 Pope Leo XIV appears on the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica — Vatican Media © 2025 POPE LEO XIV(Formerly Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost.) He is the 267th successor of St. Peter, the Apostle. Elected Pontifex on 8 May 2025, Vatican City, Rome. The Americas Pope: North and South; both Peru and the United States. Pope Leo XIV is the first Pope from the Order of St. Augustine (OSA), but the seventh from religious orders that follow the Rule of St. Augustine of Hippo. Vatican News biography article linked here.
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Well, given that my 12 Months Later review of my social media exodus was read as more of a 2023 Review (which it was, to be fair) I might as well do another re-view for 2024 😅  'Silver screen' rising into position. Note the storm clouds in the background. 2024 was kicked off by going out with some fellow World Youth Day pilgrims to the Westpac OpenAir Cinema on the Fleet Steps overlooking Farm Cove and the rest of Sydney Harbour. The film we’d arranged to see was One Life (2023), a biographical film about humanitarian Nicholas Winton and more broadly about the Kindertransport of Jewish children from German-occupied Czechoslovakia to Britain at the beginning of World War II. This is hardly a film for the faint of heart and as if to accentuate this point we sat, in provided ponchos, for about the last two-thirds of the film under wave after wave of rain pouring over Sydney Harbour. Watching a film outdoors on Sydney Harbour in rolling rain running off my poncho-covered head is an experience I won’t soon forget. Speaking of World Youth Day Lisbon, much of 2024 was spent finishing off a 12-month voucher for photo printing by having a selection of my photos from 2023 physically printed and then arranged by me in a photo album. To mark the 1-year anniversary of the WYD Pilgrimage in July, I organized two get-together lunches for the Over 18s Pilgrim (Italy and Portugal) cohort which many appreciated. I cannot comment about my fellow pilgrims’ experiences. But for me, a year-and-a-half on from Lisbon I’m only just coming to grips with, and processing through, what we all went through over those 22 hectic days of pilgrimage across Mediterranean Europe. But I can say that, for having done it once, I at least have more of an idea of what to expect a second time around and how to manage things and myself better than I did the first time, please God.
In comparison to 2023: 2024 was an exponential increase of train trips, train festivals and rail heritage excursions with my father. Our travels took us north to the Hunter Region around Newcastle and as far south as Goulburn and the Southern Highlands. Indeed, there were many long days with very-early morning starts. But we enjoyed ourselves nonetheless, yet we were very tired by the end of those same days. September saw me travelling by airplane up to Brisbane for the IGNITE Conference 2024 organized by Emmanuel Community and its Ignite Youth ministry team. This was the real curveball of 2024 and it was my first ever experience of IGNITE.  Archbishop Mark Coleridge at the microphone. All the talks by various speakers that I went to were good and informative on different parts of the Catholic faith life. A special stand out was the Archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge’s talk on Encountering the Scriptures where he discussed how the bible “goes to the heart of hopelessness to find a hope that cannot be destroyed.” He truly enkindled in his audience a greater appreciation of “the black fire on white fire” as the Rabbis describe the Holy Scriptures.  Emmanuel Worship on stage, IGNITE Conference 2024 Brisbane. The rallies at IGNITE were experiences. There was much good in them, but by the end of the three-and-a-bit days I was ready to run back to my bunk-hole at home and not have another thousand decibels going right through my body. After attending IGNITE and commuting across Brisbane each morning and evening, it has confirmed to me that what’s needed is smaller and quieter events where good conversation can take place. There’s a place for the big events, as long as they are not the only option available.  Kodak M38 point-and-shoot camera arranged with Kodak UltraMax 400 speed film. On a less frazzled note, that same month I also started shooting 35mm film with a re-loadable plastic point-and-shoot camera. It has been a nice change of pace from taking photos with my smartphone. I don’t really know or have even an idea of what 2025 will bring, apart for the Jubilee Year of Hope that has just begun. Dear God, may this new year see an outpouring of Your love and of experiences of hopes and dreams fulfilled. Let’s see if there’ll be a 2025 Review, eh? Vincent Cavanagh 3 Jan 2025 Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an account
of the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence. ~ 1 Peter 3:15-16, NRSV Catholic *Orders are now Closed*
 Vincent Cavanagh © 2024 * 2025 Calendar Flip-Through GIF added — 6 December 2024.
