#crossing avenue

[zootzbootz]

here's a fun silly post. a list of (almost) all of our like- fandoms and shit 😋😋 if ur also in any of these- (ESP the more obscure ones) pls pls talk to us teeheheheheeee

- the mark side

- lalaloopsy

- starters (movieunleashers)

- fundamental paper education

- dude where's my juul

- smiling friends

- welcome to the statehouse/table

- hetalia (kinda. I LITERALLY JUST LIKE THE CHARACTERS 😭😭😭)

- ok ko

- south park

- mlp

- lost ollie

- dick figures (I hate to admit this LMFAO)

- animal crossing

- miitopia

- animatic battle

- making fiends

- monster high (esp the new gen 😞)

- word girl

- avenue q

- run (the coolmathgame)

- pinky and pepper forever

and there's probably more but I'm too lazy to list them or can't rember rn 😞😞😞😞😞😞😞😞

[lemonsharks]

Please do not reblog.

It's been such a long time since something good happened to me or since I sought and achieved something good for myself.

This year I have been hired three times for positions that all fell through at the last minute. I've been targeted by scam job recruitment twice. I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't know why it has to be this hard.

I'm never going to get to have a family. I'm never going to get to be in love again. I'm never going to live in a real standalone house again. I'm never going to get to meet all the people I desperately want to meet in real life.

I'm so tired. I'm so, so tired.

[nyandreasphotography]

Crossing Fifth Avenue - Flatiron District, New York City by Andreas Komodromos

[noisytenant]

i am a person who believes that a "good therapist" can be a meaningful part of someone's efforts toward wellbeing, but it's occurring to me that i feel like a lot of people simply don't know what to look for in a therapist, and don't feel comfortable talking about their relationship to their therapist.

i feel like the way that therapy is commonly treated as a "quarantine" of emotionality means that a lot of people are hesitant to reflect on and discuss interactions with their therapist to trusted outside parties. (of course, sometimes we seek therapy because we have no trusted outside parties). and there is a societal assumption that therapeutic authority is well-earned, which doesn't necessarily align with reality.

but i guess i'm wondering if it wouldn't be helpful to just... talk a lot more, blab about your experiences with your therapist. complain more about uncomfortable interactions and figure out if it's something you can set a boundary over or if it's a dealbreaker. for people who actually feel helped by their therapists to explain what's so good about them.

like compared to the friends and mentors that comprise our support networks, there are so few social consequences for discussing our emotional responses To therapy, because they're not a person woven into the fabric of your social sphere. they're removed from it, intentionally. so i feel like we should really take advantage of that to loudly talk about What theyre telling us and How it makes us feel.

(my partner says one of the things about psychoanalysis that they prefer over conventional therapy is that it's understood that you might feel various ways about your analyst, and you aren't expected to have this... neutral-pleasant relationship. it's understood as an emotionally involved relationship with two parties who have their own biases. without analysis experience myself i can't speak to how that shows up in practice, but i think it's a compelling angle)

i guess i feel like a lot of the everyday posts about therapy are either quite personal and limited in scope, or really general trends, or zoomed-out posts on therapy as a theory and practice. perhaps i sense a gap in personal anecdotes that center emotional experience while providing some guidance in ways to move forward. maybe im just not following the right people but i guess i think it's a societal trend that could be changed

[fictionadventurer]

How can I be known to history as a charming and witty correspondent if I don't write any letters??? This is a problem!!

[nsewell]

i need to move to a major city i can’t keep living like this

[panneshirley]

every movie I watched in 2024:

公園通りの猫たち (Cats on Park Avenue) dir. Shinichi Nakada, 1989

[shrimpoe]

Sketch dump 😼

[parasitic-saint]

i dreamt i met laura jane grace and she complimented my goth makeup

[aiiaiiiyo]

[moe-broey]

Also Moe gender notes/lore:

It has a more masc leaning identity, and typically uses masculine language/titles but more like. For fun. Like the way you say "SIR." at a misbehaving cat. It will also call itself a man ESP if it's funny. Also I've been toying w it liking the terms "boyfriend"/"boytoy" for itself, which is a very funny combination w Alfonse (in my mind) preferring the term "partner" (broadly, but also esp for himself). So like, Moe calling Alfonse "My partner" and Alfonse, On Occasion, ESPP if the situation calls for it, calling Moe "My boyfriend" (still, partner is the preferred term across the board for both of them -- but if we need to clear up the air...)

BUT ALSO! There are at least, so far, Two cases where Moe prefers feminine titles/language!

One was initially a misunderstanding but it ultimately ended up preferring the term anyway, with "cleric" (one comic idea is to resolve this castle dialogue):

LIBRA.... I WOULD NEVER .......... (Moe didn't realize "cleric" was a femme-gendered term, and had already been using it for itself for a while at this point.)

The other title is "seamstress"! That one is a case of Knowing the genderedness of it, but deciding to use it in a nonconforming way (which is eventually how "cleric" ended up). To me Moe uses these in the same vein as a drag queen, if that makes sense!

[waddei]

i fucking hate driving let's burn all cars forever

[mknewsmedia]

People are always seen jaywalking in Dhaka streets although there are hundreds of foot bridges and zebra crossings across the city. A rhesus monkey is seen attempting to cross the Gulshan Avenue using the zebra crossing at Section 2 in Gulshan recently. A security guard of a nearby building said a monkey couple lives in the trees of the surrounding area and they often cross the road. Photo: MUMIT M         

[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!

[361degreesrealestate]

361 DEGREES REAL ESTATE ROCKBANK PRESENTS! STUNNING HOME IN CENTRAL LOCATION WITH STCA!!! 36 Bernhardt Avenue, Hoppers Crossing, VIC 3029 Looking for a Dream Home in Hoppers Crossing? Contact Us Now!

[thottacelli]

Another aspect of the Gaza Genocide that I want to talk about is the complicity of Internet banking and crowdfunding websites like GoFundMe.

I have seen multiple Gazans raise enough money to leave for Egypt, but the banks and the crowdfunding websites freeze their money or cancel their funds for "suspicious activity" or whatever. Every day that passes in Gaza supplies get more scarce, conditions get more deadly, and the price to cross into Egypt gets more expensive. I've seen people, like ghost-90 here on Tumblr, raise the full amount to get their entire family out of Gaza, but their money gets frozen for so long that the original goal is only a fraction of the price now needed to cross the boarder.

These financial institutions should not be allowed to get away with contributing to the death toll in Gaza. They are intentionally keeping people trapped in a kill zone by withholding money that is rightfully theirs.

I'm so pissed and angry that every avenue for relief for Palestinians is being cut of left and right. It is vile that Gazans are being extorted for 10s of thousands of dollars by the Egyptian gov just to save their family's lives, but even when they play by this corrupt game, the world still finds a way to make them suffer.

My heart is with every Palestinian for the rest of time, from river to sea you will all be free. 🇵🇸❤️