#allegedly pushed

[mediagraph]

Internet digs another video of SRK with man he allegedly pushed in Switzerland

A video of Shah Rukh Khan pushing an old man while getting photographed at the 77th Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland has gone viral on the internet. While people are divided about the actor's behaviour, some have dug out another video of SRK, where he is seen walking with the man he allegedly pushed.

While the viral video had a few people on the internet calling out Shah Rukh for his "bad" and "ridiculous" behaviour, some defended him, saying that he pushed the man in jest. Meanwhile, a fan also dug out another video of SRK with the concerned man and claimed, "That guy is his old friend (sic)."

The new video shows Shah Rukh walking the red carpet of the 77th Locarno Film Festival with the old man walking just behind him and even interacting with him. A fan commented on it, saying, "That’s an old friend of SRK. Go watch the full clip before spreading hate (sic)." An X user, who claimed that he is not a Shah Rukh Khan fan, wrote, "I am not an SRK fan but it seems like he knows the person. Regardless of his stardom and his ego of being a superstar, Shah Rukh is an extremely chivalrous and kind person with people. Unless provoked, he never loses his cool. This is a storm in a teacup (sic)."

Shah Rukh Khan was honoured with the Pardo alla Carriera award at the Locarno Film Festival. At the event, Shah Rukh spoke about several things, including his next film King, his iconic pose, and also his family life.

King, helmed by Sujoy Ghosh, will also star Suhana Khan and Abhishek Bachchan. The makers are yet to make an official announcement about the film.

[nikkoliferous]

after reading the one hundred and one millionth inane quote about how Loki is such a pRiViLeGeD pRiNcE while Sylvie is just a poor baby who had no real childhood and had to learn to fend for herself from a young age, I feel the need to point out that even the ONE thing we know about Sylvie's past, the thing that's supposed to be her mAjOr tRaUmA and set her apart from him somehow, was literally stolen from Loki.

this is how Tom described Loki's experience post-suicide attempt back in the day while doing press for Avengers:

“I think he went, like with everything else, to a sort of… it was just like, the worst place imaginable. I think he went to all of the darkest recesses of the universe. I’m sure he had a brush with—several brushes with death. I think he ran into the shadiest characters you can find in the Nine Realms. I think he had to rely on his wits to protect himself. It was really, really, really unpleasant, I think. I don’t have any frame of reference for that, except for imagining what it might be like to be kidnapped by a terrorist or something and have to survive a very, very frightening and precarious existence. But whatever it was, it was important when Loki came back for The Avengers, that whatever compassion he had left was absolutely shriveled to a minimum because of the experience that he had. Harrowing, I think, and scarring for life—in a way that Thor and Odin and Frigga find very, very difficult to understand.” [source]

and now the show pretends that Loki teamed up with Thanos completely of his own will, even though Marvel had JUST confirmed that the sceptre was influencing him throughout Avengers, and they hand that traumatic backstory that was Loki's off to their precious OC.

[sunnywalnut]

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(Please check tags for context)

[flying-potato2]

idk if any of yall remember this project i posted abt it a while ago but im building a monochrome minecraft city and this is the latest addition

[shoulderholsterfreak]

So, I keep seeing people expressing how disappointed they are that Filoni is "going with legends!Thrawn," but to me this sentiment makes it clear that they've probably never read past the original three books, or even the Thrawn Trilogy itself.

Let me explain.

The Thrawn Trilogy is only three novels. There was also the duology (Visions of the Future and Specter of the Past); the stand-alone novels Survivor's Quest, Outbound Flight, and Choices of One; the short stories Crisis of Faith, Side Trip, and Command Decision; and a few other non-Zahn novels and a couple video games wherein Thrawn is present if not in a starring role.

In all Zahn publications after the Thrawn Trilogy, we see a character that, aside from the random political/social debuff introduced in 2017, has a personality and morality system that is nearly identical to the one in canon.

It's in legends where you get Thrawn saying "we do not make war on civilians" and "as civilized beings, it is our duty to minimize suffering" (from the short story Crisis of Faith which takes place weeks before Thrawn began his campaign against the New Republic, so any excuse of "oh he got worse as Palpatine's influence deepened" doesn't really hold water).

And just look at the Empire of the Hand. If you want to know what kind of man Thrawn is, look at the organization he himself founded. To summarize, this is what an alien refugee taken in by the Hand had to say about it:

“The Empire that Senior Captain Thrawn is carving into the evil that pervades our worlds is not the Empire you chose to leave. His is an Empire of justice and dignity for all beings. His Empire is one we gladly serve. One we are willing to die for.”

