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mortallydarkbird · 11 hours ago

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(tags from Myeba/prev ↑)

Yeah...

Some of these guys did not cooperate very well

Afterdust Character Info!!

This post is for appearances (outfits), personalities, and other basic info about the characters in Afterdust! Remember, if you do have any questions or are curious about certain things, send an ask! I'll happily answer. Fanart is always welcome!

The info slowly gets shorter... I'll update swap when I come up with his outfit lmao

Nekros -

Appearance: Nekros looks almost identical to the typical Geno. With a few changes of course. He wears a white jacket with a grey hood, a dark grey turtle neck, the typical red scarf, the classic sans shorts, and some grey boots. His left eye is covered by white glitches as per usual. He has the bloody slash going diagonally across his chest, with the top on the right. He has the usual Dust eyelight for his visible eyelight. (Art post will come later)

Nekros is standoffish, cautious of others. He's paranoid, often snapping at others despite them not having done anything. He experiences auditorial and visual hallucinations which increases his paranoia. Even without the paranoia, he's constantly on edge. The DT and LV mixing together to give him a hell of an adrenaline boost. He's also lowkey insane due to how many resets he's been through and how many times he's had to kill his loved ones. He's also not doing so great from watching his loved ones live through pacifist timelines without him (still deciding whether to have the whole soul splitting and making a new Sans thing happen or not..). When he gets out of the save screen, he often gets sensory overload due to how used to the save screen he is. No noise other than himself (and Reaper), no colors other than the few included in the save screen.

Flare -

Appearance: Flare looks like your typical Error sans, with a few changes of course. He has patches (colored mostly dark purple and dark grey) all over his clothes, along with stitches of various shades of purple. Instead of the blue markings, he has purple markings (you can probably guess that his strings are also purple). The yellow of his left eyelight is instead purple. He wears his scarf as a sort of hood. (His appearance is also linked in the pinned post!)

Flare, unlike Nekros, is highkey insane! He has lots of LV and it affects him very negatively. His hallucinations and paranoia are increased by tenfold. His haphephobia is also worse, leading him to attack long range. He crashes immediately upon someone touching him. He has a whole bunch of trust issues, he refuses to work with anyone unless he absolutely has to (this is also the reason he's not working with Nightmare). He is protective of the more violent and darker AUs, feeling a sort of kinship with them, though he doesn't know why. He'll occasionally have some moments where he's more calm and he's more willing to be around people. But those are very rare. He only really tolerates being around a few people, such as Outer and Swap. He despises both Ink and Fresh.

Nightmare -

Appearance: Nightmare wears a dark teal high neck shirt. The stomach area of the shirt has a corset esque design, with a flower pattern embroidered into it. The sleeves of the shirt are loose and somewhat baggy, only to tighten at the wrist and flare out at the end. He wears a long dark purple cloak with a moon clasp. The inside of the cloak has gold star patterns (constellations is probably the right word to use). He wears black pants that have many pockets sewn into them and black combat boots.

Nightmare is very awkward around people, and very blunt. He doesn't like to sugarcoat things, even if it does make people upset. Despite being an empath, he often struggles to comprehend emotions. He cares a lot for his gang and makes sure they all get therapy and take care of themselves. He feela regret for being too late to save someone from their fate. He hopes to one day be able to help Flare out, though he knows it will not happen anytime soon. He enjoys reading ofc, but also likes participating in everyone else's hobbies, even if he isn't the best at them.

Killer -

Appearance: Basic Killer appearance, HOWEVER!! This man has pins all over his jacket, he likes to collect them. He also has some of those little iron on patches. Like you get in girl scouts. His hood has cat ears on it :). He wears high top tennis shoes, like vans or smth, and refuses to unite them to put them on. He will just slip them on

Killer is a menace to the multiverse, he messes with anyone and everyone. He also is still learning what the concept of personal space is (... He got too close to Flare a couple times). He was the first one Nightmare picked up and after a lot of therapy he became a certified gremlin. He can actually be quite calm when he wants to. He'll often be seen just following the other members of the gang around or just hanging out with them. He likes to make pottery :). When on missions, he typically is the one who causes the most mayhem and property damage, often having to be dragged away by the others. He is the middle child

Cross -

Appearance: Cross wears a black turtleneck and a white slightly oversized jacket. He is typically seen with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The inside of his jacket is a dark purple. He has various flowers embroidered onto it in different colors. He wears dark grey cargo pants and black boots with sewn in vine details. He also wears a dull purple scarf with his heart locket under it.

