The Ramble Brambles is a collective of system members determined to fight for a future we deserve. If we can exist, if we can survive, if we can live, then maybe we can convince you, too.
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The system is an aplatonic system by default. We do not experience platonic attraction or any level of desire to socialize with others besides our partner system. The answer to "can we be friends?" is most likely no. Please respect our boundaries around this. With that being said, we are a huge activist and resource hoarder. If you are struggling, we are there to provide any information we have collected over our time fighting on this planet. I am paid simply by the act of being allowed to ramble. I don't like socializing, but I love talking about things I care about.
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THIS BLOG IS STRICTLY FOR LEGAL ADULTS, NO ONE BELOW 18 IS ALLOWED ON THIS BLOG AS CONTENT WITHIN WILL INCLUDE A VARIETY OF CONTENT NOT INTENDED FOR MINORS TO CONSUME. NSFW/SEXUAL CONTENT IS EXPECTED AND IMPLIED.
[System List] [The NSFW Disclaimer]
(Longer intro below)
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This blog will include a wide variety of topics under the umbrellas below. This is first and foremost a personal life blog of someone physically and mentally ill in ways that are not easily hidden or masked, please proceed with this information in mind.
Art: I am an artist of many varieties but this will refer to things like drawing of traditional and digital varieties, photography, scrapbooking/papercrafts, DIY projects for gifts and decor, fiber arts project, and more! I'm a jack of all trades for art specifically and will latch onto any artistic medium my brain enjoys, which usually is formats that require a wide range of skills to accomplish (think blogging, web/game design, cosplay, content creation, etc). There will also be a slow and less detailed continuation of my previous comic series Love and Injury. No dedicated posting date, but I will still be loosely working on that as well.
Writing: I enjoy writing fictional content, with some lean towards research gathering type projects, such as How-To's, or resource guides. My main forms of writing come in reviews of books or other media, poetry, short fiction, and posts that can best be defined as written down info dumps of whatever is being rotated in my brain that day.
Life Blogging: Content creation has always been a close love of mine, not due to any particular reason other than wanting a space to talk about my life and share any wisdom I have that others may find helpful. I found most of my healing journey was perpetuated by seeing people like me and realizing that I was allowed to exist as I truly was, and that I even deserved to exist happily. I will never try to display unrealistic perfection. I plan to cater to my reality more than what I think people want to see. If you want to know what my general life blogging will contain, it will be contained in the section below this one, as well as general blog content tags and warnings.
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GENERAL EXPECTED CONTENT :
(Do not come to me pissed off because the content is here, anything that tends to be an explicit expected trigger will be marked in the next section. Not everything I will be discussing on this blog will be present in this section either, this is what I know will be here in this current moment. Curate your own virtual experience please!)
Human Beings: sex and human sexuality, alterhuman-ness, plurality, psychology, political activism (community based resources specific for queer, disabled, neurodivergent, low income, eco-friendly, Indigenous and Latine people, also including history)
Media/Fandoms: Indie animation, book reviews, video games, board games, card games (Pokemon TCG especially), pokemon in general, Japanese content such as anime, manga, and specific alt J-fashion like yami kawaii, menhera, lolita, and decora kei, horror/creepy content.
Spirituality: Philosophy, astrology AND astronomy, pagan practices, divination practices (cartomancy, bibliomancy, shufflemancy (playlist based), etc.), pop culture/modern day magic, witchcraft, self improvement type stuff.
I have known and dated this woman for four and a half years. She told me she was trans the moment we met. My progress with coaxing her out of the closet at some point surpassed the "patience and grace" event horizon and is now more so me trying to drag her out kicking and screaming.
There's this weird brain fuck shit that happens when you suffer from the type of trauma that shatters your ability to recognize yourself and gender dysphoria due to being trans. Like. I know I am someone people think is an attractive man now. I'm not exactly everyone's taste but I do feel like fat hairy alternative punk guy wearing leather, boots, black clothes, and cologne is at bare minimum some people's cup of tea. I know I have My Wife, that's not what I mean. I know she's an exception but when you've spent your whole life being treated as fundamentally less than human, it really obliterates your brain's ability to register anything about yourself as positive 🫠
I hope someone else understands this, but I grew up on tumblr and have a schizospec disorder with pretty bad verbal disorganized speech. And that shit is the definition of a core decision that led to person I am today. Etymologist fever dream. I speak in the most fuckass metaphors you've ever heard.
