RANDOM Things #001

Yes, I’m back and this may or may not be a newsletter under a different guise.​

If only that were my jawline.

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Apart from a small handful of photo-edited pictures that will never be seen outside of its intended audience in a group chat of my peers, I’ve been in a creative drought since about the end of March/start of April this year (2024). Being sick at home for the last three weeks of May with whatever strain of influenza is going around this winter didn’t help my creative juices either.

Also, this drought overlapping with my general backwards slide into doom-scrolling and wasted hours poured away to YouTube videos.

​Let’s be honest, the act of “doom-scrolling” is not the sole purview of life-sucking social media applications.

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.

When we use our devices as memory keepers, we not only interfere with the formation of long-term memories, but we also flatten our experience and personal identity into a one-dimensional digitized version of ourselves.”

​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.
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As real Alzheimer's progresses, there is not only memory loss, but disorientation, anxiety, depression, aggressive behavior (…) Reliance on a support system of machines to hold our collective memories is a formula for docility. When Steve Jobs brought us [the] Apple computer we were promised bicycles for the mind, but many of us feel we’re ending up with cognitive wheelchairs.”

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.”

~ (emphasis my own)

[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 Z

​Now 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 2025

For 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

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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.

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