This interview is dedicated to all the real friendships formed over Club Penguin Warfare.
KLONDIKE, CP Army Headquarters– After a multiple month hiatus, welcome to another edition of “Back to the Dawn“! Once again, I will be contacting legendary figures of the earliest times of CPA history in order to bring light into some of the less well documented years of armies.
Alongside me in this project there is always Coolster114, CPAHQHistorian and S/M Army Legend! For this edition of the column we had the chance to talk with the individual responsible for one of the most powerful armies of the World War III (WWIII) era. She is a 2007 Army Legend, and is widely known amongst CPA history enthusiasts as one of the main figures from that time period, with her army playing an important part in changing the tide of the war. The name? Db Penguin, Creator of the Club PenguinAir Force (CPAF).
Db Penguin started her career by creating the Club PenguinAir Force (CPAF) on February 2007, with the army’s colors being blue and orange. The army’s first website was Db Penguin’s personal Club Penguin Cheats website, which was created earlier that year on the 4th of January. The website was called “CP Central“, also known with the names “The Penguin Pals” and “CP Lighthouse” in other time periods. The army kept growing in size and power over the following months, something that didn’t go unnoticed by Oagalthorp, the creator of the Army of Club Penguin (ACP), who even referred to them as having at the time “nearly the size of ACP“. Starting on the 20th of March 2007, ACPgot involved in WWIII versus the Underground Mafias Army (UMA) and its allies.
CPAF’s oldest known surviving video.
Following a small ceasefire and after many important losses from UMA‘s alliance, Oagalthorp in May and June decided to approach the most significant non-aligned armies of the time and get them join the war on ACP‘s side, the biggest of which were the newly formed Rebel Penguin Federation (RPF) and CPAF. Db Penguin accepted Oagalthorp’s invitation and CPAF joined ACP‘s alliance. The new allies turned the tide of the war for ACPand its alliance achieved decisive victory on June 25, 2007, at the battle of Wool Socks. Around this time Db Penguin even joined ACPas a private for a small period. Following the war, she left CPAF temporarily to go to a summer camp, which led to its sizes rapidly dwindling. Upon her return, the situation had become too chaotic to handle and she decided to shut down the army, therefore ending the first generation of CPAF towards the end of summer.
After a failed attempt of starting an army called the PSA, Db Penguin reinstated CPAF on February 2008. However, this second generation never reached the sizes of the original one. Inactivity and a deface which caused most of the website’s content to get deleted resulted in the second generation ending a few months later towards the end of summer. The third and final generation began on November 2008. Like the second generation, it didn’t meet the success of the first one and on February 22, 2009, Db Penguin merged CPAF into the United Penguins Army(UPA). The army held democratic elections for selecting its leader, something very rare in the modern community, but not unusual at the time. Sadly UPA didn’t see much success and shut down on May 26, 2009, ending Db Penguin’s CPA career.
Contacting Db Penguin initially seemed like a really hard task to me and Coolster. The original CPAF website has been turned private, and all other CPAF-related websites we could find either didn’t provide much help in approaching Db Penguin or had been deleted. To top it all off, Db Penguin had pretty much ceased all her public interactions with the CPA community for many years now. After a lot of research we were finally able to contact Db Penguin and she immediately accepted our interview request. She also informed us that apparently she had in fact kept in touch with select individuals within the army community, mostly from ACP, and that there exists an official CPAF veterans Discord server. Despite being a bit disappointed when we realized that we didn’t have to go into all this extensive research to contact Db Penguin, we were thrilled to be having the opportunity to speak to her!
Note: After the interview was concluded, Db Penguin dug into old CPAF archives and provided us with some extra information! Those sections of extra info are denoted by an “EDIT” indication.
Hi Db Penguin! So first of all, how did you come up with your username?
Oh man. So this one is really random. I’m not sure if it would be interesting at all to people honestly. Basically when I started Club Penguin I was in around 5th grade, and we had desks, and I would do this thing where I would like take an extra desk for myself, so I’d have two desks. And then I called it a “desk buddy.” So I was trying to figure out a good name for my penguin and I just arbitrarily chose “Db” as the initials. So technically I’m “Desk Buddy Penguin.” Mainly I wanted to get something that avoided using any numbers in the name because I thought that looked better and more rare. I also figured no one would ever find out what it stood for… lol. It was basically just some random thing I was thinking of at the time. I think a lot of people thought it stood for my actual first and last name initials or something like that, which honestly sounds cooler but sadly that’s not the real story lmao.
What inspired you to create CPAF? Why did you choose the Air Force theme?
So basically … I had this friend from back in elementary school, and I would go to her house on the weekends, and one day she showed me Club Penguin on her computer at home, that was how I was originally introduced to it. For some reason I got really into it and pretty much addicted, I think this was in late 2006-ish. I basically did some Googling around at the start and found some Club Penguin blogs at the time, like news blogs and stuff. Most of them were like “tips and tricks, hacks, news, etc.” that kind of thing. People like Paintboy100 or Holagurl25 (not sure if I’m spelling that right) were the famous bloggers I remember around that time. I realized that people who started blogs like that could become “famous penguins” and get some level of attention / notoriety, so I thought that would be a cool thing to try to achieve. Like “oh, I could do that.” That was the start of the blog idea.
Then, one day on YouTube I found this video of some kind of like Roman army on Club Penguin having a battle, and for some reason it lit up my mind and I was like, “I really want to start something like that”. I honestly thought at the time that the Romans were basically an unorganized spontaneous kind of gathering on CP. I wasn’t aware of them having an actual WordPress blog. I didn’t know if they actually had an organized leadership or anything like that, but to me they were sort of like the original ancestor of all CP armies. I had never heard of CP armies before that. So I ended up starting this army called the “Club Penguin Roman Empire” with the friend who introduced me to Club Penguin. (Also that might have already been a pre-existing army name and we possibly may have just ripped it off, I honestly have no clue).
What ended up happening was that, I got REALLY into the blog and started building it up and working on it every day, and the other friend didn’t really get into it the same way, but she wanted to be the leader while I was technically second in command, so the power dynamic didn’t really make sense. That’s when we pretty much decided to stop working on it together, and I decided to start a new army that I would just do on my own, and that became CPAF. The air force thing, I’m actually not 100% sure how I came up with it, I think I just liked the idea of being in the sky or something, and it was a niche that hadn’t been filled yet. It also seemed like the lighthouse beacon would be a cool HQ.
Did you frequent on the Miniclip forums? They were quite big across the Club Penguin Army scene when you started your career.
Ohhhh yeah, I remember the Miniclip forums. Those people were really OG. I had an account on there but I mostly just lurked. I remember seeing things about ‘legends’ like Vital Viper on Miniclip, that was partially one of the things that inspired me to start. Because I just thought it would be fun to get famous and possibly meet those people. Which is kinda getting into a whole other topic honestly. I think a lot of us kids who started CP got into it for reasons like that, to have some sense of significance and belonging that you didn’t get in your real life for whatever reason. For me, I had really bad social anxiety as a kid, so it felt like I couldn’t be myself in real life and I had a hard time making friends. But it was a lot easier online. Many if not most people back then made armies and CP cheat websites to get fame in-game. I don’t know if you guys ever heard of that girl I mentioned Holagurl, but she had a whole drama thing about this at one point. She wrote this blog post at the time talking about how it’s not healthy for people to try to become famous on CP and neglect their real lives. It was influential at the time for me.
Now its kinda different, armies are more like gaming communities.
Yeah it seems like that from the vibe I get when I go on Discord and stuff. I checked out RPF’s Discord a few months ago or so and I was surprised at the community vibe of it, even though the army is so large. CPAF had a good community vibe back in the day but that was only because we were small, I thought. With big armies it seemed different.
When/How did you first come across people like Oagalthorp and Pink Mafias?