My father and I spent the day today travelling together along the recently opened City section of the Sydney Metro, stopping to look at the new-build architecture on our way out to visit the Australian Railway Historical Society’s Redfern bookshop. Just over a hundred metres from Waterloo Metro Station. In the Sydney suburb of Alexandria. Clear as mud ;p Our first stop on the new section was Victoria Cross Metro Station which, as far as I am aware, has already been shorted to “VicX” in text message form by my peers.  “Captain Kirk to the Bridge ...” Yes, I’m back and this may or may not be a newsletter under a different guise.
You can do it like I have 💀 by staring off into the sea of empty calorific YouTube video suggestions wondering what that last thought was that you didn’t want to forget. Or reading through multiple inter-referenced substack pages and church journalism and a touch too much European politics “news” – which I still don’t have my head around; and should probably be grateful for that fact. Or not-quite-compulsively checking either the weather application or if there are any updates on Facebook Messenger to previous text messages (or trying to reverse engineer which comment someone liked due to the latest update, grrr!) Speaking of substack pages, one that I’ve been gravitating back to of late—and isn’t as overly swimming in bar graphs or generally depressing as others—is the School of the Unconformed by Ruth Gaskovski. For about the past year(?) or so she has been doing shared essays with her husband Peco that they cross-post between each other’s substack page (Peco’s is Pilgrims in the Machine). The general theme of their essays is regaining man’s [1] humanity from both the jaws and bowels of the inhuman Machine world we now find ourselves living in. Of which this quote by Ruth from their recent article, ‘Building People with Three-Dimensional Memory’, is an example: The incessant distraction of interfacing with devices leaves us feeling as if our brain and our body are forever in a different place. It almost seems as if we are in a race to upload our life into the virtual universe. Our desire to capture and share the present is numbing our ability to form natural memories of the moments we want to actually treasure. By excessively documenting our lives artificially Marshall McLuhan might say we are “autoamputating” our memory. And Peco continues in his section of the piece by exemplifying how technology is artificially engendering the tell-tale symptoms of Alzheimer’s into all of us glued to our digital devices: Some segments of the culture might experience a carefree insouciance as they become largely forgetful of what has come before—the wisdom, knowledge, and traditions of history—and more gripped by the here-and-now stimulation of their screens. I would highly encourage anyone else interested to read the whole article here. As well as Ruth’s interview with Erin Loechner (don’t worry, I’d never heard of her either), ‘Turning the Algorithm Upside Down: The Opt-Out Family’, where Erin answers Ruth’s daughter’s question of whether there even is a “healthy” way to be on social media: I know the more palatable answer here is to speak of digital well-being and balance and how to successfully navigate the algorithm in a way that we can consume the good without the bad. But we can’t. Just like any mind-altering drug we might ingest, social media makes it so we are not in control of the experience we’ll have immediately after. And I can no longer see any potential reward in delivering our God-given brains to a [tattooed] group of tech bros in Silicon Valley.” [Note: At the time of writing, this post by the Gaskovski’s was open to non-subscribers (June 2024), future readers of this blog post may find these articles behind Subscription/Pay Walls. Their substack posts tend to be open for a few months before going behind the Subscription Wall, depending on whether an article is important enough that it remain open for the greatest number of people to read and gain use from it.] Keepin’ Up wit’ Gen ZNow on to lighter fare. Amongst my varying sojourns through internet-life I have compiled a list of all the various different Internet Grammar and Acronyms that I’ve come across over the past month or so: LLAP ‘Live Long and Prosper’ 🖖 rekt Internet form of ‘Wrecked’. 