sayornispress

[sayornispress]

anyway the actual point of fandom is to inspire each other. reading each other's fics and admiring each other's art and saying wow i love this and i feel something and i want to invoke this in other people, i want to write a sentence that feels like a meteor shower, i want to paint a kiss with such tenderness it makes you ache, i want to create something that someone else somewhere will see it and think oh, i need to do that too, right now. i am embracing being a corny cunt on main to say inspiring each other is one of the things humanity is best at and one of the things fandom is built for and i think that's beautiful

[sayornispress]

Having a much older, much more experienced person tell you you're doing well in your shared hobby is better than crack, especially when the hobby tends to be 80% retired ppl. Like, hell yeah I'm gonna get a good grade in birdwatching and I'm not even 50. Child prodigy moment

[sayornispress]

I made a thing! As a slightly late 1 year anniversary of the greatest album of all time release, I present you with

The Tortured Poets Department lyrics book

📋 typeset by the lovely @sayornispress 📖 bind by me (I still can't believe I did it!!!!) 👩🏻‍🏫 technical binding info and inspo from @phoenixortheflame, @wisewitchbindery and memoru (the last one is a Polish resource!)

This is a fanbind of the TTPD lyrics by Taylor Swift, made for personal use only. The typeset is made to mirror the official lyrics videos which is SO.COOL!

It will be a gift to a friend who introduced me to Taylor's music 🤍

My rambling about it under the cut below!

oh

my

god, I'm so excited!!!!! This is a very first bind that I share with an audience of more than 1 internet person so please be gentle with me haha

I only found out about what binding is and how AWESOME it is by fanfic binders here on tumblr. I do plan on ficbinding in the future so watch that space!! Honestly, having those beloved words on paper rather than your phone screen is just SO PRECIOUS.

It's actually my second bind. The first one is honestly still just so close to my heart I haven't shared it with the Internet yet, maybe in some time :') As I am just a beginner this bind has maaaany flaws - I didin't get the format right, trimming my text block with an old photo trimmer was a Bad Idea™, I printed the photo on the wrong end of the canvas so I had to just glue it on :D And so on and so on, but I'm gonna learn from these mistakes when creating the next one!!! For the things that did work out: I wanted the theme colours to be the colours of TTPD on the Eras Tour so white, black and gold. I used the plainest cream canvas available, with just a white and black photo on the cover, gold lettering on the spie and a lil sticker on the back. For endpapers I printed my favourite quotes from the songs and then foiled it. AND I managed to sew with a non-wax thread without crying too!

I had the ambition of starting from the very beginning - so making a typeset myself. And then I lost my patience about half an hour in and decided to stick to ready typesets first :D

Now, for the Taylor contents! I absolutely love the concept of lyrics videos, they just make the words really hit you, you know? So when I saw Phoebe very kindly sharing the Taylor typesets they made - I may have screamed a little :D And I absolutely knew that it will be a gift to a fellow Swiftie - a friend whose fault it is I am in this Taylor Swift-shaped madness since last year!

My Swiftie story is pretty new really - I liked Taylor, sure, I liked how kind she was, I liked her mainstream songs, absolutely loved how she DEVASTATED me with Safe and Sound back in my The Hunger Games era. But I didn't really know her other songs or much about her. And then Ela took me to the cinema to see The Eras Tour and well. Here we go, some months later and I am still going on and on about the brilliance of it. I got to see it life in Warsaw, which was a life-altering experience and couldn't get it out of my head ever since.

Hence, the literal studies of the lyrics :D

It really is a special moment for me because I dreamed of learning how to bind your own book. And it really is a full-circle kind of situation. Why? Well, because going to see the Eras Tour life made me believe dreams do come true - so chase them! So I went to bookbinding workshop, bought the materials and here we are!

[sayornispress]

hope is a skill

[sayornispress]

@mythrilthread

The poem!

hope is a skill

[sayornispress]

Binderary 2025: Week 1

In the Renegade Bindery Discord Server, we are once again running Binderary during the month of February. Attendance is free, and a link to the 18+ Discord Server can be found on our website.

Whether you’re new to the world of bookbinding or an aged veteran, join us for a month of binding fun! This event is all about community & learning, be it trying something new or refining existing skills.

All our workshops are run by members of our fanbinding community, and some of them are even on Tumblr!

Here’s the list of who’s running the week 1 workshops:

Specialized Typesetting in LaTeX: Celandine My Immortal and the History of Fan Studies: Parsley Typesetting in Google Docs: @sayornispress Introduction to Typography and Typesetting: @bearclubbooks Renegade Round-Up 2024!: @fanboundbooks, @robins-egg-bindery & @celestial-sphere-press You Shouldn't Have to Pay for that: Making Your Typesets Pretty For Free: @daemonluna Bookbinding Craft Along 1: Noodle

[sayornispress]

Hello,

Happy New Year! I recently got into bookbinding and wanted to bind the Avatar the Last Airbender fic Embers by Vathara. It is quite a large body of work and a little intimidating. I saw the beautiful binding of the work on chaoticbindery's page on tumblr and I was wondering if you would be willing to share your typeset with me? I would not sell it or share it with anyone else. It would solely be for personal use. I completely understand if I am asking for too much. I hope you have a wonderful weekend!

