Late Night Drives — Obey Me!

Day 4: Baking 💕 #StolitzWeek2025 Whipped cream ~ 💕

straight men have beauty standards for men that are completely different than the beauty standards women and gay men have for men and then they get mad when they conform to the beauty standards other podcast bros set for them and women still don’t find them attractive

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Do I look like a fool?” said the frog. “You’d sting me if I let you on my back!”

“Be logical,” said the scorpion. “If I stung you I’d certainly drown myself.”

“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Climb aboard, then!” But no sooner than they were halfway across the river, the scorpion stung the frog, and they both began to thrash and drown. “Why on earth did you do that?” the frog said morosely. “Now we’re both going to die.” 

“I can’t help it,” said the scorpion. “It’s my nature.”

___

…But no sooner than they were halfway across the river, the frog felt a subtle motion on its back, and in a panic dived deep beneath the rushing waters, leaving the scorpion to drown.

“It was going to sting me anyway,” muttered the frog, emerging on the other side of the river. “It was inevitable. You all knew it. Everyone knows what those scorpions are like. It was self-defense.”

___

…But no sooner had they cast off from the bank, the frog felt the tip of a stinger pressed lightly against the back of its neck. “What do you think you’re doing?” said the frog.

“Just a precaution,” said the scorpion. “I cannot sting you without drowning. And now, you cannot drown me without being stung. Fair’s fair, isn’t it?”

They swam in silence to the other end of the river, where the scorpion climbed off, leaving the frog fuming.

“After the kindness I showed you!” said the frog. “And you threatened to kill me in return?”

“Kindness?” said the scorpion. “To only invite me on your back after you knew I was defenseless, unable to use my tail without killing myself? My dear frog, I only treated you as I was treated. Your kindness was as poisoned as a scorpion’s sting.”

___

…“Just a precaution,” said the scorpion. “I cannot sting you without drowning. And now, you cannot drown me without being stung. Fair’s fair, isn’t it?”

“You have a point,” the frog acknowledged. “But once we get to dry land, couldn’t you sting me then without repercussion?”

“All I want is to cross the river safely,” said the scorpion. “Once I’m on the other side I would gladly let you be.”

“But I would have to trust you on that,” said the frog. “While you’re pressing a stinger to my neck. By ferrying you to land I’d be be giving up the one deterrent I hold over you.”

“But by the same logic, I can’t possibly withdraw my stinger while we’re still over water,” the scorpion protested.

The frog paused in the middle of the river, treading water. “So, I suppose we’re at an impasse.”

The river rushed around them. The scorpion’s stinger twitched against the frog’s unbroken skin. “I suppose so,” the scorpion said.

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Absolutely not!” said the frog, and dived beneath the waters, and so none of them learned anything.

___

A scorpion, being unable to swim, asked a turtle (as in the original Persian version of the fable) to carry it across the river. The turtle readily agreed, and allowed the scorpion aboard its shell. Halfway across, the scorpion gave in to its nature and stung, but failed to penetrate the turtle’s thick shell. The turtle, swimming placidly, failed to notice.

They reached the other side of the river, and parted ways as friends.

___

…Halfway across, the scorpion gave in to its nature and stung, but failed to penetrate the turtle’s thick shell.

The turtle, hearing the tap of the scorpion’s sting, was offended at the scorpion’s ungratefulness. Thankfully, having been granted the powers to both defend itself and to punish evil, the turtle sank beneath the waters and drowned the scorpion out of principle.

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Do I look like a fool?” sneered the frog. “You’d sting me if I let you on my back.”

The scorpion pleaded earnestly. “Do you think so little of me? Please, I must cross the river. What would I gain from stinging you? I would only end up drowning myself!”

“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Even a scorpion knows to look out for its own skin. Climb aboard, then!”

But as they forged through the rushing waters, the scorpion grew worried. This frog thinks me a ruthless killer, it thought. Would it not be justified in throwing me off now and ridding the world of me? Why else would it agree to this? Every jostle made the scorpion more and more anxious, until the frog surged forward with a particularly large splash, and in panic the scorpion lashed out with its stinger.

“I knew it,” snarled the frog, as they both thrashed and drowned. “A scorpion cannot change its nature.”

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. The frog agreed, but no sooner than they were halfway across the scorpion stung the frog, and they both began to thrash and drown.

“I’ve only myself to blame,” sighed the frog, as they both sank beneath the waters. “You, you’re a scorpion, I couldn’t have expected anything better. But I knew better, and yet I went against my judgement! And now I’ve doomed us both!”

“You couldn’t help it,” said the scorpion mildly. “It’s your nature.” 

___

…“Why on earth did you do that?” the frog said morosely. “Now we’re both going to die.”

“Alas, I was of two natures,” said the scorpion. “One said to gratefully ride your back across the river, and the other said to sting you where you stood. And so both fought, and neither won.” It smiled wistfully. “Ah, it would be nice to be just one thing, wouldn’t it? Unadulterated in nature. Without the capacity for conflict or regret.”

