Gnawing Agnostic

this woman—stephanie turner is her name, because i think people should know it so this shit can ruin her life—regularly fences cis men and wins because fencing is fucking co-ed

i know that is in the screenshots already, but what i can add which isn’t in the screenshot is that i personally know and have fenced some of the people listed in that “competition history” screenshot, including some of the cis men which she beat. i know from fencing them myself that these guys are good, smart, capable fencers

that said, even if i didn’t know them, i could tell you a lot of these guys are solid. do you see that column labeled “rating”? being rated means they’ve placed very well or won medals at prestigious or decently sized tournaments—E is the lowest rating (but still difficult to get) and ratings go up to A (and U means unrated). if you look, you can see she beat a few rated fencers in that screenshot, some of them male!

another thing i know about stephanie turner is that she fences at a club my friend’s brother works at. she regularly beats said brother, who is 6’4 and 200lbs. i’ve never met this brother, but if he’s anything like my friend, he’s a damn good fencer with years of experience. stephanie turner is GOOD. per my friend, she probably would have won the bout she took a knee on. she really did not need to pull shit transphobic shit and i guarantee she knows it.

all this shit about fencing cis men really does not matter, to be clear. being a woman beating men doesn’t make stephanie a good fencer—it doesn’t even make her a notable fencer. every afab fencer who is good enough to beat other fencers beats amab fencers. the first fencer i beat as an afab person was a cis man who started the sport at the same time as me just bc we were at the same general level. because again, fencing is co-ed. i just am explaining all this to show how damn stupid dying on this hill is (and the fact she for sure knows how damn pointless and hateful it is)

because fencing is NOT a strength sport! being stronger or taller than your opponent, like how a cis man would stereotypically be vs a cis woman, isn’t necessarily an advantage—strength can absolutely fuck you up if you don’t know how to manage it, and if you know how to use it, being shorter than your opponents can actually be an advantage

if anything, fencing a stamina sport, which something you can very much train no matter your gender if you put in the work. more than anything to do with strength or speed, though, fencing is a strategy sport. there is really no reason to gender segregate it. a lot of tournaments do, but plenty tournaments DON’T, and most clubs you go to for practice and drills and learning fencing will be co-ed and have you constantly fencing against “opposite sex” fencers

(half related—one of the best foils on my fencing team is a trans woman who sometimes fences in the men’s brackets in tournaments and regularly beats cis men)

if stephanie turner is a good fencer—which she definitely is—she knows all of this. that fencing is more about stamina, that strength and height mean nothing, that the only thing that really matters is your strategy.

stephanie turner was literally just doing this to be an asshole. the fact she’s getting money for it is fucking disgusting. i hope she faces some damn consequences for this shit, because it’s such stupid, hateful bullshit, especially for a sport where that “biological advantage” shit really and truly does not matter

Why do we need - or even want - two separate leagues for men's sports and women's sports? The gender pay gap, the recognition gap, the trans sports "issue" are all solved by having only one league for these sports (except, of course, for bigotry like we see above).

Men have the advantage - on average - in some sports, sure, that's the argument. But time and time again, stories show that the best female athletes can and often do defeat the best male athletes (in fact, that's why competitive skeet shooting was gender segregated in 1992).

For example, car racing. Danica Patrick being smaller and lighter than the men she races against is such an advantage that the league made a lot of noise about handicapping her by putting extra weights in her car. (To the best of my knowledge this did not happen.) Why is she the only cis female car racer anyone's ever heard of, when being small and light is an advantage in driving fast?

Or horse racing! Practically every teenage girl in the world used to want to own a horse, or loved horses, or wanted to ride horses. Jockeys are small men, typically, because being small and light is an advantage in racing if something is carrying you. And the strength difference between men and women is a. all in the upper body, which is basically not really used in racing a well-trained horse and b. negligible in comparison to the strength of the horse. I don't care how strong a dude is, he's not using his manly strength to guide the horse. The horse is much stronger than him, full stop. It's the horse's training and the trust and respect between horse and jockey and the jockey's strategic mind that wins horse races. All of which are traits cis women have just as much as cis men if not more so in some cases, considering how many cis men are subjected to an upbringing that trains them to think empathy for an animal is a weakness. Why are all the top jockeys not cis women?

