Studying the Ising model using its graphical representations has been tremendously successful.These representations are coupled to each other using the uniform even subgraph, which is invariant under XOR. This trick enables simple proofs of equality of critical points between loop O(1) and Ising and exponential decay for the two-dimensional near-critical Ising model. The scaling limit of the latter is famously conjectured to be related to the exceptional Lie Algebra E_8. Joint work with Ulrik Hansen, Jiangping Jiang and Peter Wildemann.