Somewhere in 2007, there was this big CP war event called WWIII, if I’m remembering right. I think I probably found out about them around the same time. I’m guessing I probably just ran into the UMA while on Mammoth, etc., and then probably looked up their site afterwards. And same with ACP, probably just ran into them and/or Google’d for “cp armies”. As for meeting those people specifically, I don’t think I ever actually met Pink Mafias in particular. He was kind of a legend and that was part of the mystique, the fact that it felt like you never really knew where to find him. I think seeing him on CP was a big event. UMA at the time was kind of like the big antagonist for everyone, at least the way I saw it, they were like the shady evil empire at that time, with the red bandanas and sunglasses and everything. Of course they weren’t actually evil but it was a fun game for us to play, it gave us a common enemy to rally against.
After hearing those things about UMA, Coolster, being an UMA veteran, tried to control his anger but it was proven very hard.
COOLSTER114: GRRRR… GRRRRRRR! UMA FOR LIFE! PINK MAFIAS FOREVER!!
Lmao sorry. I actually thought UMA was pretty cool. To be honest the conflict was what made it fun. We didn’t actually dislike them per se but it was more like… just for the competition I guess and the drama of it all lol. As for Oagalthorp, I think I talked to him a few times on the old Xat chats that we had back then. But honestly my biggest memory of him is that he emailed me this letter. I didn’t mind it at the time but looking back at it, it was kind of funny. I kind of admired and looked up to Oagal so I was flattered that he talked to me but basically it was this letter asking to be allies in the fight against UMA (I believe) for WWIII. And it was funny because it had all these demands like, “you must wear a green shirt” (our uniform was blue and orange) “you must show up to our meetings at XYZ times” and all this stuff and in return it was like 1 bullet point: “we will put you on our blogroll” lol. But I honestly didn’t care at the time, I was hyped up and just thought it was awesome to be allies with a huge army lol and of course we never followed through on the green shirt thing. Or like, hardly any of the demands lmao. A lot of the people in my army disliked Oagal (they also used to call him “Bagel”) and I didn’t really get why at the time. I was just like, “guys it’s Oagal!! this is awesome!”. Another thing, my army was basically a dictatorship for a long time, probably most of it, and I just went with what I wanted to do on most things so they followed.
I think I liked most of them. I’m not sure if Commando717 was around yet in that time but, I thought he was cool too. I can talk about what I like about each of them. RPF I remember being impressed by because they had this ridiculously long complicated constitution document. They seemed very intellectual to my middle schooler sensibilities at the time lol. I never knew Commando717 personally though, I might have talked to him but I can’t remember. A bit off topic, but there came a time in CP armies when we all started trying to do different like “government” things, trying to be more democratic and what not, more objective and structured. And one thing I specifically remember, I don’t think I’m the only one who did this, but I would literally go to school and read something in my social studies textbook, and come back that afternoon and try to implement it in my army. Like I remember reading about the “triumvirate” in Rome, which was like a group of 3 leaders, so I did something like that with CPAF! And I specifically remember one day, reading about this guy who fought in some war or something, in an American History textbook and his name was “Oglethorpe” and I was like “That’s him! The guy!”. So to this day I’ve always wondered if that’s where Oagal got his name from. It’s kind of funny how as kids we just copied what we saw adults doing, and things in history and what not, we kind of created our own little societies, with the small scale simulation thing.
For the benefit of readers, can you describe how battles were like back then?
To be honest, I always thought CP battles were a bit vague in the sense that it’s like, it’s not like you can kill people or knock people out in Club Penguin, in a lot of ways you’re just using your imagination, and in reality I don’t think there was a very structured system to decide who actually won back then. But I think it was really like, just eyeball who seems like they have more people, and has held out the longest, and then you get a rough approximation of who “won”. I also remember battles being pretty spontaneous. Like you’d just show up on a server and start something, sometimes it was planned, sometimes not. There WOULD be updates and stuff on the major blogs though, asking for reinforcements and stuff like that. It was pretty off the cuff though.