Long distance running. Over a distance, speed doesn't matter as much as stamina and endurance, which science has proven cis women have a slight advantage, on average, over cis men in. So... why do cis women not dominate marathons?

Also, why is long distance swimming not a popular sport? Is it just because we don't have mile-long swimming pools? Because we could use natural bodies of water and have boats coming behind the athletes to grab them if they falter and look like they're gonna sink. Could it possibly be because women, with higher endurance and more body fat for better floatation, would be better at it?

Or -- a slightly different angle. Men's professional basketball has become all about "how tall are the athletes you can recruit." Women's professional basketball is still about skill and strategy, not about absurd heights and which team can field more incredibly tall people. I'm not saying short women dominate in women's professional basketball, but I am saying that women exist at the upper extremes of height much more rarely, so women's professional basketball is basically "normal human professional basketball." Why is it so unpopular and unhyped in comparison to men's? Why do the men make so much more money, when they're playing a sport that the vast majority of fit and trained athletes couldn't win in, because those fit and trained athletes aren't in the 99.9% percentile for height? Women's basketball ought to be more interesting than men's... but funny that.

Soccer (aka football everywhere but the US) is a sport where a low center of gravity is valuable. So is hockey. In fact, I, a short and unathletic autistic girl, did incredibly well at floor hockey in high school, in comparison to the taller girls who were better athletes, because I could get under them to get the puck. Therefore why do cis women not dominate those sports? Particularly soccer! Cis men excel at upper body strength but the strength levels of cis men and women's legs are pretty close to equal, and you're not allowed to use your upper body strength in soccer! Women should have an advantage over men there. They do not.

It's because all of the "men are better at sports" bullshit is the patriarchy talking. Men have to be better at sports than women because women have already proven we can compete with men in every other way. Individual female athletes who are excellent cannot be allowed to compete with excellent men because what if they win? What does that say about men and women?

And that's why this "trans women shouldn't compete with cis women" thing was bullshit from the getgo. (Particularly when it's applied to trans girls, who if they are under 13 or they're on puberty blockers don't have significant advantage over their agemate cis girls.) Trans women do not have systemic advantages over cis women in most sports -- not if they've fully transitioned, because you need a continuing supply of testosterone to have the muscular advantage over cis women -- and a fuckton of sports are ones where cis women should own trans women because on average trans women are taller, and sports exist where greater height is a disadvantage.

Red flags: Unbelievable nature you've never seen before!, no external source cited, low image quality could be hiding AI artifacts, lacks scientific name for plant, OP is an aesthetic blog (no offense, I see you credit most of the artists you post, OP <3).

Green flags: Common name of the tree provided (although the leaves don't look like any olive tree I've ever seen).

Reverse image searches and citation trails all seem to lead back to now-deleted Reddit posts. Google Images says it's this one in r/NatureIsFuckingLit, and TinEye says it's this one in r/interestingasfuck. Both were posted back in 2020. This is important because the rise of AI images was in 2022.

People in the comments of places this image is posted throw around botanical terms like "dichotomous branching" [branches split into two at the nodes] and "divaricated" [branches grow far apart from each other], which are cool, but don't tell me what the tree is.

