storiansmane

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[storiansmane]

Episode 1: "The Invisible Trail", Part 1

Episode content warnings: mention of superiority complex (in an antagonist) and self-experimentation

Reports had flooded the news for the past couple weeks. Londoners were coming home, inexplicably shaken and speaking of an "invisible figure". Some recounted being shoved on the ground, others heard a deep, malicious laugh coming from an unseen source. It was only a matter of time before the news reached the Society. And reach them it did.

Nellie Lovett had been sent to gather information, specifically at the Beating Heart Pub. It used to be her relocated pie shop, but she'd since sold it to a couple she knew well. The pub was alive with a nervous, frightened energy among most of the patrons, retelling their personal encounters with whatever was plaguing London. An old man's tools vanishing from his shed, only to be found in the most improbable places. A flower girl having her basket seemingly float, before it got chucked right at her. Amidst the combined scents of food, alcohol, and bark chips, Nellie kept her focus. Something was telling her these weren't merely drunken ramblings, or any sort of hysteria. The way these stories were told, the genuine fear she heard in the patrons' voices, it couldn't be imagined. Not with this many people. With a silent nod towards one of the pub owners, she slipped out into the night.

Her heeled boots gently clicked on the concrete, as she made her way home to the estate. It wasn't too far from the Beating Heart, thankfully, about ten minutes from each other on foot. Nellie couldn't help but notice just how... empty the streets were, which was odd at this hour. It wasn't even 10pm yet. The sight sent a small chill down her spine, as she instinctively clutched the maroon-colored shawl around her shoulders tighter than before.

As soon as Nellie was back in the estate, she was immediately greeted by both Jonathan Harker and Dr. Henry Jekyll. The two men had been intensely focused on the news, with Jonathan trying to make sense of it and Jekyll already having a prime suspect in mind.

"Nellie," Jekyll began, standing up from his seat in the living room, "did you find anything pointing us in the right direction?" His clear, baritone-ranged voice was mostly calm, but an underlying sense of apprehensive tension underscored his tone.

"I remember hearing some people had caught sight of the bugger. Or, well. What he was wearing," Nellie answered, gently nodding her head. "Something about a trenchcoat and glasses, but nothing else I could make out." As Nellie hung up her shawl on the coat rack near the door, Jekyll's memory started going. He put a gloved hand to his chin, his gaze intensifying as he racked his memory for anyone matching the description.

"Griffin." Jekyll's sudden answer was accompanied by a vocal shift, a hint of annoyance coming through now. Nellie and Jonathan exchanged strange looks, with the exact same question. Who the hell was "Griffin"? Jekyll, sensing their confusion, then called for a Society briefing.

Now that everyone had gathered in the drawing room, decorated by various portraits and elaborate furniture scattered around, Jonathan was the first to speak up.

"Dr. Jekyll, you mentioned the name 'Griffin'. Who is he?" Jonathan, sitting beside his love Mina, raised an eyebrow at the doctor. Van Helsing, the other head of the Society sitting across from the Harkers, froze for a moment. He knew the name.

"Claude Griffin was...," Jekyll sighed out, "he was an old colleague of mine in my university days. Brilliant man, don't get me wrong. But he was very much not of sound mind. Griffin had delusions of grandiosity, that he was superior. And when I graduated and he didn't, that set him off on the path he's followed to this day."

Jekyll's words made Victoria, who was now listening intently after being dragged away from her work, visibly flinch. It reminded her of how she let her own pride and ambition cloud her judgement in her own college days, back when she had initially made Ada and brought her to life. She had left those actions behind her, but it still stung.

"... and?" Nellie folded her arms, leaning forward where she was sitting. She wanted to know what happened after the graduation.

Jekyll nodded gently, continuing his explanation. "He made a concoction, one that, if it worked, would allow him to get away with anything he wanted." Jekyll winced at his own words, the memory of his own self-experimentation coming to mind. "And as you all know from the recent reports... it did."

[storiansmane]

Add realism to your fantasy stories by having characters from different backgrounds struggle to pronounce each others' names.

"My name is [low guttural sound] but I don't want to hear you butcher it. So you may call me She Who Arises With The Cold Mountain Sun."

"...Is that what your name really means? All that in just one word?"

"Yes. If you stress the wrong syllable it comes out as 'She Who Coldly Wakes Up The Mountain Sun', or 'The Cold Woman Who Wakes The Mountain Sun', and you will not call me that."

"Oh, huh. Could we just call you Mountain Sun, for short?"

"Hmh. It's boastful, almost bordering on blasphemy, but it is flattering. I accept it."

