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ekingston · 2 months ago

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SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.

IN SHORT

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.

When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using

his dyslexia;

his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and

a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,

as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.

When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there.

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain;

2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and

3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again.

THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)

Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):

This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)

I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:

Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.

I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice.

I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.

After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.

While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:

And then I went to bed.

By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:

@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.

That response came only an hour or so later:

Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.

I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.

A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)

A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.

Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.

Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :

Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):

which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)

... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)

After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether.

It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:

And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.

That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:

They were completed works;

They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and

They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.

If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!

I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.

I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.

Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***

That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.

Sooo—

We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them.

This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:

Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.

Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.

THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):

*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that.

**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation.

***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.

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!

#fandom #plagiarism #AO3 #speechify #word-stream #Cliff Weitzman #writers on tumblr #fan fic writing #AI plagiarism #independent authors #Ofek Weitzman #please share

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teaboot · 10 months ago

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Other tips for financially abused kids who want to leave:

Most banks will send you a credit card when you apply. You cannot opt out of it. See if you can get it sent somewhere that's not your home, or find a bank that allows you to opt out of getting one (try emailing them to check).

Also: here's a reddit article I found with banks that allow you to opt out of a credit card- (do your own research though-this information could be false or outdated) https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/deqlx6/how_to_open_a_bank_account_while_hiding_it_from/

(I hear Novo bank allows you to opt out of getting a card. And it's also a business bank. However, a good chunk of the reviews are bad).

Get an account at a bank your family doesn't use, and make sure they don't know about it. Otherwise they could get access to it.

Cashapp can be used as a bank (not recommended bc cashapp isn't as secure as a bank, but it is an option).

You can check how good a bank is by checking nerdwallet and reddit.

You'll need a business bank account-or an account that lets you do business-if you want to freelance (which includes things like transcription). There's an article on nerdwallet about the best business accounts, and another one about accounts you can open without an EIN.

Make sure your bank statements are emailed and not mailed.

There's a bank called Majority which allows people to get accounts without SSN. Most of the reviews I've seen are good, but I still recommend checking the reviews yourself.

Try to get a paypal if you're going to get an online job-a lot of them require a paypal to use their services.

If you don't have proof of address, look for an online-only bank.

^^^

#Abuse cw #Boost

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kenyatta · 2 months ago

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‘We Can Bury Anyone’: Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine (NYT)

There have long been figures behind the scenes shaping public opinion about celebrities — through gossip columns, tabloids and strategic interviews. The documents show an additional playbook for waging a largely undetectable smear campaign in the digital era. While the film, about domestic violence, was a box office hit — making nearly $350 million worldwide — online criticism of the actress skyrocketed. “He wants to feel like she can be buried,” a publicist working with the studio and Mr. Baldoni wrote in an Aug. 2 message to the crisis management expert, Melissa Nathan. “You know we can bury anyone,” Ms. Nathan wrote. In the following weeks, Ms. Nathan, whose clients have included Johnny Depp and the rappers Drake and Travis Scott, went hard at the press, pushing to prevent stories about Mr. Baldoni’s behavior and reinforce negative ones about Ms. Lively, the text messages show. Jed Wallace, a self-described “hired gun,” led a digital strategy that included boosting social media posts that could help their cause. [...] Three days later, Mr. Baldoni texted Ms. Abel, flagging a social media thread that accused another celebrity of bullying behavior and had generated 19 million views. “This is what we would need,” he wrote. Ms. Nathan soon floated proposals to hire contractors to dominate social media through “full social account take downs,” by starting “threads of theories” and generally working to “change narrative.” “All of this will be most importantly untraceable,” she wrote. [...] It is unclear exactly how Mr. Wallace operated. There are references in emails to “social manipulation” and “proactive fan posting,” and text messages cite efforts to “boost” and “amplify” online content that was favorable to Mr. Baldoni or critical of Ms. Lively. “We are crushing it on Reddit,” Mr. Wallace told Ms. Nathan, according to a text she sent Ms. Abel on Aug. 9. The next day, one of Ms. Nathan’s employees texted, “We’ve started to see shift on social, due largely to Jed and his team’s efforts to shift the narrative.” Ms. Nathan wrote to Ms. Abel: “And socials are really really ramping up. In his favour, she must be furious. It’s actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women.” When a TikTok sleuth started asking questions about Mr. Baldoni, Ms. Abel texted that “this girl is on a very dangerous crusade.”

