This Website’s Easy Watch. *dangles A Bunch Of Greek Gods Like Keys*

Reblogging because this is REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT.

Also second that people shouldn't have to dump their whole medical history on someone, or be forced to share their medical trauma/life story, just to get what the hell they asked for and what they are more often literally PAYING for.

None of them are making this a problem. Especially if they ask "can you do this" and don't usually make a fuss if you can't, they just want to know so they can make an informed decision. It only becomes a problem when pretentious people decide to be spiteful, hateful, deceitful or judgemental with no cause and MAKE it a problem.

Just trust people to know what the fuck they can eat on their own. It's not your damn business.

DO NOT DO THIS.

This makes me so angry.

If you work in a movie theater and you do this I have no respect for you.

My younger brother is Type 1 Diabetic.

When we go to a movie theater, we always get him diet soda. If he were to get regular when we asked for diet, we would not give him the insulin he would need for it. If that happens, his blood sugar level could go so high he could go into a coma, go blind, or even die.

If somebody gave him regular soda instead of diet without telling us, that person could be responsible for a nine-year-old being killed or blinded.

Just thinking about that makes me so angry. I get scared every time we take him to a movie in case the people working there saw this picture and decide to do the same thing.

Please signal boost this so people know.

Baba Yaga the Kind

Like I said in this post, in Russian fairy tales Baba Yaga can range from helpful to occasionally murderous to actual cannibal, but @the-importance-of-being-wilde wanted to know about stories where she is friendly. So here are the ones I know:

The Three Kingdoms

The hero Ivashko Lie-on-the-Stove is sent to Baba Yaga for help after a quest gets him stranded far away from home. He calls her “little grandmother” and she lends him her giant eagle to fly back to Russia. However, this is Baba Yaga’s eagle, so she instructs him to take enough meat with him to feed it every time it got hungry, or it might start snacking on Ivashko himself… (Don’t worry, he only loses a bit of his shoulder before he gets home and even that gets magically healed.)

The Maiden Tsar

I know this is about Baba Yaga, but the Maiden Tsar sails around with a fleet of ships accompanied by her thirty foster sisters just to court an extremely beautiful merchant’s son named Ivan. It’s awesome. Of course the lovers get divided and the Maiden Tsar lets Ivan know that he can find her in the thrice tenth kingdom. Ivan cannot find it, but he does find Baba Yaga’s hut and asks her for help. She says she does not know, but perhaps her younger sister does. Her sister is described as “another Baba Yaga”, but she does not know either. She tells him to go to their youngest sister and warns him that she might get angry and want to eat him, but that if he quickly begs her for three horns and asks her permission to blow upon them everything will be alright. Sure enough, this happens and when he does blow the horns a large firebird comes to fly him to the trice tenth kingdom. (Where Ivan makes amends to the Maiden Tsar and manages to win her love again.)

Keep reading

I really love the idea of Baba Yaga: an old witch who lives in a house with chicken legs. Are there any Baba Yaga stories you know of where Baba Yaga isn't evil? If not, what are your ideas on a friendly Baba Yaga

Oh I agree, Baba Yaga is a great character! She features in broader Slavic folklore, but I know her mostly from Russian fairy tales. There she mainly shows up in three forms: helpful Baba Yaga, cannibal Baba Yaga and… let’s call her maybe-murderous Baba Yaga:

The helpful type gives heroes good advice and useful gifts. (E.g. The Three Kingdoms, The Maiden Tsar, King Bear, The Sea King and Vasila the Wise, Go I Know Not Wither, Bring Back I Know Not What, Ilya Muromets and the Dragon.)

The cannibal type wants to trap people to cook in her stove and eat. (E.g. “Baba Yaga”, Baba Yaga and the Brave Youth, The Prince Danila Govorila.)

The maybe-murderous type is only helpful when the hero performs the right kind of behaviour. (E.g. “Baba Yaga”, Maria Morevna, Vasilisa the Beautiful, and Ilya Muromets and the Dragon, again.)

