#i have video proof of most of this

[princeloww]

Things David Tennant has done on The Last Leg in the last 20 mins

- gave a speech about hating "woke" as an insult

- sang a musical number as gwenyth paltrow (with a blonde wig) (click to watch)

- asked where Michael sheen came on the DILF list, and flexed that he came higher than him (and argued that having more kids should put him higher on the list) (click to see a gif set) (click here to see a video)

- wore a TRANS FLAG tardis pin

- very gently stroked a man's mullet (click to watch)

- insulted some politicians

[killjoy-prince]

House M.D. but it's when a character says the name of the episode

[watchyourbuck]

After watching ep 1 of 911 s7, I was left with this kinda… ig weird (?) feeling about the Chris and Buck conversation. Not only bc I never imagined Chris to be a player (that was my sweet lil boy😭), but because to me it felt like,,,, really uncomfortable and SO different from their usual conversations and dynamic.

But THEN I realized why.

This is the first time that Eddie recurs to Buck for an actual coparenting feat that doesn’t involve physically saving somebody from like,,,, horrifying situations (tsunami, the shooting, the meltdown). When in the interviews they said Buck and Eddie were getting closer than ever this season,,,,, 👁️ I can’t keep Buddie-speculating cuz we’ll see, but this- this is real u guys.

Don’t get me wrong, Buck’s always been a coparent (cough cough, the will). Besides the previously listed Disasters™️, he makes sure the kid eats, goes to school, is safe, is warm, listens to his dad, etc. NOW? Now he’s in charge of a really delicate situation, and that’s b o u n d to be uncomfortable,,,, like tell me ONE parent who’s ready or excited to have this kind of talk with his kids???

Yall know what this means right ????? Actual parent!Buck (<33) who Eddie actually leans on for you guessed it,,,, coparenting.

[vampiremansionpoolboy-moved]

going insane over the fact that happiness and care and concern and love is underneath every interaction between newt and hermann in pacific rim

[tinylittlebab]

ill be skinny. it will happen. ive been trying for so long now. once it was just trying to eat less and be smaller but not much real focus on my physical appearance. now its all about that. 11 years of my ed and 7 years of wanting what i want now. i dont live with my parents anymore. i have more control. i will achieve it.

there was a time where id eat 300-700 consistently. ill get that back. i will.

[arcaneyouth]

fnaf fans are always like 2 steps away from having reading comprehension but always miss the landing

[steampunk-raven]

spider in room but everyone else is asleep so no one can help me :/ panic time i guess lol

[constantvariations]

Not me forgetting the Unicorn of War video on the White Fang 🙃🙃🙃

[tomwambsgans]

i'm just gonna say it. on the app that could reasonably be called Misinformation: The Website, where you have no good reason to believe almost anything that anyone says, where people are known to play genuine fucked up long cons where they go so far as to fake a disability, or stage scenes of verbal/emotional abuse with their partners, or make some other incredibly serious claim only to eventually come out and admit that they lied or faked it to be *interesting* or whatever... i think it's wise to take the anecdote of a single random person with a grain of salt

[thiefking]

ever since that post blew up i have been more and more tempted to make a full video essay discussing it because when i wrote it it was a one-off personal post that i was NOT expecting to get any notes at all but given that it did indeed explode and not only that i've found an overwhelming amount of agreement in the tags i feel like i should expound upon it. address a few more things make some better clearer points (eg, yes, tiktok and twitter have character limits. you aren't only allowed to make one comment or one tweet ever though. you can make multiple. you can have more. than one. also if you use enough characters that you seriously have no room to write anything more than /gen or /srs or whatever... is your tone not already clear by virtue of you using all the characters? your tone should be clear if you've used all of them especially on twitter. if your message is like 4 words long, as is the case with many tweets and comments i see tone tags added to, then you have MORE than enough space to simply type the full word) (also yes it's faster to type a two character tone tag than a full word. but we've been over this. these are an inconvenience you are willingly subjecting yourself to in order to be clearer in your tone and intent online for the sake of other people, or at least that SHOULD be your intent. come on now.......)

[chrisbangs]

so much of the songs i'm listening to rn are bc i cannot stop watching last life / hermitcraft animations 😭

[abba-enthusiast]

Instagram keeps recommending me reels by harry styles stans and every time i watch one i lose 5 years of my life. Aren’t you guys embarrassed to put your face on the internet and say shit like he’s going to be our generation’s Elvis or pretend to cry because of a quote he never said? 😭

[cy-cyborg]

Please stop using disabilities you don't have as comparisons.

I saw a video trying to explain that autistic people don't make eye contact because it can be painful for them (good, this is true) and telling them to "just do it anyway" is ridiculous, saying "you wouldn't tell a wheelchair user to "just walk, its better for you" so don't tell autistic people to just make eye contact".

But people do. They do all the time. It's well documented that doctors will withhold their ok for patients to get a wheelchair (which is needed unless you're paying out of pocket, because insurance and most public disability services like the NDIS need proof from a doctor). I've known people who can hardly walk and are having to fight because the doctor still insists it better for them to walk, even if it's painful and sevearly limiting their quality of life.

Then in the comments, someone pointed out that people do say that to wheelchair users (good, this is true) but then continued on by saying "unless you just don't have legs" which is just as bad as the origonal.

I had to fight to get my first wheelchair as a double leg amputee, and every wheelchair since then I've had to justify not wanting the "better option" (prosthetics) to the government so they'll approve me for the funding. Doctors and even strangers too, all want to know why I'm not walking, why I'm not using prosthetics all the time. When I go on trips with my family I'm told to "just walk" so they don't have to pack my wheelchair. at my own graduation from university I was chastised by the organisers for not bringing my prosthetics (because wearing them was exceptionally painful back then and i hadnt worn them in nearly 3 months. I had asked before if this would be ok. they knew) because the venue was accessible but not the part of the venue the graduates were in. On the topic of university they also put my class in the only non-wheelchair accessible room and held meetings i was expected to take part in, in the non-accessible lunch room. When I complained, I was told to just use my legs for a few minutes so I could get into my classes. Being an amputee with no legs didn't shield me from these experiences either, it often made it worse.

I have all 3 of the disabilities mentioned (autistic, wheelchair user, amputee). If you don't have the disability you're using for a comparison, don't use it. Please

[hoodienanami]

im a big fan of sources and citations. theyre very easy to include and theres no reason not to so whenever someone doesnt include any in their posts i automatically assume theyre lying

[werehamburglar]

tbh. it's probably not great that the few moments i remember from this week are (1) putting my head down some time around slime time, (2) biting my arm on monday, and (3) choking on meat on last night

[echoekhi]

I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

------

See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/