Ask the Staff!

[coyote!]

To the great, all-mighty Tess,

Hello, I hope your life is going fine right now!
I have a huge burning question that's been practically devouring me for quite a bit.

I'm aware you hide your online status, and that you hardly post anymore. I'm not quite sure how active you are nowadays or what you do outside of CS.

But,
Was 2011-2012 CS's "peak" time?
You know, the time of rainbow MS paint sparkledogs, text abbreviations, and Smoothiecon?

I even have evidence to prove it! (thanks to some snooping around and the wayback machine)
• Many, many oekaki drawings were made
• By October 2012 you had roughly 10k posts vs 14k now (i did the math... that's roughly 250 posts a month, and just an average of 57 a month since then. since 2008 that's about 115 posts a month, but you're not really keeping up with that)
• We had Smoothiecon in 2012. Enough said.
• 2011 had the Cake Contest and we haven't had anything else similar to it (unless you count the pride art contest on instagram last year, but that wasn't on the site)
• I picked about a dozen random dates in the two years and most of them had over 1.2k users on at a time. Right now as I'm typing this there are 696.
• There's a big spike seen in the number of wayback machine captures in Oct 2012 and isn't seen again for another 3 years
• etc etc etc

I've noticed the forum users are a bit more mature nowadays compared to those back in the early days of CS. They used text talk, excessive smilies, and incorrect grammar.

Also, I've slowly gathered enough questions to compose a full-on interview with you, haha. You were actually in my dreams TWICE, where I just asked you a billion questions about CS history and the inner workings of the site. I even have a copy of my unfinished list of questions to post on this thread, which I probably won't post unless you'd like me to.

Please don't think I'm weird, I'm just a huge CS enthusiast! I dream of being a GH someday and educating interested members like myself on the history of CS.

[Kyar]

Has anyone here ever flown a kite? I remember I used to when I was young. I even made ones out of paper! :D

Yes, a few summers ago my fiance and I bought a kite and had a really great time with it - although it nearly hit me in the head when it took a nosedive! I used to fly little kites with my sisters when we were growing up, but we never made our own.

to : anyone

are there anything small and random that you treasure dearly?

I have plenty of things like this lol. I tend to collect a lot of little trinkets here and there. I think some of the ones that stand out would be a little toy horse given to me by my riding instructor when I was young, and a pair of carved stones I bought on my first big family vacation!

[Michael's Fan.]

To anyone:
When did you first start drawing (cs or digitally)? I started digital art for the first time in early 2017, after I joined. It was my first experience ever with digital art! if you look at my first drawing (haha, it's bad, but I didn't delete it since It shows how much I have improved!) And then look and my recent drawings, you notice a big difference. CS has changed my life, I would've never gotten this great at drawing w/o chickenpaint/chickensmoothie .

I've been drawing since 2009, just because of my big sister, who is a great artist and I wanted to be like her, now I'm much better then her *sweats*.

[Swiftalu]

to anyone
in your friend group, which role are you (like mom friend or whatever lol)

I take 2 roles either as the comic relief person or as the nerd who knows everything about a game I've played :'D

Has anyone here ever flown a kite? I remember I used to when I was young. I even made ones out of paper! :D

Yes! I flew one earlier this year for my universities destressing event, they brought in kites you could assemble and I flew one! It was pretty relaxing and I got a really nice looking picture out of it!

to : anyone

are there anything small and random that you treasure dearly?

I treasure one of my stuffed animals very dearly as it helps me sleep at night, when I was a kid I was very afraid of mice (Still am) but believed mice were afraid of bells, so I slept with my stuffed animal every night since it had a bell. I still sleep with it as it relaxes me a lot!

To anyone:
When did you first start drawing (cs or digitally)? I started digital art for the first time in early 2017, after I joined. It was my first experience ever with digital art! if you look at my first drawing (haha, it's bad, but I didn't delete it since It shows how much I have improved!) And then look and my recent drawings, you notice a big difference. CS has changed my life, I would've never gotten this great at drawing w/o chickenpaint/chickensmoothie :).

I've been drawing since 2009, just because of my big sister, who is a great artist and I wanted to be like her, now I'm much better then her *sweats*.

I've been drawing my whole life basically, all the way back when I used to draw on the walls and anger my parents (lol), I've always been known as the artistic kid growing up, but I consider myself as beginning to start seriously drawing back in 2010. In my family no one else really draws as far as I know, they are really into musical arts however.

[Kira Nightblade]

To: Anyone
I have always wondered this, but where did the name 'Chicken Smoothie' come from?

To: Swiftalu
What program do you use to animate? Who is your inspiration in art? What led you to Chicken Smoothie?

[vicasterology]

to anyone

choose your fighter: friends, seinfeld, how i met your mother, or the office

[Swiftalu]

To: Swiftalu
What program do you use to animate? Who is your inspiration in art? What led you to Chicken Smoothie?

It depends on the animation, but the animations you might have been seeing in signatures was done with DragonBones! It's a free, open source program. c: A little tricky to get the hang of but a very good budget option in comparison to Spine!

I have a lot of art inspirations, my biggest was probably a dA user called PurpleKecleon at the time (They are no longer on dA), they're paintings inspired me a lot when I was starting out with lineless/painting! There's a couple here on CS too now; Chia, Yagmur, qwertyo, RainbowCharizard are probably just to name a couple who have inspired me in the recent years!

I kinda found ChickenSmoothie through another site called Foopets, was just randomly browsing profiles and saw some CS pets on one. I thought they looked really cool! So I joined, because back then I used to join a lot of virtual pet sites lol. This is the only one that has stuck with me over the years!

[yeosang1]

To; sollaby, Nadine, and/or swiftalu
How in the world did you come up with your usernames?
They are so aesthetically pleasing <3

[Oddlybubblegum]

To: Anyone
What is the smallest thing that bugs you?

[Swiftalu]

To; sollaby, Nadine, and/or swiftalu
How in the world did you come up with your usernames?
They are so aesthetically pleasing <3

My username goes wayyyy back in 2009 when I used to roleplay warrior cats on my iPhone (Yup, it was through an app not intended for roleplaying lol!) I used to be super obsessed with warrior cats so I made my own warrior OC named Swiftstar who was leader of Lunaclan.

Fast forward to when I got introduced to Foopets, I hadn't really gotten a concrete username for myself yet so I used Swiftstar-Lunaclan since I was still very obsessed with the series. I met someone on there who had a username that I thought was pretty cool and they told me they merged it down from a longer username, I wanted to do it too! So I shortened that long username down to Swiftalu, and now I continue to use that today. :'D

To: Anyone
What is the smallest thing that bugs you?

There's honestly a lot of small things that bug me, it's usually with other people though. I would name something but, honestly, I can't think of anything right now. S: