maulish

[maulish]

A Secret Light, A Sacred Fired: Chapter 10

Yes, yes, yes. It's been 84 years, but chapter 10 is finally up, in case anyone is still following it. It will be the second to last chapter in this fic, but as the title of the chapter 'Change of Plans' implies, should I have the time and motivation to keep going, this will be the first in a series of related works. I have big plans, but we'll see.

[maulish]

jedi shaming

[maulish]

whole squad got nerfed

[maulish]

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.

[maulish]

Much has been said on the modern healthy masculinity of tolkiens men but what I think what we’re really seeing here is medieval masculinity

[maulish]

Re: Star Wars: Skeleton Crew

I watched the first two episodes and already wrote down some of this right after, but I felt like it needed to sit with it for a moment. It's hard to say where the series will go plotwise, but it has revealed its tone and premise.

It's simply a fact that Disney Star Wars era lacks any coherent creative direction. Each film and series has a different director, writers, producers, crew etc. This means that any shared vision is at most a vague outline. Projects seem to be greenlit and cancelled based on audience reactions and whims, rather than on said vision and long term creative goals. Writing is of exceptionally uneven quality and the tone vacillates from bleak to gratuitous comic relief.

There is a set of problems that are symptomatic of Disney's creative control and lack of understanding for Star Wars as a mythos. One such major issue that a lot of them seem to share, which had been bothering me since the sequel trilogy came out, but that I only understood when I saw this video essay on de-infantilizing Star Wars. It's exactly that. The shift from accessibility to younger audiences, to infantility.

Skeleton Crew has a premise in an interesting and as of yet unexplored setting which is at first glance the mundanity of a suburban environment. The exploration of those everyday moments is an element that Andor excelled in, that made it feel like an authentic representation of this galaxy far away that we've longed to see more of. Capitalizing on this would be great for Skeleton Crew.

Something else I find rather fresh about Skeleton Crew is that the main characters are children, because the Star Wars universe has never been introduced to us through this point of view in film. It has always been relatively kid-friendly, as this was the intention Lucas always had, but I think there's a significant distinction to be made between a child's point of view on various narrative themes and infantile storytelling. I don't expect this to be a popular opinion and many will disagree, but at least for now, this is where I also feel let down by Skeleton Crew.

The first season of Skeleton Crew wil have eight episodes, and we won't even know if it will get a second season. But here we are, 2 episodes into the 8-episode season and while we are knee deep in easter eggs we don't even have an answer to the question: WHY? Why was this show made? What is the main driving point of the narrative? We've seen 25% of the show, there are 6 30 minute episodes left.

The first two episodes were informative, but not at all in the way that feels rewarding to me from a narrative perspective. It is packed with references, someone counted over 111 easter eggs, which goes beyond integrating this story into the galaxy and begins to feel like a red flag that points to a possible underlying belief that being able to drop in all those references and tick boxes is plot armor against claims that this doesn't feel like Star Wars.

And this doesn't feel like Star Wars to me, because it feels explicitly like Disney. This has a strong sense of nostalgia, but it immediately became clear to me that it wasn't nostalgia for Star Wars. If you remove the one alien kid and the droids, this is essentially identical to most mainstream American adventure movies targeted to children. Home Alone, Hook, Jumanji, The Goonies, Monsters Inc., The Wizard of Oz, take your pick.

And the creative decision to play up that proximity is actually a major factor that prevents me from forming any type of nostalgic bond with it now. They could have taken notes from both Andor and The Mandalorian which both have successfully been able to pin down what makes a story look and feel like Star Wars and capitalize on our collective nostalgia for that world. What keeps us coming back to this galaxy is the mythology of it, the universality. I am nostalgic for Star Wars, not for a representation of childhood I was already culturally and geographically locked out from when it was first presented to me in the 90s/early 00s.

I have a very cautious relationship with representation of any kind and what I think is a lot more crucial is to develop an ability to see and understand the universal shared aspects of things we all experience. But at the same time I will not accept pandering a very narrow experience as universal. Especially in conjunction with nostalgia which is very much about memory and lived or inherited experience and not about universal sentiments. Thus relying on nostalgia in storytelling while favouring memory and experience only one group has access to means that people's reaction to it relies on their ability to connect to it as represenation. The basic problem here is what happens when you intentionally anchor Star Wars to real word nostalgia, instead of the nostalgia we collectively had for Star Wars itself and have equal access to.

Regardless of the set decoration or superficial alienness in Skeleton Crew, the idealized environment that is meant to create that nostalgia is suburban United States. The disappointment for me is that fantasy and science fiction which could take a motif or societal pattern and turn the mirror so we may all gaze at something universal hiding behind a facade of something seemingly alien, it instead results to emulating the toneformula of every 90s and early 00s American kid-centric adventure film you have ever seen (that is, if you have seen then).

We can appreciate them and there is nothing wrong with them, because we get that that this society and audience is who they're made for. But even as a kid, watching them, I knew that I didn't live in a world that those stories spoke of or were made for. And this awareness becomes especially hard to marry into who and what Star Wars claims to aspire to, especially now.

So when Disney Lucasfilm claims to be telling stories of a galaxy far away , where all manner of species live together in worlds alien to both us and sometimes them and find common ground to form close-knit communities, targeting all available audiences... no, I did not imagine it to be a Californian suburb. And I find the aim to bring Star Wars "closer to our world in a boundary-pushing endeavor" concerning.