I have a type of heterochromia but it's rings round my pupils rather than one being completely different, and people are so genuinely stunned by my eye color when they get up close enough to see it. It was genuinely the only thing I could say I liked about myself the majority of my life. However, I'm older now and while I still do genuinely think my eyes are pretty, I'm lowkey kind of bored of them. I want to start wearing cosmetic contacts to have animalistic eyes lol. I feel like a previous version of myself would be throttling me right now.
I have known and dated this woman for four and a half years. She told me she was trans the moment we met. My progress with coaxing her out of the closet at some point surpassed the "patience and grace" event horizon and is now more so me trying to drag her out kicking and screaming.
I don't know what happened between the Kaitlyn-to-Sage era for this to happen. But like during that time we always thought lowly of people who were the more traditional alt guys. They were usually raging bigots and abusers in my school. I'm not entire sure if that's what everyone's experience at my school was, or it was a product of me being a disabled kid, but I know a lot of girls hated the "bad boy" type guys cuz there was no saving "heart of gold" layer. Just a bunch of guys who were all around douche bags.
I tended to correlate them with drugs, monster energy drinks, high sex drives, all that jazz when I didn't know better.
Well now I'm a whole ass 25 year old and I'm a super alternative punk asshole, who collects drug paraphernalia, monster cans, and pornography/sex toys. I get an insane amount of euphoria of filling this predetermined role of shit bag douche and filled the personality with my own. So now on the outside I'm a blunt apathetic asshole to people I don't trust. But the people I DO trust know I'm a genuinely good guy with very high standards and walls for good reason.
Also, I can actually make my girlfriend cum unlike any of those bad boy types I've dated previously :)
You can really tell my art perfectionist sins when looking through my sketchbook. There are so many faceless and headless drawings with insanely good character body language. Sorry bro, your face was too intimidating, get headless-horsemaned for eternity.
Me and my wife are discussing getting into making music as a hobby as we were both performing arts kids, with me acting and heavy emphasis on singing/choir, and her being a band kid with honest to god an INSANE ear for music.
Because of this, we've been talking about duet songs a lot, and unfortunately we are the trans het version of Vaggie and Charlie so we really want to do a cover of Easy. However, I have stated if we actually do this and it ever sees the public light of day, I'm making the cover art a massive trans flag with the words "IT'S STILL QUEER, I PROMISE" over it so we do not get smote by the internet on the spot.
Bootblacking is top level kink because it's one of the few I can think of where the nominal sub is treated as a thoughtful, knowledgeable technician from the outset.
Like, a flogging bottom might be praised for their ability to take pain and know their limits, or a rope bunny might be recognised as keeping themselves in good physical shape so they can hold complicated stress positions for longer than a novice, but even the most beginner of beginner bootblacks has learnt a little bit of materials science (Will this type of brush scratch this patent finish?), a little bit of basic chemistry (If these were last polished with a silicone wax, how do I remove that to start to bull them?), a little bit of leatherworking history (Is that natural fibre stitching on those surplused Warsaw Pact boots, will my polish rot it?) and spent time practising techniques on their own boots.
And it's one of the few kinks I can think of where the top is so immediately physically and emotionally vulnerable to the bottom in that way: I put my foot in the hands of a stranger bootblacking at a party, and I trust that they won't damage the boots I was gifted by my long-dead Master when I was 17, that they won't soak the stitching and start the rot of the boots I was wearing when I first fucked the love of my life, I trust that they'll carefully work around and treat the cuts and scuffs in the leather that I picked up wearing these same boots marshalling at a dozen prides and going toe-to-toe with strikebreakers and scabs on twenty years' worth of picket lines. The experienced bootblack can look at my soles and where my boots crease, and see that I have a weak hip, that I'm slightly bowlegged, that I don't drive and that I walk even in the weather where I'd rather not. And I trust that they'll see that worn-out, poor, slightly sad old man and still call me "sir".
the joke among my leather circle is "everyone subs for a bootblack," not necessarily that bootblacking = sub or dom, but rather, we could have the most stone-top, left-pocket-black-flagging, powder-coated-steel-paddle-gripping Sir Dom, and all a bootblack has to do is move their wesco boot with a palm and they obey.
