Vaguity, a blog

Thank you for showing me Orion

2024-01-15T00:00:00Z

Last week our family went to a “Forts by Flashlight” event at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. The Wildflower Center is a favorite weekend outing for us (we’re members). Our elder son can run around safely and it’s easy to push a stroller around or wear our younger son.

In the winter they have artists build different themed forts for children to play in. Some of them have tunnels, some have slides, one looks like a house of cards, it’s great. For this event, they opened up for a couple of hours after sunset and had the forts available to play in in the dark. We put a high-vis vest on our almost-three-year-old and gave him his toy flashlight to run around in the dark, me tagging along behind him with a maglite pointed at my feet set on the minimum setting.

After some hot cocoa, we headed to the exit with my elder son on my shoulders. I noticed the sky was clear that night, so I stepped away from the main path for a little bit and pointed out Orion, my favorite constellation since I was kid. Pointing at Orion's belt, I said, “It comes out in the winter and you find it by looking for those three stars in a row: one, two, three.” I turned around and pointed at the Big Dipper too, but of course, it doesn’t have as easy a trick to point it out.

Every night after we put our toddler to bed, he’ll wake up (seemingly after his first REM cycle) and find a parent to climb in bed with. I’ve been working on taking him back to bed and lying down with him, usually accompanied by some sadness on his part at not being allowed in bed with me.

Tonight, he woke up, found me, and said “Daddy” with no hint of distress in his voice. We did our usual routine of “Let's go back to your bed,” and walking him into his room. He stopped before the bed, stuffed tiger in his hand, and said a full sentence I couldn’t quite make out.

“What was that?”

“Thank you.”

“Oh, you’re welcome, but for what?” We climbed in bed. I usually try not to talk too much in the interest of calmly settling him back into sleep.

“Thank you for showing me the constellations. I like the contellations.”

“You’re welcome, I love that — I like the contellations too.”

“Thank you for showing me Orion. It has one,” his index finger held up to start counting, “two, three stars.”

We talked about Orion more for a second, I talked about how I could show him more contellations, how we could maybe get a book at the library about them, or find a show about them. My aunt-in-law gave a bit of advice before he was born, saying that it’s a chance to experience the world anew, through their eyes, as they discover things. It’s easy to forget that, and just as easy to remember and celebrate that when a tiny voice remembers something you told them and recounts it to you.

He smiled, nodded, closed his eyes, and fell asleep about ten minutes later, while I sat there with my hand on his back, full of emotion that he thanked me for showing him something I was interested in sharing.

We’re going to get some books on contellations this week.

It’s finally Spooky Lake Month

2023-10-01T00:00:00Z

It is Oct. 1 which means it is the best time of the year: Spooky Lake Month.

This will be the fourth year that Geo Rutherford has put together a series of stories about unusual water features of all kinds for the month of October. She shares biologically unique sites like Lake Baikal, geologically interesting lakes like the Dallol hydrothermal system, manmade environmental catastrophes like the Techa River, a lot of facts about Great Lakes shipwrecks, and Lake Superior’s loneliest lighthouse.

I started using TikTok in 2020, originally consuming Vine-like content — short, silly videos for a quick laugh. That quickly turned into watching short-form essays as TikTok loosened the time restriction on its posts and more creators showed up on the platform sharing their obsessions for all manner of topics.

TikTok gets a lot of unwarranted flak for being home to frivolous content — the similarities to the defunct Vine are superficially obvious. Folks will always be dismissive of people younger than themselves expressing themselves online in ways they find foreign or incompatible with their sensibilities. And there are a lot of harmless TikTok dances and sketches and pranks from that cohort. The kids are alright.

Besides that “old man yells at cloud” attitude, there are legitimate criticisms and nuanced discussions to be had about issues with user data and algorithm-based discovery, the economics of how creators are able to monetize their content, questionable citizen journalism practices, and the often bizarre trends on livestreams that bubble up to manipulate some money from the viewers and the platform.

But beyond (or perhaps underneath) all of that, the parameters of TikTok as a platform have allowed creators with passions of all kinds a venue that they likely would not have had elsewhere. Creators simply weren’t making this type of content in this sort of format on a platform that had this vector of discovery for users. It’s hard to imagine Hank Green riffing on random science questions as effectively on Tumblr, or Spooky Lake Month’s short-form content finding success on YouTube.

That means I gets to enjoy a month’s worth of videos on a topic of one artist’s personal obsession, which I definitely can’t imagine having happened elsewhere. And that means I now know just how bizarre Lake Baikal really is.

Getting started

2023-09-29T00:00:00Z

It’s been a long time since I have blogged; probably the last time was 2007. First posts are bad. The trouble is usually in getting started.