Adobe Alternatives That Don’t Suck

Every few months someone asks the same question:


“Is there actually a good alternative to Adobe stuff?”
Usually the answer online is either:
“Just use GIMP bro”
or “nothing comes close”


Reality is somewhere in the middle.
Adobe is still hard to beat if your whole workflow depends on tight integration between apps, shared project structures, agencies using the same pipelines, and years of muscle memory. 
I found this massive community-maintained repository collecting alternatives for basically every Adobe app:


Adobe Alternatives List


It’s honestly one of the best references I’ve seen because it doesn’t pretend everything is a “Photoshop killer.” It just shows what tools are good at what-
Some stuff I think is genuinely worth checking out:


Photoshop alternatives
Krita — legitimately great for painting and illustration
Photopea — absurdly useful browser-based editor
Affinity Photo — probably the closest thing to a professional Photoshop replacement
GIMP — still rough around the edges, but improving constantly - check https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP

Illustrator alternatives
Inkscape — honestly very solid nowadays
Graphite — really interesting newer project
Affinity Designer — probably the easiest transition for Illustrator users

Premiere / video editing
DaVinci Resolve — at this point it’s not even “an alternative,” it’s just industry-standard software
Kdenlive — surprisingly capable open-source editor
Shotcut — lightweight and practical

After Effects / motion graphics
This is still one of the hardest Adobe apps to fully replace.
But:
Blender keeps getting better for motion work
Cavalry is extremely interesting for procedural motion graphics
Natron exists if you lean more into compositing/VFX


Lightroom alternatives
Darktable
RawTherapee
Capture One
Capture One especially is used professionally all over the place.


XD / UI design
Adobe basically lost this battle already.
Figma
Penpot
Framer


Especially if your work is more experimental, indie, motion-heavy, illustration-focused, or pipeline-flexible rather than giant agency production work.
And honestly? Some newer tools feel less bloated than Adobe apps at this point.
The original repo is here if you want to dig through everything yourself:
KenneyNL Adobe Alternatives Repository
Also shoutout to Kenney.nl for maintaining a ton of genuinely useful free resources for creatives and game devs

Ichi the Killer

There are films you discover, and there are films that happen to you. Ichi the Killer — Takashi Miike's gloriously deranged 2001 yakuza nightmare — falls firmly into the second category. I first encountered it the way most people did: through whispered recommendations, a dodgy disc, the promise that it would go further than anything you'd seen before. It delivered. And then some.

Twenty-five years on, it hasn't mellowed.

Based on Hideo Yamamoto's controversial manga, the film drops you into the criminal underworld of Kabukicho, Tokyo, where a yakuza gang is tearing itself apart searching for its missing boss. At the centre sits Kakihara — played with extraordinary, twitchy menace by Tadanobu Asano — a sadomasochist enforcer whose scarred, stapled face has become one of the most iconic images in cult cinema. Somewhere in the shadows lurks Ichi himself: a damaged man-child in a yellow latex suit, weeping as he dismembers people, manipulated by forces he barely understands.

What Miike does with this material is almost witchcraft. Horror film, black comedy, psychosexual character study, ultra-violent action movie — often within the same scene. It shouldn't work. Of course it works.

What gets lost in conversations about its extremity is how emotionally precise it actually is. Beneath all the viscera, it's a film about broken men and what they do with their brokenness. Kakihara doesn't just want to find Ichi — he's in love with the idea of someone who can inflict ultimate pain upon him. It's a film about desire, about numbness, about people who can only feel anything at the absolute outer limits of experience. That's not shock for shock's sake. That's something stranger and more human than most mainstream cinema dares to get near.

Its cult reputation has only grown in the decades since. You can trace its fingerprints across everything from Park Chan-wook's revenge trilogy to the more extreme corners of prestige television. It didn't just push the boundaries; it basically burned everything and salted the earth.

As a curiosity worth noting: the film is getting a new 4K restoration, supervised by Miike and cinematographer Hideo Yamamoto, opening in Japanese theaters. Originally shot on Betacam and transferred to 35mm, there's a genuine question of whether scrubbing it up will cost the film some of its essential grunginess — part of what makes Ichi feel so dangerous is that raw, degraded texture, like you've stumbled onto something you weren't meant to see. A pristine 4K print is almost philosophically at odds with the thing itself. But here we are. 

