if you have the Honey browser extension installed, uninstall it immediately. big big story broke on youtube today strongly indicating that Honey has been massively defrauding basically everyone who does any business with them at every level, including influencers, customers, and actual retailers.

the short version of ONE of the alleged crimes is that they've been hijacking referral links and codes. if you have honey installed on your browser at all, and you use any referral code from anyone, there is a high probability honey will swap out the referral link identifier for their own even if they don't provide a coupon at checkout.

they also are just lying to you, and hiding coupons that very much exist. they're completely fraudulent

paypal bought honey in 2019 for 4 billion, so paypal has been strip mining the influencer economy for 5 years now. the amount of money that's been essentially stolen is unfathomable

from op in the comments because I didn't quite understand the explanation above:

If you don't care about this, just know they are also lying to you about discounts too.

They make deals with retailers to give you lower discounts codes so retailers would lose less money.

making art is so fucking hard. wheres that defunctland quote

Another storytelling rule I think people should remember is the law of diminishing returns. If you keep on ramping up the stakes higher and higher and higher, after a point it gets to where the audience can’t really care anymore.

this is why u gotta do a killing god episode and then a putt putt golf episode so it evens out

A Visual #Fashion Guide For Women - Necklines, Skirt Types & More!

By KikiCloset.com

Rebloggimg for writing reference

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 

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)

Hey folks, I doubt many people will see this message or the comment I left about it down below, but if you’re reblogging this post with death threats or calls for physical violence against this man, I am blocking you. I want this post to reach as many people as possible, and if you carry on like that you’re not just incriminating yourself, you’re giving tumblr reasons to nuke this entire recap. Thank you.

For the people coming in after Weitzman made the fanwork hidden to people who hadn’t signed up for an account beforehand, there does appear to be a way to see if your fic was lifted: searching for the fic title ( your username maybe, if your title is a song lyric or something else used frequently) wordstream will still bring up your fic if it was included in the theft:

Again, sharing this info is appreciated, because (understandably) I’m getting a lot of questions about this, and I will not be answering all of them individually. Share (and check back for) all additional info in the comments either here on on the latest Reddit thread if you can, because even useful additions in reblogs are difficult to keep up with. Thank you!

I sent messages to him every single day multiple times a day until I got this reply

Cliff Weitzman says it will take a week from takedown for our work to be given back to us completely—minus that pesky little part where he fed it all to AI, of course! I guess we will all find out if he’s been telling the truth about removing the work by December 31st 2024 (seven days after the fanworks disappeared from view).

Speechify CEO Weitzman has yet to communicate ANYTHING about his website & app word-stream taking fanworks and then quickly hiding them when we found out—nor this announcement in the screenshot above—ANYWHERE PUBLIC, so let’s help him get the word out!

Weitzman’s ‘X’ account

Weitzman’s Instagram account

Weitzman’s LinkedIn account

Weitzman’s YouTube account

Note that he will likely block you (like he did me) if you tag his username directly, so make sure to hashtag #cliffweitzman, #speechify and #wordstream as well when commenting or making your own posts about the issue!

Also, I know nothing about TikTok and don’t follow fandom on YouTube, but if anyone knows anyone who might be interested in covering this issue there too, I’d be extremely grateful for you bringing this post to their attention.

-

ADDITION DECEMBER 29th: Works that were accessed previously by people who signed up to gather more info before Cliff Weitzman made all fanworks disappear from view are still accessible on his servers today. Also check the comments for more info as it comes in!

Update December 30th: all the works I personally saw were up on word-stream before they were hidden from view still come up in search results today and are still accessible as AI-generated audiobooks through his app to people who signed up for his app before Weitzman hid the works from view.

Also, this was an interesting find, when googling Cliff Weitzman fanfiction:

You may remember that one of Cliff Weitzman’s arguments that his theft was somehow defensible was the idea that word-stream was ‘only in beta’. (See above for the screenshot of his message stating this). Really, Cliff? Then why were you already advertising the operation on your main platform two days before we discovered it? Why was its payment system fully functional?

Friends, if you really want to help, please, if you can, don’t stop at merely reblogging this post. The previous reblog above lists some things you can do to help this issue break containment and make Weitzman take accountability for what he did. As things stand, we’re allowing him to make this entire thing quietly go away. And as someone in the comments said, wouldn’t it be awesome if we could broadcast this issue broadly enough that whenever someone does an online search for this man, or his company Speechify, his theft is one of the first results to come up?

Weitzman is either willfully or carelessly risking bringing about the end of freely available fanmade media by attempting to monetize it. If he receives zero consequences for this, it’s going to happen over & over & over again, and eventually the IP holders of the source material are going to go ahead and stop tolerating widely accessible fanwork entirely. Can we try to help not make that happen? Please?

Amazing: thanks to youtackything on Bluesky, we have the screenshots of Weitzman’s advertisement for word-stream!

