#gawker media

[peacelykerockets]

I miss Gawker

[kp777]

By Jon Queally

Common Dreams

May 24, 2024

"This is how free speech is actually chilled—vengeful dipshit billionaires," said one media executive, after more than a dozen staffers let go from nonprofit watchdog whose mission is to combat right-wing disinformation and propaganda.

Just months after mega-billionaire Elon Musk launched what he termed a "thermonuclear lawsuit" against Media Matters for America, the nonprofit media watchdog outfit announced a round of punishing layoffs Thursday which it in part attributed to the financial strain imposed by the legal battle it now faces. What triggered Musk's initial outrage in November was MMFA reporting about "pro-Nazi content" on the social media platform X, owned by Musk, appearing alongside ads by prominent corporations in the content stream shown to users.

In his post threatening the lawsuit, which was later filed in Texas, Musk vowed to target "Media Matters and ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company." Noting the scope of his retribution, Musk then added: "Their board, their donors, their network of dark money, all of them…" would be included in the suit's scope.

"However you feel about our work, it should worry you that any billionaire could do this to any outlet at any time for any reason. It's a sad day for free speech."

In the organization's Thursday announcement of layoffs, Media Matters' president Angelo Carusone said: "We're confronting a legal assault on multiple fronts and given how rapidly the media landscape is shifting, we need to be extremely intentional about how we allocate resources in order to stay effective. Nobody does what Media Matters does."

Due to the pressures, Carusone explained, the group was "taking this action now to ensure that we are sustainable, sturdy and successful for whatever lies ahead." More than a dozen staffers, including researchers and digital producers, were among those terminated.

"Many of my best colleagues at Media Matters lost their jobs today," Ari Drennen, the LGBTQ program director for Media Matters, said Thursday on X alongside individual posts from many of those laid off. "However you feel about our work, it should worry you that any billionaire could do this to any outlet at any time for any reason. It's a sad day for free speech."

Media Matters is a 501(c)3 registered nonprofit—which describes itself as a "progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media"—founded in 2004 at the height of the George W. Bush administration.

Ever since it has targeted the right-wing media echo chamber, including Fox News and other prominent cable, newspaper, and radio broadcasters who coordinate the messaging of pro-corporate and reactionary forces within the Republican Party and beyond.

In a post on X shared Thursday afternoon, laid-off Media Matters journalist Kat Abughazaleh lamented the firing of her talented colleagues (and encouraged outlets that are hiring to consider them) as she also directed her ire at Musk for his possible role in the downsizing decision.

"There’s a reason far-right billionaires attack Media Matters with armies of lawyers," said Abughazaleh. "They know how effective our work is, and it terrifies them (him)," with the parenthetical a seeming reference to Musk.

Responding to her message on the social media platform now owned by Musk, media executive Ben Collins, current CEO of the satirical website The Onion, doubled-down on the charge against the Tesla founder and on-again-off-again world's richest man.

"Fuck Elon Musk," Collins said.

"This is why right-wing billionaires sue people reporting on them," continued Collins, who previously worked as a reporter for NBC News covering, among other thing, right-wing disinformation. "They know they can't win these lawsuits. But they also know legal fees will cripple the little guy reporting on their lies and crimes. This is how free speech is actually chilled—vengeful dipshit billionaires."

Musk has championed himself as a devote "free speech absolutist," but his time at the helm of X, which was Twitter when he purchased it, has repeatedly exposed the limits of his commitment.

In 2007, in one of the most famous cases of its kind, the Gawker media group—which controlled a number of online outlets—was sued by professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, a lawsuit later discovered to be bankrolled by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel due to a preexisting grudge he had against the site's reporting, which ultimately led to its bankruptcy for Gawker and closure.

In March of this year, a federal judge in California threw out a similar lawsuit brought by X under Elon Musk against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit group that had publicly accused the platform of profiting off hateful content published on the platform.

In tossing the case, U.S. District Court Judge Charles R. Breyer cited the transparent motivation behind the suit as part of the reason it lacked legitimacy.

It was "evident," said Breyer in his ruling that "X Corp. has brought this case in order to punish CCDH for CCDH publications that criticized X Corp.—and perhaps in order to dissuade others who might wish to engage in such criticism."

As Tim Karr, senior director at the media advocacy group Free Press, wrote in an op-ed for Common Dreams last year, Musk's "attempts to silence his critics are not surprising to anyone who has followed Musk's erratic behavior" over recent years.

