Just a reminder that you can stay up-to-the-minute on everything Transplant by subscribing to the multi-purpose, all-in-one Transplant feed.

Now with extra added Toy Division.

Drop by the forum and congratulate everyone on a job well done.

Speaking of Matts, over at Chip Shop Adventures the Idiot is making his girlfriend a black forest cake. I think we all know how well that’s going to turn out. Mildly NSFW.

Meanwhile, at Ordinary Things Ozge is taking her life into her own hands, at The Flowfield Unity Adam talks about his worst jobs ever, and at Ataraxia Theatre Darcy finally gets to use his grappling gun.

Shi Long Pang is an interesting mix; part history lesson, part comedy, part serious personal journey, it’s all of these things and more than a sum of said parts. There’s wonderfully cartooned characters and backgrounds, a great sense of color as well as place.

Shi Long Pang is well worth checking out

So it goes with the Gimp. Today I upgraded to v2.4. I was hoping that this release would clear up some of the tablet-related problems I had been having with v2.2; instead, tablet handling is worse than ever and I’ve been brought face to face with my own mortality. This has not been a good year for me and software upgrades.

First, the tablet issues. The brush tool has been completely, if you will forgive me for saying so, gimped. Pressure sensitivity has been made very coarse, such that as you increase pressure the line width will remain the same size for a while until suddenly jumping up to a much greater thickness. It is absolutely impossible to draw a smooth line with the new pen tool.

I went to the Gimp knowledge base to see if someone had reported this bug; they had. The response from the developer was to not use the brush tool.

Instead, people using tablets are now expected to use the ink tool all the time. Well, I don’t want to use the ink tool. The brush tool worked (mostly) fine before. The ink tool has ten thousand options and it scares me. Why did they change it? Who out there is using pressure sensitivity without a tablet, and thinks that ragged lines look better than smooth curves?

This is where the “facing my own mortality” part comes in. I realized at this point that I was rambling like an old man, and I’m barely even 35. Eris help me by the time I reach 40. I decided that I would learn to do things the new way, that change is not always a bad thing, and that if I was really serious about the brush I could always download the source and revert the code myself.

Another thing which has changed is that moving a selection no longer moves the image contained within the selection. I had to go back to the knowledge base to find out how to move things. Bah. Back in my day we didn’t even have selections, we just had brushes. And there were only two layers. And we had 4096 colors, but could only use 32 of them at once. And we liked it, dammit!

But I digress. Aside from these issues, the new version seems to be pretty good. I drew the above robot using the pencil tool, which doesn’t appear to suffer from the same jaggedness problem as the brush tool. I’m going to use it in the masthead of my game site, pictured below.

Ataraxia Theatre raises the following question: ‘Comic book stores. Demonic possession. homeopathy. Who could be behind such villainy?’.

Idiot comics presents the ‘concrete Tree’.

Throg Infintron continues at pace.

The Flowfield Unity considers ‘The Periodic Table of Pain’.

Shi Long Pang presents page 95.

Well done, and happy birthday.

Here at Transplant Comics, Dan is the creator of Thog Infinitron. You can see all the comics he beat out for top spot at the contest entry page.

Although there has been significant controversy over this years event, especially with respect to Diamond and the pushing out of several independant distributors as well as webcomics in general.

Not only that but all participants must be ‘for all ages’ – so no swearing, nudity or immoral shenanigans then. Probably best considering. I think they’re hoping to avoid andother Gordon Lee incident:

Lee’s trial comes after three years of legal action arising from the Halloween 2004 distribution of Alternative Comics #2, a Free Comic Book Day sampler which featured an excerpt from the critically acclaimed graphic novel The Salon that depicted Pablo Picasso in the nude, and was allegedly handed to a minor.

In many ways, this just about rules out most every member of Transplant from contributing… in fact some of them would be banned twice.

But that doesn’t matter, because here at Transplant, every comic is a free comic… just click on the links on the right and head on over to whatever you want to read.