pandabuddha

[pandabuddha]

Spiritual successor to this thing

[pandabuddha]

what’s the difference between a piano, a tuna, and a pot of glue?

[pandabuddha]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Elise & Takumi (Fire Emblem), Elise/Takumi (Fire Emblem) Characters: Elise (Fire Emblem), Takumi (Fire Emblem) Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Post-Fire Emblem Fates: Revelation, Pre-Relationship, Fluff, Festivals, Shippy if you Squint, can be seen either way but pls see the shippy vibes, Fates Week 2025 Summary:

The celebrations are in full swing in Hoshido for the anniversary of the war times end and peace between Hoshido and Nohr. And for Takumi, Elise is determined to bring him along with her to enjoy it.

For Fates week 2025 on Tumblr. Day 1 “Hoshido”.

~~

As I said in the notes on the actual fic, it’s my first time writing actual fic for FE Fates despite being really into it when it released. So I’m a little nervous hoping I nailed the two of them :’D

Tried to lean into some ship tease fluff since I wanted to provide a little something for my rarepair, tho I guess you could see it either way.

Gonna look forward to trying as best as I can with Fates Week, even tho it’s gonna be a little short notice now for some of them with the week started. Hope you enjoy reading~

[pandabuddha]

hey guys, i’m here to relieve you of your fear-mongering For You Page, here’s what we know:

1. this is not “world war 3”. that would be insane, unrealistic, unnecessary, and would never happen immediately off of one (albeit, awful) event like this. absolutely no country wants to go to war right now lol. anyone who makes any joke or post about “getting drafted” or “we’re all gonna die” has not done a lick of research, do not engage with it. plus, we’ve been at war with the middle east for ages, so for them, the timing of this attack is a bigger shock than the attack itself.

2. people in the US are not going to get hurt. more than likely, the worst this can get is some type of gulf war with the middle east limiting access to our resources, which still isn’t ideal. the best course of action for iran right now is to control what they can, which probably means cutting off the strait of hormuz, a strait that runs to the US (and other places) and provides it with resources like oil. (at least, that’s what i predict will happen based on the research i have done, but the resources part still stands). the US military is too advanced and too strong for an attack on US soil to be a strategic move for iran (a country with a population less than a third of the US’s) because they know that whatever they do, the US military will hit back even harder (that is apparent from one of trump’s latest social media posts… that heinous bitch 😒)

3. president trump wants you to be living in fear. that’s what his entire platform has been run on, along with lies and hypocrisy that more and more people are starting to see through. whatever happens in the future, this will be a huge turning point for a lot of individuals who may or may not care about who they voted for. but for those who did not ask for this, here’s what we can do:

stop making everything about the fear in the US and do what you can to lift up the people of iran, the people who were actually attacked, especially if this situation progresses any further. if military attacks do break out, it will most likely be on iranian soil, not the US’s, so do your best to try to be selfless, even through the fear.

please for the love of god do your own research, and keep it as unbiased as possible. news articles, reports, even historical articles, anything is better than scrolling through tiktok or tumblr and making your anxiety even worse. don’t even take what i say as fact! yes i’ve done research, but things can (and will) change, so it’s best to stay updated in whatever way you can.

spread positivity, build community, and gather information. as civilians, that is our current best course of action, and our collective greatest strengths. living in fear is feeding into what our government wants you to feel like so you’re easier to control. do not let them.

this is my own pet peeve, but stop saying “we bombed iran” or “we started a war”. WE did not do anything. donald trump did. that is not the america i associate with, nor should it be the one you associate with, either.

lastly, and i’ll say this until i die, everything is going to be okay. there will be issues, of course, but it won’t last forever, i promise. take a break from doomscrolling and get a good night’s rest. stay safe 🫶

[pandabuddha]

"Deprecated Fandoms" Spam Bot Alert!

If you get a comment that says AO3 is "deleting works to conserve server space", that is a Spam Bot. There is no such thing as "deprecated fandom content", nor is there any limit on the number of works that can be posted to a fandom tag (regardless of how "popular" it is). AO3 has not changed its content policies. We are committed to upholding our founding principle of maximum inclusiveness of fanwork content, and will only remove content that violates the AO3 Terms of Service. While non-fanworks are not allowed on AO3, we consider both original works and real-person fiction to be fanworks. Please don't listen to anyone telling you otherwise.

Unlike the previous round of art spam, so far these comments have all been from guests, so our advice for handling them is different! We're working on filtering these comments out, and flagging them as spam is how you can help. Read more below the cut!

To help train our automated spam-checker to block similar guest comments in the future:

If the comment is on your own work: 

Note: The "Spam" button only appears when viewing a guest comment directly on your work. This is because the AO3 comment inbox is merely a copy of the work's comments – deleting a comment from your AO3 inbox does not delete the comment from the work itself.

Go directly to the comment on your work, either by clicking on the link in your email or in your AO3 inbox.

Click on the "Spam" button to mark the guest comment as spam and remove it from your work. 

That's it! You don't have to do anything else.

