Actually Just Void

This blog started with the title Meltworld before I decided to change it to Actually Just Void.

The name Meltworld has quite some history. It originally started in the early 2000s as an obscure Sci-Fi/Cyberpunk story inspired by The Matrix and Quake that I wanted to write when I was a kid. It remained a vague idea, but the name stuck with me.

It briefly became the title of a game project that never made it past the drawing board... mostly because I didn't know how to code yet and was fighting a losing battle with C++. The name then found a home as a DOOM mod. That mod actually existed, but it was never finished and has since become lost media.

Later, I poured some work into reviving it as a Quake mod, though the project was eventually rebranded as Hellgrinder. I developed an early version alongside Chainworm, the creator of the infamous - and also lost - Stonehouse 3D. Naturally, the Hellgrinder demo suffered the exact same fate and is completely lost today. A video still exists but it doesn't show the new weaponry we had implemented - a magic spell-book that turns the player into a battle mage.

Beyond gaming, *Meltworld* was the title of my very first blog in the era of free subdomains like *.de.vu*, *.de.tc*, *.de.tl*, and *.cx.la*. Years later, I happened to notice that the actual domain was up for sale. I didn't hesitate to make it mine.

The subtitle 虚無の星の時間 (Kyomu no hoshi no jikan, ~"Magical Moments of the Void") is related to my username AcidicVoid, which I first used in Quake 3 somewhere in the 2000s. The name also was the working title of an instrumental metal track I made back then. It marks the beginning of my personal golden years in gaming. The subtitle actually has a deeper meaning:

虚無 (kyomu): Nothingness. The void.
の (no): The versatile particle, a connector of words.
星の時間 (hoshi no jikan): literally "time of the stars". In Japanese, this term is often used as a direct equivalent of the German word "Sternstunde" ("finest hour", "moment of glory", "magic moment", best known through the Japanese translation of Stefan Zweig’s Sternstunden der Menschheit - 人類の星の時間).