#i originally made more but then tumblr said no so

[beefscrap]

CONTEST HONORABLE MENTIONS

A total of 12 designs were submitted for this contest. Holy crap! I couldn’t ask for more. Not only that but they were all so goddamn cool and creative. It was HARD picking the top three out of all of them. So if you weren’t chosen, you should still be so proud of yourself!! Thank you to each and every one of you for your submissions.

Everyone who didn’t get first place can do whatever they wish with their designs, ofc. Whatever you choose, I wanted to do a LITTLE something to express my thanks. So I did a stupid little doodle for each of them :]

THE SUBMISSIONS

The first submission, and a GREAT start! I love your clean style, and the colors you used. Like I said before, I LOVE the birthmark

SO BADASS!!! Nugget never fails to make an amazing design. The headcanons are so silly and entertaining to think abt. Imagining a dragon who loves to walk on his hind legs for no reason like lmaooo

The colors here are FANTASTIC. The fades between each scale plate are super unique. I really love the pattern of the stars, too. Just a super cool style in general.

I ADORE the idea of nightwing scales going white with age for this dude. As I said before I loveee how he’s shaped. So many fun lore ideas were added to this guy. I love old men

Beautiful wings and awesome colors. The combo of red and blue is really cool. You have such a pretty style!!! And I love their big ears

Another baddassss designnnn. Face marking you added is something I just can’t get over. I had so much fun reading the lore.. and his name (Sickle-Moon) is so cool sounding.??! Where do yall find these names

(As I’ve said) I haven’t seen compression gloves like this for a dragon before! That’s so cool! And the pattern on them makes them even better. The blues are great - need more blue Nightwings in my life

The amount of detail put into this is CRAZY. Especially with those accessories - holy crap. They were something i particularly kept note of because of the job this character has in the story …

Love love loveddd this guy. Again, the tear drop jewelry was something I kept in mind and really liked. There’s so much care put into the scales in this drawing. Omg some of you have patience that I do NOT

[le-fruit-de-la-passion]

Hey, dude.

I understand wanting to use ChatGPT to instantly generate any fantasy you might have, that it seems so easy and convenient. But please...don't. I can't tell you just how bad it is for everyone involved with Arcane.

I appreciate that you at least acknowledged it in your first post, although not in the second. But this is still incredibly hurtful and disrespectful to the artists and writers who made Arcane, especially since many of them have explicitly said they do not wish for their work to be used in Al training and content. They have poured hours and hours of work into creating something unique. The reason Arcane is such a good show and so visually stunning is because of the human work behind it. It's really, really essential to respect that if we want more shows like this in the future.

This is also very disheartening and off-putting to all artists and writers in the fandom. ChatGPT writes these "stories" by using OUR works, on Ao3, Tumblr, Wattpad... Works we spend so much time and care crafting for everyone. We get very little to absolutely no control to prevent our fics from being put into Al systems. Some of the best Arcane fanfiction writers on here have either privated all their work or deleted their entire accounts out of the fear of their work being taken for this exact purpose. I don't want that to be the future of our craft and fandom.

As a T.A. in university, I've seen many students use Al to write their works in their stead. They usually fall into two categories. Some are doing it simply out of a lack of awareness of how detrimental Al is to art and academic research, and how it's even hurting them in their studies and passions. Others are aware of this, and simply refuse to care, because they want to take the easiest way through life no matter how many people it screws over. I really want to believe you're part of that first category.

I'm not writing this for people to go on a witch hunt after you, especially if it is a genuine mistake. But it's something that needs to be addressed directly, because as a fandom, we need to stand together in being respectful of the original product and each other. I really hope you understand this a bit better now, and that you stop doing this in the future.

Thank you 🩷.

First kiss – Viktor x Reader (POV)

This is a fanfic I asked Chatgpt to write for me with a soft and kind Viktor, it was cute so I am sharing :)

---

The lab was quiet, the hum of machinery a soft backdrop as you and Viktor worked side by side. It was late—far later than you’d intended to stay—but neither of you seemed ready to leave.

Viktor leaned over his notes, muttering to himself in Zaunite as his pen scratched across the page. His concentration was magnetic, and you found yourself watching the way his fingers moved, the faint furrow in his brow.

