M.B. Drapier

@mbdrapier.bsky.social

768 Followers 31 Following

A jumped-up egg. I can neither confirm nor deny that I am the Queen of the May.

A cartoon image, a still from the Simpsons in the art style of that TV show: a landscape-oriented three-quarter shot of a thin, elderly white (yellow, in the art style) man in a dark business suit (Mr. Burns) holding a roughly-constructed, blocky remote control. The remote control has several buttons including one large red button at the top and centre of the front panel. An awkard-looking antenna component appears to be sticking out of the top right of the remote control. Behind the man is a bookcase with a motley selection of books with different spine colours (no text is visible on the spines). Mr Burns is holding his left hand (not visible) behind his back, while his right hand is showing off the remote control, holding the it up at about the height of his head and a little away from it. Burns is looking nearly into the camera and is grinning with a look of cunning and self-assurance. Both Burns and the bookcase are dramatically illuminated by a strong light from above and to the left of the image which creates sharp areas of shadow and light. Burns is standing bent forward, mostly at his upper back. He has a white shirt with a plain collar and a black tie. The right sleeve of his jacket is very short, revealing a long shirt cuff. He is looking nearly into the camera. He has a long spindly nose which tilts down a little more near the very tip. He is bald except for a long tonsure of rear hair which begins a little in front of his visible left ear. Three large spots are visible on his head above eye level and above his left ear. His eyes are a little closed: the clenched eyelid muscles underneath are visible. His brow overhangs his eyes a little. His chin is weak and his upper but not lower teeth can be seen.
A narrow colum of the following text, in black serif text on a white background: **Entering the Nazi Suicide Pact** There was always in National Socialism a profoundly pessimistic streak. Defeat in 1918 had seemed to bear out earlier intimations among the far right of national decline.21 The manic swagger affected by the leaders of the supposed master race was in part over-compensation; and it continued to alternate with moments of deepest gloom.22 At times, this took the form of a pronounced death wish. It was not just Hitler who repeatedly
A vertical strip of three black and white photographs. In the top photo a group of four people in dark business dress, plausibly Japanese executives from the 1980s or 1990s, are sitting around a conference table. In the top and centre of this photo, between the heads of the two most central people, the Yamaha corporate logo (both the name and the famous tuning-forks icon) has been added. The oldest-looking of them, a man who appears to be in early middle age at the centre-left, is looking toward two younger-seeming men to his right. A speech bubble has been added, pointing to his mouth, with text which reads “Get McCartney a CS-80. Imagine what a Beatle would do with that power!” In the middle photo Paul McCartney, probably a roughly 40-year-old McCartney in the 1980s, is in a smallish recording-studio live room. The white-walled room is quite full of a slightly untidy mixture of guitars, speaker cabinets, floor-standing keyboard synths from this era or a little earlier, and some junk. A large window gives a blurry view into what seems to be a control room or another live room, also quite full of assorted stuff. McCartney is standing in the centre-right facing roughly left. He is in shirt and trousers and is wearing a small moustache and old-fashioned studio on-ear monitor headphones with white plastic sides. He is touching a key on an ‘80s-style synthesiser keyboard with a very large, bulging body, the bottom of which seems to be built into the bottom of a flight case. It is standing on a tube-steel stand and facing diagonally left and away from the viewer, towards the control-room(?) window. He has a speech bubble saying “Simply having a wonderful Christmas time..” The bottom image shows the same photo as the top image. The main difference is that now the added speech bubble points to the younger man on the centre right, and it says simply “Shit.”
An image of a Bluesky message. A large semi-transparent red X has been drawn over the whole message. On the top left is the user icon (showing the face of Simpson character Martin Prince), and to the icon's right is M.B. Drapier @mbdrapier.bsky.social The main text is: (As I assuem many of you know.) But also: IIUC, in the past couple of years the HW for AI has been becoming increasingly specialised, with eg. extremely low-precision floating-point units which are optimal for AI but near-useless for "normal" scientific computation or even graphics gaming. The bottom right has: October 21, 2025 at 4:57 PM
A black-and-white comic strip in a horizontal four-panel-gag format: the Peanuts strip for November 10 1959. The art is in the usual (mid-period) Peanuts style. In the first (leftmost) panel Charlie Brown and Linus are sitting on a low kerb: they seem to be sitting on the end of a footpath, with grass on either side. A small shrub is to their left. Linus, with his head resting on his hands and his elbows resting just above his knees, says "WHEN I GET BIG, I'M GOING TO BE A HUMBLE LITTLE COUNTRY DOCTOR". His expression seems thoughtful or wishful. In the second panel Linus and Charlie Brown appear in profile and at half-height against a plain background. They are standing close to and looking at each other, with Charlie Brown on the left. Sticking his right arm straight out and slightly upward, making a fist with his thumb up, Linus says "I'LL LIVE IN THE CITY, SEE, AND EVERY MORNING I'LL GET UP, CLIMB INTO MY SPORTS CAR AND ZOOM INTO THE COUNTRY!" His mouth is wide open. In the third panel Linus at half-height and facing forward on the left, with his arms outstretched sideways and slightly up and his hands spread open. He says "THEN I'LL START HEALING PEOPLE ... I'LL HEAL EVERYBODY FOR MILES AROUND!" His eyes and mouth seem to be wide with joy. Charlie Brown is standing to his L (our R) a little behind, his whole body visible, looking at Linus. He seems a little worried or dubious: his mouth is turned down slightly. In the last panel the boys are in profile facing each other again, but at full height and with Linus on the left. Linus has his fists clenched, the left raised at the elbow, his right arm straight up in the air. He says "I'LL BE A WORLD FAMOUS HUMBLE LITTLE COUNTRY DOCTOR!", still with an excited expression and an open mouth.
