Sam that was
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sambrambling.bsky.social
Sam that was
@sambrambling.bsky.social
1.7K followers 2.6K following 1.8K posts
Retired by disability but still grooving.
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sambrambling.bsky.social
Post a game you remember playing that nobody else remembers
One Must Fall: 2097 (1994 mech fighting PC game from Diversions Entertainment)
October 30, 2025 at 2:06 AM
sambrambling.bsky.social
Without downloading any new images, where are you mentally?
Farside style cartoon of a kitchen where a teen standard washing dishes. Three older men in matching uniforms and rubber gloves look on, all smoking. One in the middle with a stack of dishes says "I hate to be the one to break it to you kid, but - we're all heavily versed in esoteric wisdom and lore."
August 26, 2025 at 2:15 AM
sambrambling.bsky.social
A meme featuring an East Asian man with a beard and shaggy bangs looking into the distance, captured mid speech. The top text reads daily affirmation. The bottom text reads Godzilla is inside each one of us.
August 3, 2025 at 9:51 PM
sambrambling.bsky.social
Is the cure to male loneliness getting a nautical jagua "tattoo" across your knuckles? Stay tuned to find out.
Light-skinned person with cats eye glasses and a blue bandana displays their closed fists to the camera. The knuckes read "hold fast", inspired by traditional nautical tattoos as seen in Master and Commander.
August 2, 2025 at 4:02 PM
sambrambling.bsky.social
In my feelings about my bro NED-B right now (image from Wookieepedia)
NED-B, a loader bot from the Kenobi miniseries. He is wielding a blaster at some colonizers.
July 11, 2025 at 10:26 PM
sambrambling.bsky.social
These are personal pictures from the area - my mom's a sometimes pro portrait photographer, so her picture of me and my little sister in the 90s is much nicer than my 2008-2011 potato cellphone pictures. But they show the point well enough.

(Read the alt text for a story about each one)
(Two young girls with blonde hair and fair skin stand on a dirt path in the Texas Hill Country brush) Picture of my sister and I somewhere near Pedernales or Llano in like 1998. Idk why I always walked around barefoot, but I did. This was the summer we learned that actually I'm kind of allergic to the sun. Also, we narrowly missed being in a flash flood. As the picture demonstrates, the Hill Country ecoregion is more like an arid savannah. It's adapted to long periods of drought followed by torrential, monsoon like rains and floods. It's much more suited to drylands agriculture and permaculture practices, which is exactly what the native peoples, Mexican, and early German/Czech families did for thousands of years. 2011 cellphone picture taken roadside in San Marcos. We were driving through some switchbacks to get to the family cemetery. As the picture demonstrates, most of the region is characterized by channelized canyons and eroding cliffs. Native fauna comprises flood-resistant trees like pecans/mesquite/live oak, scrub/brush (squat junipers, yucca, prickly pear), and grasses. 2011 cellphone picture of Natural Bridge at natural bridge caverns. It's a big limestone sheet suspended over a sprawling cave system, aka a massive hole. Vegetation is sparse, concentrated in basins that form favorable micro-climates. What I want you to see here is that central Texas is full of caverns and sink holes like this. I lived on a cliff overlooking the Guadalupe river valley for a while. This was about halfway down the wooden stairs built into the cliff wall. The flood plain was about 120' down. About 80' down, you could see boulders that had been relocated by floods in the 1970s from miles upstream. This was taken on a flip phone in 2008, sorry
July 11, 2025 at 9:24 PM
sambrambling.bsky.social
Water down a rock slide go brrrrr
Topographic map of Kerrville (Kerr County) demonstrating the complex geology and elevation extremes of the Guadalupe River Valley. Aka you might as well try to stop water flowing off a cliff. You might slow it down, you might even direct it for a while, but that water is going down eventually. Black and white elevation map, showing the hill country on the border of the Edwards Plateau. What I want you to notice from this picture I snagged off Etsy or Amazon is that rain water naturally drops towards the Gulf of Mexico at this point. The water can't be stopped or diverted. Humans can live smarter with it, but water is gonna water. Different perspective, showing the same features. The hill country is grasslands and savannah on limestone. The water has been carving these paths for millennia. We're not gonna stop it with clover, vetch, and sheep.
July 11, 2025 at 8:55 PM
sambrambling.bsky.social
Ouch, and accurate

