I Love The Flow And Feeling Of This Painting! Cas Looks So Peaceful, It’s A Great Look On Him

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Keep your priorities straight: post fic.

I saw these at dollar tree a while back and I was immediately thinking of Cas shopping with Kelly (before y’know, shit happened-but that doesn't matter in the spn in my head) and she saw the angel ones and was like:

“Oh,We’re so getting those.” Kelly pointed to the rack with cute angel socks that came in a variety of sizes, most notably the tiniest pairs for the celestial being in her growing baby bump. Cas gave a small smile as he took the one with the wings off the rack. “Get another pair of those for you too, Cas.” she teased.

“Alright.” He fondly sighed, he couldn't fully hide the grin on his stubbled face. Having some downtime doing something so simple as shopping was peaceful.

Cas wished he could do this more often, hopefully when other powerful beings weren’t ruffling his feathers and trying to kill the nephilim and Kelly, who was becoming a close friend to him already.

He put two pairs of them in the cart with all the other supplies that they had. Onesies, babypowder,soap and some groceries and a maternity pillow recommended by one of Kelly’s friends. Cas’ blue gaze lingered at the rack for a moment longer and decided to get the one with trucks too. Dean liked cars right? Why not get him some truck socks. And if Dean didn’t like them,well, his loss and the baby’s gain.

Saw something today on common asked questions in the google search engine and it said “can cats hurt you?” Anyway it had me thinking.

Anything or anyone can harm you in theory. Dogs when provoked and or trained to, can rip you to shreds-I’m looking at you, hellhounds! Cats can scratch the daylights outta ya if provoked, or on accident if they’re kittens who are learning to use them. Snapping turtles can take a bite out of ya, horses and kangaroos can break your ribs and more from just a kick. Some plants can make people and animals have horrible allergic reactions and can even kill ya. Hell, someone could drown in marshmallows. Is it likely, no, could it happen in theory, yes. Where was I going with this? *sigh* I need a nap.

ao3 turns 15 today

reblog if youre older than ao3

(there's a lot of people asking about this, but the legal age to use social media is 13, except in few countries. so yes, there are people here under 15)

Wear breathable clothing! Like nice airy fabrics and light colors! It attracts less heat to your body. Sunglasses are a must people, ones that actually protect your eyes, not the ones for fashion only. I find that reusable water bottles are great to carry around with you, put some ice (the big ice cubes) or pour some cold water to last you throughout the day. Some water bottles, like the metal ones or ones with a little insolation, do a great job of keeping drinks cool, at least in my experience. Heat also can make people more irritable, and do or say stupid things sometimes, so don’t blame yourself for everything okay? Give your self and others a little extra grace. Ya’ll are doing all ya’ll can.

to uk peeps

so you guys are facing down yet another global warming summer and as an american i feel entitled to barge over and give you a lot of advice about how to live your life. also i’m used to surviving 90-110 degree summers (32—43 celsius) with no ac. so here we go. 

you need to drink  a lot of water. on average you should be drinking about two liters. on hot days, double that. 

fill plastic water bottles halfway up and stick them in your freezer. take them out once they’ve frozen and fill the rest up with water, drink the water, fill it up again, and carry it around with you until it’s time to get the next ice bottle. also you can put the icy end against your throat or over your chest for maximum refreshment.

consider making a lot of sun tea. get big glass jars or a pitcher. put a bunch of your preferred teabags in it with some sugar. if you want to be an american southerner, your tea should be green or black and your sugar amount should be enough to kill a child. if you want to be sane, put in as little sugar as you can get away with so it’s not dehydrating, and stick with herbal teas because the last thing you want during the heat of the day is a caffeine boost. leave your tea on a windowsill. after a few hours it’s steeped and you can put it in the fridge. tadaaa. 

fruit juice, soda pop, beer, and a lot of sports drinks like gatorade all dehydrate you, and in really hot weather they’re dangerous because people will drink them instead of water. drink an equal amount of water as anything with sugar. see prior point about sun tea. 

when you sweat you lose salt. so don’t feel bad about eating some junk food. 

freeze grapes. eat the grapes. repeat. 

get a hat with a brim. baseball caps are ok but wide brimmed hats are better because they shadow the back of your neck and that’s one less thing to have to worry about. 

don’t wear knit caps. just… no. 

you don’t get more sunburned because it’s hot, you get more sunburned because when it’s hot you wear less clothes. so don’t freak out.

if you don’t have AC you can put a bowl of ice behind a fan. this creates a swamp cooler, by pulling the air over the ice. also, put on a wet t-shirt and sit in front of it, and you’ll cool further by evaporation. 

speaking of evaporation, watch out if it’s humid. you don’t cool down from sweating as much when the air’s already saturated. drink more water, have more salt, and change your shirt a lot. 

heatstroke is serious shit, and kids and the elderly are prone to it. but whatever your age, if you feel nauseous, headachy, or short of breath, the heat’s getting to you. pour your water bottle over your head and go sit in the shade. keep an eye on friends and family as well. 

if someone stops sweating when they’re still out in the heat, that’s serious business and get them medical treatment as soon as possible. it’s a case of dehydration and/or heatstroke.  

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!

I am b. Unwell and c. Choking with laughter

i love that skepticalfrog post where dean realizes cas is just Some Guy to literally everyone else and then he has to chew on some leather [ID in alt]

One day I’ll use this on someone (me being the nb one)

Being on the aromantic spectrum is interesting cause there’s so many experiences that I can have in a single day-

me: omg! Look at that happy couple holding hands! So cute

also me: Led Zeppelin if you say “Whole Lotta Love” one more time!