[storiansmane]

You should only write in present tense with extreme caution.

not because it's bad or anything but because if you do it even once you're going to be editing the bits where you shifted tenses out of your writing for the rest of your life

[storiansmane]

been stewing on an analytical approach to fiction which I call "is this book afraid of me?" and in order to answer this question you determine how hard the book is trying to make sure you don't come after the writer on twitter

[storiansmane]

yeah golden retreiver boyfriends are great and I've met several personally, but personally I have a house cat boyfriend

extremely affectionate despite of seeming aloof and politely distant to unfamiliar people

my friends have seen him irl less than 5 times in the five years I've had him - if I invited people over he would hide under furniture until they're gone

haha you got up from your work desk, time for unskippable 35 minutes of kisses and cuddles

can and will throw up out of sheer anxiety because Things And Events Are Happening that do not even involve him in any way

can instinctively sense exactly when I am going to decide I'm done bedrotting and will climb on top of me to cuddle exactly 3 minutes before I was just about to get up

can be placed sideways on any soft surface at any time of the day and immediately takes a five hour nap

cannot eat or drink in unfamilair places. can and will go 16 hours without food or water if the situation is uncomfy.

unhelpful but valiant efforts to try to protect and rescue you from things and situations that he would personally hate being in, out of not understanding of Why Are You In There Voluntarily

will come show me incomprehensible memes the same way a cat will bring you a random bug. thank you. I do not understand it but I know you brought it to me because you love me.

[storiansmane]

i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point

[storiansmane]

trying to explain to normal real life people that in fanfic world it is a genuine, unselfish kindness to write your friend’s favorite fucked up kink into a story

[storiansmane]

died and came back exactly the same but something was so so so wrong with me before and now I have an excuse to really lean into it

[storiansmane]

I heart prey animal rage I love when characters are fucking insane with terror

[storiansmane]

too many stories about turning yourself into a monster as a metaphor for pretending to be something you aren't and losing yourself in the process. not enough stories about turning yourself into a monster as a metaphor for choosing to openly embrace yourself even if it's strange to other people

[storiansmane]

I just found the funniest font ever

Like. What is this. Why is this. Who is the target audience of this?

[storiansmane]

One of the easiest ways to understand the fact that Will was always a killer-in-waiting is to look at some of the most well-known themes of the show. What does Will love most about Hannibal? The fact that Hannibal saw, understood & never judged him, no matter how deadly & dangerous he was, no matter how wicked his thoughts were.

If Will didn’t actually feel all the things that Hannibal called him out for feeling or want the things that Hannibal pointed out he wanted, then Hannibal wouldn’t have been the only person to truly understand him, since he’d have been wrong in his assessments of Will. But he wasn’t wrong, which is why it meant so much to Will that Hannibal could see all of that in him but didn’t turn away or judge him.

One of the big things that upset Will when he learned the truth about Hannibal was the fact that he was faced with one of the main reasons they understood each other so well: they were both violent, dangerous people. Hannibal understood him because he’s felt those same things & had those same urges, and he’s a vicious killer. Ergo, SO IS WILL! That’s a big part of what led to Will lashing out hard at Hannibal, but never actually hating him or wanting him dead.

Will tied his own inner monster up so tightly with Hannibal’s so that he could give his conscious mind distance from that part of himself. By lashing out at Hannibal, he could lash out at himself. It’s where the whole “needing to kill Hannibal so he doesn’t become him” foolishness originated. Since those two things were so inextricably linked in Will’s mind, he’d convinced himself he could kill it if he killed Hannibal. (Chiyoh was so real for calling him out about that, btw.)

It’s also really ironic that Hannibal’s foolish, fucked up experiments with Will in S1 to speedrun his transformation actually ended up delaying it. Will suddenly had another shield to hide behind to tell himself “It’s not me, it’s Hannibal. If I kill Hannibal, I can kill that part of myself.” Poetic irony at its finest! I could do another whole post just about this.

But back to the point at hand, if Hannibal hadn’t been correct when he called out all the violent & dangerous things he saw inside of Will, he certainly wouldn’t have considered Hannibal the only person who truly understood him. He’d have been creeped out & wouldn’t have had any trouble at all either killing him “in the name of justice” or getting him arrested.

It was very deliberate that Will’s conflict about accepting Hannibal was intertwined with his conflict about accepting himself. He couldn’t do one without the other. It would’ve been a lot easier for Will to just accept that he’d fallen in love with a murderer & didn’t want to let him go. But Hannibal’s monster is so similar to his own that he couldn’t possibly only accept Hannibal for who he was. Accepting Hannibal was the same thing as accepting himself, which is why he fought so hard against it for so long.

[storiansmane]

Love that Nick was like “yeah none of this mattered to me in the summer of 1922……..I just worked and spent time with Jordan………I didnt care about Jay Gatsby……….” And then proceeds to give us explicit timelines where he could not possibly have been working full time, admits he lost track of Jordan for much of the summer, and lets on that he and Jay spent so much time together that he started having to do welfare checks if Jay didn’t come over or call him.

Like, okay, Mr. Honest. You only care in retrospect. Mhm. Sure

[storiansmane]

YALL. Holly Black has a list of resources she's used for writing her books on the fair folk. I'm OBSESSED. I love her work and world building. it's so true to the heart of faeries

[storiansmane]

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.

[storiansmane]

The point of fiction is actually to put that guy in a situation™️, and he might try to tell you the point is to then get him out of the situation, WRONG, second situation