About Octahedron World

Who am I?

Hi, my name is Matthias.

I am a Software Engineer and Team Lead. But since I was a teenager, I have been thinking of stories and building other worlds in my head. Later, I have written them down, forgot them, found them again, added layers of ideas to them and so on.

I am several decades older and still, from time to time, I have ideas popping up. So there's plenty of material.

What should I do with all that content in my head?

Some years ago, one of these ideas grew so large that it had to be channelled into a novel. And I have even managed to write and publish it together with my beloved wife, Anne. It is a fantasy novel written in German and called "Die Hermetiker". And I'm sure I will place one or the other hint on these pages, probably even a sample chapter. For the beginning, you can read about its worldbuilding and other things

But there were many other stories ranging from space opera over cyberpunk to researched science facts. For those, I haven't found a suitable channel yet.

I've tried many formats. As a developer, it's so easy to get lost in creating the best possible blog technology and forgetting about the content. And so I've tried many variants all bound to conditions like "at least one complete article per week". And I never managed to deliver that much and lost track after a while.

Byte Sized Fiction

Then came the Twitter crisis. Elon Musk wanted to buy Twitter. And everyone tried out other things like Mastodon. This was the opportunity for a reboot and the creation of a purposeful account.

The format was given. The maximum on that instance was 1.000 characters per toot. So I sliced my content into small 150-word-pieces and published the material in series that I called storylines. What started was a phase I called the Cambrian Explosion of content.

Because you might lose the overview after some time when skimming throug a social media feed, after a while I came back to the original plan of creating a website for it. But this time with the difference that there is quite some content already.

And the routined pace of four contributions per week or 2 to 3 printed pages remained. Amazing. And I'll never forget the additional thrill beyond continuous writing: compression into flash fiction and and creating a little bit of suspense every day.

Reformatting

But that was not the end. Sooner or later, the concept had to reach its creative limits and the willingnes to go beyond this artificial constraint got bigger and bigger. The next iterations therefore went back to publishing full short stories, this time in a monthly magazine format. I also refurbished the Storylines and recreated full fledged short stories out of them again. But you could still see how things grew. All content is live during their creation with all the steps inbetween. Whenever a new chapter or paragraph will be available, the site will be updated.

Consolidating

Fast forward to 2026. Another big change of the page and especially its content. I've dropped the concept of monthly magazines with mixed topics and introduced a structure that leans into my story arcs. One chapter for each arc and you find all the material that belongs to one world in that chapter, ready to explore the whole world at once.

Creating fiction in the area of sci fi and fantasy means worldbuilding. Creating Principles that can be reused is much simpler and more concise than starting with a story and trying to adapt the surroundings to it. This is my way of imagining content and I thought this should be reflected on the page.

Side effect: All of my other ideas (music, games, coding, photography) fit in as well.

Nitty Gritty

Want some tech facts about the portal?

I'm using Solid JS (Solid Start) and deploy everything to a self hosted Docker Image that lives in a self hosted Hetzner server. Therefore I turned away from my previous iterations with Next.js and Vercel (whose policies I don't like that much anymore).

I don't want ads on the platform. The minimal and bespoke tracking is done via - you guessed it - a self hosted Matomo instance (after also exiting Google Analytics).

I use Tailwind for the styles and a bespoke markdown pipeline base on unified and remark to create the pages. All the text lives next to the code and goes through the same deployment cycle as the code itself.

Every topic comes with its signature image. Most of the key visual images come from the midjourney AI or Gemini's Nano Banana.

Have Fun

The first purpose of my texts is to entertain myself during writing.

But I also appreciate feedback and discussion. How do you like it? Would you want something changed? Are you curious about what is coming next?

I'm still thinking of a direct feedback loop inside the page. I'd love to hear your thoughts. But for now, you can mail me, or reach me via Mastodon, Bluesky or Instagram.

But of course, I also want you to have some fun with my texts. Why don't you dive into them?