www.idrlabs.com/jock-nerd-pr...
July 8, 2025 at 10:33 PM
sambrambling.bsky.social
Institutions like Columbia University are big enough to know the risks. They love to blame the bad actor or the faculty/staff member whose credentials were used to compromise the servers, but it's their poor data management that created the vulnerability in the first place.
Simpsons Meme "Don't Make Me Tap the Sign." The bottom text reads "any data stored on a near or online server can be stolen and exploited by outside actors.... (why are you keeping it???)"
July 8, 2025 at 8:49 PM
sambrambling.bsky.social
And my paternal grandmother, Serena aka Nanny (daughter of Big Mama). This is the side with very close genetic ties to the African diaspora in Piedmont Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia.
Sepia headshot of a dark-haired woman with heavy brows in WWII army uniform. This was my grandmother Serena. Her grandmother Cora Alice was a creole child in antebellum Louisiana who may or may not have been enslaved; her mother, whose name we don't know, was likely enslaved in Tennessee and sold or brought down south in the 1850s.
July 8, 2025 at 8:10 PM
sambrambling.bsky.social
Pictures of some of the players.

Dad, maternal grandmother, maternal great-grandmother, mother.
My dad, who would have been born legally Black in 1963 if his great-grandmother hadn't fled Reconstruction Louisiana and faked her identity in 1868. This is the Dairy Queen in Nacogdoches. He died by suicide in 1998. Picture of me as a baby with my grandmother, Glenda Rose. She told my brother and I that we had Black ancestors in the 90s. She was forcibly institutionalized in the 70s, given a hysterectomy at age 34, and died destitute in Winona, Tx. One side of our family, the Doziers, was closely connected to a local plantation and rose-growing dynasty (the Kirby family). They're Rose Parade royalty. We're the poor "black sheep" of the family. I didn't learn until I was in college that local Daughters of the Confederacy consider all the Doziers Black. Irene Kirby Taliaferro. She was a registered Daughter of the Confederacy and a mean old witch who hated women, children, and the truth. I was her first grandchild and (after all the black curly hair on my head fell out and grew back blonde) she was initially enamored with me but later decided I acted too much like a [slur]. Grandma T, I don't ever expect you to return to God after the way you treated my grandmother and my mother, but if you do it will be entirely thanks to His grace. My mom, who snuck downstairs to watch Roots and the Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman as a child because the spirit moved her to disobey her parents. She taught me about the blues, Juneteenth, and a whole lot of folk magic. Everything done to me (to pressure conformity with WASP ideals) was done to her first, but much more violently. Thank goodness I finally learned how to care for my hair.
July 8, 2025 at 7:59 PM
sambrambling.bsky.social
Yes, I am aware I look white 😂

My postbellum grandmothers worked real hard to make that happen by having kids with the whitest dudes they could find and bullying their daughters into doing the same for 100 years.

"Whiteness" has always been conditional. It makes orphans of us all.
July 8, 2025 at 7:20 PM
sambrambling.bsky.social
Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas' 2015 "Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God" quotes a 1751 essay from Benjamin Franklin complaining about Germans, Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes being too swarthy to settle in his new white utopia. founders.archives.gov/documents/Fr...
July 8, 2025 at 6:51 PM
sambrambling.bsky.social
Without downloading any new pics, where are you mentally?
Sepia-toned picture of six young men representing their neighborhoods, captioned "FUCK Preston Brooks, all my homies hate Preston Brooks." The meme refers to that loser Preston Brooks who beat Charles Sumner with a cane on the floor of the Senate for daring to oppose the institutions that upheld slavery. Cause fuck that guy. Sumner came back, and we will too.
July 3, 2025 at 9:55 PM
sambrambling.bsky.social
Big fan of stepping into my lay-pastor robes when writing to self-professed Christian officials.

