Squee into the Void

You might occasionally find fandom things here, which could include the MCU, Harry Potter, LotR, the Buffyverse, Avatar, and Supernatural. If you want my fanfiction and fanart, I have the same username on fanfiction.net, Ao3, and deviantart.

[takofukkatsumi]

Reblog this and tell me what was your biggest crying over a piece of fiction. You can be vague if you don't want to spoil.

[taaroko]

It's a four-way tie between

"Leaves from the Vine,"

the end of A Little Princess (1995),

"I'll never forget,"

and

Geralt and Ciri's reunion in Witcher 3. While sob-worthy on its own, it makes the cut specifically because it flashes back to their reunion at Yurga's farm in Crossroads of Destiny, which also had me bawling. The devs absolutely knew what they were doing.

[taaroko]

Telepathy Thoughts

Are there examples of telepathy being more complex than overhearing people thinking in complete sentences in the same voice as their speaking voice? What about being bombarded by mental images or sensory input or emotions or raw unsymbolized thinking? And what about people thinking in languages the telepath doesn't know? Would a telepath know the answer to whether colors look the same to everyone (who isn't colorblind)? Are there any telepaths who are constantly mind-blown by how differently people's minds work?

I would think that someone with a particularly abstract type of thinking would be the ideal person to combat telepathic surveillance without needing a lot of training, and maybe you could weaponize things like having an irritating song stuck in your head.

The telepathy examples I know of are Charles Xavier (movies only, and not all of them), Edward Cullen (but I never read Midnight Sun), and Buffy in that one episode where she gets temporarily infected with demonic telepathy, so it's entirely possible I just have a super poor sampling. Legilimancy in Harry Potter might be a little more nuanced, since it at least seems to include visuals as well as words, and Snape mocks Harry for reducing such a complex idea to "mind-reading." Legion is very creative and trippy with the insides of minds and there's at least one wild telepath vs. telepath battle per season. It's probably the example that does the most with the concept but I'd love to know about others.

[taaroko]

It's very easy to imagine a Muppets adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, in large part because Alison Steadman's performance as Mrs. Bennet in the '95 BBC miniseries is already 95% Miss Piggy.

[sonypraystation]

white people have the sauce sometimes and dont even know it

[sonypraystation]

i just saw a youtube short of brandon sanderson on a podcast. the whole time hes talking hes doing book signings. what a flex. so many bitches on my dick i gotta multitask

[if-i-was-a-wyrm]

brandon sanderson is actually just built different. once on a podcast with patrick rothfuss they were talking about tools to write better and he said "i try to limit myself to 8 hours of writing per day." he took time off of writing during the first year of covid and accidentally wrote four unplanned books. he teaches a class at byu. his wife has a codeword to get him to stop writing in his head because at any given moment you might think he's doing something normal but no he's also writing another novel. stephen king said he's insane

[gryfndorgodess]

via queenofattolia: #stephen king said he's insane: most damning sentence ever written

[taaroko]

[taaroko]

It's interesting how, culturally, we've gone from workplace comedy (The Office) to workplace existential dread (Backrooms and Severance). Can't imagine why.

[merelyspecters]

they may never make another score with the same level of pirate as the pirates of the caribbean theme song. listen to that. like. yeah. that's the piratest. there are only two ways to make it more pirate. you can either illegally download it, or! give it a gun. which is difficult because sheet music doesn't have hands.

[taaroko]

As someone who saw PotC before Gladiator, this is very true but it makes the Gladiator soundtrack incredibly distracting. I'm trying to get into Maximus's story but I get knocked out of it every time the the main theme plays because it's almost identical to the PotC theme. Does anyone have this issue in reverse if they saw them in release order? Are most people out there getting intrusive gladiator vibes all over their pirates, or have most people here only seen PotC so are unaffected?

[richaldis]

[taaroko]

Okay, the promos for Leverage: Redemption S4 are starting to get out of hand.

[glorious-collections]

Am I the only person who... actually really likes Thor: The Dark World? Not even in a "this movie is so bad that it's good" way, just genuinely really liking the movie 😅 It's actually one of my favorite comfort movies, I watch it all the time.

If Thor: The Dark World has no fans I'm dead

[dashing-fandral]

//It's one of my favorite movies ever! I adore it ❤️

[woodelf68]

It was one of the very rare movies that I was able to watch the whole thing in one sitting without getting bored or needing to be doing something else at the same time to keep myself occupied. Even the first Thor movie I remember watching in something like half hour segments, because after that I start to get antsy just sitting and doing nothing else. TDW was a very good film. Did I like all the angst in it? No, but it kept me interested, and make good use of the main cast.