Searching up "Black Olive" on iNaturalist finally got me some answers, and it turns out that YES. This is a real tree! This tree is a Dwarf Black Olive (Terminalia molinetii, Formerly Bucida spinosa). The above photos are some particularly nicely framed shots of a tree with particularly small leaves, which really highlights the branching structure. I really wish we knew the photographer's name. Here are some more photos of the same species:

Terminalia molinetii by jriveracruz50 on iNaturalist, posted under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

This tree is native to Southern Mexico, Belize, the southern tip of Florida, and Cuba. Dwarf Black Olives are completely unrelated to Olive trees in the Olea genus that I'm more familiar with (the former is in Order Myrtales [Myrtles, Evening Primroses, and Allies], and the latter is in Order Lamiales [Mints, Plantains, Olives, and Allies]).

so as per various DC social media concepts Clark has a Superman twitter where he posts left-leaning but fairly safe & tame stuff e.g. happy pride from Superman. Clark Kent also has his own twitter account where he posts his actual opinion.

if you don't know, there's a very popular 3d printing model out there called "benchy". this is used for benchmarking your 3d printer because it's a difficult print and will help test it out.

this is so widely used that people make their own little versions of it, remixing the 3d model to make benchy look cooler and stuff. however, a new company owns the benchy license. they are sending copyright takedowns to all those who wrongfully uploaded the benchy model.

of course, this is pissing off the 3d printing community greatly. everyone loved benchy and have used it for years. so someone on reddit decided to make a new model that is designed as a 3d printing stress test. one that works a lot like benchy, and people are freely able to edit it as they please. you know what they called it?

NO ONE IS IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA.

The whole point of propaganda is that it appeals to emotions and biases to make you believe something. Not all propaganda is BAD, but there is some piece of propaganda you are wired to accept.

And for a lot of people, "There's no point in voting because the Democrats are just as bad" is propaganda that is very easy to believe because we do not have proper civic education and truly HAVE NOT since I was a kid, and I'm a middle aged woman now.

I'm upset beyond words at how many people boosted and ate that propaganda.

But I don't want to say "I told you so."

I want you to learn. You have been lied to all your life about our two party system to convince you that voting is just a waste of time. People who wanted to steal everything from you convinced you to just shrug while they took all the power they needed for their theft.

“wake up,” she urged the dummy, pressing her hands to the pulse points on its wrists. “come on. what the fuck.”

“yeah, i don’t think that asking nicely is going to do the trick,” hank said, his eyebrows raised. his helmet, the special one they’d decorated for him with craft supplies from michael’s when he’d gotten promoted to firestation chief, sat askew on his head. “i can see now why they didn’t pass you.”

annabelle rolled her eyes. “it’s a psychological thing,” she said. “it’s like, you give the brain an instruction and it follows naturally. and the pulse-point thing always works. i don’t know why it’s not, like, in any of the books, but i swear to god it’s worked for me every time.”

it was true that annabelle had the best record on low body counts, which was good because she was the smallest person on the team not counting Georgie, who was a corgi. jake and lillian were always making fun of her for having been the shortest of their whole rookie class. but it hadn’t ever been a problem before; annabelle rarely had to carry anybody out, because she was good enough at getting them on their feet.

but none of that would matter if she couldn’t pass her stupid recertification exam, because they’d take her badge and she’d have to go be, like, a doctor or something.

hank blew out a long breath and sunk down to where she was kneeling on the station floor in full fire gear, giving CPR to the practice dummy, whom they called dierdre. there was a little light that went on when you’d saved its life. it had been a dull gray for an hour now.

“look, AB. i know you’re a good firefighter, and i know you know how to deliver CPR. just do it like you do it during an emergency. you’re overthinking it.”

“but this is what i do during an emergency!” annabelle cried, throwing her hands up. “i put my hands on their pulse points and i use psychological mumbo-jumbo and they just get up and walk!” 

hank blinked. “…really,” he said, voice flat. “people who’ve been inhaling smoke for half an hour just … get up and walk.”

“the brain is an incredibly powerful organ,” said annabelle, shrugging. “look man, i don’t know, okay? but it works. i haven’t had to actually do CPR in like a year and a half.”

he gave her a long, quiet look and said, “well….huh,” before pushing himself back up onto his feet and frowning off into the distance. “keep practicing,” he said after a minute, and left her there.

-

hank switched her team.

