they/them; ancient; does not play well with others; 18+; salty af about a variety of things; learn to curate your own social media & online experiences; anti-censorship
We live in the dumbest, lamest cyberpunk dystopia possible.
So LA has been — and continues to — protest against ICE. These protests haven’t gotten any smaller or lost any momentum, but social media wasn’t reflecting it.
TikTok users, realizing that the platform/other social media are censoring/deleting/shadowbanning these protest videos, decided to find a workaround.
They’re calling it the LA Music Festival. Ice detention centers and other protest locations are “stages.” The hottest band is Rage Against the Machine. “Here’s what gear you should be bringing to stay safe at the LA Music Festival.”
And it fucking worked.
TikTok has become a proving ground for a lot of new music, meaning lots of labels and organizations have lucrative deals with TikTok to promote their new artists and music festivals. So they absolutely cannot censor the words “music festival” or train the algorithm to ignore it, or they risk endangering that very important revenue.
So now protest videos are flooding feeds again, but it’s the LA 24/7 Music Festival. Truly an incredible timeline we’ve landed in.
During the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s, radio broadcasts would refer to upcoming marches as "parties" and use other such euphemisms to sneak calls to organize past censors. For example, the Birmingham marches of 1963 were called "a field trip in the park with a luncheon".
This is, frankly, a timeless strategy, just done online.
This summer I talked with a friend who has a high-support-needs autistic son. He shared the good news that they hadn't faced a severe meltdown in several years, because of a peace of advice they got from an ER doc.
It was something like, "I've seen a fair number of autistic kids come in for severe meltdowns. Every time, we check their blood sugar. And every time, it's low."
Based on this encounter, my friend added cinnamon and more frequent meals to his son's diet, and limited refined carbs. That was all it took to move severe meltdowns from a frequent occurrence to a non-occurrence.
For myself, I noticed long ago that I get lightheaded easily from not eating, and that sugar gives me migraines. I've asked for diabetes testing multiple times about it, but the labs always came back stellar.
I shared this with some of my other highly verbal audistic friends, and they've had a similar experience.
Hi, I'm an autistic guy who learned this a while back and Every Time I mention it there's always at least one person who's on the spectrum who goes 'oh fuck, is that real???'.
Autistic peeps are far more likely to have unstable blood sugar - iirc it's something related to how much energy we spend dealing with coping with the sensory overload of the world, and how our brains can sometimes whirr extremely fast. It's at the level where at my undergrad university (who were AMAZING for my autism, shout out to Leicester Uni back in the 2010s) one of the default recommendations for reasonable adjustments for exams is allowing autistic people to eat during it. We burn through energy fast.
Ideally you'd be snacking and drinking regularly to prevent, but a lot of autistic people are bad at self monitoring in the moment (hi, it's me, i'm autistic people). So setting specific times/triggers for when you'll get a snack or a drink can really help with that.
If you have someone who's having a meltdown, no matter how severe, feeding them will help. I managed to fix what would normally be a 'I'm unable to do anything for the rest of the day' meltdown this weekend with a cup of hot lemon and ginger tea for calming myself down, half a pint of salty water (salty enough to taste the salt), and a couple of slices of cake over an hour spent in a quiet dark room. Aka:
- Something nice to calm you down
- Small amount of sugar (a slice of cake, an apple or a cake bar, not an entire cake or an entire bag of apples)
- Electrolyte replenishment (dehydration prevention)
- Sensory/environment adjustments to help calm you down
In that order.
When I remember things (or my partner reminds me) I always make sure I have on me something sugary that's easy for me to snack on (taste acceptable, consistent texture) + bottle of water when I'm out for this purpose.
The most important part of this is that you're trying to keep your blood sugar stable. Having highs and lows in blood sugar will make things worse by giving you headaches, giving you the zoomies (and the crash), and tire you quicker, hence the "consistently snacking and grazing" style being very useful if you're able to keep it up.
I suspect this may also be helpful for people who aren't autistic - ADHD, Dyspraxia, Dyslexia and similar have a lot of overlap with Autism and may benefit from this too. Can't comment for certain on this as I only have Autism and ADHD (with minor traits from dyspraxia and dyslexia).