"give me this foot." tugging laces loose with one practiced finger. hefting a heavy-soled engineer up to wrench pebbles loose from in between the lugs. "stay still." taking finger-fulls of huberd's and lathing it meticulously and lavishly over a pair of oil tans - watching my customer curiously eye the lubricated shine with a rising heat behind their cheeks. planting the full weight of their boot on my shoulder and commanding them, gently, to press their weight onto me.
there's something so deeply fulfilling in being a technician, someone who restores leather like a museum archivist, accentuating scratches and blemishes and returning life to those leather pieces so they can go on to keep fucking, kicking, running. i am as much a craftsman as i am a history keeper. my respect is given not just by the titles i refer to you with, but the care i have given to your boots, jackets, and harnesses, and the stories they tell.
My wife: I should have thought of a cosplay idea before the con event I'm working... Maybe I'll do a goth Futaba cosplay from some spare pieces I have lying around for the last day :(
Me, at home, who has been waiting for those words to leave her mouth for literal years: oh damn babe I'm so sorry :( I'll see what I can pull out and put together for you.
Me, in person, launching out of bed like a sleeper agent:
Weird time in my life to learn that the book my parents tried to strong arm me into reading since I was 8 and never shut the fuck up about til I ran away at 20 was a mass-sold-to-business "novel" about how I should just accept being an eternal lab rat for the rest of my life.
(Context and trauma below, for the old IBCK fans seeing this Sorry???)
I discovered the podcast If Books Could Kill through a tumblr I follow, and I found their episode on "Who Moved My Cheese?" by Spencer Johnson and the same book I'm referencing in the above paragraph. I never knew anything about it before a few minutes ago other than my parents were CONVINCED I needed to read it because it would help me stop being so hard headed and stubborn.
So uh, learning in the first three minutes that it was a demonic book commonly given/recommended to people by the worlds shittiest bosses about how you are an eternal lab rat who needs to submit to your fate is definitely something.
I know my parents were abusive but it's always been difficult for me to ever remember the full extent, plurality and all, but also because my trauma was interlaced with people refusing to ever listen to me or believe I had any right to complain because my parents were rich. So like, I genuinely DID NOT realize how even the stuff I DO know happened is already like super duper fucked up alone. Because until a few months ago, I was still dealing with people seeing the money of my parents first when I talked about my childhood and it's really messed me up since I may have been "used" by my father to make that money when I was young. I don't have a lot of clear memories of those yet and would rather not honestly. I'd rather live in ignorance with that one.
Either way, having another clear cut piece of evidence of the levels of cartoonishly evil shit they had accomplished raising me is always... helpful? I don't really know. I'm contemplating finishing this podcast and leaving it, or maybe getting my own second hand copy of the book and going through it on my own. Its crazy short so I should be fine. I think I might do both honestly. Treat this podcast as a brace for impact briefing of the whole text.
Every single time this fucker thinks about his mom, I will be behind him with the mental sound board hitting "a white woman's instagraaaam~" over and over
Does anyone have any weird favorite smells that aren't just like gasoline or sharpie? I do like those but I want to dig deeper. I love the smell of frozen cardboard and brand new hardware
Okay, so. I have something different for this actually.
When I was a highly undiagnosed autistic child, with an extremely rich mother with a conquest to white wash our whole family (herself included), I ended up at Starbucks a lot. As you do when you're trying to cosplay basic white women. And because of how my mother was, I was only allowed to get the little like... soy milk boxes??? From the fridge thing next to the register. But I didn't care about those.
I was there for the smell of the cold air in THOSE SPECIFIC FRIDGES. I will never step foot in a Starbucks again, but fuck I miss the smell of their open fridge thing. It was so cold and refreshing and so good. I can still sometimes remember those wonderful sensory delights when I'm grocery shopping and dip too far in to get my milk carton from an understocked Walmart. It's never been the same...