“what the fuck, man,” she said, sliding into the truck next to him as the sirens went on. “i can’t get CPR on one fucking dummy and suddenly you don’t trust me to do my job without supervision?”

carl and bethany very carefully did not meet her eyes in the rearview from the backseat. bethany pulled a magazine from beneath the seat and said loudly, “look, carl, jennifer aniston and brad pitt are getting back together.”

“thank christ,” said carl. “i’ve been really worried about jen.”

hank gave annabelle the flat look that had gotten him promoted to firestation chief in the first place, the one that said i’m your dad and you don’t want to disappoint me. as always, annabelle wilted underneath it, sliding down in her seat and crossing her arms over her chest. it was a difficult feat in full gear but she wanted him to know she was feeling sullen.

“i trust you completely,” hank told her, his voice a light scold. “i want to see you in action so i can help you figure out what’s going wrong with the dummies. sometimes it’s hard for the brain to accurately remember everything that happens during a crisis.”

annabelle rolled her eyes. “i told you,” she said. “it’s just – it’s the same thing every time, I’m not like, blacking out.”

“great, then i’m about to learn a cool new trick,” hank said serenely, and pulled the truck out of the lot. annabelle kept her gaze focused out of the window, watching the city pass as carl and bethany talked loudly about which celebrities were dating which other celebrities and who wore what better. she tried to swallow down the nerves that tightened her throat. maybe the dummy was right. maybe she was doing something else and didn’t remember it. maybe the last two years had been a fluke and she had no business being a firefighter. maybe she was about to get fired.

there wasn’t a fire, though the alarm was going off. instead they found a bag of smoking popcorn and the collapsed heap of a forty-five year old bachelor type, down to just his boxers and a pair of slippers with llamas on them. he had no pulse. 

hank held carl and bethany back, directing them to deal with the smoke from the popcorn; annabelle he pointed toward the resident with a jerk of his chin. 

she sighed, kneeling by his side. she pressed her hands flat to his heart and then dragged them across his chest and down each arm, to his wrists. with her thumbs on his pulse point, she hissed, “let’s go, man. up and at ’em. you’re not meant to die in your underwear while cooking popcorn, come on.”

she held her breath for a few moments, conscious of hank’s eyes on her, and let out a long sigh of relief when she felt his pulse jump beneath her, watched his eyes flicker. “what the fuck?” he asked, voice a croak. “what happened?”

“you gotta eat more vegetables, bud,” annabelle told him, and looped his arm over her shoulders to help him get to his feet. she was so relieved she could have wept, but instead met hank’s eyes with a challenging glare. see? she thought. i told you. “let’s get you to the ambulance.”

-

“the bad news is that you have a lot of practicing to do if you want to pass your recert,” hank said without preamble, showing up at her apartment. she didn’t think she’d ever seen him in jeans before. it was weird. “the good news is i understand your problem now.”

annabelle stepped aside, beckoning him in. “what problem?” she demanded. “it worked! you saw it work. that’s the opposite of a problem.”

hank shrugged. he handed her a trifold that he’d clearly printed off at home. it said so you think you’re a necromancer. annabelle blinked down at it, and then up at hank, and then down at the trifold again. “i … don’t understand what’s happening here,” she told him honestly. 

“i’m not in the community and they’re kind of cagey, so i can’t really tell you a lot,” hank told her, stilted and visibly uncomfortable. “but i have a cousin who is, and um, i just want you to know that this doesn’t change anything. you’re still who you’ve always been and you have my complete support. we’ll figure out how to get around the recert. maybe i’ll – i can put you on admin duty to give you time to study. we’ll say it’s because of an injury.”

“hank,” annabelle said, with some urgency. “hank, this flier says the word necromancer.”

“yes,” agreed hank, looking relieved. “oh, good, you’ve heard of it already. i thought i was going to have to have the whole your body is changing talk.”

annabelle shook her head. “no, i – hank. you know that … um, you know that necromancy isn’t real, right? people can’t bring other people back from the dead. that’s crazy.”

