Is there a way to turn off the smiley animations on the left when I'm typing posts. It's very distracting.
No, you can't hide them yourself. I could probably make them as more of a drop-down optional extra bunch of smilies, they don't distract me but they are a bit immature.
If you could even relocate the smiley part to the bottom of the page, that way one didn't have to see them wiggle all the time and you could enlarge the text box so that you wouldn't see them. Or something. Weirdest collection of smileys I have ever seen, by the way. Good work on that.
Weird, thread necromancy on something I forgot I posted. My new strategy is to type lengthy posts on MS Word and copy and paste.