"The magnate positions himself as a champion of free and open debate," wrote Karr, "while taking extraordinary efforts to silence any honest criticism and independent research that might negatively impact Musk and his many businesses."

Citing the specific attack on CCDH at the time, Karr concluded that the "only thing absolute about Elon is his refusal to give a fair hearing to any of his critics. And that's absolutely not free-speech absolutism."

[gothicprep]

doing the thing i usually do where i let youtube autoplay in another tab while i Accomplish Tasks, and i'm starting to think i might have to pick a new thing to nod along to. the quality of the "breadtube" style edutainment video essays has really dipped, and i'm not sure whether this is because the format is oversaturated, or because the '15-'16 youtube environment was pretty hostile to this stuff. so the breakout creators, by necessity, needed to hit a really specific balance of substance and tone to get recognition. right now, there are lot of youtubers who make political content, or media analysis with a lefty bent, but i can't think of a single one who's regularly active on the platform that i'd recommend.

i think the internet lore consensus is that contrapoints was the one who influenced a lot of this. most people who make this kind of stuff acknowledge that her videos are very good, but don't really understand why or how they're good. they recognize that she's erudite, so what they do is cite a lot of academic theory (sometimes, embarrassingly, in a way that betrays they only read the passage they're quoting and not the full work it's from) and hope they can capture this sort of lightning in a bottle. but if you pay attention to her videos, one thing that's pretty clear about them is she isn't showing her entire hand.

her video "envy", for example, takes very obvious inspiration from lasch's idea of narcissism and lacanian psychoanalysis, but if my memory serves correctly, she never name-checks either of them. iykyk. there's a depth to these videos that isn't immediately obvious. and i'm not going to fault anyone for not "getting the reference", but i do think part of the reason why attempts to emulate her fail is because they're coming from a place of taking her extremely at face value.

or something. who knows? i don't.

[ravenkings]

tbh it's kind of shocking to me that more people don't talk about peter thiel on this website considering that he has like a james bond villain-level god complex and all the money and insidiously evil inclinations to match

[thebsideofthings]

"In theory, the “free market” should reward publications that are doing important work. The more people care about a given issue the more they’ll read news stories about it, which should give publications covering it traffic and ad dollars. In reality, the advertising industry has singled out the issues the audience cares about most, like reproductive rights, as unsuitable to sell ads against, even though a ton of people want to read about them. This helps explain the precarity of publications like Jezebel, despite it being more vital to its audience than ever."

- Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist by Jason Koebler and Emanuel Maiberg for 404 Media

[mitchipedia]

Gawker co-founder Elizabeth Spiers writes insightfully about the company, on the occasion of its (second) demise.

“I wrote about media, fashion, publishing and Wall Street because those are industries that are more or less headquartered in New York, and despite the fact that I was a 25-year-old transplant who grew up in rural Alabama, I adopted the tone I thought a provincial New Yorker would have: fascinated with power and money and oblivious to the world outside upper-middle-class Manhattan. One of my first posts was a long interview with a hedge fund employee who was dissatisfied with her cocaine delivery service, if that tells you anything.”

…

“At its best, it reported on powerful people who were abusing their power, publishing articles about Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein and the hacker Guccifer before many larger mainstream outlets did. And it did so with a fearlessness that distinguished it from all established media brands.

“But at its worst, that fearlessness bled over into recklessness. Gawker sometimes bullied people, and it sometimes punched down. One of Gawker Media’s blogs, Valleywag, heaped so much scorn on a young PR professional who posted a single ill-considered tweet that the episode became a case study in public shaming. Gawker published things that were gratuitously mean or sexist. It felt at times so negative that it was almost toxic.

…

“A friend once told me that the lead of your obituary is always the worst thing you’ve done followed by the best thing you’ve done. My obituary will lead with Gawker — but it might follow with it, too.”