In some stories there is more than one Baba Yaga, in which case they are sisters.

She is sometimes called “Baba Yaga the Bone-Legged”, in whatever form she takes. The dangerous Baba Yaga’s often fly around in a mortar, wielding the pestle as a magic rudder. The cannibal and maybe-murderous types often have a fence around their house made from human bones or decorated with skulls.

The iconic little hut on chicken feet is usually the first thing a hero ever sees of Baba Yaga and multiple stories state you must greet the house thus: “Little hut, little hut, turn your back to the forest and your front to me.” That way you can go in.

I will make a separate post to tell you some more about specific stories where Baba Yaga is friendly!

Folktales you can read as queer without squinting

Happy Pride everyone! Here is a selection of folk and fairy tales that I enjoy for both their plots and their queer vibes. I speak of vibes only, because I cannot say I have insight in the historical intention of these tales, but I do vouch for me presenting them to you unaltered, as I found them.

I will give the titles with links to the full texts here and summaries under the read more:

Gold-tree and Silver-tree Scottish fairy tale, collected by Joseph Jacobs, published in 1892. [Cw: abusive parent, murder.]

The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces Cape Verdian folktale, collected by Elsie Clews Parsons in 1916-1917. [Cw: attempted poisoning]

The Unicorn Spanish fairy tale, collected by Aurelio Espinosa in 1947. [Cw: murder, attempt at being outed, awkward use of pronouns.]

The Tale of Tamamizu Japanese literary folktale, written by an unknown author between the Muromachi period (1336–1573) and the beginning of the Edo period (1603–1867). [Cw: tragic ending.]

The Tale of the Marquise-Marquis of Banneville French literary fairy tale, published in 1697, authorship contested (suggested: François-Timoléon de Choisy, Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier, Charles Perrault). [Cw: gender dysphoria, age difference.]

Bisclavret French literary legend, written by Marie de France in the 12th century. [Cw: wolf-violence]

Keep reading

So are we gonna make October the Wei Wuxian Appreciation month, or what.

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!

The argument I see way too often from Tony stans is the "you just don't like him because he is realistic" which...I know. I know there are bunch of men who get away with ton of shit just because they're rich, white and men. I know there are misogynistic people, sexualising every girl they come across. I know there are people being homophobic, sexist, transphobic and never getting called out. I know there are men telling rape jokes 'cause "it's just a joke". I know there are rich men drowning in their toxic masculinity harming everyone around them. And guess what? I don't like them either. I know Tony Stark is realistic, and that's why he is dangerous. I don't really care if you like Tony, I don't care if he is your favorite character. What I have issue with is anyone condoning his behavior that shouldn't be condoned. I don't care if he is your favorite character, you need to acknowledge that some of the shit he does, is not okay. And to those who say "it's just a movie" it's not. It's media, and media affects reality. If you don't think that the men like Tony, when seeing him being glorified, wont follow his footsteps because it's 'cool', I don't know what to say. There are too many people like Tony Stark. Saying okay to him, is saying okay to every other asshole like him. You can like his character, and call out the faults of creating characters like him. Tony is realistic. I know. And I hate it.

Why not

Two years?! I’m in!

Mdzs Fandom: JC suffered so much, he lost his entire family and sister and even his clan, surely his taking out his anger and resentment at others is totally misunderstood and reasonable, I relate to him so much 🥹

WN (who lost not only his sister and entire family and clan but also his literal life, and was held captive and experimented on for thirteen years as a trophy, watches his relatives die a second time, is treated with prejudice and disdain and fear by most of the cultivation world, yet despite all this still manages to retain a bone-deep kindness and humility, as well as a sense of righteousness as fierce as himself): Am I a joke to you?

This is what I meant when I said characters who are constantly declaring what they went through are put up on a pedestal for their non existent resilience. It's so easy to forget that other characters went through much of the same pain and handled their circumstances better, like WN who went through literal hell himself, because he barely mentions and even downplays his suffering.