Stephen Ist

@stephenist.bsky.social

524 Followers 870 Following

Gen-Xer, living in the world punk and dystopian sf warned me was on the horizon. Focused on detrumpifying the planet. he/him https://www.tumblr.com/istesque | https://mastodon.online/@stephenist | https://www.reddit.com/user/stephenist/

An avant-garde artistic photograph that appears to be sepia-and-black as opposed to black-and-white. The majority of the right 2/3s of the photograph are taken up by what appears to be a sloping wood-like element. Or maybe it’s ripped and torn pages of a book close-up. Running from top to bottom there are stratifications within that right 2/3 element. The left side appears to be a staged and constructed abstract landscape. At the top, isolated on a black horizon, are two sepia colored clouds. In the lower left-hand corner, there is a desert-like sand element that reaches to the black horizon. In the lowermost left is a spiral of displaced sand. Closer to the horizon are what might be three pumpkin-like beads. One sits on the sand and the other two are held aloft by abstract elements. The closest one could be decayed or burned organic material with a bead sitting on the top and behind it is a doglegged sculptural element like a branchless tree trunk that ends in a claw. The claw is topped by another bead. Surreal, abstract, unreality, weird From https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Two-Studies/37E2907DA7CDD76728001714C4F52715
A black and white photograph featuring a man wearing sunglasses and a hat, alongside a woman with dark lipstick and a vintage hairstyle, both appearing in a dreamy or surreal context with an ornamented pair of scissors in the foreground.
USA TODAY BREAKING NEWS: Strait of Hormuz sealed off, Iran state media says, in response to Israeli strikes on Lebanon. The move could jeopardize the ceasefire.
Jonathan Karl O 0... @jonkarl This morning, I asked President Trump if he's okay with the Iranians charging a toll for all ships that go through the Strait of Hormuz, he told me there may be a Joint US-Iran venture to charge tolls: "We're thinking of doing it as a joint venture. It's a way of securing it — also securing it from lots of other people." "It's a beautiful thing" 4:22 AM • Apr 8, 2026 • 1.6M Views
Tweet: Avery Edison @aedison I wrote "I am alive" on a piece of paper, and placed it into a photocopier. What I saw next has shocking implications 7:53 AM • Mar 24, 2023 • 2.5M Views
A painting of Jesus Christ leaning against a boulder with his right hand in the air. The raised hand and the expression on his face give the impression of incredulity. #Iran
The proverbial Nazi bar on a crowded evening. Lots of random people milling about, waiting for tables or watching the goings on. The tables are occupied by men wearing Nazi armbands with the stylized X of X-Twitter replacing the swastika. They each have a beer in front of them. A woman at the bar is speaking to a man: "Wow! This place is busy. So everyone here is a Nazi?" She asks. He replies, "No. Us journalists come here to cover this important topic. The Nazis get the good seats... and service." A man nearby, overhearing the conversation, adds "And they get paid to be here."
Cartoon illustration of Donald Trump with yellow hair and a red tie, depicted as an orange pile of excrement, with the text "NOT THIS SHIT AGAIN" on a blue background.
Gif of Donkey Kong Junior floating down a jungle themed platformer screen by umbrella and floating back up by balloon to unlock a chain holding Donkey Kong captive. Mario sits above DK as his captor. Red birds fly over and around logs and vines on the already completed left side of the screen. All movements are in that herky-jerky fashion native to early ‘80s LCD games. From the 1982 Coleco tabletop game Donkey Kong Junior. Gif grabbed from Tumblr some time in 2022, but I don’t remember who made it.
Phil Hartman and Dana Carvey, dressed as Olympic figure skating commentators, reacting disappointedly to something happening on the ice by flinching and saying “Oh!” From a Saturday Night Live skit with Jason Priestley as a fall-prone Olympic figure skater.
Guy in skiing gear intentionally turning and falling while skiing down a mountain.
Famous post by pookleblinky that reads “Anosognosiogenesis @pookleblinky Every heartwarming human interest story in america is like ‘he raised $20,000 to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine’ and then never asks why an orphan-crushing machine exists or why you'd need to pay to prevent it from being used.”
Støre confirmed on Monday morning that he had received the message in reply to a text he had sent Trump protesting against the move to impose tariffs on Norway and other European countries for sending troops to Greenland. PBS News first reported the text.
A disheveled, bloodied and soot-stained teen stops to talk to an acquaintance in her high school hallway. The acquaintance, dressed immaculately in red with a matching hair bow, says “Veronica, you look like hell.“ Veronica, taking a drag from a cigarette answers,“Yeah? I just got back.“
An industrial looking glossy floor with three lights projected on it. A green light contains an icon vaguely looking like a smooshed cartoon car, or maybe it’s a gate for some sort of bed. A larger blue light in the center has a bell that’s been crossed out.