Basically think the group of aliens and Chiss brought together at the end of Lesser Evil, add Imperials, and multiply it by 1,000.

This was in legends. That’s the vision legends!Thrawn had for a more ideal society. Rebels!Thrawn isn’t even true to what was available to Filoni prior to the canon books’ publications.

Now we can argue if Thrawn was as morally bad in the Thrawn Trilogy as he was in Rebels or not (I say short answer: T3!Thrawn’s greatest sin—for which he was killed—was apathy toward suffering in favor of results, Rebels!Thrawn simply enjoys hurting people because he’s a Bad Guy), but even if they DID hold the same fundamental values, they don’t have the same personality. Thrawn in the 90’s trilogy was expressive, he was having fun, he smiled and shrugged and fiddled with things and pet his ysalamiri. He was sassy and sarcastic and dry-humored and irritable. He was charismatic and, dare I say sometimes relatable. Sure he wasn’t a good person but that’s not the issue here. Thrawn had life to him in the Thrawn Trilogy.

In contrast, Thrawn in Rebel’s personality could be summarized as “creepy evil smart guy who likes art.” He’s really nothing more special than every Saturday mastermind cartoon villain out there. He’s bland and dry and lifeless and he’s scary not because of his intellect or his willpower or ability to read people but because he’s tall and skinny and lurks in the shadows and he’s got cheesy pipe organ theme music.

TL;DR: (as something a friend of mine mentioned) Filoni’s the kind of guy who goes with the very first idea that pops into his head. He goes with his first impression and runs with it. He’s not basing this guy on legends!Thrawn—he’s basing the entirety of it on the very first paragraph of the very first book the character shows up in.

[xbuster]

Incredibly funny seeing people in the notes wondering if the lesbian feeling that scene gave was a mistake as if Bruce Timm hasn’t drawn Harley and Ivy making out before

[jlf23tumble]

I haven’t watched The Idea of You yet, but it’s interesting that you found the music lacking. Did you see the interview that Savan Kotecha and Carl Falk gave to GQ about writing the music for the movie?

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/the-idea-of-you-songwriters-interview

Oooh, thanks for this link, it actually explains some of the problems I had with the music, especially with how bland/dated it sounds. Arguably the best song, Guard Down (which should be the title, I cannot for the LIFE OF ME, get the movie title right first time), sounds like an AI version of Bruno Mars/Locked Out of Heaven. The rest of the songs just sound [to me] like the fake music you'd see in a Hallmark movie or Disney channel show where they don't want anyone to sniff a song that sounds like some other song, yet also very AI-ish, soulless, not created by human hands. But getting back to that dated sound, it also underlines the weird timeline disconnect I had with this band in general (are they the biggest band in the world? why are they at coachella at this stage in their career? who's their audience? pick a goddamned lane or hire a beta reader, lmao). That article, though, okay, GOT IT, some dudes wrote it, some dudes who had their heyday 10-15 years ago and phoned this in, but whither the female pop songwriters? This movie managed to get the rights to a Fiona Apple song AND a St. Vincent song (and Annie H), but they couldn't ask Amy Allen to crank something out for this fake boyband? Because I think that would have been way, wayyyy better

[girlbob-boypants]

I gotta stop reading stuff the devs say tbh. It just makes me even more concerned that this game isn't going to know what it wants to do.

[sophieinwonderland]

Have you heard of the movie "Constipation"?

It has yet to come out.

Actually, The Flash came out last year...

[tendebill]

update: i am becoming more and more sick as we speak

[jennyboom21]

Who’s gonna tell them???

[galaxywhump]

Tumblr stop showing me ads for an automatic pierogi maker challenge

[fakenerdboy]

Officially made an ally today as I was the door man for my library’s drag story hour and blew the whistle on some weirdo who brought signs in with him, leading to the eventual call for police that followed

[xerox-candybar]

Bud, I have some bad news about how federal minimum wage is calculated (not well; it isn’t adjusted for cost of living) and how often (not frequently; it’s been the same for 15 years.)

[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!

[tracknews1]

Gateman Allegedly Forced to Do Push-Ups Over Affair with Employer's Wife

A gateman in Kanifing Estate, Gambia, was reportedly forced to do push-ups after being accused of having an affair with his employer’s wife. The employer, who goes by the name “Gully Side” on social media, confirmed the details of the incident to journalists on Wednesday. He stated, “In the morning, everyone leaves for work. He was left alone at home with my wife, and I saw them with my own eyes.…