25 years old movie and still one of the most dangerous ones in my collection.

SUM 41 - CHUCK

 

Sum 41's "CHUCK" was one of those albums that I got too early in my life to actually understand - I was still learning and discovering new stuff, and when I got this CD I remember I was disappointed - expecting a pop skate punk album to blast while skating, I instead got an album for quiet reflection while waiting for the train bringing me back home from the town where I was attending high school.

I was kinda disappointed and honestly the CD kinda got forgotten - at the time I preferred Screeching Weasel, NOFX, Satanic Surfers, Rancid, Exploited and Casualties - stuff that felt like it had more edge, and I was at the same time discovering all about Italian punk hardcore - I was 14 and this whole huge amount of new stuff was a lot to process for a kid coming from a small town.

Then, years later, I found myself listening to this again and again until today I consider it a key album to my musical taste and an awesome album overall.

The album's title is named after a volunteer UN Peacekeeper named Chuck Pelletier who was in the Democratic Republic of Congo where Sum 41 was filming a documentary. Fighting broke out during production, and Pelletier helped the band evacuate their hotel during the shooting and fighting, as he was staying at the same hotel.

Many tracks were way too mellow for me, but a couple of them stuck in my brain forever. Not as adolescent anthems like Fat Lip from their previous album, but as something more honest and less performative.

I am not googling while writing this as I want it to be as honest and direct and personal as possible, but I can tell you that I can still remember every riff of The Bitter End, which is basically almost a thrash metal track and which I can still poorly play — a track that, even with one of the worst and most cringe videos in history, is still a bomb of honesty and vulnerability that 14-year-old me was clearly not ready to hear.

Game Review - ReVOLUTION

There’s a certain kind of game that feels like it wasn’t meant to be widely understood. Not in an elitist way, just… misaligned. Like it’s operating on its own internal logic and never really checks if you’re keeping up. ReVOLUTION is exactly that, and that’s probably why it stuck with me.

Early 2000s, Romania. You can feel it immediately. It has that specific kind of roughness—not just technically, but culturally. Like it’s pulling from influences that don’t fully translate, then forcing them into a shape anyway. I’m into that. It makes things feel less predictable, less designed-by-committee.

On paper it’s a run-and-gun shooter, but that doesn’t really describe what it feels like. You play as a plumber, which sounds like a joke until you realise the game is completely serious about it. Everything revolves around that identity—tools, weapons, systems. It commits so hard that it stops being ironic and just becomes its own thing. That kind of rigidity shouldn’t work, but here it does, in a weird, stubborn way.

Visually, it’s right in that zone I tend to gravitate towards. Heavy, biomechanical, slightly gross. You can see the influence of H. R. Giger in there, but it’s not polished or clean—it’s filtered through limitations, and that actually makes it better. It feels unstable. Like the world is half-built and still mutating. A lot of games try to replicate that aesthetic cleanly and end up losing what made it interesting in the first place. This doesn’t have that problem.

What still doesn’t fully make sense is how it got published by Activision. It feels too specific, too off, like something that should’ve stayed buried in a local scene. But it didn’t, and that adds to the whole thing. It’s like a glitch in the system—this weird, awkward project that somehow got pushed out into a much bigger space than it was built for.

It flopped, obviously. There’s no version of reality where this competes with anything mainstream at the time. But I don’t think that really matters here. Stuff like this isn’t interesting because it succeeds, it’s interesting because it exists at all.

I tried getting it running and hit the usual wall—old software, broken compatibility, the whole thing fighting back. But honestly, even just looking into it, digging through what’s there, is enough. Half the appeal is in that friction anyway.

It’s not a hidden masterpiece or anything like that. It’s just one of those projects that feels slightly out of place, like it came from a parallel version of the industry where different decisions were made. And I’m always going to be more into that than something that works exactly as expected.

EXTRACTS FROM MY PHOTOLOG

Tried a quick html carousel with some pics from my photolog (it is on ig atm but I am evaluating a different home for it since fuckmeta ™)
Let me know what you think and if you know nice alternatives. Here on blogger it feels ouyt of place probably

AEON FLUX

Æon Flux premiered on 30 November 1991 on MTV's Liquid Television as a series of silent short films, two to five minutes each, with no dialogue, no resolution, and a protagonist who died at the end of every single one. Not heroically. Often stupidly — caught in a trap, felled by a stray bullet, undone by her own recklessness. Peter Chung, who had spent the years prior designing characters for Rugrats and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, made this as a deliberate act of aggression against everything those productions represented. It is notable as the first American adult animated series to be a drama rather than a comedy, which sounds like a minor distinction until you watch it and understand how completely it changes what animation is allowed to do.

