There were rumors going around that I wouldn’t have been able to program the robot at all if the lead software mentor wasn’t there to help me. This was just flat-out false, but it wasn’t until I won an award for the team that the other students actually saw my merit.
2) There is not a lot of encouragement for women to go into these fields. I first noticed this when I was in elementary school. I was always interested in math, science, you name it, but many of my teachers and family members pushed that to the side for a long time. When I asked for legos for christmas, I would get ballet slippers. In fact, for a long time, I was training to be a professional dancer. I loved to dance. I loved math more, but no one seemed to notice that about me. It wasn’t until I had a long conversation with one particular teacher in high school that I decided to look into engineering. I had never even considered it as an option before, because no one decided to encourage me to pursue my interest in science. If it hadn’t been for that teacher, I would probably not be at the school I am at right now.
3) For a long time, Engineering/Science/Math WAS a “boys only” club. Let me tell you when some of the top technical schools and societies started letting women in:
RPI, The oldest tech school in the country, founded in 1824. Started admitting women in 1942 to “replace men called to war.” Campus housing for women wasn’t constructed until 1966.
Tau Beta Pi, the Engineering Honors Society - Founded in 1885. Started admitting women in 1968.
Caltech - Currently rated #3 in undergraduate engineering. Founded in 1891. Started admitting women in 1970.
Georgia Tech - Currently rated #5 in undergraduate engineering. Founded in 1885. Started admitting women in 1952.
Do you see the implications of this? Engineering has been a part of our society since around the late 1800s (in the case of RPI, since the 1820s), but women weren’t even allowed in for the most part until the 1950s, regardless of their merit.
4) Because of the fact that it was a “boys only” club for such a long time, there are not a lot of women engineers and scientists to look up to. When you’re reading your physics, chemistry, and math text books, the majority of those theories were came up with by men. It is true that much of our history was written by White Men, but this does not mean that the fact that there are few women scientists to look up does not matter.
So, as you can hopefully see, princess-munckin, or anyone else that shares the opinions of princess-munchkin, Bill Nye was not arguing that women that are not interested in STEM should go into those fields anyway. But he IS arguing against all of the systematic barriers set up against women who ARE interested in engineering and science. There are several women out there who are just as good as the boys at math and science, but will never pursue their interests because it just doesn’t seem like an option. That was me for a long time. I am super grateful for the fact that I fought against that, and that I ended up where I am.
if you don’t like science, fine. Don’t be a scientist. But if one day you have a daughter and she shows interest in being a scientist, PLEASE encourage her. Because Bill Nye is right, there need to be more women scientists in the world.
I know I’m being an insufferable worldbuilding nerd here, but my basic metric for evaluating media with very inhuman protagonists is “how easily can one offer a complete and coherent account of this media’s plot without ever mentioning the fact that the protagonist is, for example, a talking car?”. The harder it is, the higher it scores.
and with fics for Critical Role, Baldur's Gate 3, The Untamed, Dead Boy Detectives/The Sandman, KinnPorche, Love in the Air, DC, The Magnus Archives, Yuri!!! on Ice, Star Wars, Delicious in Dungeon, Challengers, Inception, and New York by Night.
99% of "mysterious disappearances" esp of people in their 20s who start acting weird for 48 hours and then vanish are not mysterious, thats just when a lot of reality-obliterating mental illness tends to kick in and it's pretty easy to get a short circuit in your brain that makes you go family guy death pose in joshua tree national park. it's not any less tragic, it's just a documented phenomenon and not particularly predictable. its a big reason the medical advice is for people with a family history of schizophrenia to completely avoid weed and psychedelics. "people just go crazy sometimes" is a principle of human health that used to be a lot more accepted prior to the american midcentury and to a certain extent thats a healthier way to conceptualize and prepare for the risk, as opposed to the modern assertion that anyone acting weird is dangerous and broken forever.