“Staring won’t solve the equation,” he said suddenly, his tone laced with that dry humor that always made you smile.

You flushed, snapping your gaze back to the schematics in front of you. “Maybe not, but it’s entertaining.”

He glanced at you, a flicker of amusement softening his tired features. “Entertaining, hm? I’ll take that as a compliment.”

You grinned. “You should.”

For a moment, he hesitated, his gaze lingering on you longer than usual. There was a nervous energy in the air, a tension that neither of you had acknowledged out loud but that had been building for weeks.

When Viktor finally spoke, his voice was quieter, almost tentative. “You… You make this easier, you know. The work, the late nights. Everything.”

Your heart fluttered at the admission. “You don’t give yourself enough credit. I’m just here to make sure you don’t burn out.”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” he murmured, his golden eyes locking onto yours.

You didn’t know who moved first—maybe it was you, maybe it was him. But suddenly the space between you was gone, and his lips were on yours.

The kiss was slow, hesitant at first, as if he was afraid you might pull away. His lips were soft, his touch cautious but steady. When his hand brushed your cheek, you leaned into him, letting him know it was okay.

It deepened naturally, his other hand resting lightly on your waist. He was careful, almost too careful, as though he thought you might break.

“Viktor,” you whispered against his lips, your hands moving to his shoulders. “You don’t have to hold back.”

He pulled away just enough to look at you, his eyes filled with something raw and vulnerable. “I don’t want to hurt you. Or disappoint you.”

“You could never disappoint me,” you said firmly, your fingers brushing along his jawline. “Not like this.”

His breath hitched, and for the first time, you saw a crack in his usual composure. “You are… so much kinder than I deserve.”

You silenced him with another kiss, this one more confident, more certain. His hands tightened slightly on your waist, drawing you closer. The world outside the lab ceased to exist; it was just the two of you, wrapped in the warmth of something that had been building for so long.

When you finally broke apart, his forehead rested against yours, his breaths uneven. “I don’t know how to do this,” he admitted softly, his voice trembling.

“Then we’ll figure it out together,” you replied, your hand slipping into his.

And in that moment, you felt the first stirrings of something even deeper, something that neither of you had words for yet—but that didn’t need them.

——————-

Part II « First time » is out, link down bellow

[undescribed1mage]

Lindsay Atherton, Lillie-Pearl Wildman, Clarice Julianda, Imogen Bailey, Kamilla Fernandes, and Bobbie Chambers in Newsies!: The Musical <3

🎥: @lasagnatrades

[userlaylivia]

I forgot some more again so I'm gonna make a part 3 lmao like I forgot rachel green, monica gellar, raven reyes, octavia blake, prue halliwell, and etc so be warned lol it may not be as many as the last two though lol

tagging some people: @maya-matlin, @tudorgirl, @nessa007, @useragarfield, @makeyouminemp3

[royalarchivist]

Cellbit talked about his opinion of QSMP a few days ago!

Cellbit: [QSMP] is a really cool environment. It's really cool! All the creators have this care and dedication, and [the admins] ask if everything is fine and if there's something they can do to make me happier as a member of this project. It's gratifying.

And from one creator to another: Quackity's nailing it! He's very young, but he's very mature for his age.

[dany36]

Just got the sins of the father trophy and—

holy shit the last words that lae’zel told me before I had to kill her

“I’m glad it was you. No other blade would have sufficed” OHHHH MY GODDDDDDDDD JUST END ME NOOOOOOOWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!

[satanic-fruitcake]

hhhh

[c0rpsedemon]

it's 2023 and i'm still bitter about how kuroshitsuji, a complex slow burn mystery manga, got absolutely massacred by its shitty semi-episodic shota/fujobait anime adaptation

[victoriacoffee]

I officially learned how to use the multiply layer setting! Kinda sad it took this long, but I also barely did digital art until kinda recently

Definitely gonna rant in the tags

Because I can't not post these, here's a pic of it before most of the shading for comparison, and also a picture of him with the tower and house *not* blurred because I did kinda put work into the scene even though I knew it was getting blurred, ya know?