[z34l0t]

[biglisbonnews]

Man who bought Gawker for less money than a hat shutters company, keeps hat Back in July 2021, the media company Gawker announced its triumphant return to the internet, after having previously shuttered in the wake of a devastating lawsuit brought on by Hulk Hogan for publishing a sex tape he made. The Gawker brand had been purchased by media mogul Bryan Goldberg in 2018, according to the New York Post, who spent about $1.35M to acquire the site's archives and social media accounts. — Read the rest https://boingboing.net/2023/02/03/man-who-bought-gawker-for-less-money-than-a-hat-shutters-company-keeps-hat.html

[heavenlyyshecomes]

misc readings pt. 11

tech edition

It's not your fault you're a jerk on twitter, katherine cross, wired

Becoming human again: a reading list for the extremely offline, lisa bubert, longreads

The internet is rotting, jonathan zittrain, the atlantic

ambient cruelty, linda besner, real life magazine

Searching for lost knowledge in the age of intelligent machines, adrienne lafrance, the atlantic

Ghosts of the future: the smart home is a haunted house, julia foote, real life magazine

The internet is flat, charlie warzel, galaxy brain

How TrueCaller built a billion-dollar caller ID data empire in India, rachna khaira, rest of the world

Vivid hues: what does it mean to think of the internet as a color? anna rose kerr, real life magazine

Singapore’s tech-utopia dream is turning into a surveillance state nightmare, peter guest, rest of the world

The $2 per hour workers who made chatgpt safer, time

I cut the 'big five' tech giants from my life. It was hell, kashmir hill, gizmodo

Social media is not self-expression, rob horning, the new inquiry

The narcissism of queer influencer activists, jason okundaye, gawker

On losing perspective, or, why i don't give a fuck about geronimo the alpaca and nor should you, rachel connolly, novara media

The exploited labour behind artificial intelligence, noema

The class politics of the instagram face, grazie sophia christie, tablet

Google, amazon, and meta are making their core products worse on purpose, ed zitron, business insider

All advertising looks the same these days. Blame the moodboard, elizabeth goodspeed, eye on design

Seen by, megan marz, real life

[lesbianchemicalplant]

Kotaku seems to have outed themselves on the "AI art is going to kill all art and the sacred PB artisan profession" side of the debate: https://kotaku.com/deviantart-ai-art-nft-crypto-scam-hustle-protest-stable-1849778362

I see they also embraced one of the most completely clueless arguments that these people keep trotting out, “art made with AI tools is just like NFTs and cryptocurrency (because, uh, there are computers involved)”

(which ofc is especially insufferable since the (actual as well as just aspiring) PB artists and the rest of the anti-AI-art squad have the same obsession with Ownership/IP and enforcing artificial scarcity as the NFT crowd. AI art tools and NFTs are as close to polar opposites wrt intellectual property as fucking possible)

[mckitterick]

The End Is Near: "News" organizations using AI to create content, firing human writers

source: X

source: X

source: X

an example "story" now comes with this warning:

A new byline showed up Wednesday on io9: “Gizmodo Bot.” The site’s editorial staff had no input or advance notice of the new AI-generator, snuck in by parent company G/O Media.

G/O Media’s AI-generated articles are riddled with errors and outdated information, and block reader comments.

“As you may have seen today, an AI-generated article appeared on io9,” James Whitbrook, deputy editor at io9 and Gizmodo, tweeted. “I was informed approximately 10 minutes beforehand, and no one at io9 played a part in its editing or publication.”

Whitbrook sent a statement to G/O Media along with “a lengthy list of corrections.” In part, his statement said, “The article published on io9 today rejects the very standards this team holds itself to on a daily basis as critics and as reporters. It is shoddily written, it is riddled with basic errors; in closing the comments section off, it denies our readers, the lifeblood of this network, the chance to publicly hold us accountable, and to call this work exactly what it is: embarrassing, unpublishable, disrespectful of both the audience and the people who work here, and a blow to our authority and integrity.”

He continued, “It is shameful that this work has been put to our audience and to our peers in the industry as a window to G/O’s future, and it is shameful that we as a team have had to spend an egregious amount of time away from our actual work to make it clear to you the unacceptable errors made in publishing this piece.”

According to the Gizmodo Media Group Union, affiliated with WGA East, the AI effort has “been pushed by” G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller, recently hired editorial director Merrill Brown, and deputy editorial director Lea Goldman.

In 2019, Spanfeller and private-equity firm Great Hill Partners acquired Gizmodo Media Group (previously Gawker Media) and The Onion.

The Writers Guild of America issued a blistering condemnation of G/O Media’s use of artificial intelligence to generate content.

“These AI-generated posts are only the beginning. Such articles represent an existential threat to journalism. Our members are professionally harmed by G/O Media’s supposed ‘test’ of AI-generated articles.”

WGA added, “But this fight is not only about members in online media. This is the same fight happening in broadcast newsrooms throughout our union. This is the same fight our film, television, and streaming colleagues are waging against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) in their strike.”