#social media #entertainment #black hat social #fandom culture #social engineering

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collapsedsquid · 10 days ago

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I have a personal Gmail account which I use for correspondence about a book project I am working on. I woke up one morning in November to discover that I could no longer access it. A message from Google said my access had been “restricted globally” because “it looks as though Gmail has been used to send unwanted content. Spamming is a violation of Google’s policies.” The note said the decision had been made by “automatic processing” and that if I thought it was a mistake, I could submit an appeal. I had not sent any spam and couldn’t imagine why Google’s algorithm thought that I had. That made it hard to know what to write in the “appeal” text box, other than a panicked version of something like, “I didn’t do it (whatever it is)!” and, “Please help, I really need access to my email and my files”. (To my relief, I realised later that I hadn’t lost access to my drive.) Two days later, I heard back: “After reviewing your appeal, your account’s access remains restricted for this service.” I wasn’t given any more information on what I had supposedly done or why the appeal had been rejected, but was told that “if you disagree with this decision, you can submit another appeal.” I tried again and was rejected again. I did this a few more times — curious, at this point, about how long this doom loop could continue. A glance at Reddit suggested other people had been through similar things. Eventually, I gave up. (Google declined to comment on the record.) Among regulators, one popular answer to the question of how to make automated decisions more “fair” is to insist that people can request a human to review them. But how effective is this remedy? For one thing, humans are prone to “automation complacency” — a tendency to trust the machine too much. In the case of the UK’s Post Office scandal, for example, where sub-postmasters were wrongly accused of theft because of a faulty computer system called Horizon, a judge in 2019 concluded that people at the Post Office displayed “a simple institutional obstinacy or refusal to consider any possible alternatives to their view of Horizon”. [...] As for my email account, when I decided to write about my experience for this column, I emailed Google’s press office with the details to see if I could discuss the issue. By the end of the day, my access to my email account had been restored. I was pleased, of course, but I don’t think many people would see that as particularly fair either.

Unfriendly AI

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kallietell · 3 months ago

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AITAH for Telling my Roommate She Got Fat? (WG Fiction)

*This post is written in the style of a reddit 'Am I The Asshole' Post, a forum where people can get advice from strangers about whether they were in the wrong in a given situation. I hope you enjoy!*

AITAH for telling my roommate how fat she got?

Throwaway account cause I don’t want my roommate to see this, but the title pretty much says it all. I’ve been living with this girl, let's call her Ellie, for about 3 years. She was overall a pretty good roommate (never really had anyone over, always did her half of the chores, etc.) but the kinds of habits she's developed lately are driving me up the wall.

I don’t mind sharing my space (duh, I have a roommate), but to me, sharing a space should be 50/50, it should actually be EVEN. My roommate and I have a good amount of storage in our kitchen, but between the cabinets, drawers, fridge, and freezer, Ellie has slowly taken up more and more space with the insane amount of food she's been buying. We’re at the point where 90% of the stuff in the kitchen is hers, and it's literally so annoying to have to search through her mountains of junk food just to find my veggie straws.

There's always piles of food everywhere, I swear she gets deliveries twice a day, and it's not that I mind the mess as much as I mind the fact that I barely even have any snacks and I have nowhere to store them.

I was pushed past my limit two days ago when I opened a cabinet and a box of cookies literally fell on my head from how full it was, and I wrote her an email (we always have serious financial/practical conversations over email to leave a paper trail) explaining that her situation was getting out of control and she needed to be more considerate.

