My First Blog

Date: August 4, 2026

Last modified: August 5, 2026 (05:31 UTC)

In my pursuit of the Community Builder badge, I’ll be responding to the group prompts given out for certain days! Today’s is “Tell us all about your very first blog!” which should be pretty easy as my blogging attempts have been… rather lackluster. My first blog comes from my time over at Neocities. My first blog post comes all the way back March 1st, 2024. I’d replicate them here, but I don’t think they have much interest as it is primarily just me complaining about being busy (so I guess things haven’t really changed in two years!). I’ve deleted blog posts with every time I’ve restarted my blog, but I hope to bring some over from my last site iteration, as I began doing weekly recaps and I think there is some value in the ones I produced.Weekly recaps are something that I want to bring back, as its a good way for me to recall what I actually did that week. Plus, I can share links I found throughout the web, which I always enjoy going through on other people’s websites! I’m not sure what name I could give it, though… I like the name of fyr’s Scraps.

I began this blog as I wanted to get used to writing for longer periods of time and with more evocative detail. I know that right now my writing is not the greatest as I tend towards writing more plain in blog posts, but I hope that by writing more I get used to actually expanding upon situations with detail. I also wanted to connect with the community; I’ve been in indie web circles for three years now, but I’ve never fully engaged with people outside of the 32-Bit Cafe I highly recommend people joining either the Discord and/or the forums, or at least just take a gander at the resources. The community is super friendly and helpful! My continued existence in this space can definitely be attributed to their kindness. But isn’t the whole point of this indie web movement to not only increase individual creativity online, but to connect with other people in a deeper way? That’s the primary motivator behind this blog, which is why I hope to eventually add webmentions to increase this social connection.

For those wondering, Aster’s Asterisms comes from my name (Aster) and the term for an observed pattern of stars in the sky. As for my other websites, Eight Mountains comes from the Four Great Mountains of Chinese Buddhism, which are actual mountains, and the Four Great Mountains of Taiwan, which are prominent Buddhist organizations. This is to reflect the website’s focus on Chinese Buddhism, and in particular the role that organizations and holy sites play in religious expression and regulation. Maumee Genealogy comes from the Maumee River, which flows through my home town of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and it’s pronunciation being the same as “mommy” (thus connection to genealogy). Leveret Star comes from the star theme I’ve kinda established with my name and Tu’er Shen, the Leveret God, who is the God of homosexuality in Daoism.