Oh - and if you're on long term medication (examples: SSRIs, HRT, ADHD Stimulants) keep a close eye on diet there. They can and will affect how your body absorbs stuff and I know with T and elvanse I'm having to remember to drink so much more water than before.
anyway the thing about fanfic is that it's not essentially bad or good; it's essentially amateur. some people are absolutely out there writing award-worthy prose (some fic writers ARE award-winning writers IRL!), but that's not the point. the point is that we're all telling campfire stories. it's a community, and it's a way to spend some more time in the worlds and stories that we love.
video games are big fans of *grunt of pain* as a token “hey bitch ur getting injured be careful” cue but i think there should be like, a 1 in a 1000 chance for the pc to scream “FUCK” really loud after taking damage
i’m spending today thinking about how saber toothed cats ALSO probably had a potato form. how they also had a stage where they were fat little babies with very triangle tails and tiny squeaky voices. how they also probably play wrestled and failed badly at calculating jumps.
i’m going to fistfight god for killing them off before i could personally see fat potato saber kittens
WHUMPTOBER is a month-long, prompt-based creation CHALLENGE (think: Inktober, but whumpier). There are four prompts for each day of the month, giving 124 for you to play with! There is also a list of 18 alternative prompts that can be subbed in for any day to give participants as much creative freedom as possible.
All prompts are meant to serve as inspiration without being taken literally (e.g. you don’t have to include the exact wording of prompts into your work). Feel free to run rampant on interpretation. For example, if the prompt is “flame", you could create something with reference to a candle/campfire, your character could have suffered a burn, or the flame could be a reference to an ‘old flame’ - an old relationship. It’s truly down to you!
You can produce work in any media you choose, including but not limited to: writing, visual artwork, photo/video/audio edits, paper crafts and elaborate recommendation lists (not just a list of links). You can participate as much or as little as you want (i.e. you don’t have to do ALL the prompts if you don’t want to) and prompts can be used in any order. They are also free to use even after the event ends.
Please make sure to read the Event Info and FAQ carefully, as most of your questions will be answered there already. For everything else, you are welcome to come to our ask box or ask questions in our Discord server here.
Information on how to TAG is here.
This year’s AO3 Collection can be found here.
This year’s playlist can be found here.
The ‘Anatomy of a Whumptober Prompt’ post can be found here.
And our 'Resources for Writing Sensitive Topics’ post is here.
We’re very excited to see the community come together for yet another year of Whumptober! Go ham with the prompts, and support your fellow creators - we wish you all the best of luck, but most importantly: HAVE FUN!
Happy whumping,
Mods Vanne, Yenn, Kitty and Surro
Text versions of the prompts, including a google doc format, are posted below the cut!
A Google Doc of the prompts can be found here for easy copy-and-pasting!
Whumptober 2025 Prompt List
No. 1: “Please don’t cry”
Lamb to Slaughter | Ceremony | Beg for Forgiveness
No. 2: “You’ve got a lot of nerve to dredge up all my fears.”
Prophecy | Sewer | Taking Accountability
No. 3: “I look in people’s windows, transfixed by rose golden glows.”
Isolation | Candlelight | Found Family
No. 4: “Don’t be scared, I’ve done this before.”
Non-Human Whumper | Iron Rod | Loss of Powers
No. 5: “My panic’s at the ceiling, but I’m face down on the carpet.”
Quivering | Dream Journal | Phobia
No. 6: “No grave can hold my body down.”
Caught in a Net | Medical Restraints | Pinned to the Wall
No. 7: “Tell me that you’re okay, and I’m fine.”
Trapped with the Enemy | Elevator | Pushed Beyond Breaking Point
No. 8: “Oh horror, oh horror, what did you see?”
Self-Inflicted Injury | Held at Gunpoint | Dissociation
No. 9: “We’ll make it alright to come undone.”
Touch | Flashbacks | Scalding
No. 10: “There’s nothing you can ever say, nothing you can ever do.”
Without Consent | Secrets | Lips Sewn Shut
No. 11: “Can you get through all the pain inside you?”
Hidden Injury | Laceration | Forced Reveal
No. 12: “It’ll be for nothing.”
Cardiac Arrest | Sacred Place | Withholding Medical Treatment
No. 13: “How dull is it to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished.”
Never Enough | Insignia | Forced Retirement
No. 14: “In the end, it’s worthwhile.”
Ignoring an Illness | Body Bag | Wounded Caretaker
No. 15: “You can take a break, if you just tell me that it hurts.”