Hi!! I'm sorry, I don't share my typesets with binders I don't already know. But I'd love to see how your bind turns out! If you'd like support, I highly recommend the Renegade Guild (also their Tumblr) for questions and advice :)

[sayornispress]

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.

[sayornispress]

hope is a skill

[sayornispress]

My wife: Are you making a list of fonts?

Me: No, worse. I'm replicating the titles of video games but it's the fonts that they're in

My wife: What does that mean

Me: This

[sayornispress]

Two author copies delivered! Both for @bropunzeling (AO3 here).

More photos and info under the cut!

I actually did my copies of these a while ago--both in February, one in 2024 and the other in 2023. collide the spaces that divide us was one of my earliest attempts at social media formatting, and one of the last books I ever made with my inkjet printer. I did end up fixing a few things on that one's typeset, but it's nearly identical to my first copy. You may also notice in the photos that I chopped off a bit too much off the edge--I didn't yet know how to use my guillotine, and in all the time that's passed since then, it's become defunct (sharp enough to cut off a hand, but not sharp enough to cut through a stack of paper lol)

It's neat to see such a clear example of how much I've improved as a bookbinder in a year and a half--my copy on the left, author's on the right:

Also, a comparison of color ink (left) vs color laser (right):

Like this, it's easy to see how much more vibrant color toner is than ink. Ink works much better for complex images, but since I don't print a lot of photos, but do make a lot of social media typesets, this works much much better for my purposes.

Soon after that, I bought a black-only laser printer and had a whole new set of challenges. It was in this era of printing that I made only fools rush in. It has one of my most complex title pages to date, as they're not really my forte.

Below are my copy, the title page, and an example of how I did texts in this particular typeset.

My copy has a cloth spine and a different cloth as the cover, with a strip from the endpapers to hide my sins act as a bridge between them. This is one of the binds from last Binderary that I'm most proud of.

The title page is in several different pieces--sort of jigsaw-puzzled together from vectors, Google Drawings, and a few different fonts.

Black-toner-only printing meant adjusting how I did social media formatting, and this is one of my favorite ways I solved that problem. I like the simple, almost minimalist formatting that sets the texts apart but doesn't steal the show.

I'd been meaning to offer author copies for these books for as long as I'd had them, but it's hard to understate how little I wanted to use my inkjet once I got a laser XD It's both slower and more expensive to use an inkjet, so as soon as I got my color laser printer set up, I sent the DM!

I organize my handbound fics by ship--that is, every ship has a set spine cloth and title color--so one of my favorite things about author copies is that I get to be a little more creative about covers!

[sayornispress]

Two author copies delivered! Both for @bropunzeling (AO3 here).

More photos and info under the cut!

I actually did my copies of these a while ago--both in February, one in 2024 and the other in 2023. collide the spaces that divide us was one of my earliest attempts at social media formatting, and one of the last books I ever made with my inkjet printer. I did end up fixing a few things on that one's typeset, but it's nearly identical to my first copy. You may also notice in the photos that I chopped off a bit too much off the edge--I didn't yet know how to use my guillotine, and in all the time that's passed since then, it's become defunct (sharp enough to cut off a hand, but not sharp enough to cut through a stack of paper lol)

It's neat to see such a clear example of how much I've improved as a bookbinder in a year and a half--my copy on the left, author's on the right:

Also, a comparison of color ink (left) vs color laser (right):

Like this, it's easy to see how much more vibrant color toner is than ink. Ink works much better for complex images, but since I don't print a lot of photos, but do make a lot of social media typesets, this works much much better for my purposes.

Soon after that, I bought a black-only laser printer and had a whole new set of challenges. It was in this era of printing that I made only fools rush in. It has one of my most complex title pages to date, as they're not really my forte.

Below are my copy, the title page, and an example of how I did texts in this particular typeset.

My copy has a cloth spine and a different cloth as the cover, with a strip from the endpapers to hide my sins act as a bridge between them. This is one of the binds from last Binderary that I'm most proud of.

The title page is in several different pieces--sort of jigsaw-puzzled together from vectors, Google Drawings, and a few different fonts.

Black-toner-only printing meant adjusting how I did social media formatting, and this is one of my favorite ways I solved that problem. I like the simple, almost minimalist formatting that sets the texts apart but doesn't steal the show.

I'd been meaning to offer author copies for these books for as long as I'd had them, but it's hard to understate how little I wanted to use my inkjet once I got a laser XD It's both slower and more expensive to use an inkjet, so as soon as I got my color laser printer set up, I sent the DM!