[taaroko]

I adored TDW enough to see it twice in theaters (dragging my whole family along the second time, which was on Christmas Day) and that was before I was obsessed enough with Thor and Loki to participate in the fandom. I loved getting to see so much more of Asgard and the other realms. If I had complaints, they were very minor (like that Malekith was pretty flat and there was maybe a touch too much silliness from the Earth characters). I've always been confused and bitter that it's so widely panned as the worst movie of the Infinity Saga.

I don't understand its poor reception at all, and it seems like you can trace that poor reception directly to the intense course correction that eventually created Love & Thunder. (I like Ragnarok but I think there's a timeline out there where TDW was given its due and the Asgard side of the Ragnarok story wasn't a frustrating afterthought, and then L&T was completely different and actually good.)

[quasi-normalcy]

One field that badly needs to be purged of "Great Man-ism" is architecture.

[noctumsolis]

In my hometown there's a hospital that won awards for the brilliant architectural vision of the great man who designed it.

The fact that even before it opened they'd begun building the extension, because it was too small to accommodate the number of patients, and even then too small to accommodate visitors, apparently didn't matter.

[quasi-normalcy]

Standard "visionary design"

[terriwriting]

I've worked in multiple award-winning buildings, and every one of them was a terrible work environment. Confusing internal layouts, bad HVAC, inaccessible spaces, lacking basic amenities, horrible acoustics, just bad places to work all around.

But hey, the lines of the buildings look great from the outside.

[eilooxara]

there was an award-winning building at my college that, due to its oddly-curved roof, every year, produced icicles that could kill people

[famishedeye]

I worked as an admin for 2 months at a multiple award-winning architectural firm. When I got to see a restaurant design in progress, I pointed out that the design of the bar in said restaurant would end up causing injuries to the workers. I was told that I didn't know what I was talking about.

I had left bartending to go to that job and I left that job to go back to bartending.

[quasi-normalcy]

The fact that everyone has a story like this and yet architects are still allowed to ply their trade as if they were visionary artistic geniuses rather than glorified contractors with ideas above their station will never cease to grate my gears. Why do we, collectively, tolerate this bullshit?

[lannamichaels]

Never gonna forget that episode of Grand Designs where the architect no longer wanted his name assosciated with the build because the folks who were going to live in it (and are paying to have it built...) raised the garage roof line high enough to be able to fit their regular-sized car into the garage.

I have basically been radicalized into feeling like architecture as a field is full of a lot of people who want to make really big sculptures and make other people pay for it. (There is also livable architecture. But when I look at architecture magazines, all I see are malevolent staircases that will murder you.)

[madgastronomer]

"Well, it wasn't made for people" just explained everything to me. These kinds of architects don't want to be architects. What they want to be is huge-scale sculptors. They don't want what they make to be used, or even usable. They want to make something that (they think) is pretty/interesting/whatever to look at.

If you don't want to design for people, shut the fuck up and get out of architecture.

[taaroko]

I love the way this post is a deconstruction of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead on a practical level. For those blessedly unfamiliar, the protagonist is an out-of-touch, arrogant architect who thinks his designs are above such petty, anti-individualist matters as building codes, and Rand expects readers to agree that actually he's a visionary genius who SHOULD get to blow up the public housing he designed just because other people had the audacity to alter it into something more usable.

[miggylol]

Spin the wheel. That's who's trying to kill you.

Spin the wheel again. That's who's trying to protect you.

Are you safe?

Absolutely not. I'm dead. 100% dead.

I might stay alive, but it'll be a really close thing.

I'll take some hits, for certain, but I should be okay in the end.

A few attacks might get through, but nothing concerning.

The attacker might be able to get in one lucky hit. If that.

I am the opposite of worried. I'm 100% safe.

...Look. I've tried picturing this. But I honestly don't know how to answer.

Voting ended onFeb 18, 2025

[lokijiro]

Magneto is trying to kill me, and the person who's trying to protect me is. . . Ron Weasley.

It was nice knowing y'all.

[taaroko]

Jaime Lannister is protecting me from Timon and Pumbaa. We're about to have a barbecue, which will be a great setting in which to recommend a therapist and resources for acquiring a modern prosthetic hand.

[ekingston]

SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.

IN SHORT

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.

When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using 

his dyslexia; 

his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and 

a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,

as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.

When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there. 

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain; 

2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and 

3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again. 

THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)

Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):

This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)

I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:

Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.

I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice. 

I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.

After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.

While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:

And then I went to bed.

By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:

@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.

That response came only an hour or so later: 

Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.

I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.

A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)

A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.

Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.

Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :

Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):

which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)

... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)

After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether. 

It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:

And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.

That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:

They were completed works;

They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and

They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.

If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!

I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.

I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.

Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***

That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.

Sooo—

We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them. 

This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:

Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.

Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.

THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):

*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that. 

**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation. 

***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.

Again, please, please PLEASE reblog this post instead of the one I sent originally. All the information is here, and it's driving me nuts to see the old ones are still passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.

Thank you all so much.

[ekingston]

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

[catsi]

salt & vinegar chips are snacks for fucking masochists. literally the entire flavour of the goddamn chip is “acetic acid, which will hurt your tongue, and then just salt on top of that to hurt it worse”. it’s brutal. this chip is designed to hurt you

[maxknightley]

yeah and it kicks ass

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Sometimes you just wanna pickle the inside of your mouth

[taaroko]

It's the only chip type where I don't question the serving size. That limit is there for safety reasons.

[taaroko]

Why was Superwholock the only fandom trinity the tumblr community fixated on? Because Elementary/Leverage/Person of Interest would've been pure gold. The overlap wasn't perfect (Leverage began in '08, PoI in '11, Elementary in '12, by which point Leverage was nearly over) but they all have staying power and any combination of two or more would be *chef's kiss*.

A heist intersects with a number from the Machine. Hardison is revealed to have been a longtime admirer of Harold's code and Machine conspiracy theorist, and John initially fights Eliot to a stalemate and then WITH Eliot against various goons later.

John and Harold are working on a number of someone connected to a murder victim Sherlock is investigating, and Sherlock spots John near the scene of the crime multiple times. Just when we think he's mistakenly put John on his suspect list, Sherlock reveals he already knows a great deal about the Man in the Suit, and he's pretty sure he's been fed intel from his associate via Anonymous at least once (because they for some reason didn't require a humiliating display that time).

Anonymous are huge fans of the Leverage team and arrange for Sherlock and Joan to team up with them, or Sherlock is working the case from another angle and spots the con happening under some rich jerk's nose. He plays a subtle role to help the heist succeed, then turns up at Leverage HQ for a face-off to make sure they're what he thinks they are.

The Machine spits out Sherlock's number and he turns out to be the biggest handful Harold and John have ever had to deal with. He's in danger because he interfered in the business of exactly the rich/powerful type the Leverage team goes after, who they are just now going after, and at first the three teams are in each other's way, but then they come to an understanding (possibly offscreen, saved for flashbacks during the heist reveal).

[taaroko]

What even is webnovel?

The only time I've ever been on Webnovel was when a reader informed me someone had (very ineptly) plagiarized a large chunk of "If I Could Start Again," but then I got this comment on the appendix I recently attached to that fic—not the fic itself, or I might've believed it for .5 seconds longer. Behold:

I'm really upset! Your writing in (x fanfiction) is way too out of character. Is it even logical for the story to develop this way?! Just so you know, the "MARVEL: GAME MAKER SYSTEM" on webn0vel is the real deal when it comes to fanfiction. It's absolutely amazing and worth reading. My life changed after diving into that fanfiction!

-e31ym776 (Guest)

I love the complete lack of specifics, even before you get to them forgetting to fill out their form and include a title, but what the heck is this supposed to achieve? Is this a sock puppet account hyping up the writer's own fic? Is it more plagiarism? Is anyone else getting this kind of comment on their MCU stuff? As far as I can tell, the story the commenter so prefers isn't even about Marvel characters, it just has Marvel in the title, and it has 15.5 MILLION views so why would it need to feebly attempt to redirect readers from completely different websites? I am confusion.

[taaroko]

Okay that first reviewer clearly doesn't understand how kryptonite works but sounds like Sephora accidentally created a product line using Spiders Georg's face cream.

[veliseraptor]

that ‘pakige?’ post but me, a couple hours after posting a fic, like ‘comints?’

[kitten-kin]

[leahazel]

F5 F5 F5

[kitten-kin]

… F5 F5 F5 F5F5F5F5F5

[wolfsrainrules]

WHEEZING

[taaroko]

With only 2 days to go before the marathon starts, how many of us are the cat right now?

@iwillrememberyoumarathon

[finickyquint]

Writing Tip:

If you don’t feel like actually writing, prepare for writing:

Open your WIP Word doc

Read the last page again

Scribble notes on what happens next

Once you’ve done this, you might just find yourself wanting to continue after all. And if you don’t, no worries. You’ve made it easier to jump back into it later. 

[candy-m-s-deactivated20180720]

This always works for me! Really good advice!

[bookishdiplodocus]

I do this to get into the writing mood. I can tell myself: “I don’t have to write, no pressure. Look, I’m not writing, this isn’t writing.”

[shadokatninjakitty]

^^GREAT advice!

[taaroko]

The easiest way for me to get more written in a chapter I've already started is to reread and edit what's there. It often flows into new paragraphs without much effort.

4 days!!!

@iwillrememberyoumarathon