"This person is too lazy to create a profile entry."

While today I am a graduate student working on my master's degree in the humanities, I have been using Microsoft Chat roughly since I was in the fourth grade, creating Comic Chat characters since around middle school.

Among other things, my main contribution was a set of Star Trek themed Microsoft Chat characters, created by colorizing and modifying some of the original characters that came with Microsoft Chat (modifying these being a common practice among other AVB or character makers).¹

As a curious middle schooler, at one point I even discovered that by modifying the CChat.exe executable in a hex editor, I was able to replace Microsoft Chat's ability to play RMI files with that of MP3 files, allowing fellow users (at least those who followed the technique) to send MP3 sounds to channels and hear them even though the client had been made before the popularity of the now ubiquitous MP3 audio format. It is in this same spirit, now several years later, that I have created this blog, in which I hope to share my observations as I tinker with Microsoft Chat, attempt to discover how it works, and how to make the most of it (note Eric S. Raymond et al.'s definition of a hacker).

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1. Some of these were of a higher quality than others, and most included roughly one to two dozen poses and gestures. While my old website, The Comic Chat Connection, is no longer updated, an archived version where copies of my characters can be downloaded is still available courtesy of Mermaid Elizabeth.