Welcome to the second installment of our weekly updates to the members. Let's get started...


Battle of the Boards
Recently, one of our affiliate forums, Slightly Insane, ran a competition called "Battle of the Boards." It began about 7 or 8 weeks ago, back in June. I threw SZ into the mix, hoping to come out with a decent showing. What came of the mess is a victory for the Studio. I'd like to thank everyone who voted for the Studio during the battle. Anyways, congrats again to SZ.


Compressed Coding
It's been a while since the last optimization for SZ's coding. Since the last optimization was more or less an entire recode, I didn't recompress the coding right away, just because of all the bugs that were bound to be there. (And there were quite a few.) Yesterday, I went through and recompress and GZip'd the coding once again and reuploaded it. Most of the SZ forum should now load even faster for everyone. Below is a list of the changes from the original to compressed to gzip size for each version.

v0: 15.8 -> 15.2 -> 6.35
v1: 27.3 -> 26.0 -> 10.0
v2m: 52.4 -> 48.7 -> 19.0
v2l: 15.5 -> 14.7 -> 6.73

Obviously a major change if your browser supports gzip. (Most do now.) So, if you haven't noticed a speed up already, you should hopefully soon.


SZ's Birthday
SZ's 3rd birthday is coming up soon. The terrible twos are over and SZ will begin it's treck into the fourth year. Go Studio Zero!


60k Posts
Though it mostly went unnoticed until Ben posted the next day.... SZ recently rolled over 60k posts. Our next landmark will be 75k and then 100k. Can we do either by Christmas? That's our real challenge. Let's hope.


Starbucks Skin Development
The skin development is getting back into production with Slip's recent return. He was busy for most of July, so it's only now that we can finally get something going. This should hopefully be finished by mid-September at latest.


Interview of the Week
Fredy recently unveiled another weekly activity for the CC: Interview of the Week. A selected member (or staff member) will answer almost any of your questions that you ask. I'd suggest contributing with any questions you have since this week is v3's lead designer, Josh.


Special Caption Contest
This week's caption contest, number 30, is a special week. All prizes are doubled and you're allowed more entries than usual, etc. I'd suggest you all enter if you get a chance.


Kinda a small update this week unfortunately. There should be a much larger update in two weeks though.