Ramblings of a Greek Goddess

Mom's named me after a Greek Goddess; Mikky (mikkywhi) everywhere else. Wiccan Priestess, Translator, Teacher. An insane bookworm, RPG Player when the mood strikes and a really proud geeky nerd. I write. I draw. I create. I play. I dabble in fandoms, wander into new worlds. I walk in between the worlds. 👾🧚‍♀️💙💗💜 FFXIV (🇪🇺🇺🇸🇯🇵)/FFXV. She/Her

[moniquill]

[thebaconsandwichofregret]

She's also publicly stated that she believes that anyone who reads her books or watches her shows and films does so because they explicitly agree with her political views.

There's no "agree to disagree" with her work. Every time you pick up her work or talk about it you are saying to her "I agree with you Joanne" whether you like it or not.

[calling4glaives]

There are several types of magic wielded by the Kingsglaive in the movie - fire, lightning, shields, etc. Which one is best suited to your p

We have a lot of new people this year, so we're reblogging some of our old quizzes in case you missed them the first time!

Also, don't forget to take our interest survey if you haven't yet! It closes on Feb. 16th!

[chilledfoodtin]

Gunbreaker appreciation.

[anneapocalypse]

So this may not be news to others, but this is the first I've come across it! According to Leonesaurus, who uploaded this capture:

Urianger was being roleplayed by a Square-Enix dev and interacting with players for his first appearance in-game before they implemented him into the story as an actual character. This took place at Camp Horizon on the old Selbina/Ridill server in 2011. Urianger would give players who visited him a 10 min buff for Quickened, Regen, HP and MP increase! Arcanist powers galore! Speaking of Arcanist, you can see on his back the original Arcanist weapon that was intended by the old FF XIV 1.0 team before Yoshida took over and retconned them into wielding books instead from ARR onward.

And here's the key dialogue:

Outside the Adventurer's Guild in Ul'dah:

Alfgar: Hearken adventurers of Eorzea! Ware you the venomous words of false prophets! Alfgar: Adventurer! I ask that you heed not the foul lies of those claiming knowledge of future happenings! Player Character: Who are these false prophets? Alfgar: They appear near aetheryte camps, bedraped in shadowy robes, preaching their untruths to any and all who will listen. Keep your distance, traveler, lest you become tangled in their web of deceit. PC: Are we in any danger? Alfgar: We are all in danger, for fear can drive a man to terrible deeds, and it is seeds of fear that these farls prophets wish to plant in our hearts and our minds. They are not the Archons of legend. They are not our saviors. They only foster unrest.

At Camp Horizon:

Urianger Augurelt: A shadow hangeth o'er the realm, growing blacker with each passing day!

Urianger Augurelt: Darkness descendeth, but surrender not to despair! For the future is forged in the flames of the present!

Urianger Augurelt: I am a mere messenger, entrusted with words of prophecy.

Urianger Augurelt: Awoken but recently to the truth, I come to stir those yet aslumber.

Urianger Augurelt: Ne'er till land consumes sun can sea bear moons. Heavens spew crimson fire, hells seep black dooms.

Urianger Augurelt: The senary sun yields the septenary moon - expelling the Astral, beckoning the Umbral. So saith the eternal wisdom of Mezaya Thousand Eyes.

Urianger Augurelt: Open thine eyes, ye seekers of truth! Stand and bear witness to the path that must be trod!

Urianger Augurelt: Awoken but recently to the truth, I come to stir those yet aslumber.

Urianger Augurelt: To spread word of the coming darkness and stoke the flames in your hearts, that they may light the way.

[teaorim]

💅

[teaorim]

[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]

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.

[chilledfoodtin]

Classic Heavensward Thancred appreciation

[anneapocalypse]

Chain of logic:

Urianger's old chronicler's robe from ARR is suited to a desert climate, as he spends most of his time in Thanalan.

The grey healer's robe he wears in post-Heavensward is the Orthodox Robe of Healing, clearly an Ishgardian outfit.

He wears the same outfit in Garlemald, suggesting it is well suited to cold weather.

Urianger goes to Ishgard late in Heavensward to deliver the white auracite to the Warrior of Light before they depart for Azys Lla.

Therefore it would make sense that he got an Ishgardian healer's robe there, probably after nearly freezing his toes off on the airship landing.

Urianger probably was not traveling with the Warriors of Darkness in the field until after they nearly killed Alisaie, because that's the first time we see him in the Orthodox Robe and in a previous cutscene he's seen with Arbert and Elidibus wearing his usual clothing.

