nerianasims

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The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the right, known as the “devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population. The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent. These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society.

I have been saying! And both of these tiny, wealthy groups like to pretend they're speaking for whatever they imagine the working class to be at any given time. The actual human beings who make up the working class, they hate.

What would it have been like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? In the Book of Genesis, we are told that the descendants of Noah built a great city in the land of Shinar. They built a tower “with its top in the heavens” to “make a name” for themselves. God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said:

Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.

The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but in many popular renderings of the story he does, so let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life?

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Waiting for his turn

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My husband and a lot of other people have been trying to persuade this guy he's in the wrong about something he's been complaining about for years. This guy won't acknowledge anyone else has a point about anything ever if he doesn't agree with them immediately, and will never acknowledge that he's capable of doing anything wrong ever. Also, he's a liar. I got this in my head suddenly:

Spinnin' wheel all alone Talkin' 'bout your troubles and you never learn Ride a painted pony, let the spinnin' wheel turn

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I just downloaded three different version of Carol of the Bells.

It took me forever to find this one.

But I ain’t even mad.

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Merry Christmas to those celebrating today and happy first night of Hanukkah to those celebrating over the next few days

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To people who follow me but aren't in the Amphibia fandom: I'm sorry about putting me yelling about people mischaractirizing my blorbo you don't recognize on your dash. If it will make you feel better you can put you yelling about people mischaractizing your blorbo i don't recognize on my dash

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People are blaming Jennifer Lopez for her divorce from Ben Affleck when he just plain deserted her. Plus, in his previous marriage, he had an affair with the nanny. He lovebombed JLo, she believed him (lovebombing is hellishly hard to resist from anyone, and Affleck's a Hollywood actor), and then he got bored and somehow this is her fault. I've seen people try to blame her for Sean Combs' actions.

It's important to remember, too, that there are paid propaganda machines behind these smears. Just one of them seems to be responsible for a lot of it -- off the top of my head, it's been used by Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Justin Baldoni, and goddamn Donald Trump. It's called The Agency Group PR, and is co-owned by Scooter Braun, who has been doing his damndest to tear down Taylor Swift for years.

But if there wasn't a big audience of gossip-followers who hate women, the smears wouldn't work. And that audience is almost all women, and almost all unpaid. They spread misogyny as a hobby. Until everyone starts treating women as human beings, rather than as either saints or demons, it's not going to stop.

Women are allowed to be annoying, bitchy, mean spirited, unkind, lousy, lazy, finicky, anxious, disinterested, disingenuous, disrespectful, and also be believed when they come forward about sexual harassment or assault. Women are allowed to be unliked and also believed. We cannot keep equating our own inability to like someone to our ability or lack thereof to believe them. I don’t see this inability when it comes to men. In fact, I think so many people love a redeeming arc in a man, but hate it seen in women. Why? Why? Why do men get to have comeback stories from things like addiction, theft, bad workplace behavior, even things as heinous as manslaughter… but a woman can’t come back from a bad interview? A bad press junket? A bad relationship? I can’t think of men so hated the way women like Amber Heard and Blake Lively are hated right now. Even beyond them. It’s so easy to hate women right now. Cynthia Erivo, Lea Michele, Jennifer Lopez, Brie Larson, Rachel Zegler, Chappell Roan, Taylor Swift, and so on. I see unprecedented amounts of hate for these women and more nearly everytime they make a headline, but I don’t see the same energy for men. And if any one of them were to come out about sexual harassment or assault, I guarantee I’d have to see more comments about how it doesn’t matter because they’re famous, or how they brought it on themselves, or how they’re probably lying because they need the engagement or sympathy. It is so much more important to believe women than it is to belittle them, even the ones you dislike or distrust. Even if she did lie, I promise you, the men that they “ruin” the career of can always come back. The internet will open their arms to any man with half a jawline or lukewarm wit.

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Peace on Earth

© gif by riverwindphotography

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Hanukkah on Broadway | “Tomorrow” Reimagined Featuring Julie Benko and Cantor Azi Schwartz

Celebrate the spirit of Hanukkah with this new arrangement of "Tomorrow" from ANNIE. Featuring Broadway star Julie Benko, internationally renowned cantor Azi Schwartz, and a choir of over 50 voices from the Jewish Broadway community, this one-of-a-kind music video captures the themes of hope, resilience, and light that define the Festival of Lights. Filmed in the heart of New York City, this video showcases a spectacular takeover of Times Square billboards, uniting Broadway magic with Jewish tradition.

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Let women in the past (and present) be mediocre. Neither great heroine nor terrible villain. Just human, making normal human mistakes.

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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.

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Cleopatra was Macedonian Greek. She was part of an inbred imperial dynasty ruling over a people said dynasty saw as different and inferior to themselves. She was not Egyptian.

Cleopatra was a mediocre ruler. She was slightly better than many of her fellow Ptolemys (a few of whom she killed), but not a lot. And the Ptolemys sucked. Hardly a surprise, considering the inbreeding.

Cleopatra was a poor general. Marc Antony was a pretty shitty general too btw. He thought he was like Julius Caesar -- he really, really was not. And I think Cleopatra also thought he was like Julius Caesar because Rome, but she learned he was not, to her regret.

Cleopatra was an excellent linguist! It's too bad she wasn't born in a different time and place -- she could have been an amazing language professor. Alas, she was born into a role she was totally unsuited for. As are almost all hereditary rulers.

If you want a truly Great female truly Egyptian pharoah, HATSHEPSUT IS RIGHT THERE.

Please read the following by Bret Devereaux:

https://acoup.blog/2023/05/26/collections-on-the-reign-of-cleopatra/

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This actor played three different love interests for Rose throughout the series. I can see why -- they have a lot of chemistry. They're way hotter kissing than anything anyone does on Sex and the City.

There is, of course, still plenty of dated stuff in The Golden Girls. This guy "patted a few bottoms" while he was married. Plus there's quite a bit of men are from Mars women are from Venus stuff in the show. And yet, it's entirely likable, has heart, and has a certain amount of verisimilitude even when it's ridiculous.

Also it's funny.

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I need a break from stupid horrible Carrie Bradshaw and her stupid horrible life and stupid horrible "friends".

Ah that's the stuff.

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And Charlotte got rid of her puppy because it pooped on her rug. Also somehow, idek, said puppy was "the glue that saved [the] marriage" of the woman and her emotionally abusive husband. Lovely.

I hate everyone in this show, but mostly I hate the writers. What. The. Fuck.

SATC cannot handle spousal abuse. Carrie's minimizing it immediately. This is not going to be fun.