How did the cookie monster thing start, anyway?
I can say for certain that they were well-established on FFOF for a good while before we ever considered making TLS.
The main lot of us who spent time around there back in the day used

and

VERY regularly as a part of our normal internet banter. That's why it sort of became prevalent within the community that gathered there, so when I posted on the ACF news page to try and band the ACF remnants together & see if we might be able to make a less terrible version of forums for all that stuff, it just very quickly became engrained within the community of people when TLS was being formed, even before we actually set up these boards.
That being said, I honestly can't recall if it was something that was born on FFOF, or if it came over as we gradually collected some older friends. There's a decent possibility that it's something that started out in one of the old ACF Team cliques as

and migrated over to FFOF where we used it especially prominently, and sort of evolved it into a part of our standard lexicon. I can't quite remember, but part of me thinks that Geo or one of the old ACF folk making the awesome version edit of the really big ones for us on FFOF:
I know that those versions were used for the FFOF banner art for a long while, but unfortunately
the Internet Archive's earliest snapshot is from 2007 – which is already when it was very well established, so I'd have to just make a crazy guess at anything before that. I seem to recall that they weren't as overly prominent when I first started posting there just shortly after ACF died, but they still picked up pretty quickly between 2004 & 2007. If there's somebody who might accurately remember more, it'd probably be
@Cthulhu since he was actively running FFOF, and likely recalls more about the goings ons there back in ye olden days.
X