Which battle of WWIII do you remember the most?
There was this one, I can’t remember the name, but it happened in Mammoth in the boiler room. That battle felt like it took up my whole day. I think it was probably like April or May 2007. There may be pictures/video of it out there still. It was a UMA battle for sure, that I remember. UMA and ACP were there, and us, that’s all I can recall. I’m also not sure who won to be frank, I think ACP?
What difference do you think CPAF made to the WW3?
From my vague recollection of that battle, the amount of CPAF troops there compared to ACP was probably like, … 1/4 the size? 1/5? There are probably pictures and video of it out there to actually objectively measure so maybe that’s somehow some kind of approximation to what kind of impact we made overall. Like maybe we were 1/5 of the effort, something like that. I want to be careful not to overestimate or underestimate our impact honestly, it would probably be better answered by someone else to be honest, someone more objective. I do think we were a good support to ACP though, because I don’t remember the UMA having as strong of an ally. That might have tipped the scales in CPAF/ACP favor.
What is the correct approach for choosing sides in a World War in your opinion?
(Not that you chose the correct side) said Coolster!
This one, is pretty hard for me to give advice on. I think it honestly depends on your objectives. If the game is just about having fun to you, then maybe honestly just pick people you like the most. But in terms of actually winning that might be horrible advice lmao. There’s probably a strategic way of doing things to actually win, but I wouldn’t know a thing about it lmao.
EDIT: I wanted to add here that when we allied with ACP, I think it was because I thought they had a really good positioning as like, THE fundamental club penguin army, just with the name itself. Since the army in real life is the largest branch of the military, intuitively it seems like they would be the biggest and best at least to me
I also think that’s a side reason we allied with the ACP – because the air force ordinarily would be like another branch of the military.
The name ACP was also amazing for SEO because when you searched “club penguin army,” ACP obviously came up first, because of the name. In fact that was probably the single biggest reason for their huge growth in my opinion. Not to mention the fact that their name started with an A which made them show up first in everyone’s blogroll.
So overall, aligning ourselves with the biggest army seemed like a good strategy at the time.
But then again, there’s also an exciting appeal to being the edgy subversive rival to the biggest army, so that kind of angle could also lead to a ton of growth – so maybe all of this is totally wrong! Good luck figuring that out lol.
Would you consider CPAF as one of the largest armies at the time, or an S/M army?
To me, I think we were technically a medium army size-wise but our influence was somewhat disproportionately large compared to our actual numbers which I think is because we had a pretty good blog mostly and just really active people lol.
What is CPAF’s highest troop attendance in history?
Highest troop attendance, I honestly am not sure, if I had to guess maybe like 50 or something, but with a good amount of those being randos that probably just joined on the spot and never actually found our website or anything if that makes sense. We had a core group of people that were actually involved in the website and on the chat, and most of the rest of our numbers were just randos, or people who would come to the site, sign up to join, and then never show up again. I’d say the core group was like 20-30 people-ish, but of course not everyone would show up to battles every time. Growing CPAF to that size, I might have said a little about this before but, the site actually started as a news/hacks/tips type of blog, I have old pictures and stuff, it used to be called “CP Central”. There was this cool guy, I don’t know if you guys know him but I feel like he knew everyone, his name was Brajatk and he was from India apparently. He hacked me like a bunch of coins so I could be fabulously wealthy (sorry if that’s controversial but I’m lazy so it was great at the time) and also made us a header and some cool graphics because he knew how to use GIMP (like a free version of Photoshop), which I later also used.