It would make sense that when he needed a disguise, he probably had to just grab whatever he happened to have available, and that happened to be the robes he got in Ishgard.

This would also explain why it's not a great disguise, if he didn't have much time to plan it, and just used the best he had available.

Therefore: his disguise is not designed for a desert climate.

Therefore: Urianger is absolutely sweating balls in that getup in Thanalan.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

[chilledfoodtin]

Happy Thancred Thancred Thursday! ❤️

[crimson-sun]

Given there's sometimes more than a year between updates on this I'd be surprised if folks were still interested... but we persist! This is Chapter 1.4 of Comrades AU.

Earlier installments are here on Tumblr under this tag but the easiest way to read would be on AO3.

Now we're finally up to Chapter 2!

[kittenwitchandthebadvibes]

Helpful and Preventative Stretches for Writers, Artists, and Gamers 💪🎨✍🎮

If you type, write, draw, game, or generally use your hands a lot (especially if you’re prone to RSI or Carpal Tunnel!) try these stretches as both a preventative measure, and on the spot relief. Take care of yourself and your body, friends!

Start with hands up, fingers stretched out.  Stretch your thumb as far as you can over your palm. Hold and repeat 4 times.

Touch each finger to your thumb. Hold each for 30 seconds. Repeat on each hand 4 times.

Start with a fist. Open half way, hold for 2 seconds. Stretch fingers out, hold for 2 seconds. Repeat 4 times.

Start with one arm out, palm up. Pull your fingers back with your other hand. Hold for 10 seconds. Do the same with your other hand. Repeat 4 times

Start with arms up, palms out. Bend wrists down until you feel the stretch, but keep your fingers loose. Hold 10 seconds. Bend wrist upwards, until you feel it in your wrist and arm. Hold 10 seconds. Repeat 4 times.

[mismatchedpurple]

#finalfantasyxiv #wolcred #vierawol #thancredwaters #ffxivfanart #mikkydraws #mmpurpledraws

[kootiepatra]

#FFxivWrite2024 - Day 2: Horizon

To anyone who did not know better, the crystalline, shimmering wall of light might have looked like the edge of the world. And to the inhabitants of Norvrandt, it may as well have been.

As far as Ryne knew, only a few people had ever seen the other side of it. She certainly hadn’t. And why would anyone want to? When the earliest survivors of the flood began to understand the corrupting power of Light, and when the constant stream of monstrosities drifting through the wall showed no signs of abating—well, no one required much encouragement to leave well enough alone. And to this day, just about everyone possessed of their senses continued that tradition. 

Even after the rise of the Crystarium allowed Norvrandtians the luxury of scientific curiosity again, the intrepid researchers who ventured past the wall could only ascribe to it the bleakest of monikers: “The Empty”. Not much was known about it. It was a light-blasted wasteland. It was not exactly welcoming to visitors, and had no obvious use to the living.

…This was going to be difficult to sell to Thancred.

And as they sat across the table from one another at the Wandering Stairs, her stirring absently at her tea, and him nursing a mug of black coffee, his reaction did not prove her wrong.

“So,” he said slowly, arching a skeptical eyebrow at her. “You want to go to the Empty.” His tone marked it not so much as a question as a statement of incredulity.

Ryne nodded. “I do. I think it may be important.”

She half-expected him to argue with her, to refuse to allow her to do something so reckless. And a few summers back, he may well have. But today, he took a slow, controlled breath, folded his arms, and leaned back in his chair. “...Go on.”

“Well, I… I have begun to sense a Light in that direction.”

“You must forgive me, my girl, but that strikes me as hardly surprising.”

“No, I know it sounds silly, but…” ugh, why was she struggling this much to explain it? “It’s not just ‘some light’, it’s… it feels like it’s something more specific than that.”

Thancred’s brow furrowed. “More specific? How?”

“I mean, it’s hard to say for certain, and I’ve no idea how far it may be, but…” She fell silent, and fidgeted, and then sighed as she gave up on grasping for just the right words. Out with it, already. “It’s something big, Thancred. Big enough to be a Lightwarden.”

A long, long pause, heavy with the weight of Ryne’s revelation, descended upon them both. At last, Thancred leaned forward, elbows onto the table, hands interlaced before his chin in thought. “...Hmm.”

“So…what do you think?”