If you see comments like these on someone else's work: 

Feel free to let the creator know the comment is from a bot and that they should mark it as spam. 

You can also report the comments as botspam via the Policy Questions & Abuse Reports form linked at the bottom of every page on AO3. 

If you are reporting multiple guest comments, please submit only one report and include all comment links in your report description. (You can get the direct link to any comment by clicking the "Thread" button on the comment, and then copying the URL of that page.)

AO3's Policy & Abuse committee (PAC) does not pre-screen content on AO3; they only investigate if they receive a report. All reports are reviewed by PAC volunteers, who are real human beings. You don't need to worry that your or anyone else's fanworks will be taken down due to a baseless report or a mass-reporting campaign. 

If PAC were to determine that you had violated the TOS, you would receive a notification of the violation via the email address associated with your AO3 account—not via comments, social media, or any other method. 

[pandabuddha]

Wow, now there's a bot going around on Ao3 telling people that the "moderators" will delete works from "deprecated" fandoms and impose bans.

Fearmongering bullshit, but it's fearmongering bullshit that seems to be taking advantage of the recent spotlight series in order to trick authors into deleting their fics.

Just. Why.

What the hell does anyone get out of making these bots.

[pandabuddha]

Well shit, the Republicans brought a certain anti-online porn bill back to the table.

The Interstate Obscenity Definition Act.

This should alarm you guys.

[pandabuddha]

Listen. LISTEN. I had to do it before the show came out. I had to.

[pandabuddha]

My friends are all roasting me for living a fanfic cliche when I just want to get swole on the cheap 😔

[pandabuddha]

not all ships are For wanting them to be in a happy healthy relationship together. sometimes shipping two characters means you want them to be erotically obsessed with each other and become entwined in a mutually toxic love affair for a few months and then horrifically break each other's hearts and never speak again. sometimes you want them to be codependent best friends with enough repression to explode a submarine who only make out/have sex when they're at their worst. sometimes you want them to pine after each other for years, never say anything, and then die. sometimes you want them to kill each other. this, too, is shipping

[pandabuddha]

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.

[pandabuddha]

Friends!

Are you feeling hopeless in the face of the oncoming MAGA-pocalypse? Want to do something fast, easy, and free that will make a difference?

If you're in Michigan, keep reading! If you're not, signal boost this to your Mitten State Mutuals!

Michiganders, it's time to contact your state reps and tell them to vote YES on HB 6034 and HB 6035. Together, these two bills comprise the Freedom to Read Act and they severely limit the ability of assholes to ban books in the state of Michigan.

Want to read the bills for yourself? Click here:

https://www.legislature.mi.gov/Search/ExecuteSearch?sessions=2023-2024&docTypes=House%20Bill,Senate%20Bill&contentFullText=%22freedom%20to%20read%22

Tl;dr? Here's an article and video summarizing the Act from CBS News:

Not sure how to contact your Michigan state representatives? Text RESIST to 50409 and Resistbot will walk you through it.

It's easy, it takes about 5 minutes, and you can do it from your couch/bed/puddle of despair.

Tips for contacting elected officials:

1) If you're asking them to vote YES or NO on something, say that in the first line. Bonus points if you can tag the actual bill (HB/House Bill) number.

2) Only include ONE issue per communication.

3) 1&2 are because these are being skimmed by interns who keep a running tally of what each communication is about. One communication = one point.

3a) Don't be a dick to the interns. Their lives are hard enough.

4) Keep it short. One sentence very clearly stating what you want. One or two sentences about why they should care about what you want ("As a resident of your district, I know you agree that SOMETHING SOMETHING FREEDOM, SOMETHING SOMETHING LIBERTY, SOMETHING SOMETHING THINK OF THE CHILDREN.") Appeal to the person they claim to be in their campaign ads. Get it, give them clear instructions, get out.

5) No profanity.

6) No threats.

7) No memes/ slang/ sarcasm/ lols. You are cosplaying as someone who thinks salt is too spicy and whose greatest joy in life is sorting their collection of plain white socks.

8) 5, 6, & 7 are because anything you communicate to an elected official will become a matter of public record. It goes into a file. And if anyone ever pulls that file, you want to be on record as the most boring, conscientious, polite, non-threatening motherfucker who ever lived.

Now go forth and make your voice heard!

(Hey @unpretty and @official-michigan-posts, can you help get the word out?)

[pandabuddha]

HR 9495 is going back up for voting. All non-profit orgs are in danger.

The Committee on Rules is meeting at 1600 EST on 18 Nov 2024. The agenda includes HR 9495.

If this bill passes, the Secretary of the Treasury would have the power to strip any non-profit group of it's tax-exempt status with no due process.

If you are part of the fandom community and you are in America, please contact your reps and ask them to vote NO on HR 9495.

[pandabuddha]

going through the new voice lines added for mahjong and graha's are the most unhinged by far

[pandabuddha]

son boy

[pandabuddha]

I GOT MY DARK KNIGHT SWORD AT

🌸 CLAIRE'S 🌸

[pandabuddha]

Anti-piracy ad from 2004