The premise, to the extent that the shorts have one: Æon Flux is an agent from Monica, an anarchic territory, operating against Bregna, a technologically advanced authoritarian city-state run by Trevor Goodchild. Monica is freedom as ruin — people living without constraint among the wreckage of things that didn't hold together. Bregna is control as gleam — a city that functions, surveils, and slowly devours the people inside it. Chung never tells you which is better. He understood that the question was the point.

The visual language he built to contain all of this came from Egon Schiele, Hergé's ligne claire, Moebius, and the specific angularity of German Expressionism — elongated, distorted figures that move with a boneless, serpentine fluidity, wrapping themselves around architecture as if gravity is a suggestion. The sound design for the silent shorts used laughter, grunts, sighs, and ambient noise in place of speech, which produced something closer to pure cinema than most films that use dialogue achieve. Chung said in 1992: "I was interested in experimenting with visual narrative, telling a story without dialogue. For me there is a solid storyline going on under all the action. It's not really that important to me whether or not everybody agrees on what that story is." This was not humility. It was a statement of method.

The anti-continuity structure was total and intentional. Æon dies, the episode ends, the next episode begins and she is alive again with no explanation, in a different situation, with no memory of what came before. Chung never intended to make more than one batch of shorts, so he killed her at the end of the first series because he had no further plans. MTV pushed for more, the deaths continued, and eventually the structure became the philosophy: a world where consequences don't accumulate, where the protagonist's failures — and they are almost always failures — don't resolve into growth or meaning, where the loop simply resets. Chung was explicit that this was intended to satirise the way Hollywood action narratives manipulate audience sympathy. His version was more honest. His hero dies in a bug trap. She gets shot in the eye by a child. The mission fails. The next episode, she is back.

In 1995, MTV commissioned ten half-hour episodes as a standalone series. The structure shifted, the characters began speaking extensively, and the anti-continuity loosened into something more episodic but still determinedly non-linear in its moral logic. Trevor Goodchild found his full voice here — verbose, charismatic, genuinely visionary, and genuinely monstrous in ways that resist easy categorisation. Chung has always resisted calling him a villain: "Whether he seems a villain or not in each episode will depend on how much you agree with his motives and actions." Trevor's dialogue in the series is the dense, self-aware monologue of someone who has thought too long about power and convinced himself that his conclusions are compassion. "That which does not kill us makes us stranger." "Light, in the absence of eyes, illuminates nothing." "Revolutionaries need an oppressive establishment to thrive, just as governments need hidden enemies to justify stricture." That last one is Chung himself being interviewed, not Trevor speaking, and the line between them is deliberately thin.

What the show was actually doing, underneath the eroticism and the violence and the Gnostic symbolism and the references to Julian Jaynes, was a surveillance argument. The city of Bregna is a watching machine. Trevor announces "nothing is sacred, nothing is secret" and then leads Æon to a private rendezvous in the hollowed-out body of Bregna's former leader, offering her freedom from the camera's eye as a seduction. Æon's entire existence is defined by whether she is being observed — she moves differently in monitored space, exploits blind spots, makes the gaze itself into a weapon. The show understood, thirty years before it became a mainstream conversation, that surveillance is not simply oppression imposed from above but something people participate in willingly, enthusiastically, for reasons they don't fully understand. The show also understood that this was erotic, which most contemporary commentary on surveillance technology has not quite got to yet.

The relationship between Æon and Trevor is the structural engine of the whole thing, and Chung was always clear that it is not resolvable. "No, they are not reconcilable. In fact, their existence depends on the eternal struggle between their respective views. They are aware of this dependency on the other, and that is why they can never bring themselves to destroy the other." This is why Æon never shoots Trevor in the elevator in the pilot, even when she has the shot. Their mutual destruction would be the end of the argument, and the argument is what both of them are made of. It is also, quietly, one of the stranger and more honest love stories in the medium — two people who understand each other completely and are constitutionally unable to stop.

