eirrann | he/him (eirrann.eth)

As an artist who has chosen anonymity on purpose, how do I clearly introduce myself – truthfully, with enough specificity to feel real – while honoring the underlying reasons why I feel compelled to conceal my IRL identity? After nearly three years of trying to find the right words, I think I finally have. This is a narrative I can stand behind. A practicable answer to a simple question: who am I, behind the pseudonym, and why do I keep making the kind of art I make? Read more👇 https://eirrann.art/updates/f/my-name-is-a-pseudonym-my-voice-is-my-own

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Alas, Gemini Omni on my Pixel phone is not the solution to animating my art.

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one small step for eirrann one giant leap for eirrannkind

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My son is turning literal garbage that he collects around school into a mech model. When he's done building, he'll cover the whole thing with primer and then paint it. I'm so impressed 🤯

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I've been married (mostly happily) for over two decades. Every once in a while, I'll connect with someone (online or in person) who sparks in me a similar – almost-feral – electricity as what I felt the first time I saw my wife. Instead of chasing it, I've learned to treat it like a flare: a reminder. For me, what matters about that feeling has nothing to do with the new person. It has everything to do with remembering who I saw (and who I was as a person) when I first looked at my wife twenty-odd years ago: and reminding myself to see her through a similar lens again. We aren't the same people we were back then. Two decades reshapes you: physically, mentally, emotionally. Love isn't a static emotion or a passive activity: it's an action verb. Every so often, we both have to choose it again.

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Confession: I read this article about Rosie O’Donnell getting a facelift after losing weight, and it hit me in a place I wasn’t expecting. I’ve been on Wegovy for a couple years now. Not as a vanity project. Not because I wanted a shortcut around discipline. More because, after years of feeling like something in my body was screaming all the time, an endocrinologist at a VA weight management clinic helped me understand that “willpower” had long since stopped being my actual problem. Before Wegovy, I could eat a full meal and still feel genuinely, aggressively hungry. Not “I could snack” hungry. More like my body had completely missed the signal that food had happened. After the first injection, it felt like a cloud began lifting from some hidden room in my subconscious. For the first time in nearly a decade, I didn’t feel hungry. That was honestly emotional. My peak weight was around 320 lb. I’m now plateaued around 280-285. So I’ve lost roughly 35-40 lb, or around 11-13% of my body weight. The VA doctor at my recent annual checkup said she was pleased with that progress because it had helped me get and stay just below the “morbid obesity” line. For my height, that threshold is around 285 lb, so I’m not far below it, but I am below it. That matters. Because when people talk about weight, they usually talk as if the body is a simple moral ledger. Eat less. Move more. Try harder. Stop making excuses. But bodies are not spreadsheets. Mine came with a long chain of causes. I grew up in a family where my mother was a pastry chef, and her invitation to work through life’s difficulties was often: sit at the table, eat something fresh-baked, and talk it out. That is a loving memory, but therapy in recent years has also helped me understand how it hardwired stress-snacking deep into me in ways I often don’t even notice while it’s happening. Then there was the Army. I herniated discs in my lower back in my early 20s, back when I could still push through and exercise anyway. Over time, that changed. Desk work became the norm. My arches fell in my late 20s, which led to the discovery that I had been wearing insufficiently supportive shoes for years. By my late 30s, my back had deteriorated, regardless of my best efforts. Radiculopathy started affecting my lower body. And now entering my late 40s, even ordinary physical activity can turn into a negotiation with pain. I also don’t think we should ignore the society we live in. My family eats relatively healthy food. We don’t do much fast food. We don’t eat out often. We don’t rely on ultra-processed food. And yet we still live in a world where multinational megacorps hire brilliant scientists and marketers to make food as appetite-stimulating and habit-forming as possible. So no, I don’t think this was ever just about willpower. The next step is Zepbound, which I should transition to in a couple months. My doctor wants to see whether its compound formula can help me break through the plateau and get to a weight where exercise becomes less likely to injure me. That’s the part people don’t always understand. For some of us, the goal isn’t to look better in vacation photos. It’s to be able to walk farther without limping. To bend over in the yard without triggering days of back pain. To be able to do normal human things without my body punishing me for trying. I have a 50% VA disability. I’m not expecting to become some super-athlete. I’d just like to get light enough that movement can become part of the solution instead of another way to hurt myself. The math is clarifying and brutal. At my height, getting below the BMI obesity threshold would mean getting under roughly 215 lb. From where I am now, that’s still about another 65-70 lb. That is a lot, and I will probably experience life-changing differences if I can even make it halfway there. But for the first time in a long time, getting even close to that doesn’t feel metaphysically impossible. And that’s where the Rosie article got me. Because she was writing about weight loss, loose skin, surgery, feminism, shame, choice, and the strange psychological negotiation with the mirror. And I realized I’ve been so focused on pain, mobility, and metabolic health that I haven’t really let myself think about the aesthetic or emotional aftermath of losing a significant amount of weight. I’m lucky in one very dumb and very male way: I have a long full beard that keeps me from even knowing whether my jowls have started to sag from weight loss. If my face changes after even further weight loss, I can probably just keep hiding behind the wizard curtain and pretend I planned it. But the body keeps receipts elsewhere. I’ve already noticed skin on my midsection that used to be filled out by fat starting to sag lower as the weight comes off. If I lose a lot more, I have no idea what that will look like or how I’ll feel about it, let alone how I will adjust my clothing habits to compensate. And I guess that’s the confession: I started this process mostly wanting my body to stop hurting itself. I wasn’t thinking about aesthetics, identity, loose skin, aging, vanity, masculinity, surgery, or any of that. But weight loss isn’t just subtraction. It reveals things. Some of them are medical. Some are emotional. Some are absurd. Some are skin-deep, except skin-deep turns out to be a lot deeper than people like to admit. For now, I’m grateful Wegovy quieted the hunger noise. I’m grateful the VA doctor understood this as a medical problem before I fully did. And I’m grateful for the beard. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2026/05/27/rosie-o-donnell-facelift-surgery-poem/90274859007/

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Earlier today, I saw video from several different angles on X (now also circulating here on Farcaster) that shows somewhere between a half-dozen to maybe a dozen federal agents tackle a man, appear to remove a holstered weapon from his hip, and then shoot him repeatedly to death. They fired a volley even after he was motionless on the ground: first what sounded like a double-tap; then what sounded like a quintuple-tap. The video clips showing this span less than a minute. I’m not going to share those videos here. If you don’t want to watch what looks like a public execution, you shouldn’t have to scroll into it (and be warned before going to any of the media links cited below). I also don’t know the details before the clip starts. But I’m already watching the same familiar pattern: the state moves faster than the facts. DHS almost immediately posted on X framing meant to portray the man as deserving of death: before the public has any meaningful timeline, before an independent investigation, before a clear accounting of commands, decisions and rounds fired. One of the video angles makes something even more disturbing seem plausible. It looks like the first shot might have been a negligent discharge: an agent yanking the victim’s weapon away and the gun going off during the disarm. I’m not claiming that’s confirmed. I’m saying that’s what the angle appears to show, and it underscores why we need full, unedited footage and real accountability: because “split second” narratives collapse when the shooting may begin as incompetence and then roll forward into fatal certainty. From a self-preservation standpoint, I cannot imagine why anyone would voluntarily put themselves in proximity to aggressive, trigger-happy federal agents operating in the street with administration-asserted impunity right now. Not because the person “deserved it”, but because despite being a firearm owner with a concealed carry permit who firmly believes that my Constitutional rights empower me, I’m also a realist. I can foresee the outcome when armed agents told they have absolute authority decide they’re threatened first and justify later. And here’s the part that should terrify people across ideologies: even if you were perfectly within your rights, those rights don’t protect you if the people with guns treat anything less than immediate, unwavering compliance as domestic terrorism, and the exercise of Constitutional rights as provocation. People in America have constitutionally protected rights that my forebears – who have lived on this land for more than ten generations – fought and died for: paid for in blood. Not vibes. Rights. 1st Amendment: speech, press, assembly, petition. In practice, we’re watching federal operations where the public is told to disperse or face violent suppression, where information is managed through rapid official spin, and where the practical effect is to chill speech and assembly: especially when bystanders filming and protesting are met with escalation and crowd control, branded as “domestic terrorists” for acting as legal observers. 2nd Amendment: the right to keep and bear arms. Reporting indicates this man was a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry. If the state can treat lawful possession as an on-the-spot death sentence, then the “right” is a slogan, not a safeguard. 4th Amendment: security against unreasonable searches and seizures; warrants based on probable cause. The word “seizure” includes your person. When federal agents can violently seize someone in public space and then kill them during that seizure, and the first official move is PR rather than transparency: the spirit of the 4th is being selectively hollowed out in real time. What makes this feel especially grotesque is the hypocrisy: a lot of the people who sign up to work for ICE are staunchly vocal, Gadsden-flag-waving “Don’t Tread On Me” proponents of their 1st, 2nd and 4th Amendment rights: yet they’ll bend themselves into knots to justify trampling those same rights when the person on the ground is someone they’ve been indoctrinated to unquestioningly view as a threat. Zooming out, it’s hard not to feel like this administration is deliberately creating the preconditions for violent confrontation: unleashing heavily armed federal teams that appear poorly trained and poorly advised on their constitutional responsibilities and our constitutional rights; operating in a posture that predictably triggers panic, resistance and righteous public outcry; and taking advantage of every remote opportunity for extreme escalation. And in a state like Minnesota – where permit holders can legally carry a handgun in public without concealment, and where the modern record includes public armed right-wing and anti-government activity showing up around unrest – the “someone will come out armed” outcome feels less like a risk and more like an inevitability. If you wanted a pretext to claim there’s an “armed insurrection” and justify extraordinary measures under the Insurrection Act, this is what the setup looks like: provoke, escalate, then declare the crisis you manufactured. It’s difficult not to see hardliners in Trump-world, including Stephen Miller, as having waited for an opening like this since the first term (see my earlier thinking about these accelerationist tendencies in the administration in the QC below; relevant sources cited in that thread). I can’t wait for the mental gymnastics from the “Don’t Tread on Me” crowd. Sources linked in this cast: Reuters (24 Jan 2026); Financial Times (24 Jan 2026); The Guardian (24 Jan 2026); my QC about accelerationism in the current administration Sources linked in second cast of thread: Minnesota DPS on Permit to Carry and no concealment requirement; Minnesota open-carry summary; DOJ/ABC documentation of “Boogaloo” armed anti-government activity tied to Minneapolis unrest Sources linked in third case of thread: reporting from WaPo that the Insurrection Act has been explicitly floated in the Minneapolis context https://www.reuters.com/world/us/minnesota-governor-says-federal-agents-involved-shooting-minneapolis-2026-01-24/ https://www.ft.com/content/3d855ba7-3e96-4512-b34c-6ff87ade6c12 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/24/minneapolis-shooting-federal-agents https://farcaster.xyz/eirrann.eth/0xed29cd6d

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