meanae

[meanae]

I was looking for other pictures and found... these!

I was on vacation with a friend 2 years ago and took Lillian with me; the Scottish landscape is really perfect for her <3

Our time management was horrible though; we absolutely did not plan enough time for everything...

[meanae]

Hello and welcome to another Eryn preorder! 🐲

This will probably the last preorder for a loooooong while, so if you were ever thinking about getting a little dragon for yourself, now's the time ⭐ The preorder will last from today until June 30th. You can fond the order form on my profile! Eryn is a small 13cm long fully articulated BJD dragon. He's the perfect companion for any size of doll - from tinies to SDs and Smartdolls, he likes all kind of other dolls <3 The preset colors are a few already known color ways plus some new ones:

◼ Crimson - dark, full red ◼ Arctic - pale, minty blue ◼ Coral - soft rose pink ◼ Comet - pastel light lavender ◼ Garnet - dark, shimmery variant of crimson ◼ Pearl - shimmery white

And just like the previous preorders, there's the option to get your very own custom color again! Check the Post and the highlights on my profile to see more of them <3

> One Eryn in a preset color is 140$ < > One Eryn in a custom color is 160$ <

Want to get more than one? Then you're lucky! If you buy more than one, you'll save money on the second one. Please check the order form for bundle prices. There's also, again, a wide range of eyes to choose from. If you're missing a very specific color, you can message me and we will figure something out :D You want to have your dragon even more customized? Then I can offer gradient dyeing for the head, legs, wings and the tail. Any color is possible, as long as it's darker than the dragon itself. Dyes are semi-permanent - they don't scratch when moving joints, but are removable withe, for example, acetone free nail polish remover. Any other questions? Let me know!

[meanae]

Hey there everyone!

After UKBJDCon I have a very few dragons left! I've put them all into my kofi shop (-> https://ko-fi.com/quadrigadolls/shop <-) and got each just once, so if you want one, grab em quick!

There will be one last preorder for Eryns this June, again with the option to pick your own color, but I won't do another one for a long while after that.

[meanae]

A few commissions! The Pride head is mine, I am still not sure if I#ll keep him... The cat octopus dolls were mia white before and are dyed completely.

[meanae]

Dawn got her outfit ♡ its from "xiaxia handmade". Got it, as usual, through newcloversinging. They're currently selling a similar gardener outfit, get it while you can!

[meanae]

Yes sorry, grabbed them from instagram, but hey, look whos here! After just *checks calendar* 9 months!

Dollzones insane wait times aside, Shadow is one magnificent creature. The details, the attention to joints - he's just very, very pretty.

[meanae]

Again a random mix! Phoeb, Chara and Sircca are mine, the others commissions. Abadon was also fully dyed by me.

[meanae]

Iterations 1 to 9 on a sculpt I'm working on - Because I'm honestly tired of trying to find the perfect sculpt for Valentin.

So I'm just making my own *shrugh

I still think about no 7s eyes... lets see if I can bring them back for v10!

[meanae]

Me: Hm I think I'd like a Phoeb instead of the Vampire Elf Chloe, lets do a loose WTB for the human head because the Elf head will be way too expensive.

Also me: *finds an elf head for really good price within 5 minute*

The doll gods blessed me today!

[meanae]

We had snow for the first time in forever, of course I had to get out and make pictures with Celeste <3 These are the last pictures with these antlers - I lost one on the way back. Urgh. Anyone has some Dina antlers for sale... ?

[meanae]

It's my 12 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

[meanae]

Wild mix this time! A few heads from my own collection and some commissions.

[meanae]

Surprise! Tumblr just got turned into an epic fantasy RPG, just like [your favorite appropriate media franchise]. And the Tumblr RPG's plot needs to have all of its characters covered, in roles both large and small.

That means that you are assigned to a stereotypical RPG role inside our new fantasy world. Spin this wheel to find out what you are now doing for a living.

[meanae]

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.

[meanae]

On a happy note- three things!

1) yes, i am still doing all sorts of commissions for BJDs. Faceups, dyeing, mods - just ask! You can find all my work and prices over at: measbjdsalon.jimdofree.com

2) if you ever send me a message and I did not reply, please send it again. I'm not ignoring you, its just tumblr/insta being weird.

3) now that insta is slowly phasing out hastags completely, there's a good chance I'll post more stuff here again.

[meanae]

Do you know the best places to buy bjds second hand? i wanna find trustworthy sites but im not sure where to look (and also praying to find a legit darkhorn pop up in such places OTL)

Facebook groups (like BJD Adoption) and instagram in general are good! And I'm selling my Darkhorn currently, if you're interested you can write me over here or on my insta :)

[meanae]

Second preorder for my baby dragon is open, don't miss it!

Spooky Eryn preorder is officially open 👻

▶ In short:

Period: Preorder runs from today till 14th November.

Price: 140$ for standard colors, 160$ for custom colors.

Extras: You'll get a free set of eyes and can buy extras for 5$.

Layaway possible? Yes!

▶ You can find the order form here: >> Link to google form <<

▶ More information is here: >> Link to previous post <<

▶ Eryn is 13cm long and 8cm tall when standing, with a wingspan of 12cm. He takes 6mm flatback eyes.

▶ There are 5 different standard colors you can choose from. Nightsky and Twilight will come shiny to really show their depth and sparkle, Willow and Coral will come matte. With Ghost you can decide for yourself if you want it shiny or matte.

▶ You have something else in mind? No problem. For 20$ extra, you can get your very own custom color. Be it pearl, glitter or a flat color, shiny or matte, anything is possible. Check my feed to see the variety of what's possible.

▶ You can pick a pair of free eyes for each dragon you buy. Want more? Each extra pair is 5$.

▶ Eryn has 27 joints in total for fluid and solid posing. His wings are removable, and each dragon will come with a small cover piece if you decide to keep the wings away.

▶ He is fully handsculpted and professionally cast.

▶ It will take approximately 3 to 4 months till your dragon will be on the way to you. (Can't wait that long? I have a few in stock dragons in my ko-fi shop!)

▶ I offer regular and express shipping to anywhere in the world.

▶ Yes, Layaway (up to 3 months) is possible too!

Any questions? Feel free to ask!