you should have a rough outline of a plan for if any of your loved ones experiences psychosis, it really does happen a lot. UTIs can cause psychosis. taking drugs, even safe drugs, or prescription drugs, can cause psychosis. i was once prescribed a heavy regimen of vitamin D because i was deficient, but the doctor never told me to stop taking it, so i moved to california, stopped being deficient, and developed vitamin d toxicity with downstream hyperparathyroidism which triggered significant hypomania that was undetected and uncontrolled for yeeeeeeears. i just slowly got Weird and started making impulsive decisions based on slightly out-of-gamut beliefs. i drove cross country by myself to have a love affair. the love affair was real, the series of decisions leading to burning down my life in pursuit of it were based on not great brain function however. etc. you see what i mean. churchill mentioned depression being the "black dog who stalks us" (one reason for Churchgrim's multi-referential name) but theres another, stealthier dog called Insanity and it's closer to some people than others but man it sneaks up on you. every time i see one of those "guy gets weird and drives into the wilderness forever" missing persons stories i think "yeah i could totally pull that off"
"van gogh cut off his ear what a lunatic" you are 3 nights of bad sleep, getting unexpected upsetting news and taking a substance as benign as coffee at the wrong time away from doing the same hope this helps
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.
TIL anyone who's going to overwinter in Antarctica has to have had their appendix out. Because removing an appendix that's not causing any trouble just as a precaution is way better than having one that's about to burst when you're on the ass-end of the planet with no way to be rushed to a hospital if shit gets real.
No, by the way, we absolutely did not think of this ahead of time. A dude named Leonid Rogozov got appendicitis in Antarctica. Fortunately, the expedition's doctor diagnosed him quickly and knew how to remove an appendix. Unfortunately, our man Leo was the expedition's doctor.
What did he do? Well, he set up a mirror, gave his belly a shot of novocaine, presumably told a colleague, "hold my vodka," and he removed his own fucking appendix. He survived.
Humans invented writing as a way of communicating information and it’s pretty great on the whole but we maybe did not adequately prepare for depreciation in legibility
We went down to the park, where the lake drains under a footbridge into a stone-lined gully that someone generous might call a creek. Usually it’s a trickle at best, but it poured last night, and the water was still moving pretty briskly.
As we got closer, I heard kids yelling, so we went over to have a look. I was nervous, because earlier this summer we’d seen a mother cat and her kittens hanging out a few times in the (then bone dry) spillway. We hadn’t seen them in over a month, but I didn’t want to think of them being there when the water started coming down.
Instead, when I looked over the side of the bridge, I saw a skinny kid (maybe 8-10 years old) carrying an enormous catfish clasped in both arms.
The catfish had to be the length of this kid’s torso, and it was flopping around trying to escape, but the kid doggedly kept climbing over mud and slippery rocks until he reached the lake and chucked the fish in. And behind him came… another kid, holding a fish.
When the lake flooded, it must’ve washed a bunch of these catfish downstream, where they collected in pools. Now the water levels are starting to go down, and the fish are trapped, doomed to dry up and die. Not on these kids’ watch. As we watched, they rescued four fish, and one of the adults present said there were at least six left. The kids showed no sign of stopping. This is the kind of thing you love as a kid, a life or death mission you can throw your heart and soul into while getting gleefully covered in muck and slime. I was tempted to offer my assistance, but this was their Quest, and I did not want to impose.
When we continued on, the Great Fish Rescue was still going strong. Godspeed, kids. In a time of such great discord and meanspirited behavior, you will live on in my memory as a beacon of goodwill.
this painting by andrew wyeth has got SO many ghosts in it. most andrew wyeth paintings have ghosts in, but this is off the scale!
this painting by dragan bibin has only one ghost as far as i can tell, but it's a really scary ghost (the dog thinks so too)
this painting by meraud guevara looks very peaceful, but unfortunately it has a ghost in it. i can't tell you where, but it does
you might think you can see the ghosts in this dorothea tanning painting, but you're wrong. the little girls are just ordinary girls. the actual ghost is behind one of those doors.
