cultivate the posts

my texas birth certificate has my birth name, but i have a louisiana name change judgment and an oregon ID with that name on it. and the birth cert has M for sex, but i have proof of orchi and an oregon ID with F on it. so i think i shooould be able to get a US F passport, but i also just realized, i don’t know how it will work with the countries i want to go, which are mainly UK/Ireland and Japan

like, getting an X passport seems like possibly a bad idea if i can avoid it cause, you know politics….. but that would be most accurate to how i experience my gender. i may be able to get an F since i’m thoroughly documented, but then say, Japan requires vaginoplasty for a formal gender change, so would they accept an F passport from me (and could using one get me in trouble if i worked there or something)? i really don’t want an M if i can help it, but yeah i donno

lychanthrope = λύκος (lúkos, “wolf”) +‎ ἄνθρωπος (ánthrōpos, “man, human”), so essentially wolf-man

helicopter = ἕλιξ (hélix, “spiral”) + πτερόν (pterón, “wing”), so essentially spiral-wing

which means you get derived terms like therianthrope, beast-man (θηρίον (thēríon, “wild beast”) +‎ ἄνθρωπος (ánthrōpos, “man”)) and ornithopter, bird-wing (ὄρνιθ- (órnith-) + πτερόν (pterón, “wing”))

This was the most intense out of all the plantations in Ireland, but far from the only one, and the fact that the majority of the native population had been genocided is the only reason that the north was the only region of Ireland with a Protestant majority.

The settlers behaved like, well, settlers, gradually seizing land, murdering, kidnapping and attempting to destroy native languge, culture and religion. When Irish nationalism arose, the Protestants of the North were thoroughly opposed to it, and fought against it. When it was clear that the IRA had fought the British to a standstill in Ireland, more than 100 000 of them signed the United Ulstermen Declaration, stating themselves ready and willing to fight to oppose any relaxation of British rule in Ireland, and they formed many different millitias, most prominently the Ulster Volunteer Forces, UVF, with some 20 000 members.

When the official leadership of Irish nationalism signed on to become a 'White dominion’ in the British Empire in 1921, they claimed all of Ireland, but they signed off the most industrialised and wealthiest part of Ireland to make their own choice - the Protestant majority in the North of course immediately left this united Ireland to form Northern Ireland, on fairly arbitrary grounds - there were several Catholic-majority regions and cities included in this new Protestant theocracy - Fermanagh and Tyrone, and most prominently including the heavily Catholic towns of Doire Chaluim Chille/Derry and An Stráth Bán/Straban - and Protestant majority areas which were in the Free State of Ireland. This caused great controversy within the Republican movement, to the point where a civil war broke out between the Pro-/Anti-Treaty IRA - a civil war which the Pro-Treaty faction, armed and supported by the British, won handily. Sinn Féin and the pIRA emerge out of the left wing of this defeated faction. The new statelet in the north of Ireland was gerrymandered and rigged to produce a constant Unionist majority everywhere, and the all-Protestant police force - the RUC - harrased and threatened and murdered in Catholic areas.

The rest you probably know - total Protestant rule for 50 years, the rise of the civil rights movement, it’s total rejection by the Protestant ruling class, the emergence of the Provos, the Provisional IRA - Sinn Féin being it’s political wing- to defend Catholic areas being burned out as the hope of peaceful reform died in the blood spilled by British troops in the North, the Troubles, the Good Friday Agreement, and now the victory of Sinn Féin, in a place who’s only reason for existence is millitantly refusing to produce a Nationalist majority.

so the idea occurred to me of a little e-space where people could share resources, discuss their studies, speakers could assist non-speakers, and people could even organize little classes or study sessions if it was their heart’s desire

anyway, i’m just feeling out people’s interest at the moment. like this post or comment or whatever, and if it seems like it would be useful to people, i’ll make one and send out invites in DMs

glad to hear! yeah honestly i'm probably gonna go see it in the theatre. i'm glad to have a bit more context on who the Daniels are, and hopefully I can stream it for friends sometime when the time comes!

speaking of which, I really neglected to talk about their short films, but seeing their earlier work, which can all be viewed on their Vimeo page (though you may need an account to see some of it). you see a lot of the same themes of weird body stuff achieved with practical effects, not to mention kind of mopey ostensibly hetero guys getting intimate in various ways that came together in Swiss Army Man. of course, the major one - thanks so much @extractivism-chan for pointing out that I neglected this!! - is the video for Turn Down For What:

...which features Kwan himself in one of the major roles (indeed, they often act in their short films). the floppy penis rig being one of the things they evidently reused in Swiss Army Man.

their early films, such as Pockets, are mostly explorations of a high concept visual gag, but the frenetic pace and tight editing means it packs a huge amount of twists on the premise into its short runtime:

by 2016, when Swiss Army Man comes out, you get longer films like Interesting Ball that go for a broader tone of existentialist absurdity, with a variety of skits all coming together around this theme of infinite absurd possibilities. the skits themselves mostly involve homoeroticism and a certain amount of toilet humour: a roommate disappears up another's butt, a fraternity turn into an elaborate human mecha around one of their own going through a breakup only to end up fucking on the beach, a woman is pursued by her fridge which is speaking in a child's voice, a man violently guns down the rubber ball which had sex with his wife.

