Will Make A Better Post Abt It At Some Point But I’ve Opened Up A Ko—fi.

Hii chooms remember at the end credit scene especially in Goro takemura line when you kept him alive at the certain part of the game and did any other ending than the Devil ending?

His voice (audio) line is still the same 'Rot in hell' line except in the subtitles they are labeled as:

(So sorry for the low quality pic)

I recently played this in the latest update-

Is this glitch, bug, or wut?

pov ur fighting in the archon war

What the past couple days have felt like

Fran Thoughts 1

I know this isn't healthy to let it out here but better something than nothing-

Some people thought being art student is easy but it is not, between juggling to general education subjects and doing major art subjects makes the time difficulty especially this online class.

Not only that you missed and craved the interaction between your peers especially while your doing artworks with them. Even if the art profs not teaching *ehem* just really giving projects to you. Or that after school fatigue yet became gone atleast for awhile because hanging out despite getting four hours of sleep is worth it.

Now on online class it's only not much interaction between classmates because we had many things to do not only in school but many personal things happening at home. It felt like just passing time doing plates (projects) and doing requirements of school yet felt like there was no reward for it.

Yet despite the negative feelings, we still strive to be if not best do better for ourselves.

"he asked for no pickles"

Jamie, you have to work tomorrow! You have an early shift!

Me: "OKAY BUT FIRST!."

Art Lesson: Dips

Depression is a funny thing. 

Mental illness of all sorts is a funny thing. Pops up in all sorts of ways, it likes to when you don’t need it around especially. 

I try to write up art tips for people that are less about Art with a capitol “A” and more about the struggles that crop up within it. Within ourselves. 

A great deal of creatives deal with depression, or with mental illness in general. Anxiety, mood disorders, executive function disorders; it’s alluded to constantly in all sorts of platitudes, to the point that people joke about it. But it’s real. Creatives generally struggle because of the nature of creating. It’s always taxing even when it’s fun, and it can be hard when you feel the constant need to make things, and even worse when you burn out. 

I think it’s important to emphasize that it’s not uncommon to have dips. Dips in mood, dips in perceived artistic skill, dips in interest. 

These are ok. It’s apart of growth, and sometimes it’s unavoidable. Usually it’s inconvenient. 

Dips are natural. You’re not bad at art. You’re not losing your ability to be creative. You are not stupid, you’re not unwanted, you’re not alone. 

Dips can be a sign that we need a break. They can be a sign that we need a challenge. They can be a sign that we need to talk to someone and work on ourselves. They’re never permanent. 

I know I personally struggle with feeling like I’m just not a creative person. I beat myself up because I can’t meet personal deadlines, or I lose engagement with personal projects quickly. 

None of that means I’m a bad artist. It means I have to find frameworks that work for me.

What do you do without people asking you to? What is the work you do just because it feels good to be alive when you’re doing it? 

Maybe it’s working with others? Talking with people? Organizing? Growing things? Relentlessly polishing? Making people laugh? Watching birds? 

It can be a hard question to answer when you’re depressed or having an episode. Hold the question with you though. There are usually moments in the day where the heavy is lighter, and note when that is. Note why that is. 

Being able to incorporate those underlying interests will help you learn the right path. 

For me, it’s helping people. It’s not a cure-all for my problems, but it helps me manage my goals and expectations. If any one person gains something from relating with my work or words, that’s a win. They are my win. 

I know this is meandering and open ended, but I want to relate that having a dip in interest, art, or emotional health is natural. It’s not pleasant, but it’ll pass. Stop for a moment and think about what you’re needing. 

Honestly if you’re having trouble figuring it out, DM me and we can chat about it. I can’t promise answers, but I can hear you out. Sometimes framing your thoughts sets the answer out in front of you. 

Be kind to yourselves. I know you’ll make it. 

I wanted to go binge read gaz fics and after scrolling through the kyle garrick x reader tag, for almost 15 minutes every single one that I saw was another ship completely with no mention of gaz, or a head cannon with every 141 guy plus kortac, with gaz at the bottom or not even included. i’ve seen so much discourse around gaz being excluded from cod fanfic but holy shit guys this is a bit ridiculous. I understand tagging another cod ships to get more reach with your posts but having no mention of gaz anywhere on your blog, yet you use his name to get more engagement on your fics is a bit disgusting.

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.

FFXV Headcanons: Chocobros’ Modern Job AU

What would happened if the Chocobros take a job in a modern and normal world?

Noctis: CEO. Ceo of his business company which is inherited from his father,  Regis. He may sleep often but he is well-organized and resourceful. At times he might or might not be shy or stuttering while in a big meeting or press conference. All in all he is a very amazing boss  work with.

Prompto: Animal caretaker/instructor. The cinnamon-blond-sunshine loves animals especially Chocobos. He is the one enthusiastic guy who loves to tell and teach you about a certain animal breed. He is willing to petsit/animalsit your pet if your running some errands.           Professional Photographer if not animal caretaker/instructor          Remember when-in game he takes pictures most of the time during the   road trip? He’s the photographer you ever hope for. Happily snapping some pics at the right moment and time. He would create some               memorable pictures in the time of your lives.

Gladio: Fitness Instructor. Of course, how could he have that big muscles and abs like a sculpture of a god. *insert nosebleed.* He would instruct  you how to work out properly and would give food dietary. Need some motivation? He would give some fire in your spirit. Feeling down about your weight?He would gladly point out some good things about you.He’s the fitness instructor that everybody unusually but very hard to find.

Ignis: Culinary Chef. Remember the times he cooks at the main game and the Final fantasy XV:Brotherhood? Well…. he will blow your taste buds away. He loves to cook for the others especially if he gets to see the reaction/s. Hate that certain food? He’ll make that one so you’ll love it. Want some of your favorite food? He’ll cook it to the hearts content. Trade something rare (ingredient) about food? He will trade you some foodie  and you might hear “THAT’S IT I’VE COME UP WITH A NEW RECIPEEEEHH!” from the very mouth of the chef-specs who loves to drink ebony coffee. In the end, he’s your favorite chef that you keep coming back to his restaurant.