Yes, I was a little mad when I wrote it, but everything I said was true and I feel like holding it back would’ve just been passive-aggressive. She got super upset after reading it and told me I was fat-shaming her. Was I wrong for telling her the truth and letting her know how I feel?

Edit (11/08): Everyone keeps commenting that they need to see the letter, so I pasted it below:

Ellie,

I’m writing this over email because we’ve had this conversation a million times and nothing’s changed, so if it keeps being a problem I'm sending this documentation straight to the landlord and letting him know you’ll be paying a higher split of the rent.

I wanted to make you aware that your super-double-chocolate-chunk-whatever cookies just fell out of the cabinet when I opened it and almost hit me in the eye, and this wouldn't be happening if every cabinet wasn't crammed full of all the junky food you’re always stuffing your face with. I hate to have to be the one to tell you this, but you so clearly have a problem. When you moved in you weighed like 100 pounds and then you started eating like an absolute pig and just blew up. When my mom came to visit last month she didn't even recognize you, she asked me ‘Where's your roommate’ after you waddled out of the room with your bags of chips.

You’re actually such a disgusting slob, just a few years ago you were thin and fit and now you sit on the couch with your blubbery gut hanging out and eat until you can't even move. Watching you explode while you gorge yourself on all the snacks you fill our kitchen with honestly makes me sick, it motivates me to go harder in the gym so I don't end up a flabby blob like you.

Every part of your body is like a warning sign: your chubby, swollen cheeks and double chin, your pudgy arms and hands, the way your thighs are getting so thick you can’t even squeeze yourself into the loveseat anymore, it's just humiliating for you. Or it would be if you cared about anything other than stuffing your face with like 5,000 calories every day. You're actually starting to look pregnant, it's like your entire body was inflated with fat.

You have to be real with yourself, cause the denial just isn't cute. You’re a fucking whale, and I tried to be patient with you cause you’re clearly going through something, but I’m sick of you waddling around this apartment and taking up all the space in the kitchen. Just because you take up so much more space doesn't mean your food needs to.

I suggest you diet, immediately, but since I know you probably can’t, at least start keeping your snacks in your own room. Or like I said, I'm telling Tim. And you know he already reached out last month because of the downstairs neighbors' complaints. I covered for you and didn't tell him that all the stomping is just your fat ass waddling around like usual, but if this doesn't get fixed, I’m snitching about that too.

I’m really just trying to help you, cause if I got that fat that fast I would want someone to tell me too. Watching you try to cram yourself in all your old clothes is just painful, and the bigger you get the more ridiculous you look, everyone thinks so. When my boyfriend was over to watch movies and you were getting a pizza (as usual), he asked why you never wear clothes that fit. It was so mortifying to watch you jiggle just from walking across the room. Your entire gut was hanging out and your whole body was wobbling like crazy, you looked like such a cow.

Every time I see you you're fatter and every time I see the kitchen there's more junk food piled in the cabinets and on the counters. You need to get yourself under control. I literally got injured cause of how fat and greedy you are. Either stop stuffing your bloated face, pay a higher share of the rent, or just move into a buffet so you can eat yourself into immobility like I know you probably want to.

Your enormous, fatty body is my worst nightmare and it should be yours too, but instead, you just keep eating and eating and eating. I bet you're eating right now while you read this. Wipe the chocolate off your face, get up, and reorganize the fucking kitchen.

-Courtney

Edit (11/10): Everyone voting YTA after I posted the letter needs to learn to read. I didn't ask if the letter was mean, I asked if I’m the asshole for telling her how fat she got. I constantly comment on her weight and give little hints that she’s getting big (in order to help her), but I’ve never told her just how big. I just thought maybe it was rude to describe in detail just how far she’s gorged herself into obesity, but I don't even care anymore, she needed to hear it.

