STEPHAN LOY
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stephanloy.bsky.social
STEPHAN LOY
@stephanloy.bsky.social
210 followers 220 following 1.4K posts
Artist of paintings and photos, writer of novels and short stories, enjoyer of retirement, and eater of donuts. Visit my website: smloy.net
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stephanloy.bsky.social
First snow in Indianapolis. Only an inch or two for us and barely sticking to pavement. I guess South Bend north of us got about a foot.
Snowy field next to my house. A couple of inches, so the ground is pretty well covered and there's a frosting of snow over most of the plants. The trees in the background are still looking fall-like. They may have a coating of snow, but it's too far away to see. So, black and white in the foreground, a little color showing through in the middle ground, and golds and greens and browns in the background.
November 10, 2025 at 3:41 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
Devil's Tower, Wyoming
November 7, 2025 at 10:50 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
🎵It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for neighbors...🎵
Morning in the suburbs, the vibrant sunlight soaking into the walls of houses and the leaves of fall-color trees. Pink and gray-blue clouds over the neighborhood Fiery orange clouds with blue-gray shadows ash dawn breaks over working class houses. A weird pink-orange glow to the blue-gray cloud cover over working class suburban houses.
November 4, 2025 at 12:56 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
What can I say? I'm old. Also, bought it in vinyl, new, for $3.50.
Album cover art for Chicago V. Wood grain with the Chicago logo carved into it in deep relief.
November 3, 2025 at 1:30 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
On this No Kings Day, here's Naptown (Indianapolis), a lonely fortress of good sense in a deep-red state of MAGA crazies. I couldn't get scale from my perspective, but, where I expected maybe a hundred or so, we had THOUSANDS turn out!
October 18, 2025 at 8:53 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
"Well, it's no use prevaricating about the bush."
Wallace of Wallace and Gromit. A stop motion clay figure with a pear-shaped bald head, big ears, and wearing his signature green sweater vest over a long-sleeved white shirt cinched at the neck by a red tie. He's sitting at the kitchen table, pencil in one hand and a bill in the other. Other bills are scattered before him. He's been using an abacus and an adding machine to compute his income and expenditures and it doesn't look good.
October 13, 2025 at 9:16 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
Disney isn't listening to their own characters.
Captain America looking his usual Captain America grim and saying: "Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world -- 'No, you move'."
September 21, 2025 at 3:22 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
The second edition of my sci-fi-political drama Conqueror's Realm is out in the world at several venues. Check out the ALT text on the image and go to www.smloy.net/conquerors-r... to get info and buy links.
Image of a four-book display of my novel Conqueror's Realm. The cover shows a ripped, burned, and dirty American flag ground into rocks and dust, and the tagline "A fable of the American Dream gone Nightmare." The first edition of Conqueror's Realm was published 12 years ago after many years of writing. The germ of the story was conceived in the mid--1970s! It asks what would happen in the mid-21st century once white people realize that they are becoming not the overarching power in the United States, but only its largest minority. The result is a white supremacist effort to hijack the government (pretty much what we see today), but imagined during a time when few people would have thought such a thing could happen. This second edition updates the formatting and, while we're at it, cleans up the typos that slipped in along the way.
September 16, 2025 at 3:21 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
Here’s one of our hummingbirds doing their hummingbird thing at the feeder. What a bunch of characters. I hope you can hear him buzzing.
August 24, 2025 at 7:18 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
My state of mind right now.
My office and pretty much the whole house have been moved into the garage so our floors can be replaced. It’s all rather jumbled.
August 12, 2025 at 11:32 AM
stephanloy.bsky.social
Ahh, a living Frank Frazetta book cover.
A frame from the movie Conan the Barbarian, with James Earl Jones as the wizard Thulsa Doom decked out in silks of various purples while seated on his throne with a hash marked wall of gold behind him. At his feet, lounging atop large throw pillows, vibrant red carpets, and thrown silks, is Valerie Quennessen as the princess, showing off the best in bikini haute couture, bangles, arm bands, and silk wraps and staring saucily out toward the viewer. They even arranged the shot to hide her feet, because Frazetta was famed for not knowing how to draw feet and so always hiding them in fog, viscera, or whatever else might come to mind.
July 30, 2025 at 6:15 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
Unless it's the wrong religion, I'm quite sure.
Screenshot of a Reuters headline that reads "US to allow federal workers to promote religion in workplace." It shows Trump standing there looking like he's bowed his head in prayer with a bunch of other people doing the same, hands raised to heaven and that sort of thing. Weirdly, and, who knows, purposefully, the picture is arranged so that it looks like the people are worshipping Trump.
July 29, 2025 at 5:33 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
We just got back from a fun overnight at a bed and breakfast. Allow me to introduce Mancha, the manager of the Showers Inn in Bloomington, Indiana.
A black, white, and gray senior cat curled up on a rattan bench.
July 8, 2025 at 6:46 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
I’m digging my new iPhone 16e, vastly better than the Android phone I left behind. I took this pic with it last night, just whipped it out and shot, no tripod or anything. I expected it to be blurry, but look.
Shot, at night, of fireworks. In the dark sky, but including the crowd below. Well balanced and sharp. Yay, iPhone!
July 5, 2025 at 11:07 AM
stephanloy.bsky.social
I got an email from Social Security that looks like it came straight from Hydra.
