#and independence

[planetcleer]

eddie kaspbrak loves cooking shows. like, he loves them. the food network is his favorite channel, and he watches everything from diners drives ins & dives to good eats to the pioneer woman, not to mention all the different cooking & baking competitions (gbbo is, ofc, his favorite) that crop up every year. eddie kaspbrak loves cooking shows, but eddie kaspbrak doesn’t know how to cook. it’s hilarious! it’s hysterical, even! because sure, for that brief period in college between sonia & myra, he learned some basics, like toast and grilled cheese and scrambled eggs, but for all he watches he’s pretty clueless in the kitchen. ask him to roast potatoes or make a soup from scratch and watch him flounder. he’s never had to do anything like that himself before, you know. he’s never been allowed to.

and it sucks, it does, because food is a form of love. and he knows that because, while he doesn’t have many memories of his dad, almost all of the ones he does have revolve around food. frank kaspbrak loved cooking. he loved best cooking polish recipes from his youth, stuffed cabbage and haluski (eddie’s favorite) and pierogis and chalka bread (eddie’s second favorite) and borscht, and eddie loved to watch. frank would hold eddie on his hip and let him see it all, even let him help sometimes, and when eddie got a little too big to be held, frank would drag a chair in from the dining room to the stove and hoist him onto it so he could stand and watch every step. while he chopped vegetables or showed eddie how to bread pork or worked on dough, frank would tell stories about his childhood, and how he learned to cook from his mother and his grandmother, and how he would cook with eddie until the recipes were all stuck in his head like they were stuck in how own, because they had never been written down before, and it made eddie feel close to him, made him giggle to think about his big strong dad being small and standing on a chair and watching just like him.

frank kaspbrak loved cooking, and then he got sick. very sick. the last memory eddie has of his dad is curling up with him in his hospital bed and listening to him whisper-rasp promises, with what was left of his ravaged lungs, of fresh chalka and pączki and haluski and potato pancakes once he got better. the trouble was that he never did.

lots of things changed after he was gone. eddie learned quickly that his dad hadn’t lied—none of his family’s recipes had ever been written down. he also learned that hospital food was not love, and neither was takeout, but that even though it was different, his mother’s cooking was, and even more so, over time she taught him that not letting him too close to the hot stove or sharp knives was love, too. cooking for him and not with him was love, keeping track of his allergies was love, teaching him to fear food that wasn’t good for him was love, because taking care of him was love.

myra seemed to know those things inherently, and when he married her, she showed him that she loved him in the same ways. she looked after him, she cooked for him, she made sure he stayed away from too much sodium and sugar and butter, she protected him from everything including himself.

and all the while, eddie kaspbrak loved cooking shows. well, he loves cooking shows. in the hospital, after pennywise, he watches a lot, and he learns, but not how to baste a turkey or throw together a corn salad. no, he learns that actually, takeout can be love when your friends sneak it into your hospital room to cheer you up, and yeah, okay, maybe hospital food can be love, too, when you have someone who will make you laugh about it or split your jell-o with.

he divorces myra once he’s out. his friends support him, and richie is quick to offer his home for eddie to stay while he gets back on his feet. eddie is just as quick to accept. they’ve always been best friends, haven’t they? he moves in more than he crashes. it sort of feels like they’re kids again. and, you know, richie tozier loves cooking. for the first time in thirty five years, eddie feels compelled to watch, and so most nights he perches on the other side of the island while richie pretends to be on a cooking show, just for him. it’s a fucking riot! but it’s something else, too. it’s special, because they laugh, and they talk about anything and everything and nothing, and they share their meals together every night, and it makes eddie feel close to him.

eventually, richie starts to involve eddie, calling him his lovely assistant, or his little sous chef. he walks eddie through the best way to cut up potatoes, or how to do a dry rub, or how to make an egg wash. eventually, he has eddie start sautéing the onions, or dredge and bread the pork chops, or throw together a fucking roux all on his own, without having to be shown. eventually, he starts to ask what eddie wants him to do, just as much as the reverse, and renames their imaginary cooking show after them both.

one year to the day after eddie moves in, richie shows him recipes he found online for chalka bread and some cabbage and noodle dish, i think it’s called haluski or something? whatcha think, chef k? eddie knows that richie knows exactly what haluski is. richie’s already gone and bought all the ingredients for both, and so they make them for dinner that night. richie lets eddie take the lead, and later he reaches across the table to hold his hand when eddie starts crying after the first bite. it tastes just like his father’s recipe, you know. it tastes like love and comfort and home. they wash up together after dinner, eddie scrubbing and richie drying as he yaps on in one of his voices, and eddie has to stop right in the middle of it to grab richie’s face with his soapy hands and kiss him. the rest of the dishes are left forgotten until the morning.

so yeah, eddie kaspbrak loves cooking shows, and he loves cooking, and holy shit, he loves richie tozier, too.

[greyeyedmonster-18]

(conversations with friends about high yield savings accounts and ROTH IRAs recently, because were OLD and financial independence is truly one of lifes greatest privileges, especially as a woman, and i never take that for granted ever. ever ever ever ever ever.

literally i am the only woman in my family who has their own bank account. who has ever been able to live alone without a partner or without a roommate. and paige desorbo when she said “and i knew from the moment it happened to me that i would never let anyone tell what i am going to do and in terms of money. i was always going to have my own bank account. if i wanted to go somewhere i would go and if i wanted to leave somewhere i would leave” facts.)

[ekingston]

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.

PLEASE check my later versions of this post via my main page to make sure you have the latest version of this post before you reblog. All the information I’ve been able to gather is in my reblogs below, and it's frustrating to see the old version getting passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.