*This was a little experimental flash-fiction in a really fun style that I loved:) For more fiction stories, weight gain POVs, and even weight gain audios, you can check out my Patreon, Thanks so much for reading!*

patreon.com/KallieTell

#fat belly #fat kink #feedee encouragement #stuffed fatty #weight gain denial #weight gain fiction #weight gain story #eat up fatty #wg fiction #wg story #wg text

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princehobi · 3 months ago

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OK GUYS IM FEELING PATHETIC ENOUGH AND I CANT AFFORD THERAPY, TUMBLR IS ALL I GOT RIGHT NOW SO

YESTERDAY WHILE I WAS USING TUMBLR I UPDATED A RANDOM POST AND I STARTED GETTING ERROR MESSAGES ON THE SCREEN, LIKE SOMETIMES WOULD HAPPEN BUT THEN I COULDNT REFRESH ANYTHING, MY BLOG LOOKS LIKE THIS FROM MY PHONE

AND WHEN I TRY AND LOG IN FROM A COMPUTER IT SAYS THE ACCOUNT IS TERMINATED

I DIDNT RECEIVED ANY EMAIL, I ALREADY SENT A BUNCH OF EMAILS TO SUPPORT AND I ONLY GET THE INSTANT REPLY THAT THEY WOULD LOOK INTO IT BUT ITS BEEN AROUND 15 HOURS BC THAT WAS LAST NIGHT AND SADLY I AM AN ADULT AND I HAD TO GO TO BED SO I CAN WAKE UP AND GO TO WORK (WHERE IM TYPING THIS FROM RN)

I am really panicking, I've had this account for about 10 years and I really need it back, I'm so sad, I feel stupid and helpless because I really don't know what else to do, reddit and web comments scare me because I really really want to get this back

If you help me I'm gonna .. idk I'll do anything I swear I'm just freaking upset and nervous and I am not joking, I know how this sounds but tumblr has saved me from the worst times of my life so many times, I know I can just make a new account but this one is so old and has a lot of me

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femmefatalevibe · 2 years ago

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Femme Fatale Guide: How To Gain Motivation & Get Out of A Rut

Spontaneous motivation is possible but rare. However, learning how to jumpstart this valuable energy to gain the initial momentum you need to create consistent habits and routines necessary to help you achieve your goals. Here are some tips and tricks to get out of a rut and jumpstart motivation.

Create specific goals: Use qualifying and quantifying details (e.g. I intend to stay at the Ritz Paris hotel; I will save $50K by the end of this year, etc.; I'm cultivating a Scandinavian aesthetic; I will eat 3 healthy meals daily during the workweek, etc.)

Organize your goals into different areas of life: Try not to have more than 1-2 goals per life arena at a time (career, finances, health, relationships, self-development, etc.)

Write a short list of 3-5 things you can do to get closer to each of your goals: These can be habits or one-time tasks (e.g. take a walk every day, automate "X" amount of my paycheck into my investment accounts, etc.). Consider this bullet-point list as your high-level action plan. It gives you a roadmap that's simple enough to help you get started without overwhelming your mind with details or complexities. Success is born from simple, consistent habits.

Create a vision board for each goal: Envisioning yourself achieving the goal can spark some initial excitement and motivation. Everything gets clearer when you can see the end in sight.

Write out a "pros" and "cons" list for each goal: Consider the benefits of working towards each goal vs. the downsides. A little fear-based motivation can be healthy as a catalyst to gain some inspiration and momentum.

Get mapping & mathing: Create a mockup of your ideal wardrobe, healthy meals you want to eat, design a mockup of your dream project live on a billboard, all of the places you want to visit in a foreign country, every aspect of your dream date night, etc. Do some quick projections on how much you could be saving with your budgeting goals, and entrepreneurial pursuits, or run the numbers regarding health goals you can work towards (whether it's weight or strength related)

Create a weekly self-accountability goal: Choose one task per goal that you want to accomplish each day (or a few times a week) to get you moving in the direction you desire. Keeping promises to yourself is the simplest way to stay on track.