and speaking of Swiss Army Man, that was... quite an experience. the trailer really only covers the first third or so of the film - it barely touches on the elaborate crossdressing roleplay that the main guy Hank (Paul Dano) performs with his new best friend Manny's reanimated corpse, still mostly paralysed (Radcliffe), ostensibly to reawaken memories in Manny but really to work through his own social isolation. the tone of the skits really ends up feeling a lot like Nagisa's Death By Hanging, although with a totally different thematic payload lmao.

a lot of it functions as defamiliarising - Hank attempting to explain social mores to Manny, while trying to process his own shames, and Manny responding with a naive hedonist worldview - and there's a huge emphasis on physical intimacy; it comes across as less grossout humour and much more a genuine fascination with all the functions of the body, including the stigmatised ones. which is to say it's a lot of two guys going around, one carrying the other, talking about farting and masturbation, while Radcliffe does an incredible dead-eyed stare into the camera.

so, of course, with so much Gender shit going on, what's the read? it reminds me of something @baeddel was talking about with regard to the construction of sexuality on 4chan: the fact that you go on there to engage in erotic behaviour like sharing porn, playing games like 'you fap you lose', and generally talking constantly about masturbation with posters who are (at least ostensibly) other guys, but everyone has to work very hard to maintain the story that this is all heterosexual.

i think the coolest part of the film is how eagerly it pokes at that tension. Hank and Manny almost kiss during their elaborate larp (complete with facsimiles of a bus, a bar and a movie theatre constructed out of various bits of litter), and later Hank gives Manny a rescue breath underwater that's shot like a kiss. and of course the ending is that Hank comes to accept the aspects of life he finds shameful, like farting, after running away from the normie girl he fantasised about to attempt to escape once again with Manny. it's... interesting all right.

the soundtrack of the film is all clapping and singing, mostly a capella notes. i can see the logic here: all the sounds are produced by the human body, it's all about bodies and physicality. but it also makes it sound like a really annoying twee pop song lmao. i'd be fascinated by an edit of the film without any non-diegetic music. in the end, the film elects to keep the gay as barely-under-the-surface subtext, and Manny sails away on his farts in front of a small crowd, establishing that the events of the film were not figments of Hank's imagination - as much as Manny's feelings are very much projections of what he cannot say.

anyway, when i spoke of the appearance of Youtube martial artists on Everything, Everywhere as part of a general trend of 'mainstream' media turning to lean on the fame of the most successful independent web creators, I didn't realise that the Daniels themselves are an example, since their short films were apparently very popular on Vimeo (for obvious reasons - they're pithy and funny and creative with effects). oddly enough, another such figure shows up credited in visual effects, stop motion animator Kirsten Lepore, whose Hi, Stranger definitely feels like it shares something of an ethos with the Daniels. I'm not exactly sure what Lepore did on this film, but it was interesting to note!

it definitely seems that a lot of industries are starting to reconfigure in this way. the 'positive' spin is that thanks to the abundance of tutorials and free or pirate-able software, it is now possible to make a name for yourself making really sophisticated films, artworks music etc. for free on the internet, and, if you so desire, you can find your way into ~The Industry~ that way. the more realistic spin is that to make it as an independent artist in this way requires you to essentially perform a full-time job on a spec work basis, with very little direct support or guidance, and if you're very lucky and good at playing a readily parsable persona, whatever you're doing will align enough with the tastes of the crowd to let you 'make it'.

which is interesting in a way: because of this filter, the kinds of expression that boil out of the internet may indeed be the vision of a particular artist, but they're as much an expression of the milieu and its tastes. it's all a lot of complicated feedback loops and such. but i should elaborate on that somewhere else.

Brexit royally fucked northern ireland because regular ireland is still in the EU, so people were looking at. like, a hard border with customs and passport checks in the middle of ireland. This is unacceptable for pretty much all irish people.

Britain figured out a bill that basically…. leaves northern ireland in the EU, economically? There’s no customs or import/export taxes at the line within ireland, but there *are* between northern ireland and the british mainland. Basically, under this plan, northern ireland gets to keep all the EU economic perks, and essentially isn’t part of Brexit.

Pro-UK unionists HATE this, and correctly see it as pushing NI away from the UK. So, the top Unionist party leader resigned as prime minister in NI in protest of this plan, and they had to have a whole new election, and… Sinn Fein won the most votes for the first time in Northern Ireland history lmao

Sinn Feinn’s election isn’t really historic because it promises a maybe-possibly-someday 32 county republic. the reason its so historic is that traditionally the degree of coincidence between ethnic/religious background (Irishman/Catholic and Ulsterman/Protestant) and voting preferences (nationalist and unionist parties, respecitvely) has been globally significant. i’m talking, like, over 99%. that’s because the national question (which is not just a possible United Ireland, but things like home rule and devolution as well) has historically dominated civil life so much. further, Northern Ireland was a country that basically started gerrymandered, its borders drawn to guarantee an Irish minority and thereby weaken the democratic support for the republican/nationalist movement. as such, predicatbly, there has never been a republican/nationalist majority.