Gilbert Gottfried, sporting his trademark grinmace, standing inside a Star Trek looking ring with his hands above his head gripping a large VR helmet. The helmet and the ring bear the logo “VIRTUALITY”. “Ron Galella Archive - File Photos 2009 Comedian Gilbert Gottfried attends Lee Chappell Glitz Party for Virtual Reality Machine on May 26, 1993 at the Grand Hotel in New York City. (Photo by Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)”
Four men and a woman hunched over a control panel on a dark colored bridge of a spaceship. Their faces look concerned. They are all wearing stylized black leather spacewear with yellow accents. Other control panels are visible in the background along with a large view screen. Screenshot grabbed from https://www.framerated.co.uk/planet-of-vampires-1965/
Marge, Homer and Lisa Simpson pointing at the viewer and laughing.
An older white dude in a sweater vest and khakis DJing on an empty disco floor.
In reversal, Coast Guard again classifies swastikas, nooses as hate symbols The new order came hours after The Post reported the service would instead classify such symbols as "potentially divisive" under guidelines set for release next month.
Four men are standing in front of a judge in his chambers. One of the men is talking. “Judge, I argue this should not be admissible.” The judge asks “on what grounds?“ the man responds “We’re citing… unfair surprisery.” I believe the original GIF is from Giphy
A sad orange robot man saying Olivia Nuzzi’s line about RFK jr., "He desired. He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself." The image is a still from the end of the execrable 1989 film Millennium. The movie ends (spoiler) with the line “It is not the end. It is not the beginning of the end. It is the end of the beginning.”
A repurposed meme of a cartoon trump urinating on the red white and blue word America. The words “Mega MAGA trickle down” are in the upper right corner.
A black and white photo of a hip young woman with 1980s hair, an avuncular older man with a beard in a a sweater, and a trendy (at the time) young man in a t-shirt all with confident expressions.
Trump as an orange pile of shit taking a shit. The words “not this shit again” are emblazoned in white against a blue background.
Gif. A woman sitting behind the steering wheel of a car unsuspectingly when the air bag suddenly deploys.
In an off-white circle in the lower left of this image is a woman with her mouth agape and her hand cupped as if to project sound. Red concentric circles radiate from that corner and intersect with blue concentric circles running in the opposite direction. Extending from the woman’s cupped hand are the words “YOU’RE IN AN ECHO CHAMBER” in a somewhat triangular pattern. On either side of that are the same words, reversed or inverted and repeated until they fill the image. Each repeated instance is increasingly more translucent as they reach the edge of the picture.
Barbara Bain looking perplexed on Space: 1999
A black and white image of a man in a suit and wearing glasses as he stares in horror as a woman wearing glasses, with mussed up hair and disheveled clothing, hovers over him menacingly (and seemingly contentedly) with her metallic hand composed of scrap metal threatening his face. The last line of this film feels relevant.
The giant purple robot Shockwave has carved into a wall the words “ARE ALL DEAD” under the comic book’s stylized logo “THE TRANSFORMERS”. His laser gun is still smoldering from the bit of graffiti-making and he has his body and cycloptic eye turned toward the viewer, with his fist clenched, suggesting we might be next. Image grabbed from https://philipjreed.com/my-ten-favorite-transformers-comic-book-covers-of-the-marvel-era/
Light #spoilers for a 35 year old flick. The grim visage of the M.A.R.K. 13 population control droid from the 1990 film Hardware. Its skull-like head is painted red, white and blue with white stars. The background is bathed in an eerie red light and its camera-lensed eyes mimic this glow. A cartoon party horn has been added, extending out from its mouth. Red, white and blue streamers are blowing out from the end of the horn. Text has been added in the upper left reading “‘HAPPY’ 4TH” Party horn from https://www.vecteezy.com/vector-art/12540918-cartoon-party-horn M.A.R.K. 13 pic from https://www.popoptiq.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/maxresdefault-1.jpg
The stylized logo of The New York Times colored orange and yellow to look like Trump. Hopefully a transparent png. #memes #nyt
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump EVERYONE, KEEP OIL PRICES DOWN. I’M WATCHING! YOU’RE PLAYING RIGHT INTO THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY. DON’T DO IT! Jun 23, 2025, 9:35 AM
The proverbial Nazi bar on a crowded evening. Lots of random people milling about, waiting for tables or watching the goings on. The tables are occupied by men wearing Nazi armbands with the stylized X of X-Twitter replacing the swastika. They each have a beer in front of them. A woman at the bar is speaking to a man: “Wow! This place is busy. So everyone here is a Nazi?” She asks. He replies, “No. Us journalists come here to cover this important topic. The Nazis get the good seats… and service.” A man nearby, overhearing the conversation, adds “And they get paid to be here.”