Track your progress: Make a log of your hours spent reading, working out, check off the days you've had a healthy meal, how many pitch emails you've sent out, any additions or removals from your current wardrobe and environment, etc.

Give yourself a rewarding incentive: Be enough of an adult to use your childlike tendencies to your advantage. Create "if-then" compromises with yourself to ensure you stay on track. E.g: If I make a healthy meal at home for dinner during the week then, I can eat it while watching an episode of my favorite show. If I order-in an unhealthy meal, then I cannot watch my favorite show that night. Savage, I know!

Join supportive online communities & spaces: Find communities on Tumblr, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, Facebook groups, etc. to find people with similar goals and life outlooks. Read books by authors who have achieved your desired goal, and listen to podcasts on your same wavelength. Find digital ways to cultivate a tribe.

Keep a "Winning" Journal: A notebook that you can write in daily, a few times a week, or weekly to share all of your accomplishments. This method allows you to feel like you can brag and show off a bit, so you get the social validation (even if done in private) while still moving in silence and refraining from appearing arrogant.

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shousetsubangbang · 1 month ago

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Signups are now open for the February 24 issue; the text deadline for the issue is Tuesday, February 11 and the art deadline is Saturday, February 22.

Please reply to this post if you plan to submit a story or artwork for this issue, indicating whether you are interested in contributing to the issue as an author and/or artist, and whether or not you are looking for a collaborative partner. As always, you don’t have to sign up to participate, and you’re not creating an unbreakable contract by signing up, but it’s always a good idea!

This issue’s theme is Nine to Five: Looking to make a work spouse your real spouse? Clock in on time for our office-romance-themed February issue!

Quick Answers: Interested in participating but don’t know where to start? Bring your quick questions here!

Submission Guidelines for Fiction: All the specifics for text submissions. READ BEFORE SUBMITTING.

Submission Guidelines for Art: Whether you’re illustrating or submitting a standalone piece, here’s what you need to know.

Find the Shousetsu Bang*Bang community on Discord! Join us on our very own server for discussions, inspiration, shop talk, silliness, and other behind-the-scenes fun.

For related nonsense, announcements, and various goings-on, find us at our main website, Mastodon, cohost, Plurk, and Tumblr. (Other accounts in less-used places include Reddit, DeviantArt, Archive of Our Own, and Goodreads!) We have pages at Smashwords and Itch.io where you can download ebook versions of past issues for free.

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#s2b2 #nine to five #queer #lgbtq #original fiction #original art #queer romance #signup

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vaspider · 1 year ago

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I genuinely hope this isn’t too prying or intrusive, I am strictly asking out of curiosity but…. What…. Is going on with that 16 year old and why is it on a post about a house coat? Are you ok?

I'm fine.

That kid has been fixated on me since I said, basically, that the French Revolution killed a bunch of innocent people and isn't something to be emulated.

For the past 3 weeks, since I told her to leave me alone on Tumblr, she's been stalking me across the internet, digging up every possible way to contact me, and sending elaborate death threats along with suicide threats. I've turned off the contact forms on my professional website and NK. She's sent asks here and contacted me from multiple Tumblrs, multiple Facebook and Instagram accounts, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, BlueSky, and multiple email accounts. I'm pretty sure I'm missing something, though I do have it all screenshotted and saved. She found my phone number and left multiple threatening voicemails, and she kept contacting my business, sending death threats to places where my employees, including my younger brother, had to deal with them.

She seems to think that I'm a man, and that I'm attempting to use magic on her, and that she can threaten me into doing whatever it is she wants. I don't really understand what's going on in her head, and I'm not trying to do so. I don't really read the things she writes.

At this point, the FBI is involved - she's been sending death threats pretty much every day for about a month now with a few breaks here and there - and I've been declining to respond to her for the vast majority of that time, hoping that she'd get bored, or, hopefully, that someone who cares about her would realize how deeply, deeply unwell she is and get her help before this becomes a criminal matter. I really, really don't want to be put in that position, but I also can't ask the people who work for me (some of whom are my family) to deal with a constant barrage of messages detailing how if I don't publicly apologize for ... fuck all if I know or care... she's going to "slit [my] throat like a Sicilian" and throw my body in the Willamette River.