I organize my handbound fics by ship--that is, every ship has a set spine cloth and title color--so one of my favorite things about author copies is that I get to be a little more creative about covers!

[sayornispress]

they should invent a hobby that doesn't require potentially destroying your wrists

[sayornispress]

I first posted this in a thread over on BlueSky, but I decided to port (a slightly edited version of) it over here, too.

Entirely aside from the absurd and deeply incorrect idea [NaNoWriMo has posited] that machine-generated text and images are somehow "leveling the playing field" for marginalized groups, I think we need to interrogate the base assumption that acknowledging how people have different abilities is ableist/discriminatory. Everyone SHOULD have access to an equal playing field when it comes to housing, healthcare, the ability to exist in public spaces, participating in general public life, employment, etc.

That doesn't mean every person gets to achieve every dream no matter what.

I am 39 years old and I have scoliosis and genetically tight hamstrings, both of which deeply impact my mobility. I will never be a professional contortionist. If I found a robot made out of tentacles and made it do contortion and then demanded everyone call me a contortionist, I would be rightly laughed out of any contortion community. Also, to make it equivalent, the tentacle robot would be provided for "free" by a huge corporation based on stolen unpaid routines from actual contortionists, and using it would boil drinking water in the Southwest into nothingness every time I asked it to do anything, and the whole point would be to avoid paying actual contortionists.

If you cannot - fully CAN NOT - do something, even with accommodations, that does not make you worth less as a person, and it doesn't mean the accommodations shouldn't exist, but it does mean that maybe that thing is not for you.

But who CAN NOT do things are not who uses "AI." It's people who WILL NOT do things.

"AI art means disabled people can be artists who wouldn't be able to otherwise!" There are armless artists drawing with their feet. There are paralyzed artists drawing with their mouths, or with special tracking software that translates their eye movements into lines. There are deeply dyslexic authors writing via text-to-speech. There are deaf musicians. If you actually want to do a thing and care about doing the thing, you can almost always find a way to do the thing.

Telling a machine to do it for you isn't equalizing access for the marginalized. It's cheating. It's anti-labor. It makes it easier for corporations not to pay creative workers, AND THAT'S IS WHY THEY'RE PUSHING IT EVERYWHERE.

I can't wait for the bubble to burst on machine-generated everything, just like it did for NFTs. When it does some people are going to discover they didn't actually learn anything or develop any transferable skills or make anything they can be proud of.

I hope a few of those people pick up a pencil.

It's never too late to start creating. It's never too late to actually learn something. It's never too late to realize that the work is the point.

[sayornispress]

as a subtitler im incredibly biased as i say this but. shoutout to forms of fan labor other than fanart and fanfiction. fanart and fanfiction are awesome, don't take this as a dig at those, but i have a big appreciation for fans who provide closed captioning/subtitles/translations of works out of love n passion; fans who recap and explain aspects of the original work; fucking SPEEDRUNNERS, holy shit, shoutout to speedrunners and challenge runners in video game communities. lots of things that fall outside the scope of what comes to mind when people think of fanart/fan labor are integral parts of a healthy fan ecosystem

[sayornispress]

Guess who finally got off their butt!! Finished my copy today.

A fanbinding of Hawks and Hands by Dira Sudis @dsudis from AO3

This one ended up at almost 600 pages, set in EB Garamond! About 200k in total. It’s in the mail today, so I can post photos I’ve already shared with the author. Hopefully it will be delivered before Week 1 of @ds30below is done!

[sayornispress]

If You’ve A Ready Mind by maya

i have FINALLY finished the second copy for my shelf of this bind - the first was a gift for the lovely @finalfrontierpublishing - and I am absolutely ecstatic. I really try to prioritize binding fics for active authors when I’m binding an author gift, so binding a fic as a gift for a fellow fanbinder finally gave me the opportunity to bind this classic from the heady days of 2000s H/D fandom! Maya was my favorite author when I was first reading Drarry in like 2005, and so when she got a trad pub deal and pulled her fics (hence why there’s no link in the title!), I immediately downloaded the pdf she distributed and clung onto that baby like my life depended on it - across multiple computers and multiple timezones, I always return to that pdf whenever I needed a pick-me up. Every fic in there is absolute gold, but I have such a soft spot for If You've A Ready Mind.

If You’ve A Ready Mind is an AU with Draco sorted into Ravenclaw (hence the blue and bronze brocade), and it’s an absolute gorgeous mix of humor and heart-rending angst, as it’s slowly revealed which things change and which things stay the same. It’s populated by a stellar cast of seldom-seem characters (Anthony Goldstein has my whole heart in this fic) and is such a generous portrayal of how circumstances shape us.

I based (copied) the typeset choices of the first edition of Emma, because I wanted that classic Regency look & feel. This is also my first SPRINGBACK binding, which I am absolutely in love with. Some typeset details:

Next time, I will learn how not to have crinkly made endpapers, but I did get my best leather corners yet on this bind <3

AND A NEW BOOKSHELF!