New Video: Totality (Patreon)

This is adapted from a piece I wrote in 2017 after the August 21st total solar eclipse,  which I saw in Oregon. 

I was reminded of it a couple months ago, as friends and family were talking about their 2024 eclipse plans. That piece is no longer available where it was originally posted, so at first I thought I'd just repost it somewhere, and then, as I re-read it, I started having... ideas.

I know that every time I try doing something a little outside my usual production process, it feels like a much bigger change to myself than to anyone else. To everyone but me, anything I do involving narration and looking at a desk in first-person will be more like a Vi Hart video than not a Vi Hart video. But for me, there's often a lot of uncertainty in whether I'll be able to capture what I'm hoping to, nothing is ever straightforward, and I'll never really know whether I did it until the entire video is all but complete.

This was definitely one with a little extra uncertainty. I wouldn't have pushed through to figure it all out if it weren't for y'all's support here on Patreon, so, thank you.

Making videos is not as easy for me as it used to be. But this one came out exactly like I wanted it to.

Here's a behind-the-scenes photo of my initial brainstorm for ways to make an eclipse:

The mathematical content is implicit rather than explicit, in this video, as I decided to keep the narration focused on the eclipse experience as I'd written it back in 2017. But I definitely applied my math mind to finding as many ways to obtain the eclipse shape as possible.

I find it delightful that you get the right shape by folding a circle. Folded circles, and moons, seem to be a theme so far this year.

One that didn't make it in: pushing a circle of string with a circle. A thing about eclipse shape is that the perimeter will stay the same the entire time , which is clearer when you do it by folding a circle. (That's assuming the two circles are the same size, which, it's still wild that the moon and sun basically appear to be, with just enough variance that we can get both total and annular eclipses, just at this point in the history of life on our planet, while our moon is far but not yet too far away.) (Anyway...) You couldn't so easily deform a string into moon phase shapes, even if you had the right set of negatives to push it with, because the perimeter of moon phase shapes is not constant. Eclipse crescents and moon crescents are totally different animals. But for this video, the string didn't work out how I wanted. Thinking about it now, I should've tried a necklace chain.

Sometimes things work out magically, though. I'd just begun production on my first circle-stuff day when I realized I'd neglected to pick up cookies on my grocery run. And then I remembered... the night before, when I was about to go home from a music thing, the bartender brought out a tin of homemade peanut butter cookies to share with a fellow bartender after the event was over. She offered to share with me too, and though I'm not a big sweets person I never say no to home-made anything. And I still had one of the cookies, wrapped in a cocktail napkin, in my pocket. And by some miracle it was entirely round and unbroken.

Next time I go to that venue I think she'll be amused to learn that one of her cookies has become very slighlty internet famous.

If you're going to see the eclipse today, be safe and have fun! It'll be an experience whether it's cloudy or sunny. It'll be an experience if you are spending time with friends or family you care about, and it'll be an experience if you are with a crowd of thousands also trying to experience things, and it'll be an experience if you are alone. It's not the heavenly bodies that do the experience to us, it is within ourselves.

So here's to having an experience today even if it doesn't involve leaving your house.

🐌,

Vi