I really, really, really just want this kid to leave me alone. I didn't seek her out - she sought me out - and I'm not interested in talking to or debating with a 16 year old. But, also, the things that she's been doing for the past month are crimes and truly beyond the pale.

As to why that's on a video about a housecoat... your guess is as good as mine. Her last comments before this were on the two public videos on my abandoned YouTube account, both of which were process videos about making patches, and she left death threats on a post on my old personal Instagram that I made on the day of the Tree of Life shooting. It has nothing to do with me or what I'm saying - she seems to just randomly pick things to add her bizarre urban fantasy VASpider fanfic to.

Please leave that person alone, everybody. She is a third my age and very clearly deeply unwell. I'd been ignoring her, but I'm kind of hoping against hope that knowing that, yeah, actually, what she's doing is a crime, people take that seriously, and I really really really don't want her to fuck up her life? will convince her to stop.

I'm not afraid. I'm mostly just tired and very, very sad. It is really upsetting to see someone who is so out of alignment with consensus reality, and it's even more upsetting when that person is so young. I feel deeply sorry for her, both that she's unwell in a way that's clearly causing her harm, and that she doesn't seem to be getting the help she needs from the people around her. I hope it's just that the people around her don't realize what's going on and that someone can make them aware, because it is just... rotten... to see someone that young making such a mess of things.

I don't want to talk about this further. I've been avoiding talking about it publicly at all, but at the point where we're closing on a month... I dunno. I hope saying something directly and making it clear this isn't going to go the way she thinks gets it through to her.

I'm gonna go play with my dog.

#harassment #harassment tag #asker is not harassing me #this just deals with my current stalker

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cacodaemonia · 9 months ago

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I've seen a lot of people panicking, getting really angry, and sharing blatant misinformation about this upcoming lore.fm app, so I wanted to share this update I found from the creator.

I'm not defending it because I haven't seen exactly how it works yet, but from what I can tell, it's similar to a desktop program such as Calibre, which is what I (and many other people) often use for text-to-speech to read fics.

Calibre downloads the fic (just like ANYONE can download fics from AO3, mind you) into the computer from a URL provided by the user, and reads it from that file with the wonky robotic voice. I don't know if the lore.fm app even downloads the pages users provide for it to read, or if it just accesses them on a case-by-case basis, but I suspect it's the latter because otherwise, they would need to pay for a LOT of cloud storage.

Maybe the app is totally shady, but it could also be an attempt to make an accessibility tool for mobile screen reading that doesn't suck. The project definitely seems clumsily-executed, and they should really be providing more information beyond their TOS, privacy policy, and tiktok videos, but that doesn't automatically make them nefarious. It's also unclear to me if they are simply 'marketing' this as a better way to listen to fics that haven't been podficced, or if it can be used on any website, but I think it's the latter? I don't have a tiktok account and I don't feel like sifting through a bunch of videos, so. 🤷

Anyway, before you send them angry emails or messages on social media or share rumors, please consider looking into this on your own rather than relying on wild speculation.

Oh, and here's a reddit post from someone who emailed @ao3org and got a reply from them regarding the legality.

EDIT: looks like the app is shutting down. I'm still not sure what their goal was, exactly. Such a weird situation.

#lore.fm #ao3 #fan fiction #fanfiction #screen readers #text-to-speech #accessibility tools #fandom #tiktok

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chaoticstrata · 2 months ago

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Fellow Writers Be Careful

Hey, I just wanted to give ya'll a heads up on this scam/bait and switch revolving around making art of your fics.

I've had this happen twice now--once on my Ao3 account and now on my old FanFiction.net account.

