Wir sind zurück! Und haben spannende Neuigkeiten für euch mitgebracht:
Wir machen eine zweite Ausgabe des German Crime Zines 🎉 und ihr könnt als Beitragende (und natürlich später als Leser:in) dabei sein! Nächstes Wochenende veröffentlichen wir an dieser Stelle einen Interest Check für ein erstes Stimmungsbild Haltet also eure Augen offen, folgt uns und sagt euren Krimi-Freund:innen Bescheid. 🔍️🔦💡
Außerdem wird das bestehende Mod-Team aus @kathastrophen, @littledozerbaby und @sternengreif zusätzlich durch @khalaris verstärkt.
Falls ihr weitere Fragen habt, schaut in unser FAQ oder schreibt uns eine ask.
Wir freuen uns auf die zweie Jahreshälfte 2026 mit euch und der Entstehung eines zweiten Zines. Ihr euch hoffentlich auch!
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
You think Eddie killed Bushy? I think that we need to let the investigation run its course. And if Eddie is innocent, then they have nothing to worry about. Well I hope you're right, Dulcie, 'cause you've just handed Eddie over to a system which we both know treats people like you and me very differently to people like Eddie.
DEADLOCH S02E05: AMIGOS PARA SIEMPRE
Did something happen to Metalheart Meltdown?? I can't find it on Tapas anymore. I hope everything's alright
Hi anon!
Thank you for asking -- Apparently MHMD is currently blocked due to NSFW content. They have requested me to censor the according panels. I am still trying to figure out how massive the censoring needs to be ... I hope I can resolve this quickly.
It's a bit frustrating, that the "mark as mature" is not enough to handle NSFW content on tapas and that it becomes increasingly more complicated to share NSFW content ...
Did something happen to Metalheart Meltdown?? I can't find it on Tapas anymore. I hope everything's alright
Hi anon!
Thank you for asking -- Apparently MHMD is currently blocked due to NSFW content. They have requested me to censor the according panels. I am still trying to figure out how massive the censoring needs to be ... I hope I can resolve this quickly.
It's a bit frustrating, that the "mark as mature" is not enough to handle NSFW content on tapas and that it becomes increasingly more complicated to share NSFW content ...
the terror - männer for @terrorculturesandlanguagesfest
Wann ist ein Mann ein Mann? // When is a man a man?
or a 1980s german rock song and 2010s american tv show about 1840s british arctic exploration negotiate & navigate masculinity(s)
a bit of yapping below the cut 👇👀
first the subtitle typography was heavily inspired by @caleb-management who pumped out sooooo many amazing edits for this event in such a short time it's incredible🙏
second, the song is by herbert grönemeyer and is from 1984.... so almost 45 years later, it's still as relevant as ever. i like the song because it's both very serious and very ironic and i tried to capture that in my edit. also i've had now multiple people say crozier kind of looks like herbert grönemeyer but decide for yourself:
third i kind of had a really hard time translating some of the lyrics. reason n1 being the ones that are puns/word play. for example, "Männer sind schon als Baby blau" directly translates to "Men are already blue as a baby" which references of course blue being a """"boy's colour"""" but also "blau sein" means "being drunk" (which is what i translated it as). but also i discovered how for me some words/concepts just don't hit the same in another language. the word "Geborgenheit" (=comfort/security) for example...it's so. well. comforting in german! and i think that's so fun and tragic and translators everywhere you do such a hard job so well. languages i love you!!
fourth this edit made me genuinely so emo about stanley (which was very unexpected) and i do think his bits are one of the best moments in the video bc he truly embodies the "Außen hart und innen ganz weich" - "Hard outside and so soft inside" lyric!! if i missed your special guy's masculinity moments i apologize i tried to fit as many guys in there lol tell me about it in the tags!
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Did something happen to Metalheart Meltdown?? I can't find it on Tapas anymore. I hope everything's alright
Hi anon!
Thank you for asking -- Apparently MHMD is currently blocked due to NSFW content. They have requested me to censor the according panels. I am still trying to figure out how massive the censoring needs to be ... I hope I can resolve this quickly.
It's a bit frustrating, that the "mark as mature" is not enough to handle NSFW content on tapas and that it becomes increasingly more complicated to share NSFW content ...
IT'S HERE!! In august a few friends of mine and I animated a small red valley trailer! Alan and the redval team were kind enough to send the new redval trailer to us in advance, so that we'd be able to work on it before it aired!
The whole project was a lot of fun, and I'm really happy we managed to finish it despite the relatively short time we'd given ourselves to finish it :)) hope you enjoy!! as usual, if you want to share any thoughts or support the vid on youtube.. always appreciated ;))
My friends and I animated a quick thing in 48h a few weeks ago!! :D it was honestly just for fun, but if you want to check it out on youtube aswell and not just tumblr it’d be cool eheh 🦐🦐🦐
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
being a native german speaker on a predominantly english site is barbaric because i have to express myself in a language ten times less specifically mean (born to arschgeige forced to cunt) than my native tongue EXCEPT for two sundays a year when i can talken about the münsteraner tatort in ekelhaftestem denglisch and no one can mich aufhalten because i am surrounded by an armada of deutsche tumblrinas zwischen sechzehn und vierunddreißig who think the arschloch gerichtsmediziner and the depressed cop / tiny chronically correct woman, depending on who you ask, should fuck nasty. and that‘s strangely freeing.
