Ask the Staff!

[Seasonal]

To anyone

I dont know if it was asked but, what was your reaction when you became a staff member.

I had two very different reactions for when I became a GH and a mod. When I became a GH, I didn't have much confidence in my application, so I was actually really surprised when I got a PM from Tess! I was so excited and jumped around the house all day. My mom kept asking why I was so excited so I ended up explaining CS to her that day.

When I was told that my moderator application was successful, I stared at my laptop in disbelief and I was actually shaking! I couldn't stop smiling for hours.

What languages did you guys learn before/ want to learn?

I took Spanish in high school. I was only required to take up to Spanish 3, but I decided to take Spanish 4 because I planned on minoring in Spanish in college. Once I got to college, my advisor strongly suggested that I focus on a math minor and said that Spanish would be useless. I disagreed and vowed to teach myself, but that hasn't happened and I've lost so much knowledge since high school. :/ I'd love to pick it back up someday, though! I am going for a master's in biology so perhaps I'll have time for some extra classes.

I started teaching myself Japanese in my sophomore year of high school because I want to travel there eventually, and I find their culture and language fascinating (admittedly I'm a huge weeb but I am interested in the more historical side of Japan too). Again, I didn't keep up with it and have lost most of the knowledge that I learned.

[nana]

To any staff member:
Do you guys know when some of the CS stickers are ever gonna come out again?

[kkermit.]

Dear any CS Member

Do you have any pets irl at the moment? Or do you plan on getting a pet irl someday?

[Schuyler]

What languages did you guys learn before/ want to learn?

We were required to take Spanish classes in elementary school, but nobody, not even the teachers, really took it seriously and so we didn't learn much of anything besides some scattered vocabulary and basic phrases. The lessons basically amounted to memorizing things like colors and numbers and then spending the rest of the time watching kid's shows in Spanish that none of us ever understood a word of. No study whatsoever of grammar or anything else especially helpful for actually using the language. xP

When we got to middle school (so ~12 years old), we were able to choose between continuing Spanish or switching to German or French. I picked German and stuck with it through my senior year of high school, and I've been continuing to work on it ever since. I'd say I'm more or less fluent with reading and writing, okay with listening, and could still use quite a bit of practice with speaking. Over the last two years, I've been trying to teach myself Russian as well, but improving my German has been my priority, so I'm still very much a beginner with Russian.

As for which languages I want to learn ... Well, everything? If I had my way, I'd study and master ever single language in existence. Somewhat more realistically, my goals for the moment are to become fluent in German and Russian and to achieve at least a working knowledge of Irish, Mandarin, French, Latin, Icelandic, Arabic, and ASL, along with anything else I have the chance to fit in. No particular reason for choosing those, except that I just love languages and those are the ones I've taken the greatest interest in for one reason or another.

[Tess]

To any high staff member: do you guys know each other in person? Like, the admins, admin assistants, global moderators... I know tess and nick probably know each other because they founded the site, but do any other people know each other because of staff positions etc?

Nick is my brother, but apart from him there are only a handful of staff that I've met in person. The last time I met up with other staff was in 2012! I'd love to meet everyone, but it's difficult when we come from so many different countries and states.

Idk if this has been asked before but how was the name "chicken smoothie" decided upon? My mom always calls it chunky chicken bc she doesn't like the sound of it and it gets on my nerves a bit that she doesn't u sweat and that it's just a name. Unless it has some sort of dark meaning witch I would LOVE to hear >:)

No dark meaning haha. I actually came up with the name back in around 2006. It was after I had spent a summer looking after someone's pet chickens and I thought they were awesome so I just brought up chickens in conversation constantly. I used to make a lot of websites as a hobby and I put 'chicken'/'chickens' in the title of all of them. So when I was working on a website which I wanted to be a blend or mixture of a bunch of different cool stuff I figured a smoothie is a cool blended thing, so the title became chicken-smoothie the original idea for that site was completely different to the current site, but I couldn't think of a new name so I just re-used that old name.

Dear Tess

I was wondering when will you sell stickers and pins again? I lost my stickers when i moved and I would love to buy more also I want to get some of the pins (or are they called badges?) anyways long story short will you sell them again in the near future?

I'm sorry, I don't really have any idea when we might next sell stickers and pins

I still have a few sticker sheets leftover from the last sale that I like to use for occasional giveaways/gifts but there's not really enough to support another sale. I want to get some new sticker designs printed next time but it takes quite a bit of work to put them together. The pins (we also call pinback buttons or badges) were all hand-made by me so they're very time-consuming. The main barrier to selling those is that I live in New Zealand so the shipping cost to customers in other countries is about $7.50 USD for a pack of 6 buttons... that's on top of the price of a button pack, so it gets pretty expensive. That's why we mainly do small stickers, cos I can get them into a regular mail envelope to keep shipping costs down. Not many people can afford it or think it's worth it so I only make them very occasionally and just ship to a small number of people.

If I lived in the US I think CS would have a LOT more stuff for sale. I import all our stickers and button parts from America because they're the best quality products I've found. So I have to pay a TON for shipping just to get the stock to New Zealand so I can process it. Then we ship it all the way back to (mostly) American customers! We pretty much sell all our merchandise at cost, meaning we don't make any money (possibly even lose money) on every sale. And that's before taking into account the days of labor of me button making and envelope stuffing and trips to the post office. I just make merchandise because I know it'll make some people happy, especially at Christmas time for gifts. But it's not something we can offer all the time, we mostly just do it for special occasions.

Sometimes it sucks to be so far away from the rest of the world! That's the main reason we don't do other types of merchandise.

[very]

Maybe this is a dumb question, and im sorry if it's in the wrong area... but why do i keep seeing people with zebras that where born in like august of this year? Anyone can answer, its just a general question i guess.

sorry :c i feel dumb

someone helped me, thanks!!

[Schuyler]

Maybe this is a dumb question, and im sorry if it's in the wrong area... but why do i keep seeing people with zebras that where born in like august of this year? Anyone can answer, its just a general question i guess.

sorry :c i feel dumb

someone helped me, thanks!!

It'd be impossible for someone to have a pet born in August this year -- well, unless you found a time traveler! ^^ Maybe you've been seeing zebras adopted this month and have been mixing up the month & day? The dates are ordered year-month-day, so a pet adopted on, say, the 8th of January this year would have the date 2017-01-08. A pet adopted on the 1st of August, on the other hand, would have the date 2017-08-01.

(For future reference, if you have a problem or question about something on CS, it's best to ask it here or in a help ticket. This thread is for questions about getting to know the CS staff better as people, so topics like our hobbies, interests, careers, and so on. c:)

[Musicality]

Why does the pound say that it was given to forever.free by forever.free?

http://www.chickensmoothie.com/viewpet.php?id=22970316

[Shinryu]

Why does the pound say that it was given to forever.free by forever.free?

http://www.chickensmoothie.com/viewpet.php?id=22970316

Heya; pets that were donated to the pound will be listed as "Given to Pound", but pets from banned users will generally be displayed like this! Tess answered a question about it once, here. (Also note Vampy's answer above hers.)

think of it like a wall of shame ;)

[ωolfie]

To staffers:

Are you one who loves or hates speaking in front of a large crowd? If you want to, you could explain your reason, I'm curious