“annabelle, not four hours ago you instructed a dead man to stand up and he did.”

“okay, he wasn’t dead, obviously. he was almost dead, at best.”

“no. he was dead.”

“i felt his pulse! it was very faint!”

“you called his pulse. no one else would have felt it, because it wasn’t there except in response to you.”

“hank, what the fuck.”

he shrugged. “read the flier,” he instructed. “and bring dierdre home with you. you’re going to have to practice a lot if you want to get recertified, considering you haven’t one time had to use any of the skills you learned the first go around.”

he bussed her temple as he went by, letting himself out of her apartment with a friendly wave. annabelle looked down at the flier in her hand with a frown. when she unfolded it, the first page said, everyone’s necromancy journey is different, but most people discover their gift by accident. have you ever brought a pet back to life? touched an elderly relatives hand and seen some of the color flood back into their face? or perhaps, more subtly, been able to keep cut flowers alive long past their purchase date?

annabelle looked at her kitchen table. she’d had the same vase of tulips on it since she moved in, three years ago. it was true they periodically started to wilt, but she usually just changed their water and they were fine, popping back up one after the other as she slid them into the fresh vase. 

No. Raccoons are not becoming domesticated. They based that study off of the concept of “domestication syndrome,” which is a faulty study that proves nothing about domestication. This free peer reviewed article is a good summery about why.

The people who conducted the study were mostly undergrads and nobody who participated in it at all had any actual experience with raccoons, as far as I’m aware.

There's a famous example of Posca that most people misremember because we don't drink Vinegar much anymore. If you're familiar with the Crucifixion of Jesus in the Bible, you probably remember the bit about the Roman soldier offering Jesus a sponge full of vinegar to drink. Most people think the Roman dude was mocking Jesus, but that's wrong. That was a sponge full of Posca. The Roman dude was like "Well this sucks. Want a Sprite?"

...Fun fact, I know this because the phrase "Refreshing Beverage known as Vinegar" got stuck in my head one night at work, and I started googling "Does anybody drink vinegar". I had to know. It turns out the answer is yes! And you can still find vinegar-based soft drinks today! Switchel is a vinegar-and-ginger drink you can find at some bars in the US, and it goes back to pre-carbonated soft drinks.

Vinegar is basically just made from fruit sugars so we had. The most. Amazing vinegars. There’s this one made with mango pulp that I straight up would have just drunk but if you add it to soda water it was truly the most decadent beverage imaginable. So there’s like passion fruit, raspberry, elderflower- just every wonderful sharp flavor imaginable.

We had pregnant ladies who’d buy several bottles at a time because it’s really great for nausea.

I used to get bad UTIs and was told to take at least a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar daily to help. It may or may not have helped, but it was absolutely heinous straight, and only barely drinkable when mixed in a glass of water.

“Eat the rich” means 1%ers and billionaires

middle class is closer to poverty than being a multimillionaire

“The rich” does NOT include children of billionaires (come on we’re at least slightly better than the plagues of Egypt)

Upper middle class children SHOULD NOT feel guilt over having money

Being aware of privilege and using your privilege to help others IS NOT a guilt trip

Constantly feeling guilty helps no one

Billionaires, however, should feel guilty over hoarding wealth.

Upper middle class is NOT rich

Black Lives Matter

223,000 dollars is what Jeff Bezo makes in a minute

Now it's over $100,000.

(open pages for better image quality)

the moment I heard elphaba's delivery of "there's a girl i know..." in i'm not that girl i knew i had to draw this comic, i strongly recommend listening to it while you read for the full experience!

this comic is a companion to this piece (which was inspired by glinda's delivery of the same line in the i'm not that girl reprise).

pages 1-4 are from elphie's pov, pages 5-8 are from glinda's.

digital pdf zine in higher quality available here.

prints of individual pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

flower meanings in order of appearance: