For Me, He Technically IS Real. His Character Is Played By An Actor.

amid the celebrations about the queen probably dying soon, we need to remember how this will negatively affect the country. there will be millions spent on a funeral and charles’s coronation while we are in the middle of a severe economic crisis and working class families are having to choose between heating and food. it will take attention away from all the important politics and parliament may be suspended. all news and television will be about her death and her reign — it’s been said that comedy programmes will be cancelled for potentially up to a fortnight out of ‘respect’.

yes, celebrate this news. but her death does not erase the fact that the monarchy exists, and it will be a spit in the face for working people when the money we all so desperately need is spent on her and the rest of her family

Stephen: Tony look they named a burger after you

Who misses the old Castiel in season 4 and 5 where he was a badass? He once told Uriel he was close to blasphemy.

The most adorable thing I've ever seen!

SAY IT LOUDER FOR THE BACK!

Broken heart

Summary: Reader is heartbroken after Hannah gives him an ultimatum: her or the reader.

Warning: Angst, heartbreak etc

You walked through the bunker quietly not wanting to be noticed. You and Castiel had been together up until Hannah had given him an ultimatum. She forced him to choose between the two of you and to your dismay, he had chosen to be with Hannah. After they had left, you had broken down for the first time and the last time in front of both Winchesters who immediately rushed to comfort you. They were furious at Cas and how he hurt you but there wasn’t much they could do about it. All they could do was be there for you when you were ready.

Castiel still came by occasionally but during these times you would leave the room, not wanting to be anywhere near him. As the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned to months you found yourself slowly changing. You no longer cared about taking care of yourself. That wasn’t to say you didn’t bathe or take care of personal hygiene because you did. But you barely ate, barely talked, dark circles appeared under your eyes from where you weren’t getting enough sleep. Your skin was turning pale. You knew the brothers were worried but you didn’t care. You were too hurt and you didn’t want to talk to them. You made your way to the kitchen and thought of making something to eat but you couldn’t muster up the will to care so you left it and went to lay down on the couch.

Your back was to the door so you failed to notice when Castiel walked into the room. The Angel stopped when he noticed you lying on the couch. He wanted to say something but didn’t have the courage to do so. He was a coward and he knew it. He would rather stay silent than face it head on. He waited to see what you would do. He noticed how you would walk out of the room whenever he showed up or point blank ignored his existence, but you didn’t move from the couch. He wondered how you were doing but wasn’t brave enough to talk to you after he hurt you. He stayed there watching you for a few more moments before leaving to go back to Hannah. You never knew he was there.

The next time he appeared in the same room as you, worry and concern began to fill his vessel. You looked worse than the last time he saw you. He could see you had lost weight simply because you didn’t care anymore. Your hair hung lifelessly down your back and your skin was a horrible sickly colour.  Even the colour of your lips were different, he noted. He missed the smile on your face that somehow managed to light up the whole room. As soon as you noticed him you wordlessly jumped down from the kitchen counter where you and the boys were and walked out of the room. As soon as you left, they turned to Cas with angry expressions on their faces. “What, Cas?”

Castiel sighed. “There are Demons hiding out in a warehouse. They need to be destroyed.”

“Can’t you do it yourself?” Dean asked snarkily. He couldn’t help it. You were like a sister to him and now you were hurting all because of him and another Angel. Castiel sighed again. He could…..but he just wanted to see his friends again. He knew he’d hurt them by hurting you. He knew they were angry with him. A pang of sorrow hit him as he thought of the pain he’d caused you. Ever since he’d chosen Hannah, they had been together. He loved her, of course he did…..didn’t he? So then why did it feel so wrong?  Why did he feel like something was missing? He said nothing as they stared at each other. “Fine,” Dean muttered under his breath. “What warehouse? How many Demons?”

“I’m not sure how many. The warehouse by St. James Street.” They nodded and went to pack their weapons. Castiel watched quietly. “What about Y/N? Is she coming?”

They froze. “No. She’s not,” Dean snapped.

“Dean-” Sam started.

Dean rounded on Sam angrily. “No, are you kidding me? No! He dumps her for some useless fucking Angel and NOW he’s acting like he cares about Y/N?”

Hurt filled Castiel’s eyes. Is that what they really thought of him? Is that what you thought? That he didn’t care about you? He could feel his heart breaking at the thought. They were wrong. So wrong. He DID care about you. “Dean-”

Dean pointed a finger at him and gave him a harsh glare. “Don’t,” he warned. “Just don’t bother. You made your choice and personally, I think she’s better off without you.”

His words cut through Castiel’s heart but he tried not to show it. He shot one last pitiful glance in the direction you had gone before they left.

You left your room just as they came back. At first, Dean had protested against Castiel coming back with them but eventually relented. They all stopped in the doorway and held their breathes as you reached out to pick up an apple. “Y/N?” Sam called out tentively. Your head moved to look in his direction but you didn’t say a word. “Are you hungry? I could make you something to eat?” They didn’t hold much hope so they were both stunned and a little excited when you wordlessly sat down at the table, your gaze on him.

Dean grabbed Sam’s arm and leaned in to whisper in his ear. “Dude, she’s actually willing to eat. Make her something and quick before she changes her mind. I’ll keep her talking.” Sam nodded and made his way to the kitchen while Dean sat at the table across from you. Castiel hesitated but shuffled forward. His heart shattered when you stood up to leave but Dean grabbed you before you could. “No. Sit. Ignore him if you have to but stay here. I miss talking to you and Sam’s making you something to eat.”

You said nothing but did as he asked but refused to even look in Castiel’s direction. Now that he had the opportunity, he observed you carefully. Your eyes were dull and sunken, your skin was a sickly colour making you look like you were ill. You had lost weight and it was showing. There was no smile on your face and you stayed silent. Castiel couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard your voice. He wished you would say something - anything, even if it was to tell him to leave but you didn’t. You just ignored him which made him feel worse. He felt guilty for your pain but didn’t know how to get through to you. You refused to talk to him at all. And it hurt. You two had been together before the ultimatum so he could only imagine how you were feeling. He wanted to reach out to you but didn’t dare.

Sam came back with a small plate of spaghetti and placed it in front of you. You slowly began to eat much to their happiness. When you were done, you rose silently and dumped the plate in the sink. You gave Sam a kiss on his cheek as a thank you and left without a single word.

Castiel’s POV

I appeared beside Dean and Sam and waited as they got ready. According to them, we were hunting Demons. Just as we were about to leave, Y/N walked around the corner. I held my breath and waited for her to leave the room once she caught sight of me and was stunned when she didn’t. I watched as she walked straight up to Dean and pointed to the door. Dean’s eyes darkened and he shook his head at her. “No. You’re not coming with us.” Y/N crossed her arms and held her ground. I wanted to say something but knew that wouldn’t end well. “Damn it, Y/N! You’re not well!”

Y/N shrugged but didn’t back down. Sam turned to Dean regretfully. “Dean, we don’t have time for this. We need to go now. She comes.”

Dean growled and stormed out of the room. “Fine.”

My hands clenched at the thought of Y/N hunting while sick. I didn’t want her to get hurt but I knew I didn’t have the right to protest against it. It wasn’t my place anymore. I lost that when I left her. Still, I couldn’t help but try to make amends and help her when I could, even if she no longer wanted it. I opened the car door for her and let her get in. During the ride, I watched her carefully as she stared out of the window. I felt the urge to pull her back into my arms and never let go again but I couldn’t do that to Hannah.

I just wished Y/N would talk to me.

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 listed. 

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.

Reblogging

so can we start hunting down white liberals now or what

U took the words right out of my mouth.

Requested by anon

Castiel is not ignorant or stupid!!

Can someone please tell me why writers seem to like portraying Castiel out of character on Tumblr? The Angel has been around since mankind practically began and was stationed on Earth for about 2000 years - I’M PRETTY SURE HE KNOWS WHAT A VAGINA IS, AND SEX! He’s NOT ignorant or stupid. He’s shy, socially awkward, quirky, loyalty, trustworthy (most of the time), knowledgeable among other things. Thank you.