The first time (around Nov 12, 2024) this happened is on my fic In Harmonious Song on Ao3 where their first comment was on the fic, and I said thanks in reply. They then asked if I'd like to collaborate with them on drawing some scenes from the fic. Their wording led me to think that they wanted to draw something they liked from it, and being a bit excited someone wanted to draw from it I said sure. They sent me a Discord friend request and we started talking on there. It told them I'm cool with them drawing whatever, I just asked for a link back to my fic showing where the inspo was from. They then asked if there was anything in particular that I'd like drawn from the fic, I told them which one...and then they said 'btw this is going to be a commission'....

WHY DIDN'T YOU SAY THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE!? Like wtf, I'm not about to ASK someone to draw shit for free. If I'm going to pay to have something drawn I will be the one reaching out to the artist...not the other way around. And not when you don't mention anything about price beforehand.

I thought this was a one off thing. All their comments on that post were deleted and I had deleted my responses because it looked weird talking to myself in the comments (lol). I do still have the email notifications though.

I also got rid of the messages in Discord because I didn't think I'd need to keep receipts--I am kicking myself over that.

And now someone has PM'd me directly on ff.net saying this:

Apparently this is a common thing, here's a reddit post from r/fanfiction.net

The List of Scammers on Fanfiction That We Found So Far

And GloriaJenkins22 is on that list.

Searching scammer on the r/AO3 subreddit is showing similar stuff.

Just keep an eye out ya'll!

#strata speaks #fanfiction scammers #beware #please stay safe #spreading awareness

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mobiused · 2 years ago

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My best friend Stremio

Hi guysss i wanted to make a guide on how to STREAM MOVIES AND TELEVISION FOR FREE with NO ads, NO scary porn popups and NO viruses. You don't need to use a VPN, and nothing is region locked. It's an open source application called Stremio which you can download here. Basically, it's a tool that will scour the web for places to stream/torrent any movie/TV show in the world, including foreign media and list the place with the most seeders so you can guarantee minimal streaming times as long as your connection is OK - and even if you have a shitty connection, it offers multiple resolution levels so you can sacrifice quality for streamability.

The setup might be a little unintuitive (but its super easy!!!) so I'll explain how to below ^^ Let me know if you need any pointers at any part

Once you've downloaded and installed the program (make sure to allow through the firewall, it has to have permissions to be able to stream), the first thing you need to do is create an account. They never send emails or anything like that, it's just a way to save your library.

Download as many addons as you like. You can find many on the Stremio reddit I believe. I think the best one to start off with is Torrentio, which you can configure and install here , but there's also a jigsaw piece in the top right corner where you can find some community addons like this... Here's another link with a lot more. I just downloaded all of them cuz why not lol

3. Use the search bar to find what you want. It's separated by Series & Movies so make sure you get the right version. There's a couple addons which can help if you scroll down that can search via IMBD or TBP

4. Select your episode if it's a TV show, or just skip to the next step if it's a film

5. If you're like me and downloaded a fuckton of addons cuz its fun then itll appear like this

A simple rule is to go based on the amount of seeders (this is the number next to the 👤 emoji) , but if you want to do a little math, you can go by the seeders-to-filesize ratio to guarantee the fastest speed. If it doesn't load, then you can scroll down to 720p, 480p, DVDrip, etc. There are a lot of options to choose from so just choose whatever works best for your connection :)

6. Bonus step, you can configure subtitles in almost any language as long as it's available if you get subtitle-based addons. (There's also dubs for foreign media). Sometimes they're embedded like on the 1st img, and sometimes they're scoured from places online, so you might need to configure the timing a little like the 2nd img, but usually it's pretty easy to find subtitles that will match up.

7. All done! Happy pirating. Let me know if you need any help ^__^

P.S: if you're short on space, sometimes its best to just turn the cache off, or go into the directory and manually delete the cache. Won't break anything

P.P.S: Right clicking on the stream will show you options like opening it into VLC (lifesaver if you want to go above 100% vol) or downloading it (AT YOUR OWN RISK) if your internet can't handle streaming

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