A couple of times in the past few months I’ve noticed a new illness sweeping the Web: shot blot. Today I came across another example. This screenshot has, at the bottom, a round fuzzy black blob. I’ve noticed other screenshots lurking around the web with this affliction.
Using my awesome skills of a Doctor, I’m going to propose a likely cause: The GIMP. Suppose you’ve just opened the GIMP, hit the ‘Acquire Screenshot’ button and been presented with a window containing the contents of your screen for cropping. You move over the image and click to focus. But wait! The image window is already focused and, due to the GIMP now having the paintbrush tool as the default selected tool, you inadvertently place a small, easily missed blob on your image.
This particular quirk does seem to be triggered on a non-trivial number of occasions. Yes, dear reader, these will in most cases have passed you by but now you will notice each and every occurrence. I thought I should share the pain :).