User:CarolynHorn

Good grief. People want to know about me? Man, that's a difficult one. Let's see. In the days when I joined the Creatures Community, the CC lived within Usenet. When was that... Hmmm...  1996 I believe, when C1 was the most exciting "game" for computers.

In those days, CyberLife was a fun bunch of people who joined in all the fun and frolic in the alt.games.creatures group. There were no web-based forums that I can recall; JRChat was the first interactive online happening that I can think of after that. I never could get the hang of online chatting, nor am I very good with web-based forums, and I'm not sure I'm going to get on very well with this Wiki but I'll try.

I didn't do anything very active in the community until Slink (Sandra Linkletter) and Lis Morris made their wonderful Terra Nornia world, when I had all the fun of beta-testing it. Not long after that, Creatures 2 came out in all its buggy glory and the ordure hit the cooling mechanism with a vengeance in the CC. It was never quite the same after that.

There was a big row over the serious bugs in the game, and I ended up becoming very visible in the flame-war -- unusual for the kind of lurker that I tend to be. I won't go into details of the furore but various key figures left, including Slink, and the CyberLife team withdrew completely from the newsgroup. They created their own safe little newsgroup suite on their own server, and that was really the start of the CDN. Eventually that set of newsgroups migrated onto their web pages as a web-based forum.

In the midst of it all, Slink created her own, much improved C2 norn genome -- the c306 -- which I helped to test. The c306 line faired much better than the CL originals, but did not cross-breed well with those. After she left the CC in disgust late in 1998, I made some slight improvements to the c306 with her blessing. The c307 genome was the result, along with Grendel and Ettin versions.

x0tix appeared on the scene at around that time, helpful and sweet soul that she always was. She made a website with her brilliant "Jus' gimme all th' FAQs" pages for the CC. Included in that she had a special set of pages for Slink's work and also my c307 creatures, including my amphibian Grendels and Ettins. I still have those pages etc, culled from my cache back in 1999, and I believe I sent a pile of them to TreeSprite back around the time CL collapsed and the Community was trying to find a focus again.

I helped with one or two other projects, and beta-tested a bunch of stuff; I can't remember them all but Data's great COBs and ant's beautiful world (Arborium) are up there with the items that I enjoyed testing the most.

And that's enough about me. I've been around the CC a very long time, done some stuff, not done a lot, mostly lurked.

P.S If you want to know what I do these days, I went the easy route -- diverted from all the hard gengineering of Creatures into simple ballz and linez in Petz games -- see Pitz for CL's spoof -- but made up for it with the much harder stuff of rescuing and fostering Real Life cats. Have a couple of sites if you're interested:
 * Petz nonsense
 * Cats galore