The union, in its statement, said it “demands an immediate end of AI-generated articles on G/O Media sites,” which include The A.V. Club, Deadspin, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Jezebel, Kotaku, The Onion, Quartz, The Root, and The Takeout.

but wait, there's more:

Just weeks after news broke that tech site CNET was secretly using artificial intelligence to produce articles, the company is doing extensive layoffs that include several longtime employees, according to multiple people with knowledge of the situation. The layoffs total 10 percent of the public masthead.

*

Greedy corporate sleazeballs using artificial intelligence are replacing humans with cost-free machines to barf out garbage content.

This is what end-stage capitalism looks like: An ouroborus of machines feeding machines in a downward spiral, with no room for humans between the teeth of their hungry gears.

Anyone who cares about human life, let alone wants to be a writer, should be getting out the EMP tools and burning down capitalist infrastructure right now before it's too late.

[hometoursandotherstuff]

I don't know what to think. But, I think that I would've spent $20K on something other than this.

The private citizen, a Japanese native, who goes only by Toco online, says the unusual garment has helped actualize his dream of “becoming an animal.”

Since then, the human pooch has become a sensation on YouTube, where he posts under “I Want To Be an Animal,” after uploading videos of himself masquerading as a Lassie look-alike.

Many online gawkers didn’t take too kindly to his canine coming-out party, with many taking to the Japanese social media platform X to shame him.

“A Japanese man spent over $20K for this border collie costume,” jibed another. “You cannot convince me this isn’t some weird sex thing.”

The good-boy wannabe claims that summoning his inner dog is not a fetish but rather a way of life.

[mitigatedchaos]

Trump at the 2024 RNC

(~1,300 words, 6 minutes)

Thoughts on the final night of the Trump Convention.

#1A: A lot of this stuff is, right or wrong, very obvious. For example, the stuff from the school safety speaker. It's obvious that having students assaulting the staff will be bad for both the staff and the other students.

#1B: I was in a group chat with some Republicans, and one woman asked why Obama/Biden instituted the rule from the school safety segment; I speculated that they probably saw a correlation between suspensions and later arrests, and assumed the suspensions caused the arrests. "That's so stupid," she said. (There is an alternative theory for school discipline - it applies smaller punishments to smaller infractions, so that students' first brush with institutional discipline isn't from the cops.)

#2: Hulk Hogan knew what he was there to do, and he did it. The classic shirt-ripping and muscles contribute to the sense of vigor, but really, the whole convention still feels ten years older than 2015. (I've heard that he took down Gawker with help from Peter Thiel, and Gawker was involved in obnoxious 2014-era antics beyond just harassing Hogan. I suppose with this, his debt is repaid.)

#3: It would seem the Erick Trump was chosen to speak for the "they... came after Trump!" faction of the Trump coalition, moreso than Trump himself. Makes sense strategically.

#4A: The "perhaps God... protected Trump" bit honestly feels crass, basically just there because Dems lost the active shooter roll. No, I don't mean because the shooter didn't hit; I mean they lost the roll to avoid having a shooter show up in the first place.

#4B: While Trump did have a segment on the shooting, and used a photo prominently circling the flying bullet, he doesn't call for revenge! and seemingly just groups it in with all his other complaints, like the lawsuits, media coverage that he's a "threat to democracy," and so on. I think implicitly, almost everyone is assuming the assailant was mentally ill in some way.

#4C: On Twitter, there were some attempts to argue that either Trump himself or the Trump movement don't care about the other victims of the shooter. At >$6.2M in fundraising, the Trump movement have basically raised a full weregild for each one. And of course, there was a dedicated segment on them with a moment of silence.

This fits with the Trump mentality. There are reports of him being obnoxious to bill by contractors, but 'that's business.' Trump likes to think of himself as generous outside of this context, or at least that's the image he likes to project. For him, I think this is one of the benefits of being rich.

This was always going to be a dumb angle of attack, but it's not surprising a lot of Twitter Democrats tried it anyway.

#5: Trump's language was quite simplistic in this speech, especially in the assassination section.

#6: Quite frankly, not all of these economic policies are great ideas.

With that said, the consistent message is "we're all going to be rich!" which, again, right or wrong, is an obvious message. Support for energy abundance? Also obvious.

