Pizzafish77 - Pizza Fish 🍕🐟

Compiled some basic information I know about drawing fat characters for beginners since I've been seeing more talk about absence of really basic traits in a lot of art lately.

Morpho Fat and Skin Folds on Archive.org (for free!)

This is amazing the chaos is good very good!

𝔸𝕟 𝔼𝕣𝕣𝕠𝕣 (bro idk what to call it)

Another day, another torturous round of school.

Saiki Kusuo woke up as usual, his strawberry-colored hair already perfectly styled, without needing to do anything thanks to his psychic abilities. Not that he wanted to impress anyone – it was far from it. But since his telekinesis and all the other powers he had made it impossible to even think about doing something as mundane and simple as brushing his hair, he just lets his abilities handle it.

About school? It's the same as always for him. The pink haired psychic sits in his usual spot, trying to keep his psychic shields up to avoid hearing the inner thoughts of his classmates. Kineshi and Shun kept talking about their "awesome" plans for the weekend. Teruhashi keeps on being annoying and wanting to seek attention from him. Seriously, do they ever stop? All he ever wanted was to be average, not noticed by anyone. Was that too much to ask for?

Anyway, nothing noteworthy happened during the day. Oh, except for the usual noise from Riki, who tried to make him laugh by doing something ridiculous with his hair. Of course, he didn't laugh. He should know better by now. But he couldn't blame him. In his world, that's probably the best way to get attention.

By the time the bell rang, signaling the end of another pointless day, Kusuo was already preparing for his escape. He could barely stand to stay any longer in that horrendous school. Not that he has a choice, though. Being stuck in this world with a bunch of clueless people who have no idea about the disaster that is his existence? That's his life.

When he got home after a little walk in peace (somehow managing to get away from Nendo), he immediately headed to his room. Inside there it was quiet and peaceful. His only sanctuary. The one place where he could try to keep things from falling apart.

But then, something very annoying happened.

Kusuo was about to settle into his chair and relax for the evening when he noticed something unusual. One of the pink clips on his head – the ones that help stabilize his powers – was a little off. [Huh? The hell?] He didn't think too much of it at first, but as he concentrated and went up to reach it, he realized that it was, in fact, deflating.

Great. Just great.

He sighed deeply. Again? These things were important – more so than most people realize. If he doesn't have his pink clips fully inflated or in a good condition, he'll risk losing control of his powers. Which means his sneezes could level an entire block, he might break the floor with just applying a little bit more pressure by stepping on it, and worst of all, his entire life could slowly spiral into chaos. He quickly rushed to his dresser to grab the emergency backup box that Kusuke left behind, the one he kept hidden in case of situations like this. But when he turned back around, he was already beginning to feel a shift in the air. His heart suddenly dropped. "...Hey, Kusuo? I need your help–"

[ Dad! Could you not right now?! ] Kusuo huffed as he shouted telepathically to him, hoping he could just ask him to not be an idiot for once and not make things worse for him.

But of course, his dad didn't hear him. He never did, and that's what led to the problem.

He has teleportation as one of his abilities, and while he normally has it under control, this time, his powers got all out of whack. It wasn't just a simple teleportation – He wasn't even trying to teleport himself! He then felt his nose feel ticklish. He let out a small sneeze.

A simple, singular sneeze.

That's all it took.

And as soon as he did, his father – who had been standing just a little too close – disappeared. Kusuo froze in horror, staring at the spot where he had been.

What did I just do?  Kusuo is sure he felt him pop out of existence for just a second... And then... He was gone.

[ DAD?! ] He was panicking. But of course, he wasn't there to hear him.

That's when it hit him. In his panic, his powers hadn't just shifted his position a few feet like they usually do when he teleports. Oh, no. His powers were too unstable. He had teleported  his dad into another location. He tried to sense him by emitting signals, but he couldn't. His father wasn't found anywhere in the world no matter how he tried. Did he just teleport him into somewhere other than this world?

Kusuo's knees felt weak as he slumped to the floor, his head spinning. This was bad. Really, really bad. He was responsible for making sure everything in the universe stayed intact. And now, he probably sent his father to a completely different parallel universe. He's not even sure how to get him back.

His heart was racing. He's the one who handles all of the chaos, yet somehow, he's the one causing it. The pink haired man started thinking about how he could possibly fix this, but then the panic set in. What if there's no way to get him back? What if he's lost forever in some random world? He tried to calm himself down, but the truth was, he really couldn't. It was getting harder and harder to control his powers. He could feel his mind getting weaker, like a rubber band that was stretched too far. There was only one thing he could do now.

He needed to find a way to reinflate that damaged clip and get control back. Fast. How did this escalate to this point?

Not “Only my reading of canon is correct” or “Interpretations are subjective and all valid” but a secret third thing, “More than one interpretation can be valid but there’s a reason your English teacher had you cite quotes and examples in your papers, you have to have a strong argument that your interpretation is actually supported by the text or it is just wrong and I’m fine with telling you it’s wrong, actually.”

Ruin a funeral in four words

I'll go first: hey this guys delicious!

Wasn't tagged but looked fun lol

And yeah yeah I love playfully flirting I would 100% get shipped with some of my friends

@novabisexualange @l1l-lesbian @any one else who wants to join I guess

Saw this going around twitter, looked like fun. What? I'm not procrastinating (I am, I really am)

Make this picrew of yourself

Take this uquiz

Post the results side-by-side. No pressure tags: @alypink, @revnah1406, @madefordvarka, @deadbranch, @welldonekhushi, @kaitaiga, @applbottmjeens, @froglights-and-pearls

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.

9. Biteing people fun (trick them!)

Wow the cats were right all along

Things cats were right about all along:

Fuck staying hydrated by drinking enough water - eat! more! wet! food! (watermelon, cucumbers, SOUP!)

Feels great to be really high up in your house where you can see the whole place (loft bed loft bed loft bed loft bed!)

Express yourself as clearly as possible when people are touching you and you don't want them to.

Optional, but you can also express yourself clearly when your people are not touching you and you want them to.

Sometimes it's important to just go "hmm. actually, I don't care" and wander off.

You don't have to be the strongest or toughest to defend yourself, it's enough to just be difficult enough to not be worth the trouble.

Ghosts will eventually leave if you stare at them for long enough.

oh no!!! fun fantsy whats next are my children going to summon satan?!

The funniest one star review of Wicked I've seen so far

This man is my idol now.

Chirstopher Eccleston as 9

I miss the world before AI image generation

Secondly, I also miss the world where AI image generation was just incoherent blobs and obvious fakes

Thirdly, I miss when I had a spark in my eye