🗿 Moai (Easter Island Head) emoji. Used to communicate a deadpan or shocked/embarrassed-into-speechlessness expression. Or alternatively—if in Japan—used to arrange meeting up with people at the Moyai statue near Shibuya Station in Tokyo. IYKYK ‘If You Know, You Know’ Vietnamese “teencodes”: Hixx or Hixxxxx – written version of 😢 (crying face emoji). Huhu – written version of 😭 (loudly crying face – or as I know it, ‘waterfall tears’). TIL ‘Today I Learned.’ ily / ILY ‘I Love You.’ Not to be confused with illy, the Italian Espresso company. bby / BBY Internet alternative form of ‘Baby’. (ex. ‘Woohoo BBY!’) More often used when using ‘baby’ as a term of endearment. RTFM ‘Read The … Manual!’ Often used within the Linux user community forums. Jubilee 2025For those of us not on TikTok (or whichever platform it was announced on), the Reverend Samuel French (@frsamfrench) will be leading a pilgrimage in the footsteps of St Paul through Greece and Turkey with Harvest Journeys exclusively for Young Adults aged 18 to 35 for the Holy Year of Jubilee in 2025: ‘Pilgrims of Hope’. More information about the pilgrimage can be found here. AS I WROTE at the beginning of this blog, this post may effectively be a newsletter in all but name. Yes, there are already plenty of other blog posts on this website that have been tagged with “newsletter”, but I specifically chose to name this RANDOM Things #001 because I’d prefer to make a clean break of the prior hodgepodge of blog posts and because the perfectionist in me wouldn’t let up unless I went through and counted every-single-blog-post with either tag or semblance of “newsletter” both on this website and its predecessor. Which is not an option that I look upon with any enthusiasm, hence why RANDOM Things #001. I do—and I ask that you reading this likewise—not expect this to in any way be a regular or (dear God save me) quarterly affair. It is my estimation that RANDOM Things be more of an ‘every now and then’ or just ‘I haven’t painted anything, but here’s what’s been kicking around in my head recently’ type of blog post. So until the next one of these not-newsletters eventuates; Peace and Happy Feast of St Peter and St Paul. Vincent Cavanagh 29 June 2024 Footnotes [1] As in the genus man (mankind) of which both men and woman, male and female, make up the whole category (ex., “earth men” and “Men of Earth”) – for the peculiarly post-Age of Aquarius pedants out there. Not the website, but myself. I'm currently laid low with change–of–season flu, which I've been stuck with for the better part of a week and counting. I'm hoping that it will be breaking sooner rather than latter. Vincent Cavanagh 27 May 2024 A brief update as to what I’m up to at the moment.
*midst | as in: ‘in the midst of him’; not a synonym for ‘middle’. 19 Mar 2024 For any update about the writing, you'll find it at the bottom of the next blog post. Reviewing my 12-Month Social Media Exodus.  Heading towards the Marquês de Pombal Monument, Lisbon. Vincent Cavanagh ©2023 Well, it’s been 12 months since I started my Social Media Exodus and now it’s time to review the year that was. Okay, so starting off, 2023 was World Youth Day year for me. You may have seen some posts here and there on the blog and archived on the website, and possibly also on Facebook (sarcasm). Speaking of the aforementioned social media platform, I think it’s safe to say that (apart from WYD) I haven’t been signed into it any more than strictly necessary. Nowadays it functions, for me personally, as more of an alert-slash-events manager and reference tool for finding people and past events. Since WYD I have been using Messenger far more than I thought I ever would in my whole life. It’s certainly been a change of pace having a social life.  A day out on Sydney Harbour. Vincent Cavanagh ©2023 Twitter is all but officially mothballed, waiting for a reason (if any) to actively post on it again. Even though most Catholic parish Youth Ministries appear to have highly active profiles, I still don’t ever see myself returning to Instagram. Certainly not under my own name in any case. As for YouTube… oh, dear. Apart from proactively uploading two videos from WYD Lisbon featuring the lead vocals of Fr Samuel French I’ve been passively over-consuming other people’s YouTube videos. My anxieties over travel, packing, and WYD preparations absolutely did not help cut down on my ‘Watch time’ as I had hoped to rein in 12 months earlier. Being stuck in a maelstrom of choice-paralysis over what small new camera to buy to take over with me to Europe for the pilgrimage didn’t cut down wasted hours either. And in any case, I ended up taking more photos with my smartphone than I did with the camera I bought to stop me over-using said same smartphone. Live and learn, eh? I