10 People I’d Like To Know Better

Watercolour A5 painting of Neil Josten and his feature in Exy Pro magazine.

There’s some mistakes but I think I managed to smooth them over.

Made for a friend’s birthday.

Hope all you Andreil lovers enjoy.

Hello. I’ve created a discord server for MXTX novels discussions as I miss talking about them. Feel free to join here if you’re over 17. https://discord.gg/v7d6GFb5

Rewatching SHL episode 3 and Wen Kexing really out here auditioning for Jianghu’s Top Stalker.

Swinging between moods like a cat in a ball pit.

10/10 for commitment king. 0/10 for mental health.

Listening to Nirvana and it reminds me of Batman (thanks Patterson) and I just got a thought. Is I just me or would Tim drake have the best Kurt Cobain voice?

Like Tim can’t sing at all until nirvana comes on and it just fits his voice. Jason would both love and hate it. Dick would pray for Tim to stop quoting random lyrics at him (it sounds like gibberish until they recognise the song). Damien doesn’t get it. And Bruce is a proud dad.

Monday Fic Recs

Wei Wuxian/Lan Wangji (The Untamed/Mo Dao Zu Shi)

puzzle pieces by yuisaki

“Sorry, I, uh. Laundry day caught up to me before I could catch up with it. I saw this shirt left in the washer a few days ago, and—“ Wei Ying blinks up at Lan Zhan through dark eyelashes that he wants to kiss, maybe, and gives him an uncharacteristically hesitant smile. “Do you mind?”

I mind the fact that we are not married, Lan Zhan thinks.

Wei Ying keeps borrowing Lan Zhan’s clothes. It is only mildly driving him insane.

This is absolutely hilarious. Lan Wangji’s inner monologue is delightful. I love fics that are written from his perspective

Attempting the Impossible by ariaste

Jiang Cheng gathers up his determination in both hands and goes to the Cloud Recesses to embark on one of the most difficult endeavors he can imagine: Repairing his relationship with his brother.

To his surprise, he discovers he’s become an uncle again… several times over.

Wei Wuxian, what the fuck?!

I always enjoy fics where Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng reconcile post-canon and this is wonderful. The author writes their relationship perfectly.

tame by rikke

After the Xuanwu Cave incident, Wei Wuxian wakes up back in Lotus Pier with one hand clutching Lan Wangji and the other hand clutching…an egg?

in which wwx and lwj accidentally hatch a baby xuanwu

This sounds like total crack but it actually isn’t. I mean it is a bit but everyone is perfectly in character and it’s amazing how the presence of a baby xuanwu changes everything for the better. 

I Have Saved All My Ribbons For Thee by damnslippyplanet

Lan Zhan’s fingers feel nice, and so does the comb he extracted from some mysterious pocket where he keeps spiritual weaponry and extra talismans and lubricating oil and snacks for children, rabbits, and Wei Ying. He starts with his fingers, running them through Wei Ying’s hair gently from his scalp all the way to the ends, loosening up the big snarls from where Wei Ying was too hasty. To jump ahead to the fucking. Which is not happening right now, because Wei Ying’s life is very difficult and trying and his husband loves him too much.

A lovely, tender bit of hair brushing

Zhao Yunlan/Shen Wei (Guardian)

Rich in Heart by tethysian

It’s not that Shen Wei wants Zhao Yunlan to be exhausted after a long day at work, he just capitalizes on the opportunity when he is.

I really love it when Shen Wei just takes care of Zhao Yunlan and this is a perfect example of it.

Like you’re running out of time by frith_in_thorns

Zhao Yunlan is stuck in a time loop. Shen Wei is stuck on the outside.

I love anything to do with time loops. It’s such an interesting concept. This is a wonderful fic that actually looks at the emotional impact something like this would have

Please refer to the list of ingredients by frith_in_thorns

Jiajia, Professor Shen’s newest grad student, is nervous at her first faculty-and-guests function at the university. But really, what could go wrong?

I wish there were more fics about Shen Wei getting drunk. This one is adorable

Come as you aren’t by frith_in_thorns

It was a very polite kidnapping.

Yeah, I love this author’s fic, hence all the recs. This is a really fun one where Zhao Yunlan goes to extreme lengths to protect Shen Wei’s identity. 

When it snows in summer by yantantether

In Zhao Yunlan’s apartment, Shen Wei ushered him to the couch and stood over him as he slumped down. Zhao Yunlan threw his head back with a groan, exposing the line of his throat broken by the bulge of his Adam’s apple. Looking up through half-closed eyes, he said, “Well, doc? What are you going to do with me now?”

Another lovely bit of hurt/comfort. This fandom writes it so well!

Revival by qikiqtarjuaq

Not everyone gets a second chance at a new beginning.

Hurt/comfort combined with flashbacks to ye olde dixing era. My two favourite things in one lovely fic. 

Threads Pulled Tight by frith_in_thorns

Zhao Yunlan started zoning out a little. That sense — that awareness of Shen Wei was returning gradually. Wispy tendrils of emotion — fear, where, hurt — and though Zhao Yunlan was trying to organise his plan he still found himself at intervals leaning forward and pressing his knuckles into his closed eyes and trying to project as loudly as he could. Shen Wei, I’m coming for you. Don’t give up.

A wonderful psychic bond fic

All the Boundaries Between by frith_in_thorns

In Dixing, expecting to have died after lighting the Lantern, Zhao Yunlan wakes up.

This is exactly the post-canon fix-it fic I needed!

Discidium, Reparandam by galaxysoup

The corner of Professor Shen’s mouth tightens slightly in the specific way that means he’s embarrassed but too reserved to show it, but it does put a halt to his efforts to make sure Zhao Yunlan has his gun, a backup gun, a warm enough jacket, a snack, and a willingness to preserve himself in the face of danger.

Considering the two main characters spend most of this fic separated it’s still amazingly sweet and romantic and gave me all of the feelings. 

Bai Yutong/Zhan Yao (SCI Mystery)

Yes, I am apparently doing multiple fandoms at the same time now. 

jealous of the wind by sarahyyy

“Cut me some slack,” Zhan Yao says, grinning. “I’m just curious. How often is it we get to see an immortal being?”

“If you leave me for Shen Wei, I will literally die,” Yutong grits out. He makes his way to Zhan Yao, and then tackles him to the couch, pressing his face to the crook of Zhan Yao’s neck. “You’re mine, mine, mine.”

(Or, the Guardian/SCI crossover ft. Jealous Boyfriends that no-one asked for.)

This is so much fun and was a great introduction to SCI fic 

now a soft kiss by sarahyyy

He really needs to be given a sainthood after he dies. Saint Bai Yutong — patron saint of criminal psychologists who can’t look after themselves. That has a ring to it.

Kissing out of necessity leads to feelings. I love it. 

Jack/Zhao Zi (History 3: Trapped)

Reliably out of order by weilongfu

Ever since meeting the cute and intriguing IT tech Zhao Zi, Jack’s computer has been reliably on the fritz in time for Zhao Zi to come fix it and have lunch with him. Once a week. Every week.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this situation and no ulterior motives what so ever.

I honestly wasn’t interested in looking for fics for this show, because the show itself gave me everything I wanted. But someone recced this AU to me and it is SO ADORABLE

“Dude! Asgard definetly accepts LGBTQ+. They have a rainbow bridge!”

An debate between me and friends. Couldn’t argue against that.

what the fuck is "dark academia" isnt real academia dark enough do you know what some of these fuckers woudl do for funding

I seriously think RaySand Switch. They do to much pushing and pulling in their normal relationship not to do so.

An artist in Baltimore wrote names of fatal victims of the police force along the sidewalk. 

She began with victims killed on May 1st of 2013 and wrote every name that was recorded until the present day.

Names stretched from Penn Station to a George Washington monument in the middle of the city, which is nearly a mile in distance.

Source

#RIP to the lost ones by police brutality.

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 on 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 listed. 

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.