Thank you all so much!

[xcziel]

link: https://bsky.app/profile/brainvsbook.bsky.social/post/3llc72lyhu22j

google translate defaulting to chinese at first

okay but for those of us with interests in both the murderbot and the daomu biji fandoms this is kinda hilarious

(english-side-only really, i get that the kanji and hanzi are completely different)

our good (air)ship murderbot! thanks google

[soranatus]

JUDAS ISCARIOT | Official Trailer

Judas Iscariot is an animated retelling of The New Testament of the Holy Bible, featuring details from the Apocrypha (The "Unofficial" Gospels) with a fresh stylized reinterpretation of the story's core figures. The goal of this project is to illuminate this text for both a religious and non-religious audience, placing it back into the historical context of Jesus’s role as a political figure during the Roman occupation of Judea. This film explores mature themes pertaining to love, devotion, and control. The film is expected to be 15-20 minutes long, depending on how much can be raised with the kickstarter campaign. It is expected to take 1-2 years to finish writing, storyboarding, animating, and painting assets for this project, with an additional period of time devoted to film festival screenings before it is ready for the public.  Judas Iscariot will be the second short film written and directed by Charles Kugler, who has worked in the animation industry for clients like Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, and FOX. 

Kickstarter campaign link:

[ionomycin]

my favorite pieces from 2024

[wishfulsketching]

This is what the dynamic was like

[archivlibrarianist]

This is huge: You can now buy ebooks from Bookshop.org, a website that helps boost sales to local independent bookshops!

To read an ebook purchased from Bookshop.org, you must use their own app (for a mobile device) or read it in a web browser. So, unfortunately, you can't (yet) send it to your ereader, but still, you're able to buy ebooks and also share a little bit of that profit with your local bookstore, if they're an affiliate!

[val-of-the-north]

His greed sickens me.

[majaurukalo]

Disability benefits shouldn’t be tied to the income of a disabled person’s partner/spouse/parent.

Do you hear me?

DISABILITY BENEFITS SHOULDN’T BE TIED TO THE INCOME OF A DISABLED PERSON’S PARTNER/SPOUSE/PARENT.

This is the straight forward way to deprive a disabled person of their financial freedom and independence and trap them into possible abusive relationships.

[heavenbarnes]

thinking about your older bf!simon that cannot cope with being far from you.

when you’re in the shower, he’s sat on the lid of the toilet on his phone (watching those rug cleaning videos) enjoying your faint singing under the stream of water, the smell of your body wash on the cloud of steam- ready to pass you a towel or get your back.

when you’re at your desk, working from home or studying, he’s just on the other side of it reading the paper with one outstretched leg tangled with both of yours. he’s dead quiet when you’re on a call, just happy to be around.

when you’re doing laundry, collecting the clothes in the hamper and crouching to stuff them into the washer- turning around and accidentally colliding with a thick wall of muscle.

“sorry, love”

he steps aside but you can hear his soft footfalls as he continues to follow you throughout your home.

when you’re both watching something on the couch, what starts as his pinky locked with yours turns into his arm around your waist. that turns into your head on his chest, which culminates with you falling asleep in his lap with his cheek on your head and soft snores emanating from his lips.

when you grocery shop, you push the trolley but his chest is to your back, arms either side of you and hands clasped over yours on the handle. you can thank his military training for his uncanny ability to tell exactly when you’ll stop walking.

when he wakes up in the middle of the night, on a rare occasion when you’ve managed to slip out of bed without him realising, he’s immediately in a panic calling your name.

“in here, my love”

as soon as his heart settles, he realises the bathroom light was probably a dead giveaway. you’re taking a wee, you’ll be back in a minute.

that doesn’t stop a sleepy simon from leaning in the doorframe, shielding his eyes from the big light as he waits for you to finish up.

even on the short walk back to bed, you can feel fingers twisted in the back of your shirt- almost like you’re leading the way.

minute you’re both on the mattress, you’re being wrapped up in his arms, slotting you perfectly into the curve of his front- almost like you’re made for him.

(and you are)

[supine-ly]

ik a lot of ppl say that Hsy is usually the one w the brain cells when this trio unites, but I genuinely feel like 9 times out of 10 yjh is the one retaining the collective common sense of their group

[ohcorny]

it's independent bookstore day! and incidentally amazon has put on a book sale on the same day, because they're undercutting scum! don't give them any of your money!

support you local bookstore in person, or find one on bookshop.org and buy through them! maybe even consider getting my book through bookshop. it's good!

(sorry wick for making you the strawman)

[eriochromatic]

I rose too high, loved too hard, dared too much. I tried to grasp a star, overreached, and fell.

some last fleeting thoughts on an independent zaun

(original quote from asoiaf)

[cockadoodlebumtits]

So if you're in the UK you have probably heard about the proposed changes to disability benefits. If not, here is a BBC News article (link) about it, and the Big Issue (link) have been running basically non-stop articles about it since the announcement.

Crucially, the government is holding a consultation. Will as many of us as possible weighing in change the outcome? Possibly, though it's far from guaranteed. Will not filling it in help the situation in the slightest? No. So let's all have a go.

You can find the full Green Paper here: (link) and the options to respond are at the bottom of it, including the link to respond online, which is also here: (link)

It's also always worth contacting your MP to let them know what you think, if only to get a response on fancy Commons stationery. You can find your MP here: (link)

So, have at it, UK folks! (These proposals don't apply to Northern Ireland as benefits are transferred, but they are still taking NI comments and sharing them with the Department for Communities, so you may be able to influence whether this approach is taken up in NI in future, too)

And if nothing else, please reblog!