First choice would be a nordic country. They generally rank high up in metrics like health, happiness, etc…

Close second behind those would be New Zealand.

neither GIMP nor Krita is really capable of acting as a replacement for Photoshop yet

I would agree with that. But in all of their defence I’d add that they’re not trying to be. They are their own pieces of kit with their own roadmaps and goals.

The biggest frustration people from Photoshop have is that the expect Gimp or Krita to be a clone of Photoshop with feature to feature parity, and that’s never been the goal of either program.

Photoshop has spent decades basically merging the features of most of their products, so that it’s now basically a photo editor with features of Illustrator and a suite of advanced drawing tools. The only replacement for that would be a hypothetical program that combines Gimp, Krita & Inkscape. But that’s never been the goal of any of those programs. They’re separate kit and as far as I’m aware always will be.

Inkscape: Completely capable. I know many people who have used it instead of illustrator professionally for years.

GIMP: Depends on you. As someone who learned GIMP long before ever learning Photoshop, I find Photoshop unintuitive and frankly stupid. So it’s all about what you learned on. But GIMP relies on spending a few minutes setting it up for your own use case. Literally every window can be moved to anywhere. You can have whatever windows you want open all the time, or hidden behind right clicks, etc… Your tabs and tab groups are completely customizable to how you want to work. BUT the rub is that you have to be interested in doing that. GIMP is trashed for having a bad default UI because the expectation is that it doesn’t have a default UI. My GIMP would look entirely different from someone elses because I use different tools that I want front and centre than someone else might. If you’re not interested in that and just want something that you can learn a “default” setup and go with it (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that) than you’re better off sticking with Photoshop.

As for Krita, whatever else people are telling you, Krita is NOT a replacement for GIMP if you’re doing design work. What it brings to the table in terms of having built in Vector capabilities it negates by having a very limited and basic suite of selection tools. Something that would take you two seconds in PS or Gimp to band select, paint the foreground, feather the selection, shrink it, etc… takes five extra steps in Krita because Krita is a drawing program not a graphic design program; what few “advanced” selection tools they’ve introduced is tacked on and hidden between three or four extra steps because it just wasn’t designed to have them at first and they were added later.

Just because it looks nicer out of the box than Gimp, doesn’t make it better. I’ve tried replacing Gimp with Krita because i like the KDE suite of apps in general. But I was pulling my hair out trying to do even a basic composition using it’s archaic selection tools.

Literally everything.

Maybe I’m just used to my comfortable parliamentary democracy.

You vote for your representative. Whichever party gets the most representatives gets power. It’s either a majority (meaning that they can do whatever they want because they got more representatives than all the other parties combined) or it’s a minority (meaning that to pursue their agenda they’ll need to cooperate and negotiate with the other parties because they don’t have enough representatives to do it themselves)

The leader of that ruling party becomes Prime Minister. He holds less power than a president because in reality he’s just the Prime Minister (First Minister among many) but he has more authority than the leaders of the other parties who didn’t win.

It just seems so simple compared to the lunacy to my south.

So what you’re saying is that scientist’s laziness on the development of flying cars is what is going to lead to the downfall of man.

I always knew it…

apoplectic

Legitimately one of my favourite words.

I used the phrase “tilting at windmills” when discussing current politics and got looked at like an insane person.

No one reads anymore, apparently.

A largely forgotten show from the late 90s called “Seven Days”.

Josie and the Pussycats was lampooning our current celebrity obsessed, “influencer” obsessed, consumer lifestyle 20 years ago. Yes, there was certainly celebrity worship back then. But the way the movie portrayed it and the consumer greed that seeks to profit from it feels even more relevant today.

Plasma:

“Here’s literally all the things… You sort it out, if you want. If not…whatever.”

What is that, about tree-fiddy American?

Best decision my (now ex) wife and I ever made. Not because we are divorced now. But because

a) I’m free to live my own life. and

b) Even back when kids was an option, she and I both kind of saw the world that was coming and decided that we didn’t want to subject our children or grandchildren to the world that was turning to shit.

Looking around today, I feel absolutely vindicated for taking that stance back in the early 2000’s when I was married.

I wouldn’t call this “inconsequential”, but not only is Deckard a Replicant, he’s a very specific Replicant.

Gaff (played by Eddie Olmos) was the original officer assigned to hunting down the escaped replicants, before Holden and before Deckard. When the escaped Androids originally tried to storm the Tyrell corporation, one of them got “fried” going through an electric fence. And it was either there, or in another encounter, that Gaff was wounded in the leg, forcing Holden to take over the case, and we know where that ended up…

I posit that the android that got “fried”, didn’t actually get fried. In concert with the Tyrell corporation, they programmed him with Gaff’s memories in order to finish the job, which is why Gaff is chaperoning him, driving him around; to make sure the memory implant holds. It’s why Gaff seems to know what he’s thinking and can make origami to give him hints. It’s why Gaff at the end of the movie says “You’ve done a man’s work”. And it’s why Gaff is such a dick to him. Imagine chaperoning your artificial replacement around that everyone thinks can do just as good a job as you…

I always watch Blade Runner from that perspective. At least until the sequel came out and ruined it for me.

No. It’s called the Paradox of Tolerance. “Discussing” rationally with the intolerant only serves to justify their position in their own eyes and thereby embolden them.

In other words, putting up with them simply gives them more ink

Turning the other cheek only works if the person doing the slapping has a sense of shame. Trump and his ilk have long since proven they have none.

Logic does not rely on assumptions. It relies on making deductions about what is probable when faced with the current knowledge.

I see what you are meaning, but it’s a misunderstanding of how the scientific method works. Base Assumptions never come into play.

The hypothesis comes from the existing evidence, not the other way around.

For example, Eratosthenes didn’t have an “assumption” that the earth was round and then said, “hmmm…how shall we test this?” Rather, he had heard from someone or other that at noon is a certain city, there was no shadow. While in another city, there was a shadow being cast by objects. He started to logically deduce why that could be. He had his evidence, that in one city to the south, no shadow, and in another city, a shadow of 7 degrees at the same time of day. He knew the distance between the two cities and deduced not only that the earth was round, but it’s size as well.

No gut assumptions necessary.

No downvote. I 100% agree.

Science is not a “belief”. It’s a “deduction”

One is based on logic. The other is based on gut feeling emotion.

edited: I feel like emotion is a better contrast in my analogy.

1. Your right to swing your arm ends where my nose begins (metaphorically speaking)

2. “Facts” and “Beliefs” do not share equal weight in ANY policy discourse.

3. Whatever your religious beliefs (and you are welcome to them) stays at home when you are doing business or in any other way interacting with the public.

You are essentially my thesis statement. Lol.

Awww shucks. Thanks. I appreciate the compliment.