The following tweet: Elon Musk [X blue-check logo] [X.com logo] Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle? [ Horizontal blue bar with bold '*Yes*' on the left, reaching about 80% of the way to the right] *80.4%* [Horizontal light grey bar with 'No' on the left, reaching about 20% of the way to the right] 19.6% 5,630,775 votes · Final results 6:57 PM · Jun 5, 2025 · 71.1M Views 🗨️ 92K 🔁 49K 🤍 182K 🔖 13K ↥
An image in the motivational/"demotivational" poster style: a photo inside a white border taking up most of the width of the image and the top two-thirds of its height, with a caption below. The photograph is a one-quarter headshot of a middle-aged black man (Colin Powell) in a military officer's uniform with a highly-decorated jacket. He is wearing spectacles with large rectangular lenses and a metal frame. He is looking directly at the camera with his head tilted down a little, half-smiling with his eyebrows slightly raised, and pointing directly at the camera with his left hand, with his thumb up high and his second finger pointing out to the side. His full-bodied black hair is cut short. His left shoulder is turned slightly towards the camera, making the "Ranger" tab on his left shoulder legible. Behind his right shoulder is a US flag hanging down from a pole. On the bottom left of the image there are a number of microphones pointing around his head. The background of the photo is black. The background of the image template is also black. The caption at the bottom says Miss Me Yet? centered in a Times-like serif font.
A screenshot of two tweets, a top post on top and an immediate reply below, with some user-interface material between the two cut out. The top tweet reads: FischerKing [X blue-check logo] @FischerKing64 If Trump succeeds in forcing through mass deportations, combined with Elon hacking away at the government, firing people and reducing the deficit - there will be an initial severe overreaction in the economy - this economy propped up with debt (generating asset bubbles) and artificially suppressed wages (as a result of illegal immigration). Markets will tumble. But when the storm passes and everyone realizes we are on sounder footing, there will be a rapid recovery to a healthier, sustainable economy. History could be made in the coming two years. 🗨️ 846 🔁 2.8K 🤍 28K 🔖 1.9K ↥ The reply reads: Elon Musk [X blue-check logo] [X.com logo] @elonmusk . 29 Oct 2024 Sounds about right 🗨️ 228 🔁 328 🤍 8.4K 📊 262K 🔖 ↥ ↥ The tweets are shown as white text on a black background. There is a white Subscribe button, a Grok https://x.ai/ logo and an ellipsis menu (in that order) in the top-right corner of the top post.
The TV intertitle from the “Municipal Roundtable” gag from season 4, episode 3 (“Homer the Heretic”) of /The Simpsons/. A 4:3 landscape-ratio drawing in the style of season 4 of /The Simpsons/: a centred, straight-on view of the convex-sided screen of an old CRT television with its surrounding purple-coloured fascia. The TV screen is showing an image of two young or early-middle-aged white (in fact yellow, in accordance with the Simpsons art style) men in business suits and striped ties fighting hand-to-hand on top of an extremely tall and narrow clifftop outcrop which rises sharply. Both men have noticeably bulky, heavily-built arms and chests, contrasting with their normal legs and waists. They are seen side-on, and they take up about the top half and middle third of the screen. The man on the right (from the viewer’s perspective) is standing on the very edge of the outcrop, with his back foot right on the edge. He is scowling and baring his teeth as he raises his arms and swings a two-handed flail with a comically large iron ball at the man on the left. The man on the left is likewise scowling as he holds up a briefcase towards his enemy, at about the height of his head, ready to block the flail. The outcrop rises from the left half of the bottom of the screen to put them there. Behind them is an orange sky and a slightly lighter-orange cloud which takes up roughly the bottom half of the background. Two large lightning bolts (drawn in a simple and cartoony style) appear in roughly the top half of the background, one in the left side and one in the right. A title is superimposed just below the men, centred on the screen. In large black letters in a sans-serif font it reads MUNICIPAL ROUNDTABLE .
Discourage apps from showing my account to logged-out users Bluesky will not show your profile and posts to logged-out users. Other apps may not honor this request. This does not make your account private. Note: Bluesky is an open and public network. This setting only limits the visibility of your content on the Bluesky app and website, and other apps may not respect this setting. Your content may still be shown to logged-out users by other apps and websites.
The following text: Discourage apps from showing my account to logged-out users Bluesky will not show your profile and posts to logged-out users. Other apps may not honor this request. This does not make your account private. Note: Bluesky is an open and public network. This setting only limits the visibility of your content on the Bluesky app and website, and other apps may not respect this setting. Your content may still be shown to logged-out users by other apps and websites.