Again, this was posted to Speechify’s website (at what is now a dead link) on December 20th, a full three days before Weitzman tried to make the argument that he couldn’t be held accountable for his theft because we weren’t supposed to find out about it yet.

Also, to the surprise of absolutely no one, the listings of our works are still visible and fully accessible to word-stream members today.

Also: to the person who tried to add Cliff’s involvement with word-stream to Cliff’s Wikipedia page, I owe you one (really, dm me, I have an excellent recipe for banana bread) but sadly it looks like your changes were already reverted. Anyone out there with an older Wikipedia membership who wants to give it a try?

Some of my writer’s block cures:

Feel free to add your own.

Thank you so much!

please please please please reblog if you’re a writer and have at some point felt like your writing is getting worse. I need to know if I’m the only one who’s struggling with these thoughts

Hey I have good news for you!!! Actually two pieces of news, because this symptom could be indicating one of three potential diagnoses. (Preface: I am a professional fantasy author and I have been published more than a dozen times. I have also taught creative writing at the university level and am REALLY good at it. I know my shit and I have seen your problem a thousand times.) FIRST POSSIBLE DIAGNOSIS: This one happens to me all the time. If you feel like your writing is getting worse, that might mean you're at a "plateau" stage in your development of technique execution, but you're in a "growth" stage in your development of your technique perception! Because they alternate!

When you're in the phase you're in now, you have all the "omg my writing is garbage" thoughts, but those are not true. Your writing is the same as it was last week. However, your ability to see it and analyze it is getting better -- and that keener perception is why it SEEMS to be worse. It isn't, I swear.

When it's the other way around and your execution is in a growth stage and your perception is on a plateau stage, that's when you have all your "omg I'm a supergenius? Omg *I* wrote that? fuck yeah im a god of writing" moments (and if you haven't had them yet, that's ok, they'll come, be patient with yourself).

Either way, this is a normal part of the growth process. It's like the ache of sore muscles after you've gone to the gym for the first time in a while, that's all. Your muscles will hurt less as you get stronger, and then you'll add more weight or more reps to your exercise routine, and you'll be sore again until your body catches up. It's just that when that's happening in your brain, it's a lot harder to set the "muscle ache" aside, because your brain's only way of expressing discomfort is to gnaw miserably on itself and make you have sad thoughts. Prescription: Have a cup of tea or whatever small treat you like best, and be gentle and patient with yourself. It's gonna be ok. Try to consciously notice and appreciate some of the things you've measurably gotten better at and give yourself a deliberate, intentional, conscious pat on the back for it. (I have ADHD, so my brain doesn't want to give me the reward chemicals automatically; I have to trigger it manually by saying aloud "I'm really proud that I accomplished this." YMMV.)

SECOND POSSIBLE DIAGNOSIS: This one also happens to me all the time. Oftentimes when I have the "my writing is getting worse" feeling, it is a signal from my subconscious that the story is going in the wrong direction -- that is, a direction which doesn't satisfying to me, or that I'm not interested in, or that leads the characters in a direction that I don't like, or that leaves a glaring plot hole that I haven't noticed consciously yet... All manner of small, fixable problems. This usually happens after I have ignored the earlier warning signs, which start with feeling a bit bored of the story but trying to push through, and then go to a vague dissatisfaction that I ignore. The end result of this is frequently outright burnout or writer's block, so the better you get at noticing those early warning signs, the faster you can address them and nip the problems in the bud. Problem is, being able to do this and use your feelings as a useful tool to flag burgeoning story problems only comes with practice. Prescription: Do the practice. When you start having those fidgety, restless feelings, try to notice what you're feeling before it gets to the "this is garbage and I hate it" stage, and then sit with that feeling. Instead of flinching away from it and hiding from the scary feeling, turn towards it with compassion and curiosity. Ask it questions like, "Hmmm, what SPECIFICALLY is garbage about it? What would make it more fun and appealing? Is there anything I'm missing here?" Your brain may initially try to continue the tantrum of "No, it's bad, it's just all bad, there's nothing good about this, it's horrible, and therefore I'M horrible" but you're gonna need to address this with all the kindness and patience that you would give a cranky toddler. Let it wriggle and cry, and just continue being curious and trying to get it to use its words to express what the problem is. Eventually you'll stumble on SOME kind of answer, and then YAY THAT IS A THING THAT CAN BE FIXED. Oftentimes when it happens to me, I have a reaction that's sort of like, "Oh! Duh! I forgot [XYZ thing]! That was a silly mistake, haha, no wonder I'm grumpy about it. Glad i noticed it now." The answers you stumble on might be things like, "I don't like mystery novels but I seem to be accidentally leading myself into writing one, whoops" or "It is so out of character for this person to be reacting that way, I need to rewrite this scene" or "I'm feeling bored, I would have put the book down by now if I were a reader; how can I jazz it up?" THIRD POSSIBLE DIAGNOSIS: (kind of a really specific subset of the Second Possible Diagnosis, but it is SO COMMON for both experienced writers and apprentice writers that it gets its own section) Your book might be having problems with tension.

