Purveyor of fine dick jokes

Why?

On one hand, so that people who can't go to cons or meet&greets or whatever (and anyone else) have the opportunity to write to Jared/say what they want to say and know he will receive it.

But also because of how a huge part of the fandom talks about both Jared & Sam. I want to create something that shows that despite it all, there's a lot of people all over who love Sam, and who truly engage with & are interested in his character –because of Sam, and not just in relation to other characters/the ships–, and who appreciate/love Jared and his acting and what he does. Obviously he knows he has fans, but if you've ever been to a con or simply have been recommended SPN posts on Instagram/Twitter/Facebook, you know how heavy the Dean & D3stiel ship bias is, and how hard it is to find anything that focuses positively on Sam or Jared unless you're already in a smaller community/corner of the fandom.

What can I write about?

You can send letters with opinions, personal interpretations, analysis, thanks, compliments, questions and anything else you can think of.

Sam's character, Jared as a person & as an actor, should be the focus.

Examples/suggestions: how much and why you like a certain arc or a specific trait of Sam. Things you like and admire about Jared. Why/that you liked the way he portrayed certain things (like the character switches during possession arcs, body language and facial expressions, line deliveries etc). Scenes/moments/things he said that stuck with you. Scenes/plotlines regarding Sam you wish would've been mentioned again or explored more. You can talk about the way Sam's character gets mistreated narratively or criticised by the audience, and how you feel about it or why you disagree with it (like how Sam gets the blame for the s5 apocalypse, soulless Sam, S8-9 etc). Things you wondered about, questions about Sam & plotlines, Jared's opinions about certain arcs/scenes/retcons/lines, about acting choices or literally Whatever. Obviously you won't get an answer to a question, but it'll show interest, and might motivate him to talk more openly about certain things again. That you liked "unpopular" plotlines or things that a lot of people criticize Sam for, like Amelia or the demon blood arc. Scenes, or things Jared did that made you happy, motivated you etc. Things that remind you of Sam/Jared or recommending things you think he'd like. You can also talk about his other projects, old or upcoming.

Please feel free & encouraged to mention/talk about super small details, specific scenes and episodes, Jared moments or acting choices, etc. It'd cool if we have a lot of little different things!

Are there any limits or rules?

The only "rules" would be that if you talk about your mental health or personal struggles, don't go into too much detail or focus your letter entirely on it. For example, you can say that Sam's character or Jared have helped you through difficult times. Or that a specific storyline of Sam has related to your own issues. But try not to write an entire letter in graphic detail about your mental health issues/traumas. The book should be a positive experience for Jared. If you have any questions or you're unsure about what you wrote, just ask. I won't leave out a letter without a word.

For fanart: no AI and no porn.

In general, of course, be respectful. It's good to ask yourself how you'd feel about hearing something from a stranger and then deciding via that.

What's the difference between sending via Google Forms or Email?

While Google Forms asks you to sign in with one of your Emails to use it,* I * won't actually see who sent the letter. It's anonymous, but also means that you won't get a notification that your letter has been received.

Per E-Mail, I can reply to you that I received it & added it to the book.

Good to know:

There is no text length minimum or limit. There is no limit of the amount of letters I'll put into the book. The letters will be in the order I receive them in.

If you send a letter via E-Mail, it should be in the E-Mail body (plain text) or PDF. Art can be JPG or PDF.

There is no age minimum/limit, you don't have to be 18 to participate.

If you sent a letter AND fanart, the fanart will be right with your letter in the book. If it's sent in together, I'll add it together, so that if you want to write about what you drew, it's clear what work you're talking about.

If you later want to edit your letter or add something to it, please send me the entire letter again with your edits, and I'll just switch the old to the new version. I wont manually edit anything.

If you think your friends/mutuals outside of Tumblr would like to participate, they can. You can link this post on other platforms, or DM/share it privately. But please do not repost the entire post on Twitter/Instagram/Facebook.

If you have any questions, ask me per DMs, ask box or Email.

Send your letter/art: Google Forms or E-Mail

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.