have bought a Peak Design camera strap that should help aid in using the camera more in future. And speaking of the future, I am all too aware of my current (ahem!) “habit” of bookmarking videos and website articles about various different foods, religious sites, and locations of interest across both East and Southeast Asia in the possibility of preparation(!) for 2027 World Youth Day. People are not kidding when they talk about the WYD/Travel "bug". As an aside, I still don’t think that I’d ever be able to learn, let alone read, Hangul / Hangeul, the Korean alphabet. I’ve accepted that A) I don’t have to know everything and B) that I’m going to be especially reliant on those who can and have persevered to learn Korean. Returning to YouTube specifically, I did come across the DF Tube Chrome Extension that has been of some great help in cutting down more video-related rabbit holes than I would have without it. Its main attraction (for me) was the ability to turn off the righthand video suggestion box whilst watching a YouTube video. Admittedly it makes things lopsided visually, but it does mean that I have fewer distractions from the video in front of me. Sadly, DF Tube can’t do anything about my procrastination. That’s all on me. So, to sum up. I have been relatively withdrawn from my social media profiles – discounting blogging about the WYD pilgrimage. I have gained a social life that is aided by messaging applications which come with their own problems – the applications, not the social life. My personal struggles with self-discipline and YouTube over-consumption remain. In part I know that some of this is due to a lack of projects and regular routine. Pray for me. Putting my focus on posting blogs and standardizing parts of this website has helped me feel less pressured than I would have been if I was still only posting on Facebook or Twitter. As well as not having as much comparison-itis with the edited and project lives of other people on social media. This doesn’t mean that I still don’t struggle with comparison, it’s just not as severe as it has been in the past. In closing I think that I will continue as I have done so these past 12 months and with God’s help get a better grip over my YouTube-surfing and other self-defeating habits. Until next time. Vincent Cavanagh 25 Jan 2024 Website refresh for 2024.  Tis' the Season to be Changin' As you may have surmised, I have once again change this website's appearance. Cosmetically, it is not too much of a departure from the previous design, but it does have one or two improvements on the later. The main one being a dividing line between blogpost titles and the start of the post. (Yes, I am that picky over visual design.)
On the formatting side of things, I have broken down the WYD 2023 Blog Archive posts into Country sections (e.g., Italy, Portugal, etc.) to give a visual break and create landmarks for readers to navigate with. I have also begun implementing sectioning my Artwork pages, breaking them down by Yearly Quarter (e.g., Q1, Q2, and so on.) If for no other reason than being visually neater. Also, I do prefer this new website theme's rendering of hyperlinks with underlining. Visually helpful for someone looking at this site with their phone set to black-and-white mode or for those who are colour-blind. Once again, until next and Happy New Year. Vincent Cavanagh 7 Jan 2024 Just a brief update to let you all know that, yes, I am still alive. I am currently in the middle of a 6-week course on “Theology of Body” by Pope John Paul II which is taking up nearly all of my mental and physical energy and leaving myself with not much left in tank for anything. This is in addition to my general lack of focus and purpose in the wake of World Youth Day Lisbon 2023 and finishing my 2024 Calendar. Currently, I find myself living (read: surviving) from one ex-WYD pilgrim social event/get-together to the next, which are so far averaging about a month apart. Post-World Youth Day Blues? Perhaps. I know that I shouldn’t complain, because before WYD I had never had any social life what is filling up my calendar now. But I am aware of how fickle sudden-social-relationships can dissipate in the blink of an eye unless they are tended to and (hopefully) cultivated into last friendships. Please kindly keep myself and all my fellow “Theology of the Body” course participants in your prayers. Thank you. Vincent Cavanagh 22 Oct 2023  Cremorne Reserve Lighthouse, Sydney Harbour | Vincent Cavanagh © 2023 |
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