nearfromfar

[nearfromfar]

Piece for a clanmate as a gift to his buddy, featuring his cute kitty.

This was def not an opportunity to get a never-ending supply of cat pictures as "research" >:)

[nearfromfar]

This girlie is going to get her own post, but here are the (almost final) pictures of her. She's been to several conventions and adored by the very sweet props staff.

Now here's something I feel is important, and why I kept track of her progress:

There's a lot of well-meaning folks who will say you need the best tools, the best supplies, the best training to make something. Even in creative jobs or education I've found the expectation that everything good must use the best resources.

I may have access to better tools and resources now, but I learned so many of my skills on the backs of receipt papers and cardboard cereal boxes and weird trash. Some of my best and proudest projects come from nothing but random garbage. And that includes the majority of Black Talon.

She's a piece of random trash cardboard at the center, layers of old paper boards, held solid with two types of popsicle sticks, Elmer's glue and a hot glue gun. The only things I had to purchase for Black Talon was a single foam board, a resin mold, and some vinyl, all stuff that arguably can be done with alternative no-cost methods.

There's a lot of subscriptions out there, new and old tech wanting to be the shiniest tool while costing more and more money. But I had such a good time with some trash and free time and that's gotta count for something. There's always more fun to be had, despite all the worlds worry :)

Hey gang sorry I haven't posted any art since September. Yeah I've been hand-carving 19 layers of cardboard into the shape of Black Talon. No I am not sane.

[nearfromfar]

So... it's been a while... over exactly a year according to my own post snitching on me. Well, long story short, she's (sort of) finished! Once I figured out how to reliably craft the handle I put all my effort into getting her good enough for conventions. So here's what happened:

The grand total layers needed to make the swirling inside and base of the sword was 18 full carved pieces, plus the popsicle stick strengthened middle section. With all the layers glued together and compressed, the outer layers were slightly larger than the inner, meaning there was a pit all along the edge. I filled this with hot glue to make sure that there would be no wayward air bubbles to potentially collapse later.

Next was the handle... I was so focused on this particular step that I didn't take pictures. But the solution was actually simple (and cheap)! I picked up some thick foam board from a craft store, the same kind you can find in school supply aisles for kids projects. Gluing a couple layers of that together made blocks big enough for the handle, and I was able to whittle the rounded shapes with exacto knives. The new handle pieces and some smaller handle details were then glued to the cardboard layers. Using thin ripped tissue paper, I paper-mache'd the whole handle to hide the cardboard and foam board seams. The same steps happened for the wing detail. The handle and the interior of the sword were then painted black.

Next came the most painful step, attaching finicky vinyl to very complicated shapes. I'd found this perfect rainbow vinyl in the right colours for Black Talon, but vinyl isn't a fan of bending and folding. With a LOT of various glues, curses, and luck, I got the vinyl to stick. Now all the major areas that needed it, had it.

I took a break to paint one side of the interior blade details with a beautiful metallic purple gradient. This was a test of a new speciality paint and it worked well!

Now the handle isn't the only shiny part, the silver blade still needed attachment. Thankfully for my sanity, the blade was completely flat and much easier to handle. Tracing the shape of the blade on each side, there were two silver pieces for each side, one for the top and one for the bottom with the seam at the tip.

Heed my warning however... when I went searching for plain silver vinyl, the only stuff I could find was iron-on foil. I attempted to use this initially, but the foil began separating from the clear plastic after only a few months. It was also getting cloudy and losing any shine. Eventually, I was able to find permanent silver vinyl and replace the foil, but not without a struggle.

One of the final steps was creating the circular glowing detail in the blades interior. By coincidence, I found that "pop-sockets" are almost the perfect size, and I found a "pop-socket" resin mold that made the perfect shape. Mixing in some of the special purple metallic paint, and once it was solid I swirled the same purple onto the outside of the resin shape to create a very nice effect.

Full photos to come shortly!

Hey gang sorry I haven't posted any art since September. Yeah I've been hand-carving 19 layers of cardboard into the shape of Black Talon. No I am not sane.

[nearfromfar]

Hey guys listen I've heard great things about the new Nether activity in Destiny but I think I'm doing something wrong? Any advice appreciated :(

[nearfromfar]

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.

[nearfromfar]

Check out all our stuff! Special messages to the game devs (past and present) at the end, the writers the artists the VFX the customer support and more, we love you!

Ishtar Illustrated is now LIVE! With art from 48 amazing artists spanning a large selection of lore books across the Destiny universe! ! Come take a peek at our pdf below, and be sure to check out our hashtag ( IshtarIllustrated ) to see everyone's individual posts! https://drive.google.com/file/d/14Nl4LSF5z-QzV_JfyS1OW9VuRTHEZ0DO/view?usp=sharing

[nearfromfar]

My piece for the amazing Ishtar Illustrated zine, showcasing our favourite lore entries from across Destiny 1 and 2.