He pondered it for another brief moment before speaking. “Allow me to first ask a question. Assuming this is what you think it is—what ramifications do you believe there might be?”

Ryne felt her face growing warm with embarrassment, worried that Thancred thought her childish. “I honestly do not know.”

“Supposing the thing keeps to the Empty”, he continued. “That land is already ruined, and the people long since gone. Would we be wrong to assume that there is no further havoc it could wreak, so long as it remained there?”

“I do not know that, either. But after all we have seen… I think it best not to assume anything.”

“Point taken. You shall have no quarrel from me there.”

She doubted that was the end of it. “But…?”

“But, I cannot help but feel this is quite the grave risk, and with precious little information to justify it. I trust you need no reminding of the merry hells that place plays upon a person’s aether?”

“With any luck, I shall be able to help protect us from that. At least for a little while. And there will be no better way to gain more information than to go see it for ourselves… surely?”

“How certain are you that this is indeed an entity, and not some—I don’t know—happenstance blip in the aether?”

Ryne bristled a bit at the question. “Certain enough to ask you for help.”

Thancred looked at Ryne. He looked down into his coffee. He drummed a finger on the table as he considered it. “If we were to do this—and note, I said if—I would first insist we seek the Exarch’s counsel. He may know something we don’t already. Or at least, he may know someone who knows something—or who could perhaps lend us some equipment. I would not have us go half-prepared.”

Ryne tried to conceal her excitement, lest it prove premature. “Which is why I want you to go with me. I would not make the attempt on my own.”

“Aye, well, you had better not!” Thancred replied in a joking rebuke. The teasing in his smile softened to a proud fondness, and then to concern. “And you’re sure you want to do this?”

Ryne nodded earnestly. “I feel like—no, I know—I have to try.” She paused for a moment. She remembered a few apt words—words she had first learned from Thancred and Urianger, and heard again later from the Warrior of Darkness. Words that originated with the woman whose legacy she now walked out. “‘For those we have lost, for those we can yet save…’ right? If this is not my duty as the Oracle of Light, then what is?”

Thancred’s jaw dropped ever so slightly slack. Then he shook his head in a rueful chuckle. “You’re right. Of course you are right.” He rose from the table, then turned back to his young charge with a wry smirk, shaking a finger at her. “And that line is very nearly cheating, I’ll have you know.”

Ryne laughed as she rose to follow him to bring their petition to the Exarch.

—--------------------

Just a few short days later found the two gliding across the sands of Amh Araeng in a borrowed skyslipper, hastening towards the wall of light with exhilarating speed. Ryne’s attention was torn. That unsettling Light still tugged at the corners of her mind, and of course, it remained her first and foremost priority. And yet, she could not tear her eyes away from the much more immediate scene.

She knew what awaited once they passed through the wall. She had studied it as well as she could. She had caught glimpses through the passageway the last time she had been here. But nothing was quite the same as sailing through that gap, and seeing the expanse explode into view before her, looking for all the world like a gargantuan canvas that some great cosmic artist forgot to paint.

Her mind reeled at the sheer distance she beheld. This was most of the star, unbroken by sea, trees, or buildings. She was not sure she had ever seen such a vast horizon. Even then, it was hard to place exactly where the land ended and the sky began, blinding white as all of it was. It was enormous. It was breathtaking. It was dizzying.

It was heartbreaking.

This was most of the star.

“Are you feeling all right?” Thancred asked her, having to raise his voice over the thrum of the engine.

It jarred Ryne back to the mission. “Yes, fine, thank you,” she answered hastily, willing herself to once more focus on the task at hand. They were only going to travel a conservative, safe distance to see if they could verify anything about what she was sensing. Once they had a preliminary idea of the seriousness of the threat, they would turn around and head straight back through the wall. It would be wisest, after all, to strategize their next steps from the comfort and safety of well-balanced aether.

She reminded herself that they might have a Lightwarden on their hands. That was all she was here to deal with. The Empty was another problem for another time, and perhaps not even a problem with any solutions.

But she was the Oracle of Light.

What if—did she dare even hope it—there may yet be something she could do?

[ciphox]

[mementomoryo]

The Great Azure Serpent and the Woman Clothed with the Moon (Mixed media on watercolour paper, 2024)

Painted for the ever-patient Apollo as part of the 2023 FF Art Auction. It took me a long time to get things looking right, but I'm so happy with the result! (And thanks to Ammy for the n!ghtshading!)