'We'll let you choose whether to have either a gasoline, hybrid, or electric vehicle'? Very obvious, given current problems with electrical charging infrastructure. In some parts of the country, the cables for electrical chargers even get cut to steal the copper. (More information on that here.)

Aside: Fuels

Gasoline is a lower-trust energy storage and transportation option. Plug-in electric hybrids, which can charge at home and refill with gasoline on the go, are likely the future for the next several decades.

Thinking in terms of fundamental characteristics, there is different balance of trade-offs for synthetic fuel, electricity transmission, and battery storage. Both creating synthetic fuel and charging a battery result in energy losses. Synthetic fuel creation losses are higher on a per-charge basis than battery charging. However, the battery itself is much more energy-intensive to create than a fuel tank. Thus, an attacker would prefer to steal the gasoline instead of the fuel tank holding it, and the battery itself instead of the electricity it contains.

Electricity transmission requires long-distance material infrastructure between the source and the destination. If you have a favorable security environment, that's not a problem. There are reports that electricity pylons are being robbed of their structural supports in South Africa. A more obvious problem - building a massive solar farm in the Sahara and an intercontinental electrical grid to transmit the energy from it leaves you vulnerable along the entire transmission length.

Anywhere with lots of consistent sunlight and access to water (preferably salt water for ecological reasons), where political forces support the necessary infrastructure and are willing to hire engineers, can be a source of synthetic fuels. This is a much more favorable security environment.

#7: A good chunk of the speech is just Trump saying the things he's going to do.

Trump remains the low-trust candidate, which I think is something that a lot of professionals who are Democrats don't really understand. In a low-trust environment, where people don't trust that your rhetoric is correlated to the conversion of money into positive outcomes, you want simple promises with easily observable results, not high ideological rhetoric. (Matt Yglesias wrote about this in 2021. You may not trust Matt himself, but the logic of it is simple.)

Trump blowing off the fancy rhetoric frightens professional types, because it makes it look like anything could be up for sale, but establishes his credibility among people who think professional types are lying. (For example, how they continuously screw-up major blue municipalities.) This is part of the whole deal with Trump 1 and The Wall.

#8: Not a lot of 'uniting' going on here. There's a bit of it, but it's definitely leaning towards, 'we should unite... by voting for me,' rather than outreach.

If you thought he was going to deliver a galaxy-brain genius speech and completely break the context and win with 70%, you're going to be disappointed.

#9: A more competent, more virtuous, and more epistemically rigorous Democratic Party could have taken away 50% of Trump's issues, and left him with a lot less material to campaign on.

To me, it doesn't feel like Trump was selected by providence to lead the United States to a glorious new era - it feels more like he was selected to humiliate everyone else, by forcing them to make a choice.

To quote a random Twitter user:

"Ackshually Kamala wasn't 'in charge' of the border mkay she was just asked to study the 'root causes' of why migrants come from the top 3 nations we basically assigned her a term paper we wouldn't actually give her any real authority OK don't you get it?" This is, somehow, meant to be a defense of her. The press have adopted a lawyerly attitude toward "the truth." They are addicted to finding technicalities and have no interest in what is, in the broadest sense, true. This is why Trump deranges them: he serially exaggerates and bullshits while expressing fundamental truths.

In theory, this shouldn't be a close election. Obviously the reality TV star whose statements are extremely loose should lose.

In theory, this shouldn't be a close election. Obviously the faction that thinks it's OK for teachers to get beat up in schools should lose.

In the groupchat, I said, "The people that get mugged and change their party registration, I can work with. It's the people that get mugged and don't change their opinion that are scary."

One of the Republicans had an interesting response. "It's because they think they deserve it," he said.

[gatheringbones]

[“In talking about gentrification in New York City, you write about the “New People” who flocked to New York when it became a whitewashed symbol of post-9/11 patriotism. You say, “Their newness is not the problem,” since new people have always flocked to New York. What is the difference now?

