Forbes: Taylor Swift And Blake Lively: Subpoena, Spectacle And Scrutiny.
IMO, dragging Swift in just to get attention, and then pretending Lively is the one dragging Swift in is just showing off how little Baldoni's team has on the legal side.

Reminder: Lively is suing over violations of her (and her female costars') right to a safe workplace. Leave Taylor Swift out of this.

The LA Times: Blake Lively backed by advocacy groups in legal fight with Justin Baldoni over #MeToo speech law

I don't think it's being reported enough that Baldoni's team is trying to strike down the law protecting survivors of sexual violence and discrimination from defamation suits. As in, get it declared unconstitutional because suing your victims should be part of Free Speech. Holy Fake Feminism, Batman.

Here's more about the law that Lively is invoking because this is a labour issue: Legislation to Protect Survivors of Sexual Assault, Harassment, and Discrimination from Weaponized Defamation Lawsuits Signed by Governor.

Here's a Bloomburg piece about on of the "inspirations" for why California decided it needed this law [archive link]: Ex-FTC Commissioner Faces Storm of Sexual Harassment Claims.

One of the women in that case helped put together one of the amicus briefs [PDF of court document], so that the law she helped draft, intending to protect people like her, doesn't get struck down. She has now been stalked, harassed and doxxed for speaking up in support of the law, because the Lively hate train people are truly free of hinges.

Chat GPT Is Very Useful for Everything /s
Jason Sanford: Genre Grapevine’s Deep Dive into the Use of ChatGPT by Seattle Worldcon.
Though, honestly, if the rest of the volunteers quit, and the ConCom wasn't responsive to the cries for help from the last two people, I might have done crime too. I'm still perplexed by the Hugos team quitting, as it seems like a disproportionate reaction from people not prone to melodrama, but we'll probably never know.

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books: Philadephia Inquirer and Chicago Sun-Times Publish Summer Reading List of Nonexistent Books.
Good look at how that happened, followed by a long rant about the state of the media landscape, especially in regards to US Politics.

SAVYWRITESBOOKS: The “BookTok Fyre Fest” | A Million Lives was a DISASTER (Video, 1 hour).
A lot of people have been covering this shitshow, which probably shouldn't fairly be in the LLM trashfire situation, but fells spiritually akin to it, so I'm putting it here. Savy also links to A Million Lives Recovery, which boosts all the authors, artists and vendors screwed over by this nonsense. It looks like mostly romantasy, but there's a variety in there.


Misogyny Slop Ecosystem: ( Cutting five links for discussion of violence against women and non-binary people )


At Least Somewhat Good Stuff:
The Breach: Inside the campaign that upended CanLit’s ties to Scotiabank and Israeli arms.
Nice example of activism getting stuff done.

The Tyee: A Fresh Opportunity to Get Elections Right.
I really want this to happen.

MattBernstein1: A Morning With Vivian Wilson (Video, 45 minutes).
I just like getting to see her being happy.

QwithTomPower: What led Rick Astley to quitting pop music at 27 (Video, 40 minutes).
I got rickrolled the other day, and YouTube recced this charming interview.

centaurianthropology: Therapy for Thee but Not for Me: Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms in ‘Murderbot’ (Thoughts on Episodes 1-3).
Meta!