Nobody Asked But I Just Had To Draw Him, So Here Is A Doodle (〃ﾉωﾉ)

HELLO?!😍

yapping about my 'touya had a fnaf phase' hc

☆ he started watching horror games gameplays just to prove he could watch them without being scared (he couldn't)

☆ his favorite game is fnaf 3 (bc daddy issues lmao) but it's also the one that scares him the most

☆ he didn't care about the lore at first bc he was just watching gameplays but he somehow ended up watching a theory video and immediately loved the lore side of the fandom

☆ his favorite animatronic is foxy (bc he used to remind him of himself but he refuses to admit it out loud)

☆ he loathes balloon boy

☆ natsuo wasn't a fnaf fan but he knew the basics so he'd play the Toreador March at random times just to spook touya

☆ imagine if fnaf 4, sister location and pizzeria simulator came out while he was out in a coma: he wakes up with all the traumas and struggles that we know about but on top of that he learns that his fav franchise made 3 new games that give some kind of canon. so he watched the gameplays as soon as he could lmao

☆ he doesn't know if he hates or loves these three games. he is very much confused though. so he watched even more theory videos

☆ his favorite characters are henry and cassidy

☆ he hates security breach and basically believe there shouldn't have been any games after pizzeria simulator

☆ he never told the lov about this phase but one day shigaraki was humming one of the fan songs (maybe one that's not so popular) and touya sang along without realizing

☆ sihgaraki let him borrow his console to play fnaf 1 (bc touya never had the oportunity to play any of the games) and it helped them get closer even if they have heated arguments about theories they disagree on

☆ toga bought (stole) him a foxy plush for christmas. he keeps it in his room.

anyways that's all, hope you enjoyed lmao

I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

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See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/

Hiya!! Here's your Daily Reminder to Click for Palestine!

thanks i’M IN TEARS

ik it's probably not that deep but this picture and specifically Dabi's hair color + the old outfit and Twice's presence (while Magne is not there) seems to imply Shigaraki wasn't mentally present at all to register anything that happened from the first war onwards 😭

chat does he know about marriage

cozy lil cafe :3

Merch drop

as someone who wants to write canon divergence but is to lazy to watch/read the canon again, i'm so thankful for the heroes who wrote the fandom wiki pages T-T

please let me write a ‘crack treated seriously’ fic out of this T-T

dabi: why are you a hero?

touya: spite. why are you a villain?

dabi: spite.

touya: nice.

it has so much angst potential too though (like dabi realizing that, yes, he could have been a hero. it wasn’t impossible. he could have made it even without his father’s support)

I love the idea of Dabi and au Hero!Touya meeting, like, it would be so???? I can't even comprehend what it would be like.