Barrie Shannon

“I am a stranger to my closest family members so ask AI basic questions about them.”

I've just posted a write-up of what happened over the two days of Schooling and Sexualities 4, including some brief reflections on how it felt organising an academic event on gender and sexuality research in this climate 🌈🎓 @aare-gscs.bsky.social

man I am depressed all over again I fucking love the mass effect universe, we should be getting new games in it forever what a tremendous waste to consign it to the dustbin of EA

Can confirm that this is a real trailer of the Mass Effect game that BioWare was developing up until its closure yesterday www.reddit.com/r/masseffect...

this is the worst day of my life, taking leave until further notice 💀

I gave a talk at Schooling and Sexualities last week on a keynote panel about the past, present and future of schooling and sexualities research. This is my take on sexuality and relationships education - that perhaps we need to 'assassinate' it to move forward. @aare-gscs.bsky.social 🌈🎓

ARC has given some details of how new Explore scheme will run ▶️ www.arc.gov.au/news-and-pub... ❗️There's a lottery❗️ Peer review yields 3 categories: highly competitive, competitive, uncompetitive. After funding highly competitive apps, competitive ones enter a lottery for remaining $.

my favorite thought experiment at the moment is the cognitive dissonance between "we will force our sentient unpaid ai agents to make millions of restaurant reservations for us. that will be their only purpose. they will live in a tamagotchi." But we also must make sure they are happy doing this

My new article, co-authored with @sandraduffy.bsky.social is out today, please read & share: "Criminalising and eliminating affirmative healthcare: Trans childhood in a moral panic" journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The "controversy" is the typical racist misogynists manufacturing outrage for YouTube views. Stop pretending these are real people challenge 2026.

Recent open access article by TASA member Benjamin Hanckel et al.: Young People and Social Media Bans: The Need For A Youth Centred Approach www.youthandpolicy.org/articles/you...

a lot of people want to believe that right-wing beliefs are rooted in some legitimate material grievance. that makes it easier to imagine that if we simply solved the material problem, they’d deradicalize. but they won’t, because they aren’t disillusioned, they’re just morons.

Pre-orders are open for my book ‘Queer Stories in Australian TV Drama: Production Culture, Policy, and Distribution’. If you are associated with a university anywhere in the world, you can do me a massive favour by requesting the uni library purchases this book. www.routledge.com/Queer-Storie...

whenever there's a story about american religious conservatives lobbying to restrict what gay people do with their leisure time because they can't just mind their own fucking business, i think about this all-time @theonion.com classic

And it’s worse than you think, because this appears to violate state law. The Library Act 1939 (NSW), as amended in June 2026 by the Minns Labor government, prohibits these ideological bans. Many might wonder why Israel gets yet another exception under Australian law — this does not serve cohesion.

lmao "nooo our clients are gonna find out we're not actually doing the work they're paying us to do :("

Gonna keep telling this story. I watched an hour long "How To Write An AI Novel" how to video out of curiosity and I shit you not, 60% of the video was about how to trick Claude into writing something that didn't look like it was AI. If genAI is a tool, it's core audience uses it mostly for fraud.

"Arday’s story is a warning about the consequences of symbolic inclusion without structural change of elevating individuals without support, the dangers of treating representation as spectacle,the failures of institutions that abandon those they once celebrated " paulddf.substack.com/p/who-killed...

"The classic is, it will get the side of the body incorrect and say right when you've said left … so you need to check things pretty closely, especially things like drug doses." HELLO???

KEEP BULLYING THEM IT WORKS

proof of life selfie, i've been alternating between writing a lot, watching hours of reels and playing scam-adjacent mobile games

like what 😭

"it looks like you're using an adblocker to visit our site." yep! ha ha! it rocks!

In case you missed it, the ARC now has rough time-lines for introducing the new schemes 👇

omg no.... anyway

finally paid off my HECS debt, it only took 16 years 🥲

Registrations are open for SS4. Join us in Adelaide for what is shaping up to be an exciting conference on gender, sexuality, pedagogies, schooling, teachers' work and the barriers to equity within the broader education system. 🌈🎓 @australianare.bsky.social @sociologyaustralia.bsky.social

"For all of Segal’s assertions about how the local Jewish community was being conflated with the state of Israel and blamed for Israel’s action, it was her testimony that insisted on the link between them, as if any criticism of Israel’s actions constituted antisemitism" Read to the kicker on this🔥

baby's first beach day 🥹

So excited to be organising Schooling and Sexualities 4 - a decennial legacy conference about gender and sexuality justice and schooling. Please share this call for papers and consider joining us in Adelaide.

You'd almost think Israel was doing something bad.

this doesn't even have the full context which makes it funnier

prepare to have your daughter accused of being a boy and face demands that her gentials be inspected if the dad on the other team thinks that she fouled his special snowflake too hard

any sport that can end with a 0-0 draw is not worth watching 🤷

"outsider politics" and it's far-right grifters who are regurgitating the exact regressive, racist ideas that form the basis of our entire society

when AI companies go bankrupt

if you eat meat you support this shit btw

"Defeat them in the marketplace of ideas." They don't have ideas. They don't have arguments. They don't have beliefs. They just have performance which requires you to adhere to the social contract so they can profit off you as content. Getting their shit rocked is the only language they hear.

I know violence doesn't solve anything and all that, but these pieces of shit rely on the social contract to protect them and their bigotry and where's that gotten us? Fascism and genocide. Maybe the best thing for them is to beat the ever loving shit out of these edgelords so they think twice.

I don't want to pretend this *isn't* shocking or ghastly but, like, when digital media experts are expressing concern generally about the data a game like Pokemon Go is collecting from day one, this is precisely the kind of end game they are thinking about.