Screenshot of a proppganda email I got from Social Security yesterday. The headline is "Social Security Applauds Passage of Legislation Providing Historic Tax Relief for Seniors." It looks like something straight from Hydra. Hydra, you know. That born-from-Nazis anti-American authoritarian secret police-type organization in the earlier Marvel movies, the one Captain America did his best to stomp out. There was a season of Agents of SHIELD postulating a world in which Hydra won and took over the US. And they had a "TV News" show dedicated to just this sort of stuff. So here we are, living inside a dystopian Marvel plot.
July 4, 2025 at 3:18 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
Pattern recognition.
The cat dropped this here.
Sorry, you have to see it. It’s a white string on a background of Persian rug. The string has been dropped in a way that begs the brain to make sense of it. Spoiler: To me, it looks like a strutting stick figure man.
June 30, 2025 at 8:40 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
Missed this for Caturday, but, considering situations right now, perhaps Oz might be of help to someone
June 22, 2025 at 4:19 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
Terrified? Then welcome to my back yard:
June 19, 2025 at 2:23 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
Dum duuum, dum dum dum dum dum duuum duuum…
A sculpture in steel and limestone on the grounds of the Indiana statehouse in Indianapolis. It looks uncannily like a stargate from the movie Stargate or the tv show Stargate SG1. It’s a donut, about ten or twelve feet tall, which makes it about the right size and definitely the right shape. In the just several seconds I stood there taking the picture, several passersby commented something like “Look, it’s a Stargate!”
June 13, 2025 at 8:52 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
Oz the Great and Powerful, First Kitty Deluxe: “I submit now to your unbounded admiration. You may begin.”
May 25, 2025 at 3:56 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
My next novel is on the way. Action-adventure. Air rescue, hurricanes, wilderness firefighting, and work, work, work, work.
Book cover for my upcoming novel STORMBREAK. Fire on the bottom half of the image, a purple-skied thunderstorm above, with lightning. And between them, a blue-over-white HH-60 Pave Hawk, the search and rescue version of the UH-60 Black Hawk that you see in all the war movies these days. This is a pure action-adventure story. Follows a down-on-his-luck helicopter pilot fired from wildfire assistance. He is subsequently hired by Stormbreak, a startup company with the goal of successfully commercializing disaster relief. That sounds like an impossible goal, but the helicopter pilots, search and rescue teams, and firefighters employed become the guinea pigs sacrificed to make that mission happen.
May 24, 2025 at 2:58 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
Does anyone remember Starstruck? That was a wonderfully refreshing comic. Elaine Lee is one of my minor heroes.
Cover to Starstruck, a Marvel-licensed graphic novel from the 1980s. Shows the two mains centered in a mandala with the tag "The Luckless, the Abandoned and Forsaked" beneath. The two mains are Galatia 9 and Brucilla the Muscle who are, well, kind of hard to describe. Let's say Brucilla is a studry farmgirl type while Galatia 9 is more of a catwalk type. Brucilla, in this art, is wearing something like 1980s Flash Gordon (the movie) football/gladiator digs complete with odd helmet/hearing protection headgear. I told you it was hard to describe. Galatia 9 is in her usual half-catsuit archer's getup, which is a catsuit that covers roughly half her body, mostly the left side, with a black star over where her right breast was removed in order to facilitate shooting a bow. These two characters were the germ of inspiration for my Shining Star novel years later.
May 22, 2025 at 4:46 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
And, to make me feel better, here's a few shots through our train bedroom window as we rode the California Zephyr back toward Chicago. This is California, Nevada, and Colorado.
Bare rock mountains in Nevada, I think. Green scrub in the foreground, brown scrub and short, greening trees in the middle ground, then these gray, sand-pile looking, smoothly sloped mountains, nothing growing on them at all. Colorado, I think. Steep-sided, castle-like mountains of layered red rock, pine trees marching up their lower slopes and dressing their crowns. Nevada. Smooth, almost liquid sloped mountains of "painted" stone in layers of white, red, brown, and gray. Also Colorado. More castle-like red mountains rising bare-sided out of green scrub and thin grass. This one has a finger-like stone formation rising from one edge like a guard tower in some fantasy novel.
May 13, 2025 at 12:42 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
GUARDIANS AT THE GATE, a dark satire on the plight of public education in America, is right there, ready for you to buy, read, and gawk at. ebook formats and print. If you're a teacher, know a teacher, or ever had a teacher, this novel will blow you away. books2read.com/u/4A09QJ
Cover art for Guardians at the Gate. A colored line drawing with a male teacher in shirt and tie, his sleeves rolled up, physically defending the entrance to a school building. He clutches tracts entitled A Critique of Pure Reason and some of them are scattered at his feet. The school door is plastered with a notice that says: "CONDEMNED due to LOW Standardized TEST SCORES!" A woman stands behind the man. She wears a blue track suit and blue sunglasses and looks on the man with a sense of amusement.
May 6, 2025 at 1:15 PM
stephanloy.bsky.social
Two pics from Vancouver, BC.
The triple gate into Chinatown. Four pillars supporting elaborate, colorful, clay-tile-roofed lintels I don't even know what this building is,m but it's narrow on one side (like, one window wide) and long on the other (seven windows), made of red and yellow brick, arched windows on the upper floors, and the roof, encompassing the top three floors, seems to be iron or bronze, tapering almost to a point, as if the whole building were a giant, red, Mennon Speed Stick. I only took the picture because it's gorgeous.
May 2, 2025 at 5:00 PM