An image of a plastic handheld “Pocket Game” from the late 1970s-early 1980s made by Tomy. The top two-thirds are orange plastic with a yellow sticker showing cartoon images, like a pig, clown and caterpillar, with the game title “Sentence Nonsense” emblazoned across it. The bottom third has five little windows that allow one tile containing one word each to fall in, forming a random sentence. The sentence in the window for this picture is “The Excited Electric Car barked at once!” The image was pulled from a web search that took me to https://gashu-boy.weebly.com/games.html
A split-paneled, comic-style image of a falling man against a vague, abstract background. The first image shows the man at a distance, in the upper half of the frame and a rectangle that contains the words “THE GENIUS OF THE HOLE:” The second panel is a closer image of the same falling man, but now the abstract image has red splotches at the bottom, reminiscent of blood. Text boxes contain the words “NO MATTER HOW LONG YOU SPEND CLIMBING OUT, YOU CAN STILL FALL BACK DOWN IN AN INSTANT.” “-MAX PAYNE”
The stylized logo of The New York Times colored orange and yellow to look like Trump. Hopefully a transparent png. #memes
A man sitting in a stone chair behind a stone table with his arms raised above his head. He is wearing an old-timey suit and he is smiling in that deliriously demented fashion that indicates religious mania. Closed captioning at the bottom reads “[Applause] it is time”. I’d write it as “IT IS TIME!”
A picture of Congressman Alan Grayson with the words “The Republican health care plan: don't get sick... The Republicans have a back up plan in case you do get sick... This is what the Republicans want you to do. If you get sick America, the Republican health care plan is this: Die quickly!” Taken from AZ Quotes.
The album cover for Nation of Ulysses’ “13-Point Program to Destroy America” retitled “Nevermind,” in the stylized text from Nirvana’s album. The top fourth of the cover art is taken up by the previously mentioned text against a black background. The remainder shows a black and white photo of the five members of the band looking stoic and surrounded by five colored stock images. There’s a woman applying make up, factory machinery, a horse race, a kid with headphones on listening to an ancient radio, and what appears to be a group of boys reaching forward with one hand, reminiscent of a Nazi salute. Maybe they are exercising.
“Knock, Knock! Who's there? April! April who? April Fools!” texts against an orange background. A calendar with eyes is on April 1. The logo for Parade magazine is in the lower center frame. All images from https://parade.com/living/april-fools-jokes
Gravitational Lensing By A Black Hole illustration from hubblesite.org showing the measurement of the deflection of starlight by a foreground black hole. It shows a grid representing spacetime curvature, with an arrow indicating the path of light from an observed star to its real position. A doodle has been added with a stick figure holding a square. Above the figure text reads “Me with iPad (On planet Earth). A line emerging from the iPad doodle shows a blusky logo labeled as “My post” going deep into the black hole to disappear forever.
Kash Patel with eyes wide open, as if he is actively sharting himself, during today’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. The word “ZOINKS!” Has been added above his shoulder to the left and Scooby Doo — looking startled and saying “RUH RO!” — has been added to the right.
An image of a collage showing two dapper gents dressed in suits from the turn of the last century. They are standing in a field of debris and destruction. The gent on the left has the head of a donkey. The gent on the right has an old boxy tv set for a head. They are facing each other. A mostly obliterated building stands defiantly in the upper half of the frame, against a backdrop of orange smoke. The lower half is filled with bloodstained red ruble and Day-Glo green sludge which is covering a sidewalk. Text emerging from the donkey gent reads “Any minute now he’ll do something so egregious that the entire country will turn against him. Then we’ll have him right where we want him.” TV gent says “Why won’t you admit he’s been the most transformative leader in the history of humanity?!” Any resemblance of the donkey to Chuck Schumer is purely intentional. Keywords: US Politics, Donald Trump, digital collage, memes, US media,
A red kickball against an off-white/tan background mimicking the background of René Magritte‘s The Treachery of Images. In a cigar shaped oval superimposed over the red ball are the words “Ceci n'est pas un BALLON”. Treachery of Images image from https://www.nouveautourismeculturel.com/blog/2020/08/27/lart-habite-la-ville/1rene-magritte-ceci-nest-pas-une-pipe-1929/ Kickball image from https://clipart-library.com/clipart/1661782.htm
John Yates cover art for the album Last Scream of the Missing Neighbors by Jello Biafra and D.O.A. It’s a busy collage with asteroids forming parts of the skyline, ancient Roman architecture intermingled with minarets and The Washington Monument. The foreground has horses pulling a chariot with a rider wielding a whip. The chariot is followed or chased by old automobiles. They are rushing headlong toward the foreground into an encounter with a tank, which is firing its cannon in the air as it runs into a different person wielding a whip. I assume a different chariot driver. There appear to be ruins in the front left foreground, but it’s hard to say. I’m sure if I stared at it while relistening to the album I would realize more and more of the objects on the collage because each seems to correlate to a line of lyrics. I grabbed the lyrics to Full Metal Jackoff from Genius and the picture from Discogs. That song title is going to get me listed for swearing, isn’t it?