___

“By the way,” said the frog, as they swam, “I’ve been meaning to ask: What’s on the other side of the river?”

“It’s the journey,” said the scorpion. “Not the destination.”

___

…“What’s on the other side of anything?” said the scorpion. “A new beginning.”

___

…”Another scorpion to mate with,” said the scorpion. “And more prey to kill, and more living bodies to poison, and a forthcoming lineage of cruelties that you will be culpable in.”

___

…”Nothing we will live to see, I fear,” said the scorpion. “Already the currents are growing stronger, and the river seems like it shall swallow us both. We surge forward, and the shoreline recedes. But does that mean our striving was in vain?”

___

“I love you,” said the scorpion.

The frog glanced upward. “Do you?”

“Absolutely. Can you imagine the fear of drowning? Of course not. You’re a frog. Might as well be scared of breathing air. And yet here I am, clinging to your back, as the waters rage around us. Isn’t that love? Isn’t that trust? Isn’t that necessity? I could not kill you without killing myself. Are we not inseparable in this?”

The frog swam on, the both of them silent.

___

“I’m so tired,” murmured the frog eventually. “How much further to the other side? I don’t know how long we’ve been swimming. I’ve been treading water. And it’s getting so very dark.”

“Shh,” the scorpion said. “Don’t be afraid.”

The frog’s legs kicked out weakly. “How long has it been? We’re lost. We’re lost! We’re doomed to be cast about the waters forever. There is no land. There’s nothing on the other side, don’t you see!”

“Shh, shh,” said the scorpion. “My venom is a hallucinogenic. Beneath its surface, the river is endlessly deep, its currents carrying many things.” 

“You - You’ve killed us both,” said the frog, and began to laugh deliriously. “Is this - is this what it’s like to drown?” 

“We’ve killed each other,” said the scorpion soothingly. “My venom in my glands now pulsing through your veins, the waters of your birthing pool suffusing my lungs. We are engulfing each other now, drowning in each other. I am breathless. Do you feel it? Do you feel my sting pierced through your heart?”

“What a foolish thing to do,” murmured the frog. “No logic. No logic to it at all.”

“We couldn’t help it,” whispered the scorpion. “It’s our natures. Why else does anything in the world happen? Because we were made for this from birth, darling, every moment inexplicable and inevitable. What a crazy thing it is to fall in love, and yet - It’s all our fault! We are both blameless. We’re together now, darling. It couldn’t have happened any other way.”

___

“It’s funny,” said the frog. “I can’t say that I trust you, really. Or that I even think very much of you and that nasty little stinger of yours to begin with. But I’m doing this for you regardless. It’s strange, isn’t it? It’s strange. Why would I do this? I want to help you, want to go out of my way to help you. I let you climb right onto my back! Now, whyever would I go and do a foolish thing like that?”

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Do I look like a fool?” said the frog. “You’d sting me if I let you on my back!”

“Be logical,” said the scorpion. “If I stung you I’d certainly drown myself.”  

“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Come aboard, then!” But no sooner had the scorpion mounted the frog’s back than it began to sting, repeatedly, while still safely on the river’s bank.

The frog groaned, thrashing weakly as the venom coursed through its veins, beginning to liquefy its flesh. “Ah,” it muttered. “For some reason I never considered this possibility.”

“Because you were never scared of me,” the scorpion whispered in its ear. “You were never scared of dying. In a past life you wore a shell and sat in judgement. And then you were reborn: soft-skinned, swift, unburdened, as new and vulnerable as a child, moving anew through a world of children. How could anyone ever be cruel, you thought, seeing the precariousness of it all?” The scorpion bowed its head and drank. “How could anyone kill you without killing themselves?”

An artist : Aw man! I saw my arts were reposted on Instagram. I’ve asked them to take my arts down but they ignored me.

Me : Say no more! Click this link, then click ‘fill out this form’. Fill the form and wait for about 1-2 days, the staffs will remove the image you were reporting from the reposter’s account :^)

this is going to be a generalized take, so please forgive me, but women are an underrated enforcer of femininity.

I’ve noticed this with hairdressers. multiple times I’ve gone to lady hairdressers and said “cut it all off,” and they’ve gone “hmm alright,” and basically just trimmed the split ends. meanwhile I can go to a dude and say “hey, can you make my hair slightly shorter?” and he’ll go “on it boss,” and shave me bald.

twice now, I’ve also had lady tattoo artists add pink to femme up a tattoo, despite that not being on the initial design.

god, also thinking about this brought back a memory. my mom once threw a fit because my shoes were “too masculine” (they were black women’s flats), saying that I’d upset my dad and ruin the formal event we were going to. I wore the shoes, my dad didn’t give a shit.

I dunno. it just feels like the misogyny is coming from inside the house sometimes.

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.

Blitzø changed their life 🥹🥹