Chetar



Chetar (pronounced "chee'tar") is the first character, and alias, of Lawrence Cotnam Jr. (born November 17th, 1971). His furry species is Cheetah. Chetar is primarily found on Tapestries, but visits FurryMUCK on occasion. Chetar also exists on several other worlds, but is usually hibernating. Chetar's IC background changes from world to world, as the player has adapted the character to several different types of settings.

OOC information and background
Chetar discovered FurryMUCK in January of 1996, and began to learn his way around the virtual world that the MUCK presented. Fascinated with the game and the people, and the things that went on, he continued to immerse himself into the Furry world, as it then existed over the Internet.

Being a programmer type before even discovering MUCK's, Chetar began to learn the programming language of the game, MUF. Of course, his first real program was also his first time getting into trouble with the wizards of FurryMUCK, as he dropped his Voting Booth program into the central room of the MUCK and proceeded to allow it to spam everyone in the room eliciting usage from others. It's a memory he'll never forget, because he got into an argument with Lynx over it while it was still spamming.

Chetar learned his lesson, though, and continued to learn MUF. Some months later, he wanted to play on a Fantasy/Medieval world, but couldn't find any. FurryMUCK just didn't really cater to this genre of roleplaying. However, he did discover several other Furry-type MUCKs, including Sociopolitical Ramifications, Tapestries and Furtoonia, and met a lot of interesting people. He went on to found and create a new MUCK, called FurryFaire MUCK and (along with some friends) begin to build the world that he wanted to play on.

Things did not always go smoothly:
 * It was a lot of fun, but I was younger then and emotionally, rather spontaneously and prone to flare ups of temper. Yes, I suppose you could call them temper tantrums. I was prone to that back then. I suppose I still am, if severely provoked. But I try to keep a level head now.

After discovering ANSI color on a world called The Lion King MUCK, Chetar was absolutely amazed (mostly that the idea had eluded him for so long). By then he had run a BBS for several years, and ANSI color with IBM graphic characters was flexible and a lot of fun. MUCKs didn't have the IBM graphic character, but ANSI color was a good start. This is about the time Chetar's MUF skills began to really blossom; he wrote many replacement MUFs with flashy coloring (as well as enhanced functionality) for core MUCK programs. He took great pride in cloning many programs, most without ever seeing the original code.

During the work with FurryFaire, Chetar became aquinted with a branch of the Fuzzball TinyMUCK server, called GlowMUCK, which offered a lot of things Fuzzball did not. It was much to his dismay when its developer ceased working on the project, especially with the Fuzzball team already releasing alpha versions of the 6.x line of TinyMUCK server.

Moving away from MUF and relinquishing his wizard positions on a few mucks, Chetar began to work on a new breed of TinyMUCK server, picking up where GlowMUCK's author left off - he wanted a Fuzzball 6.x server with all of GlowMUCK's extras. This project is still an ongoing, with new ideas being tried all the time, and may never be finished. The project is FurionMUCK, a branch of the Fuzzball 6.x line, currently featuring a new way of storing the database using MySQL as a backend storage mechanism, eliminating the need for DB dumps. You can study the project and what has been done so far over at Sourceforge.Net.

Known alternate characters
Chetar was the first character ever created by the player, but Chetar was followed by the creation of Snowferret and Jinxie. Other alternate characters may exist, but they're specific to certain roleplaying situations, or simply kept hidden for personal reasons. Snowferret eventually evolved into Syvel the silkie, but that character has been retired, as has Jinxie.