Well, you can take it as an outcry or whatever, I guess I can't wait for GIMP 2.10 release (for so many reasons).
This splash is one out of a dozen I currently have (including animated GIF's).
I like this particular one - when GIMP starts up it looks very sharp and tunes my mind on creativity. Don't get me wrong, but official GIMP splashes always make me feel sad.
Other notes: You can have your own splashes as many as you want. Create 'splashes' folder in user Profile directory (do not delete pre-installed gimp-splash image in Program directory. It's not necessary). GTK, that starts GIMP will randomly pick one of the images in 'splashes' folder. Did I say it supports GIF file formats as well as JPG's and PNG's?
One more thing. Using animated GIFs does not increase GIMP start-up time, no matter how 'heavy' it is. I timed it! Of course, it better not be 50-60 MB in size. Reasonable 5....8 MB is something GTK can handle without problem.

P.S. this image is based on a tutorial by some guy. I can't remember his name/website. It was 2-3 years ago. Tried to locate it online to make a proper reference - no luck. If someone recognizes it, please, let me and everyone else know. Thanks!

Really nice, I do remember seeing the tutorial as well, though never tried it.

its obiously very good, but damn, that looks like an invasion of the bodysnatchers remix with a furry tentacle grabbing an (alien) egg

I did that tutorial a couple of years ago and it worked out perfectly but I lost all that stuff when my USB 18GB crashed. I will try to hunt it up again.

haha, everyone is always antsy for the next version of Gimp...I barely have time to learn some of the new stuff in one version before the next version is out.

There won't be a lot of changes in GIMP 2.10, but those coming changes is a huge leap in GIMP development. I mean full porting to GEGL and (finally) color depths appropriate for high-end image editor. Unified Transform Tool is one of the other most anticipated changes.

Here's some info I dug up.

From Gimp.org, Create your own Splash Screens.
http://www.gimp.org/about/splash/
1. Make the splash 300x200 or more. (Smaller splashes will make text being cut off).
2. Go to your personal GIMP directory. For UNIX users, this is usually in /home/username/.gimp-2.6/. For Windows, this is usually in C:\Documents and Settings\username\.gimp-2.6\ (you may have to enable the option "Show Hidden Files" in your file browser).
3. Create a "splashes" directory if it does not exist.
4. Save your image in the "splashes" directory.

From Gimp 2.6 Manual (still good for 2.8x)
Splash Images
http://www.gimp.org/man/gimp.html#sect6
GIMP comes with a default image for the splash screen but it allows system administrators and users to customize the splash screen by providing other images. The image to be used with the splash screen is chosen as follows:
1.GIMP tries to load a random splash screen from the directory $HOME/.gimp-2.6/splashes.
2.It then falls back to using $HOME/.gimp-2.6/gimp-splash.png.
3.If the user didn’t install any custom splash images, a random image is picked from /usr/share/gimp/2.0/splashes.
4.As a last resort, GIMP uses the default splash image located at /usr/share/gimp/2.0/images/gimp-splash.png.

This seems to be the go to Splash Screen Tutorial
http://www.gimpusers.com/tutorials/colo ... creen-gimp

Plus lot's of YouTube Tutorials.