But anyway, in the beginning it was a news site and I’d post blog posts about that kind of stuff every day, and CPAF was like a side thing but eventually the army overtook the news aspect completely. To be honest I wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand how to hack, so the blog never explained any hacking techniques which is possibly a reason why it didn’t grow as much as other CP news/hacks/tips types of blogs (in addition to just my general laziness lol). As for growing the army and stuff though, besides posting news I think it was also just going on CP and trying to get past those annoying censors they had on the chat. They made it near impossible to say anything in those days but somehow we figured out how to tell them to search CPAF, and then they’d find us on Google. I also occasionally would post on other blogs to ‘advertise’ us but I honestly hated doing that, so I didn’t bother with it much.
EDIT: I think slightly after CP Central, according to Wayback Machine at least, the site was briefly called “the Penguin Pals” (which I also have pictures of) and we used to use this extremely ancient chat client called Bribble.
In your opinion, besides WW3, what was the biggest war CPAF fought in?
I think that was it mainly, we were a pretty short lived army in a lot of ways, mainly because of a lot of stop-and-starts over the years. I can’t remember any other huge things we were involved in. We had a short period of having battles with these guys called the Shadow Troops or Shadow Warriors or something, but that was like small time compared to before lol.
What caused CPAFs fall in 2008 and 2009?
It was kind of overly dramatic and anticlimactic, like silly middle school stuff, but basically like I said CPAF was basically a dictatorship for most of it, and I did a lot of like … cajoling people to get along so it kind of depended on me being there to mediate conflicts, otherwise it would devolve into some chaotic hell realm. So in 2007 when summer came around, I went to summer camp and had no internet or computer for like a month. I left someone else in charge, and I’m not sure what happened EXACTLY because I wasn’t there, but it was basically a mess when I got back, people having fights and what not. I was pretty sensitive and I kind of valued the friendship aspect over the actual army itself, I basically just wanted everyone to get along so I decided to dissolve it because I couldn’t handle the pressure and conflict. I thought having ranks in and of itself was causing the issues, people being mad about power dynamics and stuff like that.
So, we went through a period where we started a different website that I’m pretty sure was called awesomewebsite and pretty much gave everyone editor access, and people could just post what they wanted. This was also in a weird 2007-2008ish era where all 5th graders were really into being “random” so it had that era’s vibe if you guys know what I’m talking about lol. Like lots of “xD” and talking about “omg i love pie im soooo random”. Oh and like, weird memes, we had a lot of weird memes actually. This may be a tangent but that was one of my favorite things actually about CPAF, the weird memes and inside jokes we came up with. We have some really funny ones from one year when we had like ‘elections’ and stuff. Anyway, the awesomewebsite thing eventually also kind of dissolved, and then at some point I decided to re-start the army just for and less serious compared to before. I think that was somewhere in 2008 or possibly 2009? After starting the army a second time around, another cataclysmic event happened lol.
EDIT: So I had to go back and find details about this, but apparently here’s what happened with the second disbandment:
At one point I stepped down as leader (can’t remember why) and a guy called Snowyowl was leading, but he was overthrown by some other higher ups in CPAF called Aang777 and Fishguitar11. Then, I think somehow as a result of that conflict, all of the site’s content got deleted. I ended up getting the permissions back to the website but the army fizzled out again from there.
Why did you decide to merge CPAF into UPA?
That is the final time the CPAF disbanded, basically this was when the army was getting more inactive and a bit boring, because we were all getting older at that point and starting to lose interest and I had the idea one day to do this merger with a different army, and become the UPA which everyone hated, but for me it was a fun project because we got to make a new site and design a new uniform and stuff. And the biggest reason was that I kept thinking that CPAF was going to die out anyway so I guess in a way I was also trying to save us from becoming totally inactive. It was basically a failed attempt to revitalize things. But after that happened and everyone hated it, we kind of just decided to end things, people started quitting and after that point I think it just slowly died out, we were getting to the point of almost graduating middle school and entering high school so it was kind of getting old for everyone.