You want to claim brotherhood in Christ? Then I'm going to exhort you, brother. God is sick of you.
I am writing to you as a long-time constituent from Tyler, Texas. My family has lived, worked, farmed, fished, and served in combat on behalf of the great state of Texas for nearly 200 years. I am speaking to you as a Texan and as a sister in Christ. Senators, I grieve the hardness of your hearts that allows you to even consider signing the bill that will come before you soon. I do not recognize the fruits of your spirits as the works of our Almighty. I beg and exhort you, and all of your staff who profess Christ's name, to repent for the blood and gold you've carelessly spent. Repent and cling to God's guidance, that our Father may transform you in the Living Word whose Kingdom surpasses all human empires. In Jesus' name, repent for your role in driving God's children into the dust. Repent for your role in disenfranchising God's children from the land that feeds them. And for all the personal and political gains you have enjoyed at the expense of Texas children, grandmothers, and veterans, repent. To vote in favor of this budget bill would be a deep and intentional betrayal of Texans, especially Texas children, elders, and veterans.
June 30, 2025 at 8:53 PM
sambrambling.bsky.social
Go 'merica' (pejorative)
Four panel "one push-up" meme structure. Top left panel, one giant bald muscle man titled 'disabled person trying to get on benefits.' A small character with big orange hair and a yellow shirt says 'Wow! How did you get like that?' Muscle man responds 'Every time someone asks why I don't just get a job'... he continues in the next panel.... 'I do ONE push-up.' Yellow shirt guy says 'Go 'merica' (pejorative)
June 18, 2025 at 10:34 PM
sambrambling.bsky.social
Last but certainly not least, my parent's high school prom picture from 1980, because bless them.
Two high school students posing for a prom picture. On the right, my mother is wearing a pink dress with a little sheer shift over it. My dad, who apparently decided to tone down his white boy afro for this picture, stands in a three piece? suit that I frankly don't have the fashion knowledge to describe. Just know that there's like, a lot going on.
May 25, 2025 at 4:06 AM
sambrambling.bsky.social
Serena, my paternal grandmother, is on the left. Glenda Rose, my maternal grandmother is on the right. Through them, I am connected to the Black diaspora in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina (that I know of so far). Likely Haiti as well, but that's conjecture at the moment.
A dark-haired white looking woman with a bold red lipstick poses in a jumpsuit next to a statue of a lion, probably sometime during her deployment as a nurse in WWII Europe. A dark haired apparently white woman kneels next to a jarringly pale blonde child in a high chair.
May 25, 2025 at 3:55 AM
sambrambling.bsky.social
Have you ever seen a picture of young Thurgood Marshall? The first time I did, while processing the Sarah McClendon papers, I got chills. When my dad was deployed and had to shave, they resembled each other to an uncanny degree.
An apparently white man in his early thirties, sitting with his daughter at the Dairy Queen in Nacogdoches where my parent handed off custody. Black and white portrait of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall around the same age. When my dad was deployed and had to shave, they resembled each other to an uncanny degree.
May 25, 2025 at 3:55 AM
sambrambling.bsky.social
Mr. Rhymes. His death was one of my first heartbreaks. At the time of this picture, he had been a central part of my life for 5 years. He was the institutional memory. I loved him. He and my mom really looked out for each other.
An older Black gentleman in a cap and overalls sits at ease on a boat dock with me and my little sister. My mother took a series of portraits, one of which was used for his repast.
May 25, 2025 at 3:22 AM
sambrambling.bsky.social
I wasn't going to share the name, but now I feel the need to make a point.

Edifices of white supremacy often look non-threatening, even welcoming, if you see them out of context. The marker reflects very little of the history I've shared with you. Naming and claiming is the colonial game.
Texas Historical Commission marker for Ferndale Club. Ferndale club. It was the vision of leeburg physician and banker J.B. Florence that led to the creation of Ferndale Club, once called Fern, Fin and Feathers. In 1908, Florence and friends planned a hunting and fishing club. Drawing members from Pittsburg, the men bought land along Lilly Creek and built a dam at Flat Ford, creating Ferndale Lake. The popular fishing and duck hunting club, chartered in July 1909, expanded its membership and, in 1912, built a clubhouse to accommodate guests and social functions. The club continues today, utilizing professionally managed wildlife habitat and fish stocking programs. Entrance to Ferndale Club Lake. This is where I first saw Black cowboys. Beyond that gate, membership has historically been restricted to WASPs with hella money.
May 25, 2025 at 3:13 AM
sambrambling.bsky.social
I like to imagine that this birth chart is the blueprint my ancestors and I cooked up before I came. I finally returned to them when I started working on my North node in Pisces placement.

Anyway, here's my latest at home haircut
May 25, 2025 at 1:11 AM
sambrambling.bsky.social
Important dog news: this little old man is named Lunch and he's a perfect gentleman.
An older male Jack Russel terrier naps on his side atop some brown blankets in the fading sunlight. Just out of frame is a surprise corgi splooted on the floor.
May 16, 2025 at 10:56 PM
sambrambling.bsky.social
Anyway, the world is on fire but from here, life is beautiful
Snapshot from a treehouse porch of a rain-fed river flowing in Texas. In the foreground is a bench full of freshly potted aloe transplants.
May 11, 2025 at 12:24 AM
sambrambling.bsky.social
I've learned a surprising amount about myself and my recent family history for Black History month 2025.
Screenshot of user's 23andMe ancestry summary page showing "very close" (within ~4-5 generations) ancestry genetically linked to members of the African Diaspora in southern Appalachia. Screenshot from user's 23andMe ancestry report predicting a recent (within ~5 generations) African ancestor. I found it significant because I am a white passing Texan with no known Black ancestors. A very blurry Ancestry.com thumbnail of my grandmother's grandmother Cora, who I now suspect may have come to Texas to pass as white.
March 1, 2025 at 7:47 AM