MTV had almost no idea what Chung was actually making. He had to negotiate carefully — he got Trevor to deliver the voiceovers that the network demanded rather than Æon, because putting introspective exposition in her mouth would have destroyed her character's opacity — and he embedded references to Saul Bellow, Nabokov, and Gnostic theology in dialogue that the executives read as flavourful sci-fi patter. The episode "End Sinister" is a reference to Nabokov's Bend Sinister. The demiurge in "The Demiurge" is exactly what Gnosticism means by it. Nobody stopped him.

"End Sinister," the final episode, aired on 10 October 1995, and it is the show's most complete statement of what it has been doing all along. Trevor plans to fire a satellite ray — "Aldus B" — into the population, a forced evolutionary cull designed to kill the weak and accelerate humanity's development. Before he can proceed, Æon discovers a stasis pod in the woods containing an alien: eyeless in one socket, orifice-free, serene in a way that unnerves everyone who encounters it. Trevor, characteristically, finds it beautiful and wants to possess it. The alien eventually departs with Trevor on its ship while Æon waits in the pod, enters a kind of hibernation, and sleeps. She wakes to find Earth transformed — these alien beings everywhere, apparently having displaced humanity entirely. She reaches for the ray and fires it. Most of them die. The rest flee. Trevor then appears and tells her what she has done: the creatures were not invaders. They were us. Evolved humanity, returned or arrived from the future, unrecognisable to the baseline human eye. Æon has just committed genocide against her own species out of pure instinct — the reflex to destroy what looks wrong, what doesn't fit the expected shape of a person.

It is as clean a xenophobia parable as the medium has produced, and the show earns it by never announcing it. There is no speech about what the moment means. Trevor says, with his usual serene self-satisfaction, "We have already evolved so much our actions would be incomprehensible to a human from a thousand years ago," and the episode ends with the two of them in the pod, the last humans, heading somewhere. The argument between control and freedom, between Bregna and Monica, between Trevor's visions and Æon's refusal, terminates not in resolution but in the quiet horror of what reflex does when it meets the unfamiliar. The entire series has been building an argument about what happens when people cannot tolerate ambiguity — in power, in bodies, in each other — and the finale simply extends that argument to its species-level conclusion. The loop, as always in this show, resets. Except this time it doesn't.

The 2005 Charlize Theron film is not worth discussing at length, except to note that Chung saw it in a crowded theatre and described feeling "helpless, humiliated and sad," which is the correct reaction. The animated series exists in a different category entirely — one of the most formally rigorous and thematically dense things American animation has produced, a show that was built on the principle that meaning in a film must remain elusive, left for the viewer to discover, because a reward given is not as precious as one earned. It was broadcast at midnight. It died without ceremony. It has never been adequately replaced.

Game Review - Metal Eden

I went into Metal Eden expecting nothing in particular. 
Reikon Games, the Polish studio behind Ruiner, had announced it during a State of Play in February 2025, delayed it twice — first from May, then from a vague summer window — and the critical reception when it finally landed on 2 September was what you'd charitably call mixed.
Metacritic landed it in the "mixed or average" category. Some people liked it. Most people said it was short. Nobody seemed to be talking about it the way you talk about a game that has actually done something to you.

I devoured it in a single sitting and thought about it for days afterward - it is rare since I usually play multiple games and i abandon most of them after a bit.

Metal Eden is a first-person shooter built in Unreal Engine 5 in which you play as ASKA, a Hyper Unit android sent on a suicide mission to Moebius — a vast orbital city that was supposed to be humanity's next home and has instead become something between a prison and a graveyard. The premise involves Cores, a technology that transfers human consciousness into digital storage, and the Engineers who were supposed to oversee the whole operation and have instead gone violently wrong. The story is the weakest part of the game and I am going to say almost nothing else about it. It is the frame, not the picture.

What the picture actually is: one of the most satisfying movement-and-combat loops I have played in years. ASKA moves the way very few game characters move — with weight and momentum and a sense that the space around her is something to be used rather than traversed. Wall-runs, dashes, ziplines, a jetpack that you cycle in and out of constantly. The game has seven weapons, each of which feels genuinely distinct, and a core-ripping mechanic where you can tear the power sources from weakened enemies and either absorb them to fuel your melee attack or throw them back as explosive grenades. The loop is: move, shoot, rip, punch, move again, never stop. On Normal it runs about six hours. I was not bored for a single minute of it.