I think most of what was on the site was deleted and a few posts were left over as a memorial. So I think the army actually ended like, at least 3 times lol. I remember the exact day, I was sitting around drinking a lemonade fizzy drink and I was like, eh why not this will be fun lol. I can’t remember how I met the guys we merged with though. The weird thing about CPAF and CP armies at the time was that, in those days my world genuinely revolved around that stuff and I was naive enough to think it would always be a significant part of my life like I would sit in class all day and just wait to go home and work on my club penguin blog, and go on xat and talk to people and there was so much drama and stuff that happened, so many details. But yet in the grand scheme of things, everything that happened gets forgotten, mostly. It’s like a really big detailed world that over time becomes small and grainy and you gotta squint to look at it.
Most armies are oligarchies nowadays, and democratically elected leaders are very rare, if not non existent. Why did you and other armies at the time decide to follow a democratic voting system in the February 2009 UPA leader elections?
Ah so, I think part of it could have been that RPF influence, assuming they were around at the time, but really it was a little more personal actually. I mentioned a little bit about how there’d be a lot of fights and drama and such during periods when I was gone, and just in general, ESPECIALLY over stuff like ranks. And back then we didn’t have a good system for objectively deciding who would be what rank. There was a lot of favoritism and stuff, just choosing people you liked and got along with, and who were around a lot. I could definitely see how that was unfair so I think I remember wanting it to be more fair (although the merge itself wasn’t democratically decided so that’s kind of ironic) but I think what might have happened is that I thought in the NEW army, everyone could start from scratch and work their way up to a rank objectively by getting like ‘points’ and stuff for doing certain actions.
However, people didn’t like that either because it’s like, you lose all of the effort you’ve already put in to get your current rank, in their minds, which makes sense. That may be one reason I decided to stop with CP Armies in general, because it felt like there was no way to win, like no way to make sure no one gets upset over ranks. It’s possible though that I may be completely remembering this wrong and we just transferred the ranks, but I swear I remember some kind of like points-based system thing. We also did have elections in CPAF at one point, I remember because we had really funny election memes lol. I think that worked out better.
What inspired you to join ACP? What do you remember from your time in the army?
To be honest, I can only vaguely remember being “in” ACP, I think I may have pretty much just been a member in name only and I didn’t necessarily participate in anything much with them. But if I were to guess why I did that, it was probably to get to know the people in there, build some goodwill, and just see how they do things. To be honest, I never was that interested in joining another army in CP. Even when I first started I always had the inclination to just make my own army, because I liked the creative process of building the website, the freedom to try my ideas without getting permission from anyone, and because I hate being told what to do lmao. But honestly I think I’m a somewhat bad leader in some ways, I was better at the creative aspect of things and not necessarily at managing people. Trying to be the mediator in peoples’ conflicts stresses me out.
You are arguably the most successful female leader in early army history, alongside maybe Abercrombie29. You are also the first female army legend. How was it like being one of the not so many female members of early army community?
Well, this might go off on a tangent, but basically ever since I was little I was just naturally a tomboy. Like from 7-11ish years old I was a girl that just wanted to watch Dragon Ball Z and play Pokemon Ruby version on my Gameboy lol. I only wanted to do ‘boy things’ so I didn’t fit in. People thought I was weird so I was basically an outsider in school. I think that’s partially why I liked CP so much, because none of that mattered since it’s all just anonymous. I could have even hidden my gender and I don’t think anyone would have noticed (although I would’ve felt weird about that). But yeah, it was liberating at the time to just be myself and not have to be self-conscious about appearance, etc., especially since I had really bad social anxiety, which pretty much went away when I was on the computer.
As for how it was and how people treated me, I think people were pretty nice overall. I just had to make it clear that I was a girl because people never knew otherwise and that could lead to some weird situations. I used to have to put like a female symbol thing in my name on Xat chats so people would know, and I used to wear a pink hoodie on club penguin. But yeah, I was lucky that people just treated me normally and I didn’t really want to think of myself as different at the time for being a girl. If it affected me at all, then I either wasn’t aware of it or I must have blocked it out. I wanted to just think of myself as a CP army leader and not necessarily a FEMALE CP Army leader, I didn’t think that part was important as a distinction. But I also get the fact that in the grand scheme of things, in context, that’s how people are going to remember me so I’m fine with it but I’d also like to be recognized just as myself.