Cross doesn't tend to emote much, you can tell what he's feeling by small twitches in his expression. Like his eyes narrowing or widening slightly, the corners of his mouth moving up or down slightly, etc. This man can't show his emotions properly. He's also pretty quiet most of the time, he tends to scare the other members of the gang by accident. Like Killer, he can be seen following people around from time to time, making sure they're safe. It's a habit from his days in the royal guard. He enjoys gardening a lot, he finds it relaxing to tend to the flowers he's planted. He's pretty protective of those he cares about, often anxious about losing them like he lost those in Xtale. He can often be seen taking with XChara, who is of course invisible to others. During missions he often tends to go straight for the target, wanting to get it done as fast as possible.

Horror -

Appearance: Horror wears a thick dark grey jacket that has fur on the hood. Like Killer, he has various patches on his jacket. He wears a black knitted turtleneck. He has maroon fingerless gloves that have violet accents. He wears black cargo pants and dark brown hiking boots.

Horror is usually pretty calm most of the time. He often gets distracted when doing tasks and forgets what he's doing. He doesn't like speaking all too much due to the trouble he has, so he uses sign language most of the time. He enjoys making dark jokes and seeing the reactions he gets. He cares for the other members of the gang a lot and makes sure they care for themselves. During missions, he usually is the one keeping an eye on Killer so he doesn't cause too much trouble. He enjoys cooking and baking and also likes taking photos. He was the second one to picked up by nightmare and is the oldest child. He has his own section of the garden for growing various crops so he can use them in food and takes care of it with the help of Cross.

Ink -

Appearance: Ink typically wears various colorful sweaters that are covered by light brown overalls that have paint covering them, they also have a pocket filled with various pens. His vials are in a belt instead of a sash and each one has unique caps so Ink doesn't forget what they are used for. He wears artist gloves that have colorful patterns on them. He wears simple black slip on shoes and has rainbow socks. He wears a cream colored scarf that has many notes on it.

Ink doesn't understand emotions at all. He understands the basics of them but also doesn't understand things like tears of joy. He struggled a lot to figure out what emotions the vials gave him, he often uses situational cues or facial expressions to know which vial to take. He will sometimes hurt other people's feelings and not realize until they tell him. He is very hyper most of the time, having a hard time doing one task for a long period of time. He is very good at multitasking despite his memory issues. He will often avoid some of the more negative AUs because he believes that it is just their story playing out, though he will occasionally visit Fell universes. He has a tiny bit of hope that he could help Flare change for the good (... It gets tinier with every destroyed au. This man is NOT committed to this). He's very annoyed with Nightmare for messing with AU storylines and just messing with AUs in general.

Dream -

Appearance: Dream wears a short golden cloak with a sun clasp, the inside being darker and having silver vine patterns. He has the same type of shirt as Nightmare, but in white. He wears a golden brown vest with yellow accents. He wears black pants and grey boots with light blue accents. He still wears his circlet.

Dream is a very positive individual. He does his best to keep everyone happy. He doesn't like the idea of negativity in the multiverse unless for specific things, like grief. Otherwise he'll do his best to keep people from experiencing negative emotions. He overworks himself a lot, with Swap often making him take breaks. He wants to go back to how things used to be with Nightmare. He knows that's his brother, and not some evil parasite or whatever, but he still wants the brother he knew back. He wishes Nightmare would give up on spreading negativity so they could stop fighting. He is often put off by Ink's emotions due to how artificial they feel. He does his best to avoid Flare, knowing how dangerous he is. He does his best to visit aus, but can't do it often without interfering with the story.

Swap -

Appearance: .... I'll update this later he's being stubborn...

Swap is pretty neutral in regards to things. He isn't on any particular side most of the time, though when he is it is usually with the Stars. If he sees nightmare or any of his gang in an au, he won't step in or interfere with what they're doing unless people are getting hurt. He's managed to form a very shaky friendship with Flare, and refuses to fight him during battles because of it. He tries to help out whenever he can with whoever he can. He likes taking care of his friends, making sure they eat, sleep, and just relax. He doesn't tend to travel the multiverse much unless necessary, preferring to stay in his own AU with his brother. He can get hyper at times, but surprisingly he is pretty calm most of the time.

Reaper -

Appearance: Reaper wears a long black hooded cloak that has silver swirls embroidered on the bottom, it also has sleeves. The clasp of the cloak is a small gaster blaster with blue gems for eyes. Under the cloak he wears a dark grey turtleneck and black pants. He wears dark brown gladiator sandals

Reaper is pretty chill compared to the other gods, he doesn't like to interfere with the others' problems as long as they don't interfere with his job. He'll sometimes go around scaring people just by following them around only to go "not your time, see you when it is!" and disappear. He tends to bug Nekros whenever he has free time, making sure he doesn't go even more crazy. He'll often bring him small gifts, like rocks or jewelry or food. His humor is dark humor, especially death related stuff. He finds it funny how uncomfortable it makes people.

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mortallydarkbird · 1 day ago

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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.

#ao3 #fanfiction #ao3 talk #ao3 things #ao3 fanfic #ao3 fanart #ao3 fandom

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