[wabblebees]

thought id update to say; i survived opening night!!! and not only that, it went REALLY fucking well, and people seemed to REALLY REALLY like it omfg... god this is so crazy

[clocks-are-round]

sometimes my taste in media blows me away a little

like, i love red vs fucking blue when in personality i am a socially anxious introvert who probably is too optimistic and people-pleasing about stuff and is scared of being disliked and cries over fictional media lol

ok, i like to think i have a little more backbone than the above but like. idk i just found it kind of funny. like i know there’s all types (of queers)— jkjk but like we are a high demographic relatively speaking— in this fandom but i dunno. i like shows about chaotic assholes i guess lol

i’m debating whether to even post this since it is clearly written out of sleepy rambles but like. yeah sure why the fuck not

dan vs and sao abridged and that sci fi one i’m forgetting the name of with the cynical genius and her himno best friend also fall into the same chaotic assholes category lol

yeah imma sleep now. i hope y’all are doing goodddd

[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.

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.

[kelpiemomma]

the forgotten god and the one who brought him back

ugly sketchy. i meant to include emmet and akari and rei but. its 1 am and i chose to stop here lol

[higherhell]

Popping on to say sorry for the extended absence once again and that I'm not sure when I'll be back in full capacity. To paraphrase that one old newspaper clipping about life being one damned thing after another being an understatement, The Damned Things Are Overlapping, quite a lot right now. Miss you all and I hope to catch up at some point but I don't know when exactly. One would hope soon, but everything feels like shaky ground right now, so no promises. Love you though 💜

[sonicboomseason3]

a brief recap of what has been going on with the sonic movieverse in the past several months:

paramount has come out in public support of israel

keanu reeves, a man who has publicly rubbed elbows with none other than benjamin netanyahu, reportedly gets cast as shadow for the upcoming third movie

james marsden, the guy who plays tom, got exposed as having written a letter of support for a convicted pedophile

there's fucking??? zionist propaganda in the knuckles series???

kind of connected to the last point but adam pally, the guy who plays wade, is evidently pro-israel too

this is a complete and utter joke.

EDIT AS OF 4/30/24: if people see this version of the post, i'd really appreciate it if you reblog it instead of the other versions, as it's the most updated one with all the information that i want included. thank you :]

you know, it's been a few days since i've made this post, and some of you (not most) are staying determined in defending/justifying/giving the benefit of the doubt to keanu for that photo with netanyahu, whether it's because "it was a decade ago," "him being civil to someone he ran into at a party one time doesn't mean anything," "he's probably just silent because his pr managers won't allow him to speak up," etc. i've made my thoughts on the matter quite clear by directly responding to these people, but at this point, i'm tired of both seeing them in my notes and repeating myself, so take this as my final word on the issue.

i can't help it if you don't think the photo with netanyahu is damning, and i'm done engaging with everyone going out of their way to tell me that. i obviously disagree, especially after finding out that 1. the host of the party, arnon milchan, is a former israeli spy who has a history of developing israel's nuclear program and promoting apartheid in south africa (information that had broken out a few months prior to the party and thus would've been fresh news around the time keanu chose to attend) and 2. keanu has been caught hanging around at least two other weirdos, but if you don't find any of that to be cause for reasonable concern, then there really is nothing else i can say afaik.

with all that said, i'm beginning to realize how strange it is that these people's first instinct when seeing this post is to start debating about keanu's political stances without ever acknowledging any of the other bullet points. you guys realize that this isn't just about him, right? i know tumblr reading comprehension is known for being piss-poor, but like… you realize that i was trying to make a point of how there are MULTIPLE terrible things that have broken out about the people and company involved in the sonic movies, right? and yet, a lot of the people leaping to speak on keanu's behalf in my notes are completely ignoring the parts where i bring up paramount, pally, etc. all in favor of zeroing in on the singular point about keanu and making bad faith assumptions about me for holding him accountable. really makes one wonder where your priorities lie if, in a post that talks about so many other things, me accusing an a-list celebrity with, according to google, a net worth of almost $400 million is where you draw the line and apparently the only thing worth your acknowledgment.

ultimately, what i'm trying to say is that the intention of this post was just to gather up everything that i had been hearing for the past several months and put it all together in one place. there were a bunch of people who didn't know about at least one of the bullet points before seeing this post, and i'm glad that i could help inform them, that was what i was hoping to do! but as for the keanu thing, i've said pretty much all i can say for now, and i don't want to derail the original post even more than i may have already. unless something new comes up, i'm done talking about him.