Tension issues account for 99% of all book problems. It's like sewing machines?? You know how all sewing machines have the devil in them, and if you try to sew and your thread gets tangled and fucked up on the bottom, that's because the tension has gone weird, so you have to try rethreading the machine and wiggling the tension knob a bit to make it stop? Like that.

Prescription: If you are having the "this shit sucks" reaction, stop immediately and check your story tension. Are there stakes? Do they MATTER DEEPLY to the protagonist? Can they be raised? Can they be endangered? Does a new problem need to be introduced, or an existing one made worse? TENSION TENSION TENSION TENSION. There are a thousand ways of raising tension, and I cannot list them all here. When my tension is right, I almost never have the "this sucks" reaction, because I am in that document doing my job with ruthless efficiency. The SECOND it goes wonky, I have a crisis of confidence and a small tantrum and I sink into my Desponds. Every single time. It has gotten to the point where I have trained my closest friends to say, when I slide into their DMs to complain about my book: "Oh, this part. Past!Alex told us to give you a message. [checks notes] Message reads, 'bitch, is it a tension problem'" whereupon I subside, chastened, and say, "....yeah probably."

CHECK YOUR TENSION, IT IS PROBABLY FUCKED UP. How do I know? Bc tension wants very badly to fuck itself up if you're not keeping an eye on it. Same as sewing machines having the devil in them.

Hope that helped. <3 Good luck! It's gonna be ok.

On twitter I’m seeing dozens of threads from Black activists warning people against burnout, giving all sorts of useful tips about preventing and managing it for the sake of a long-term, sustainable effort.

On tumblr I’m seeing a hell of a lot of young white kids yelling at anyone who actually follows those steps, and acting like burnout is a moral falling rather than a well-proven psychological phenomenon.

Be careful who you get your information from. Don’t let guilt lead you to make choices that will harm both you and the movement.

I’m going to reblog this again since I see more individuals are inquiring about burnout prevention tips in the notes and it’s why I sought out this resource. I hope it helps you!

source

Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?

I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.

The world may never know…

Maybe it’s something mathematical?

I’ve been in fandom since *about* when Panic! formed and the adjective!character thing was already going strong, pretty sure it predates them.

It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.

(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)

“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).

It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.

So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.

100% born of bang paths. fandom has be floating around on the internet for six seconds longer than there has been an internet so early users just used the jargon associated with the medium and since it’s a handy shorthand, we keep it.

Absolutely from the bang paths–saw people using them in early online fandom back in 1993 for referring to things.

I had been doing it for a very, very long time but never actually knew the actual name for it. This is exciting! I like learning things.

Good trope: Character yelling, "It's not what it looks like!" while doing exactly what it looks like.

Great trope: Character yelling, "It's not what it looks like!" while doing something so unfathomable that the person who interrupted them can't even begin to attempt to figure out what the hell it is they're seeing.

Is there a way to see the exact results of a tumblr poll (actual number, not the percentage?)

I've heard people say something about an API or something, but I'm very technophobic and tried to look up what that meant and couldn't understand it at all.

Could someone explain to a newbie? Doesn't have to be super detailed, just maybe a bit more than "use the API" as I don't even know how to get started with that, and tumblr's guide for their API makes it seem like it's for people who are trying to build an app on top of Tumblr?

(I am reasonably fluent in python (including web scraping with various python packages, but only for things I can read off the html of a page, and "number of votes" doesn't seem to be unless I'm misreading it), and have passing familiarity with javascript, but otherwise know Nothing about web programming)

Never mind I figured out how to do this! (At least one way, though I suspect it's not the best way. I did not use Tumblr's API; still not sure what that's about)

Here's how I did it for anyone else who might have this question (for Chrome and Firefox):

My redesign hot take is that if you’re aiming to “desexualize” a female character, don’t make her boobs smaller. You’re implying a lot here.

Instead of shrinking her boobs, try:

There are probably lots more options too! I’m not an artist! Just a person with a big chest and back pain!

Throwback thursday to when I was like 12 and I was putting out new writing DAILY...... Like entire Chapters of my then-current wips just, over an afternoon. What the fuck was I on

Nobody:

Me, age 12, just started drinking coffee:

I drew 14 pictures during the day, and wrote 32 pages a night. Now I can’t do shit.

A huge part of this is because you've gotten better! And now, when you're drawing/writing/doing whatever creative task, you're not just mindlessly throwing thoughts at your paper, you're thinking as you do it. Children can churn out a lot more work because it's not yet refined, but when you're older and have more practice, you work with all these thoughts running through your head about form and shape, color palettes or word choice. Now, you're making a dozen decisions with every moment of work, and you're also questioning the decisions you've just made, wondering if you can do it better. Don't beat yourself up about producing less work now than you did back then, because every sentence or shape involves a lot more effort for you now, than it did when you were ten and brand new to this hobby.

Also you have a job now and the never-ending bullshit that is laundry and dishes and feeding yourself.

okay, I actually really needed to hear this