What do you regard as your greatest achievement in armies, besides being inducted as a CPA Legend?
It sounds corny to say this but the REAL achievement…. is the friends we made along the way. We really were a close knit army, I thought. Like one of our old members 123log said one time, I could probably find the quote: “We weren’t the biggest army or the best, but we had a friendship within the army, unlike most”. I’m still really good friends with someone I met back then all the way when I was like, 11 years old. It’s pretty crazy, I just talked to him the other day. We’ve never even met in real life so I think it’s odd how that can happen. In those days the idea of meeting someone online was really strange but now it’s so common. It’s funny how things have changed and I still keep in touch with a lot of the other army members.
Also, I remember back then there was a lot of cautiousness about meeting people online, but we all ended up being who we said we were. It was surprisingly innocent. I guess a secondary achievement was that working on that website made me realize I liked writing and being creative. I still feel like I’m chasing the dragon of when I was a kid, the motivation I had where I just genuinely LIKED making stuff and it came naturally. I had no fear, no procrastination, I didn’t have to force myself to write. These days it’s hard to get myself to do creative stuff even if I WANT to do it. Maybe some people know what I’m talking about lol. I think it’s cool what you guys are doing, putting together something like this, gathering all the history in one place. I can definitely respect anyone doing something creative like that.
EDIT: Here’s the quote by my friend that i referenced earlier, for the biggest achievement / power of friendship.
Would you consider a CPAF revival/reunion in the future in CPPSes?
I would definitely consider it, it’s more a matter of whether or not other members would be interested. If something like that were to happen, I think it would just be for fun though, like nothing serious, we’d probably just get together and play find four or something. Probably no actual battles or anything. But you never know… .
What advice would you give to current army leaders in order to make a successful army?
Hmmm, I’d say take this with a grain of salt because I’m obviously RUSTY (a big understatement). But I think one thing hasn’t changed, which is that blogs are really important. Back in the day I really think that the people who had the best blogs – the best writing, the best appearance, the most put together, up-to-date, etc. – attracted the most people. That’s the one thing that stood out. I was pretty crazy about it back then, I would literally go and edit peoples’ comments, to add the proper grammar, like capitalizing shit and fixing their punctuation. But it got to that level, trying to get things to look nice and these days, it’s amazing how good the blogs are. Like, what they have now blows the old blogs out of the water. So I think getting really good graphics done, by an artist, seems important and good writing.
Also, I do think there’s something to be said for just … being a good person to be around. I think it might be somewhat hard to grow an army if you have trouble getting along with others, because in-fighting could cause things to fall apart. But it’s not necessarily impossible, you might just need to partner up with someone who’s better at that. Like you guys said earlier, balancing things out with people with different strengths. Seems like things are more egalitarian these days anyways, so power is probably better distributed across more than just 1 person lol. That’s all I can add from an onlookers perspective, I’m sure there’s other stuff that only current insiders would know about though so I can’t really speak on that.
After reading this interview multiple times in order to create this post, I have to say it hits differently to me than all the previous ones. It reminded me of why I got so attached to this community on the first place. Db Penguins mentions that in her eyes, wars are not about hating others but about having fun, and went in big depth regarding the community aspect of CPAF and the lasting friendships that were formed over the years. The memes, the alliances, the search engine fight, building the strongest of bonds with random peers all over the world and losing your sleep over something so insignificant in the greater scheme of things, just for the pure essence of entertainment that it provides. A “politics simulation” realest than any other game there is but on the same time with a clear line between fun and obsession, which ironically is based on a virtual world with dancing penguins. In my eyes, this is what CPA has always been about and why the current army reality alienates me day by day.
But those are the main points I took out of this interview. What do YOU think? Are there any extra questions about Db Penguin/CPAF you would like to see answered? Please let us know in the comments below!
