Getting out to the dark and just looking up is a really good suggestion of a place to start. Turn Left at Orion is a really good absolute beginner book too, so I second that recommendation as well. One resource I’d recommend that was missing from the article is the Cloudy Nights Forums. It’s one of the niche old-style forums that a lot of amateur astronomers frequent.

I’ve recently heard that if you want to get into astronomy… forget getting a scope, just go to NASA’s website, download some of the raw data from the “big guns”, even starting from a decade ago, and figure out a way to analyze it to find inside something that nobody has found yet.

But stargazing is fun as a hobby.