Chester

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

“... By the standards of many, Randy was himself a tedious, scary, obsessed character. He was not merely obsessed with science but also with fantasy role-playing games. The only way he could tolerate working at such a stupid job for a couple of years was that his off time was completely occupied with enacting fantasy scenarios of a depth and complexity that exercised all of the cranial circuitry that was so conspicuously going to waste in the ILL office. He was part of a group that would meet every Friday night and play until sometime on Sunday. The other stalwarts in the group were a computer science/music double major named Chester, and a history grad student named Avi. ...      ... Anyway, Randy finished his software after a year and a half. It was a success; Chester and Avi liked it. Randy was moderately pleased at having built something so complicated that actually worked, but he bad no illusions about its being good for anything. He was sort of embarrassed at having wasted so much time and mental energy on the project. But he knew that if he hadn't been writing code, he'd have spent the same amount of time playing games or going to Society for Creative Anachronism meetings in medieval drag, so it all zeroed out in the end. Spending the time in front of the computer was arguably better, because it had honed his programming skills, which had been pretty sharp to begin with. On the other hand, he'd done it all on the UNIX system, which was for scientists and engineers--not a savvy move in an age when all the money was in personal computers. ...      ... "This," Chester says, head-faking towards his house, "was the first house to trigger the LOHO."      "LOHO?"      "The Ludicrously Oversized Home Ordinance. Some malcontents rammed it through the city council. You get these, like cardiovascular surgeons and trust-fund parasites who like to have big nice houses, but God forbid some dirty hacker should try to build a house of his own, and send a few cement trucks down their street occasionally."      "They made you repave the street?" ...”