Table of contents

• Banksy (A visit to the exhibit and Current Reading)
• Andor: recently on the ImplausiPod
• Multi-melting: Rogue One and more
• Networks of Resilience: recently on the blog
• Kinsmen Book Sale: new to Dr Implausible's Bookshelf:
• Current Series: Positive AI Archive

The month of May 2025 was all about the Rebellion, mostly having to do with the release of season 2 of Andor, and we started to notice some concilience there with some other recent reading and visits. A theme started to emerge...

Recently I was in Vancouver and happened upon a Banksy exhibit while walking through Gastown.  I had missed seeing a similar one in Amsterdam about a decade ago, so I took the opportunity to check it out now. There was a short wait to get in, as ticketing had moved online, as so many other things these days, which presented a bit of a speedbump.  The collection was housed in some empty gallery space in an ancient (by Van standards) brick building, above and behind a bar whose patio monopolized the street.

And like the Tragically Hip song goes: "The rest of the world / Becomes a gift shop".  I've started looking for exhibit catalogues or other works when I visit museums, as they usually offer a much better document of the collection than my quick shots with my phone.  A memento of the visit, in the original sense of the word, something to look back at and help me trigger the recall of the impression I had first seeing the works.  Above is the front and back cover of the catalogue for this Banksy exhibit, and a bit of a career outline as well.  I appreciate it, even months later, and it's a practice I'd recommend to others who frequent museums and galleries, if they're able.

(I'm not sure if that's Mona Lisa or Bruce Cockburn in disguise.)

Of course, Banksy's entire oeuvre has had a strong rebellious streak, resisting hegemony and fighting against forces of oppression, or highlighting the injustices around the world.  I've only selected a few images here, of the reproductions of his works taken from the streets and reproduced on the gallery walls. 

Even outside their natural element, and seen here as a copy of a copy, the images are striking and sublime, evoking emotion within the viewer and connecting us together.

* For those interested, we mentioned Banksy and his works and how they relate to AI Art back in episode 38 of the podcast last year. 

Throughout the month of May we reviewed Season 2 of Andor each week as the episodes were released, charting the start of the Rebellion in the Star Wars universe, and how it came to be.

Rogue One
Following the end of Andor, I did hold off for a week or so to catch my breath before starting Rogue One for the first time since it was released.  And to the surprise of no one, it is a markedly better film. The focal point shifts from Jyn Erso to Cassian, obviously, but the increase in tension and pathos of the battle on (and above) Scarif is poignant.  Rogue One was already one of the better films in the Star Wars Universe; it remains such following the conclusion of the Andor series.

WYCU
Over the last few months, we've been mentioning the WYCU on the blog, and we've started the rewatch of those films (chronologically) starting with Prey, Predator: Killer of Killers, Predator, and Predator 2.  The first wave of the podcast episodes on these will be coming out soon.

Dr Who
Along with that, the second season of Dr Who with Ncuti Gatwa has recently wrapped up on the Disney+ streaming service. As we've covered most of this run in previous podcast episodes (like E0024, 40, and 41) we're excited to bring back our guest Dr Aiden Buckland to discuss the Season 2 of the fifteenth Doctor in the coming weeks.

Coheed and Cambria - Vaxis III: The Father of Make Believe
The album pick-up schedule has slowed somewhat, but I did grab a couple releases, including Coheed and Cambria's Vaxis III. This is their 11th studio album, and while this is the first one of their I've picked up, it seems they've got a formula down, with a couple songs filled with pop hooks, some other rock that floats between genres, and a section that reads like a sequence on a prog album from the 1970s. It feels a little like they're trying to serve too many masters here: where a full album of any of these would be solid, the blended album and context shift is subtractive rather than additive. ("Someone Who Can" is still a banger though.)  3.5/5

Over on the blog we've been posting about the concept of Networks of Resilience.

(This has been in the drafts since about January (for reasons), but we're making a concerted effort to move articles from 'Draft' to 'Published' on a more timely basis (and not leaving them linger for years; my Drafts folder has stuff going back since the start of the blog)).

Networks of resilience are more than just the community that we build to allow for care and maintenance; they're also the knowledge networks that are intertwined and overlapping with it.

We mentioned this briefly last issue: every spring the local Kinsmen club rents out a curling rink and fills up the floor with tables loaded with donated books for a monster of a book sale that last for 10 days. This year, I ended up going twice: once early, to get some selected titles (at $4 each), and then once late, when it's a "fill a banker's box for $20" (I counted 38 books in the box when I walked out.

Not bad. That's more Thongor than I remembered. Some highlights include a lot of pulp titles to add to the Appendix W, a few DVDs, some wonderful books on photography, and a few academic works, either of direct interest (below) or more just general curiosity.

As you can see that's a treasure trove of reading: some classics, some directly relevant to what we talk about on the channel, and some that are new to me. For now, they've been added to the bookshelf, and we'll highlight some of the relevant titles as we get to them in the near future.

This past weekend we made an update to the Positive AI Archive. I'll admit I've been a bit remiss in getting those stories linked as they arrive, but they're here, and I've got most of them out of the backlog. You can view the regular version here on the blog, and the indie version here.

Part of the reason we started posting these positive stories here is because of the rhetoric online that asserts that "there is no good use for AI". This gloats around a lot on social media, sometimes aggressively so, and having an archive of these results serves as a counterpoint. Especially when the discussion bubbles out of the social media to something a little larger in scope. I've been noticing this a little more lately, so it's high time to get this up to date.

For the next newsletter issue we'll be looking at a three way-crossover, with the start of our look at the WYCU - the Weyland-Yutani Cinematic Universe, how it influenced the Warhammer Universe in Appendix W, and how it crossed over into the real world with the Implausible Technology that it inspired. Join us for our Adaptive issue soon.