The full zine is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G3HTG2lRtBlg8N_IPh_pyfx36tY1rC5A/view?usp=sharing

[nearfromfar]

Let's sit together and listen to some nice music

[nearfromfar]

I have no explanation for this one, except that flaunting your stunning legs over your murderous fathers grave is correct and valid.

Thanks to @roxygobyebye for the idea and I stole Felwinters pants from @sylenth-l 's closet.

[nearfromfar]

I've never been the best at words, but this sucks, it really really does. I followed 18 Bungie employees in 2023 who loved proudly showing the work they did. By the end of the 2023 layoffs, only two of them were still employed. 16 out of 18 were fired in one day, along with so many others (Michael Salvatori? The other Halo-era employees?? The community managers???)

I still follow all those people and started following more after the news dropped. So many of them are still struggling to find work. Food insecurity and uncertain housing is something several of them are openly asking for help with. And now 220 more are facing the same fate, being thrown into an industry that doesn't care and continues to fire thousands en masse.

It feels like we can't do anything. It's up to the remaining employees to organize, to unionize if they're able, to redefine how Bungie treats them. But us talking about it has to count for something, I hope.

See here's the thing with the Bungie layoffs. Either Pete Parsons' work as CEO is valuable enough to warrant his paycheque, in which case he has catastrophically failed at his job with this and should be laid off, or it isn't valuable enough to warrant his paycheque and he should not be employed. And that goes for executives of the same level for basically all the big game studios!

Layoffs should be seen as a massive failure of their leadership and they should be first on the chopping block. No bonuses, no golden handshakes to leave. They FAILED AT THEIR JOBS.

But no, their already rich asses get to keep their 'jobs' while the people who actually do the work (including fucking Robert Brookes what the *hell* Bungie?!?!) get laid off. After their most successful expansion. I'm fucking disgusted.

[nearfromfar]

You're absolutely right, and to your last paragraph, I went into each of these three listing to confirm it wasn't an accidental duplicate. All three were by different people, and followed a common trend by having a keysmash username, or most commonly the standard "Guardian1234" username. See this example I got about 2 minutes ago. Generic username, low rank, basic emblem, the only thing missing is the copy-paste title like the first examples.

Thankfully, you can still report the listing directly for soliciting when using the legacy version. Fingers crossed the reporting becomes available in the new version as well.

Wha... what on earth is happening in Destiny's actual fireteam finders, how are these not filtered out?

[nearfromfar]

Wha... what on earth is happening in Destiny's actual fireteam finders, how are these not filtered out?

[nearfromfar]

Bungie bringing back sunset weapons, as if I wasn't already using sunset weapons for fun. Bungo can't stop me by sunsetting my stuff (this is out of spite for them taking my toothbrush, artichoke, and charred celery out of my vault). Origin Story, Badlander, Zenobia my beloveds... I could never give up on my favourites just because they got sunset.

Honourable mention to my Red War Stompees that are so old they have the D1-style of upgrade system and I used them for years after they became obsolete.

[nearfromfar]

For the fellow destiny creatives and enjoyers who might want to do this

They are already selling data to midjourney, and it's very likely your work is already being used to train their models because you have to OPT OUT of this, not opt in. Very scummy of them to roll this out unannounced.

[nearfromfar]

The progress on Black Talon is going strong, and much better than I hoped. My biggest fear was having the whole thing be too weak, especially since it's, yaknow, cardboard. Once I started gluing the layers down, it would be impossible to go back without ruining months of work. Here's what happened:

I spent several days carving out the middle layer of corrugated cardboard and putting in as many popsicle sticks as I could fit, then adding two layers of paper to smooth it out. It was decently strong with the sticks, so I glued down 10 of the layers (5 on each side).

Let me tell you, this thing is THICC and CHONKY. Even without the handle she's already heavy enough to need two hands, and she certainly won't bend if I do a few whirlwind blade moves.

Next steps, finish and glue the last few layers, and start brainstorming how I'm going to shape the handle out of (you know it) more cardboard.

Hey gang sorry I haven't posted any art since September. Yeah I've been hand-carving 19 layers of cardboard into the shape of Black Talon. No I am not sane.

[nearfromfar]

Good news lads! Almost two and a half months lost in the mail system and the original ring was found by the shipping depot. I didn't want to get my hopes up until it arrived, but it survived its long adventure. Thank you to the pals in the original posts that gave advice :)

Does anyone know where I can buy a Crota raid ring? Bungie confirmed mine has been lost in transit, it's been missing for over a month and they can't get me a replacement either.

I'm sad about it :(( I've got the other raid rings and would really like this one too.

[nearfromfar]

Hey gang sorry I haven't posted any art since September. Yeah I've been hand-carving 19 layers of cardboard into the shape of Black Talon. No I am not sane.