It has long been a struggle to come up with a name for these people. When I started my blog, Vanishing New York, in 2007, I called them “yunnies,” a riff on yuppies that stood for Young Urban Narcissists. But that was too limiting, and too cutesy, so I dropped that. For the book, I wanted to coin some great term, but ended up with New People, which I’m not satisfied with either. What I mean is that these people are a new kind of personality type in the city. They’re not New because they’re newcomers; they’re New because they’re not like the sort of people who’ve historically flocked to the city and, specifically, to countercultural neighborhoods like the East Village. They often don’t feel quite human. They feel android-like, manufactured, and this is because — I believe — their personalities have been engineered by the culture of neoliberal capitalism, especially in the 2000s when social media spreads neoliberalism like a virus. In The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino just published an essay about “Instagram face,” what she calls a “single, cyborgian” look, and this is part of what I’m talking about. The New People are perfect neoliberal subjects, engineered to conform, perform and succeed, and this makes them quite violent in the way they enter and commandeer urban space — and in the way they approach people who are unlike them, who they see as beneath them. They are also violent toward themselves through de-subjectification, the process of hollowing themselves out. I find it difficult to empathize with them, though. I keep trying, but I feel so assaulted by them, I just can’t.

I love how you eavesdrop on your influencer neighbors to give us the flattened details of their lives. Surveillance has stifled so many of the possibilities of urban life, and yet here you’re flipping the gaze to examine the gawkers and their “contemptuous disregard.” What do you find?

“Flattened” is a good word and it describes well what happens when someone de-subjectifies themself; they smooth out all the bumps that make them human and particular. They are the cyborgian Instagram face, the flat sameness of the glossy catalog image, drained of all personality. And — here’s their violence — they aim to de-subjectify everything and everyone around them. This goes way beyond gentrification. This is about turning the entire urban landscape into a slick, frictionless, endlessly repeating Instagrammable scene, devoid of affect, risk and surprise. To create this nightmarish hollow city, many of us will have to be removed, and if we refuse to go, we will be controlled — by the police, by systems of surveillance, and by the contemptuous disregard that the New People throw like poison darts from their eyes. They are trying to annihilate us. To make us not exist.

At the beginning of COVID lockdown in New York, so many of these “New People” left the city.

The day lockdown began, in March 2020, they fled in droves. The people who stayed behind and roamed the streets were the sort of New Yorkers I used to know. I’m talking about the ordinary people who aren’t cyborgian, along with the poor and working class, the nonwhite, the queer, the weird, the unhoused, the old, the artists, basically everyone who’s not a New Person. So the city refilled with all this gorgeous subjectivity! It was like a cloud lifted and we could see each other again. We could feel each other and look at each other. We became un-alienated.”]

[collapsedsquid]

The American right kicked off the assault on reporters who cross powerful people, beginning in earnest with Peter Thiel’s success in shuttering Gawker in 2016. That year, future President Donald Trump promised to “open up the libel laws.” But media lawyers say plaintiffs attorneys have also been emboldened by the massive $788 million settlement that Fox agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems for its on-air lies about the company. Lawyers suing media organizations have gotten more aggressive. The law firm Clare Locke has created a lucrative business around catering to aggrieved parties, and has professionalized the art of slowing down stories with legal threats and demands for preservation of documents. As Semafor previously reported, Reuters has been forced to at least temporarily take down an exposé about the CEO of an Indian technology company to comply with a court order issued in New Delhi.The same CEO retained Clare Locke in the U.S., where several publications also wrote about the Indian tech company.

Going to start pushing the political position that nobody should ever get held accountable for anything because it always ends catastrophically. Sure that person may have committed Libel, Fraud, Murder, Treason, Genocide, whatever but don't you see any attempt to hold them accountable will merely empower bad actors?

[lightofraye]

why is there gossip about Glen and Jenna O?

Hi anon!

Sigh.

Excuse me a sec....

Okay. Now I'm ready to do celebrity gossip!

So!

Apparently Life & Style magazine claimed a source was spilling some stuff about Glen being interested in Jenna Ortega. Keep in mind, during an analysis of reliable gossip mags, Life & Style ranked about 25% accuracy, according to Gawker and their research.

Let's say he is.

I'd be a little bit concerned because Jenna is barely into adulthood at 21 years old. Glen is in his mid-thirties. (Yes, I judge the hell out of those kinds of age gaps. For good reason.)

But! There's also another rumor going around, that he's hitting up Gracie Abrams, JJ Abrams' daughter! Also citing a source from Life & Style.

Hm.

It's a shame that a few other... "media"... sites are picking that up and spreading it. (I'm eyeing you, Fandomwire. Christ.)

I always wait until there's something more reliable. If Glen is interested in dating, well, why wouldn't he?? He's single! He's said repeatedly he's open to love.

Just... not a barely turned adult, okay, Glen?

(Also, I'm fuming at Life & Style trying to imply that Glen actually had a romance with Sydney! That alone discredits them entirely!)