I can't judge this show on everything, but there are things it already stands out for. So based on this initial impression, despite the vast expanses of the galaxy, I find that...here we are, in Alien(ation) Central. Which is something no other Star Wars film or show has ever made me feel. And I wonder if it's a sign of what's to come.

[maulish]

Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back vinyl soundtrack, 1980

[maulish]

I'm late to the party (wake?), but I've taken considerable time off from Star Wars. I think it was around season 2 of The Mandalorian that I really felt like this ain't it. Nothing really caught my interest enough to come back to it until The Acolyte which I now just finished watching. I should know better by now than to see what people have been saying about it, given I was around to witness how it was the prequels already that "ruined Star Wars".

While the Acolyte was a painful watch it again points out what should be obvious now. If there is anything at all that's at serious risk of ruining Star Wars (outside of bitter middle aged men on youtube), it's Disney. Disney is to Star Wars what Amazon is to Tolkien.

We all connect with particular characters, storylines and elements within the cosmos of an IP and its lore, but I think what forms the core of those emotional bonds are stories told with heart and integrity. There is something significant that Star Wars shares with LOTR in that sense. The film franchises both started out as passion projects that performed miracles with small budgets. The people working on those films came up with ways of bringing these worlds to life without the guarantee that it would pay off financially. They also created the gold standard of cinematic worldbuilding. The franchises obviously turned out to be really successful and seeing the large bult-in fanbases and now proven profitability attracted corporations which held all of the interest in the potential of financial gain, having none for the source material and core ideas that had originally propelled these franchises to begin with. These corporations instead approach the IPs with a sense of arrogance thinking that the audience will simply lap it up because of a proven emotional connection to the material, and the more they can churn out, the bigger the profit. The initial optimism and interest for a new film or series may even briefly seem to affirm that belief. Eventually the idea of all the money to be made will make the corporations look at how to cut down the costs, how to compress the production timeline. The ambition grows, but the quality of the work put into it suffers and the passion fizzles out. Instead of a dream of bringing a world to life it will become a calculation. This is where we're at. But it's that lack of passion that is always evident in the finished work.

The Acolyte is symptomatic of what corporate greed does to culture and cultural artifacts. It's not the initial idea that is the problem, it's not the main characters, it's not the wokeness. The fundamental problem that set the series on a downward path from the start was that it was planned from the POV of corporate ambition to branch out and generate a maximum amount of product to the widest and least specific audience. And they forgot about the story they were trying to tell in the process.

And on a side note, the way the Disney acquisition pushed a LOT of high quality content out of the canon just for the sake of gaining free reign should have been a clear sign of what's to come.

The Acolyte was destined to fail. It was structured in a way that assumed multiple seasons that it would never survive to see, because the story itself was poorly planned and written. The writing for the series is embarrassing to put it mildly. The series is also giving screen time to random background characters with no actual plot line, and a good chunk to a bunch of others that steal precious time from the main characters, only to all be killed off without any of them save one having made an impact. And so the first season that should have sold us on the idea sold us nothing at all.

There's the kind of 'feedback' that would have us think that there isn't room for everyone in a galaxy far, far away. And then the kind Disney ought to take to heart. But if they've shown us anything then it's that they're not yet motivated to learn from their mistakes. And until then there is no story they can't or won't ruin.

What a waste.

[maulish]

CHASKE SPENCER as ELI WHIPP/WOUNDED WOLF

[maulish]

I forgot why I actually logged onto here the moment I saw a photo of heirloom tomatoes. This is how it is now.

[maulish]

[maulish]

'but whyyy would tolkien shoehorn sam into a romantic relationship with rosie when it's so obvious that frodo's the most important person in his life?'

hear me out, what if...and this is a long shot...tolkien had lived through some deeply harrowing experiences that emphasised that people can love each other in different ways and they're all equally important? and that the strongest bonds you form aren't always explicitly romantic? what if everything in tolkien's work (eowyn's different loves for faramir and aragorn, boromir having no interest in romantic relationships and putting everything into his love for his city) fairly dripped with the idea that romance isn't the only important sort of love? what then?

[maulish]

absolutely despise how every single social media platform has intrusive annoying “performance” shit baked into it now. You can’t just be online to post for fun, talk to friends, share stuff to whoever happens upon it.

Everything has a score now. Notifications that say “your post reached 1000 accounts” on insta. View counts on every tweet, so you know exactly how relevant or irrelevant your every thought or drawing is. Every app asking you over and over to turn push notifications on. 1 to 10 self-ratings on YouTube. Get twitter blue for a performance boost. give tumblr your money for a Blaze. Get an Instagram business account. Buy views. Constant scoring. Constant reminders to monetize your every waking moment.

[maulish]

[maulish]

When a character is assured enough in their own power that they are completely relaxed in dangerous situations??? When that same character becomes tense and uncomfortable in the mundane because they don't have a framework for peace?????? When they help navigate violence for another character and in return that character helps them navigate softness??????????? That's all, your honour

[maulish]

A bird explaining to a hedgehog crossing so it doesn’t die.

[maulish]

Maggie Smith, from “What I Carried”, Good Bones