Eroticism is simply one of the basic modes of human expression and the fact that it terrifies people who have built their lives out of repression and self denial is only more reason to make erotic art. They will not stop with their own lives, they want to punish anyone who doesn’t conform to the same standards of cruelty they heap on themselves. But of course it will not work. It has never worked before. Even under the most adverse conditions beauty has always found ways of flourishing. We refuse to hide or live in shame and fear. We will make beautiful that which they find repulsive.
Please don't try to pull that. "Pro-eroticism is anti-ace" is tired and bad ace discourse. Ace adults are adults. We know how to avoid things we don't like. Asexuals simply aren't clamoring for an extinction of erotic art or eroticism.
Also the post said it was "one of the basic modes of human expression" not "THE basic mode and everyone's required to participate". Nobody's forcing you to engage with it. If you don't like it, then you're free to avoid it. Go engage with other art.
The post didn't forget.
The post said "Stop trying to censor erotic art just because someone else doesn't like it. It won't work."
Did you know that Eddie Redmayne wrote his thesis on International Klein Blue because even though he is colorblind? It's not because he can't see the color, it's because he can see it differently than everyone else.
Aces can and do experience the beauty in erotic art. We just don't experience it the same way Allos do.
Lines of movement, displays of skill in a medium, unique and interesting ways to portray the body...there are many, many ways to appreciate a piece of art that do not involve the sexual reaction the piece was perhaps intended to invoke. Being ace does not prevent us from seeing and enjoying the same thing Allos do. Just changes the way we do it.
I am so tired of allosexual people stealing our voices to use as a cudgel in a fucked up purity war. No the post doesn't forget asexual people exist. I (asexual) also think that erotic art is important, because everything doesn't have to be about me specifically to have artistic value. You'll find some ace people clutching their pearls about how icky sex art is for gross degenerates and should be banned but they aren't there because they're ace. They're there for the same reasons that the allo people are. Purity police, stop pretending that your weird anti-sex obsession is somehow about supporting us. You don't speak for me.
Exactly. And the op is specifically talking about people who repress or deny their own urges and want to do the same to others. One of the main aspect of being ace is that we're not repressing our sexual urges—we simply don't experience sexual attraction to others the way most people do. Plenty of us, including myself, enjoy consuming and creating erotic art and writing. Some ace people don't like any of it.
None of that has anything to do with policing or suppressing the creation of erotic art.
I don't know if people who cry 'what about asexuals?' when purity wank comes up just don't understand what being asexual means, or if they're trying to use a minority group to support their views. The latter is an extremely common tactic among the anti-fiction/erotica/fun crowd, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case in many of these situations. I can't speak for the second poster in this thread, but hopefully they were just confused about what asexuality is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Lyra, my beloved cat of 13 years, passed away this year on Father's Day. She's been by my side through very difficult times and was my little rock of steady and unrelenting love. I struggled a lot drawing this, and struggled a lot posting it, but I know I would've wanted to read a comic like this that validated my grief for her when I lost her.
Wherever you are, Lyra my little summer star, I love you always! Thank you for being the best thing in my life.
This quite literally made me cry … I also had to say goodbye to my beloved cat Jeremy last November. It all came very sudden, out of the blue, and nothing worked. I tried so hard.
It was the hardest decision in my life so far, to decide one morning that it was time to let him go. I also kept dreaming of him afterwards and kept seeing him all across the flat and found his pawprints while cleaning for weeks after.
I know it was the good and kind decision to let him go, an act of love, but still one feels guilty. This comic is a stunning piece of art for capturing all these feelings. People will say „But it‘s just a cat“ and they just don‘t know, how much love they give.
Thank you so much for drawing this and sharing your and Lyra‘s story! ❤️
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Do not repost the same work multiple times on AO3, or change the date/time to put you back at the top of the list, to boost your stats. Do not post new chapters of a chaptered work as individual stories. These things are extremely rude and people who are angry at you will not want to read your stories.
DO REBLOG everything on tumblr because that is the only way this site functions. On tumblr, YOU are choosing what your followers see. They see what you reblog. They don’t see what you like. There’s also no algorithm robot AI whatever seeing what you like and showing you related comment. NOTHING HAPPENS to likes that affects what content ANYONE on this website sees.
DO SHARE stories you like on AO3 with others, perhaps by sharing them with your Tumblr followers. AO3 has features specifically for this purpose. Fic recs are a wonderful way for fanfiction to get more attention, because, as we’ve discussed, there is no algorithm on AO3. AO3 is the opposite of TikTok.
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.