Mark Zuckerberg’s face pasted onto Gilligan’s body from Gilligan’s Island. He’s standing against a jungle background. Meme created in hopes of making my significant other laugh as she came up with the idea.
An album cover of The Skipper from Gilligan’s Island wearing a tunic while holding a cocktail in one hand and raising his other hand as if to say “heeeeey”. The white background is interrupted by cartoon dancing ladies sprinkled throughout the empty spaces. A sunburst circle has the words “adults twist at your own risk”. The album bears the title “Skipper Alan Hale’s Roman Orgy”. Pic was grabbed from https://www.bygonely.com/vintage-album-covers-laugh/
The “they don’t know” meme with Hello Kitty dressed in a red, white and blue suit and wearing an Uncle Sam style top hat. She is standing in the corner behind a podium (or is it a lectern) which is also decked out in US Presidential campaign style colors. Red, white, and blue text beside Hello Kitty read “they don’t know I’m the real president.” An Inauguration Day meme made in hopes of bringing a moment of levity or maybe even a smile to the face of my significant other. I grabbed the Hello Kitty image from https://www.amomstake.com/hello-kitty-for-president-campaign-giveaway/ and the meme from https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-wish-i-was-at-home-they-dont-know
A picture of the character Edison Carter from the tv program Max Headroom. He is standing in front of a Network 23 chopper and he’s holding his ever present min-cam.
Cartoon illustration of Donald Trump with yellow hair and a red tie, depicted as a pile of excrement, with the text "NOT THIS SH** AGAIN" on a Christmas themed, snowy background. Holiday edition of a “not this shit again” meme I’ve previously posted ❤️💚 #memes #mymemes #merrychristmas #christmas #happyholidays
Sesame Street’s purple Two-Headed Monster as he appears in the TV Christmas special A Muppet Family Christmas, replete with Santa hats and beards for each head. He is waving towards the camera. White text has been added that says “Merry Christmas to all you nice weirdos”. The text references this exchange between Fozzie Bear and his mother in the movie (as written up on IMDB): Fozzie Bear: See, Mom? I told you it'd be easy! Emily 'Ma' Bear: They're weirdos, Fozzie. Fozzie Bear: Yeah? Emily 'Ma' Bear: But, they're nice weirdos. Fozzie Bear: Yeah. [chuckles quietly] This is my traditional Christmas post carried over from Tumblr.
Screenshot of Captain James T. Kirk screaming “Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannn!” from the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, except he’s screaming “Walgreeeeeeeeeeeens” in the Walgreens styled logo instead. #memes #mymemes
Screenshot from the Globe and Mail Bluesky account that reads “ Opinion - The problem with Bluesky: It won't broaden our horizons: In the wake of Donald Trump's election win, the social-media platform has enjoyed a surge of new users looking for an alternative to Elon Musk's X. But will it be useful, if it just creates an echo chamber for the left?”
Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Captain Picard at the helm of the starship Enterprise, looking grim and clutching the armrests of his command chair. Large white letters at the bottom of the picture read “damage report.” White letters above, on a black banner, read “how it feels waking up every morning in 2017.” The 2017 has been crossed out and a 2025 has been added beside it. The 2025 has also been crossed out. Underneath, the words “(oops, spoke too soon) the end of 2024.”
Pauline Oliveros and the Deep Listening Band. “Stuart Dempster plays one of his didjeridus. The sound reverberations throughout the 8-level tower were amazing, especially with the reflecting pool of water at the bottom. The tower itself is a musical instrument.” Photo and description by Cathryn Hrudicka (https://www.flickr.com/photos/creativesage/) From: https://oliverranchfoundation.org/tower-performances/past-tower-performances/2011-past-tower-performances/
Major T. J. "King" Kong riding a nuclear bomb to a hootin’ n hollerin’ glorious death while waving his cowboy hat like a rodeo rider in Doctor Strangelove.