Failed Rescue Attempt | Body Part in the Mail | Live-Streamed Torture
No. 16: “I’ve had the rug pulled beneath my feet.”
Repressed Trauma | Permanent Marker | Disorientation
No. 17: “Tell me there’s a hope for me.”
Internal Bleeding | Coma | Redemption
No. 18: “As the world caves in.”
Dystopia | Ruins | Environmental Whump
No. 19: “You’re on your own, lost in the wild.”
Dehumanisation | Living Weapon | On Patrol
it's so hard to gaf about anyone romantically. truly what if you get home from work tired and there's someone inside your house. i feel like id get mad sometimes and it'd not be their fault. anyways im going to start a new book
The fact that they are refusing to transfer the Steam page ownership to the people who have the IP & game rights seems very legally actionable, especially over an action that takes only a few clicks... Almost sounds like WB wants to pull the video game version of what they did with Coyote vs. Acme for tax write-offs.
This is why we can't trust corporations with ANY form of media. They'll destroy it all if it means they get the most meager of profits in return.
Something that you should consider if this seems pointlessly cruel or impossibly lazy of WB
They actively want to make this stuff go away. They do not WANT the games to stay on the market, in any capacity whatsoever.
Because then they compete with it.
See, if you make media, there is this problem where if what you make stays around forever, you eventually become your own biggest competitor.
This is why Disney would "Vault" movies for a long time, and its the main reason behind the fight against piracy, home videos, hard copies, remixes, fair use, and any and all kinds of media preservation. These capital owners are not just incompetent stewards of the media they own, they are ACTIVE and HARMFUL enemies of it.
In a time when data storage is as cheap as its ever been, and movie production is as expensive as its ever been, why are companies actively deleting completely done projects? To make it so you have to buy the new one.
Note that they don't even want to be the sole distributor, like they don't just want a monopoly on what they have made, they want it to stop existing.
They want you to only have the option of buying the thing they are making right now, and when they've gotten your money, they want it to go away forever. If it sticks around, they have to compete against it. Even if you buy it from them, they slowly wind up spreading themselves out storing and distributing all these pieces of art. They just want all art to be a single moment in the present that they control. No history, no memory.
The owner class is the active, deadly enemy of art. Always.
people who for very silly reasons want to market prepared food products without preservatives in them who then discover why we started putting preservatives in prepared food products in the first place (because without a preservation method food quickly grows stale, and frequently also moldy or downright toxic) is a consistently good bit. like people really seem to think we put Evil Chemicals in food on purpose for no reason.
I used to work at a wholesale bakery that specialized in "clean label" products and this was my pet peeve. A company would want our products because they didn't have preservatives, but then there were many versions of the following conversation:
"This bread is moldy in 5 days!"
Yeah, it doesn't have any preservatives. That'll happen.
"But the other company's bread lasted for 15 days without mold."
Right. They put calpro in it, which inhibits mold. You wanted bread without calpro, so it's going to get moldy faster.
"Well, it has to be preservative free! But we want it to still last 15 days."
This a a reminder to not fall victim to the sunk-cost fallacy. Just because you invested time and energy into something, does not mean you should indefinitely waste more time and energy on it, if you decide it’s not what you want anymore. This goes for anything, from books, to relationships, to jobs, to hobbies, etc.
This is honestly one of the places I find Marie Kondo's advice most helpful. I stop, look at the thing I've spent time and money on only to realize I dislike, and I say, "Thank you for teaching me something about myself and my preferences. I think I've learned this particular lesson and we can part ways now."
And then I don't feel like I "wasted" things or made a mistake. I just tried one path of learning about myself, learned something, and now it's time for a different path. Works a lot better for my brain.
The time Marie Kondo said "you can thank a a shirt you've never worn for teaching you about your taste", thereby making it NOT A WASTE literally rewired my whole brain. Acknowledge the thing and move forward, even if that means leaving the thing behind.
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.
the work printer cries out, "no stop, that's too much! youre gonna make me jam!" as i load a full ream into her tray, but it's too late. "see, you can take it. you're doing such a good job for me." i coo into her feeding tray as i begin printing the morning reports. her warning lights turn red as she moans in i assume ecstacy
dailybridgerton
titsay
gummygunk
yousharknotpass
prguitarman
areudirty
snowghoul
romaincrisis