Reikon made Ruiner in 2017, which was a top-down cyberpunk brawler built almost entirely in monochrome red and black, and if you played it you already understand what this studio is doing aesthetically. And I fucking love it, I keep the Ruiner artbook on my desk all the time.
Metal Eden is what happens when the same sensibility gets Unreal Engine 5 and a full colour palette to work with. Moebius is enormous — the kind of architecture that communicates both the grandeur of the original project and the specific horror of its failure, monolithic structures in deep mechanical shadow lit by neon that bleeds across reflective surfaces. The cutscenes and the in-game graphics are close enough in quality that the seam between them nearly disappears, which for a game at this budget level is genuinely impressive. The art direction was the first thing that stopped me cold, and it kept doing it throughout.

The criticism that lands most fairly is the Ball Mode — a Metroid Prime-adjacent traversal mechanic where ASKA rolls through environmental sections in a compact sphere. It exists, it is less interesting than everything else in the game, and it interrupts the flow in ways that are hard to justify. The narrative, as mentioned, is doing its best and that best is not enough.  Still, the visuals alone got me so hard I couldn't drop the game for hours.

What nobody seemed to give it enough credit for was the precision of the thing. There is a specific kind of game that knows exactly what it is and executes that thing without padding, without hedging, without adding content to justify a price point. Metal Eden is six hours long because six hours is how long it should be. Every weapon is there because it needed to be there. The movement system is exactly as complex as it has to be and no more. The whole thing is calibrated in a way that most games that cost twice as much and take three times as long simply aren't. Reikon built a game where each component is good enough, and the sum of those parts is somehow brilliant.

Akira

There is a single shot early in Akira that tells you what you're dealing with. Kaneda's motorcycle — that absurd chromium machine — slides into frame with a screech and a shower of sparks, and the camera just holds. Neo-Tokyo blazes behind it. In that moment, before a word of plot has been established, you understand you are somewhere new.

Katsuhiro Otomo released the film in Japan on 16 July 1988 with a budget of ¥1.1 billion, unprecedented in anime history. The production used 160,000 animation cels and 327 distinct colour shades, many of which had to be invented from scratch because existing stock couldn't render Neo-Tokyo at night with the depth Otomo required. The pre-scoring technique — recording dialogue before animation began so that lip movements could be matched precisely rather than approximated — was the inverse of standard practice. Geinoh Yamashirogumi, the collective who wrote the score, delivered the music before the film was finished: Balinese kecak chanting, Japanese festival drumming, orchestral electronics, all locked in place so the animators could synchronise their work to it. The result is that certain sequences have a rhythmic precision that feels less like craft and more like something that arrived pre-assembled. Otomo had spent three years compressing a 2,000-page manga into 124 minutes. He trusted his audience entirely, left the gaps where other directors would have reached for dialogue, and let the imagery carry what the story couldn't.

The setting is 2019, thirty-one years after a single energy release obliterated Tokyo and triggered World War III. A new city has risen from the wreckage — gleaming, corrupt, and rotting simultaneously. Anti-government protests boil over while the Olympic stadium goes up with gleeful cynicism on the horizon. Gang warfare scars the streets below. Into this Otomo drops two childhood friends from an orphanage: Kaneda, who leads a biker gang and has always been comfortable taking up space in the world, and Tetsuo, who follows and has spent his entire life in that shadow resenting it. When Tetsuo survives a near-collision with a government-held psychic child and begins developing telekinetic abilities, the film becomes several things at once — a conspiracy thriller, a puberty narrative rendered as body horror, and a portrait of a friendship breaking along cracks that were always there. His transformation is not just physical. He has spent years being diminished and rescued by the same person, and the power that forces its way through him is the externalisation of everything that has been suppressed. The machine, as in Tsukamoto, does not arrive from outside. It erupts from within.

The film is often described as being about nuclear anxiety, and that reading is entirely defensible. Otomo was born in 1954, which means Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not history to him but living proximity — and the film's inciting catastrophe, a single blinding sphere of light that consumes a city in an instant, maps directly onto that trauma. The opening sequence literalises it: white light, expanding, then gone. But the anxiety in Akira runs deeper than atomic allegory. Japan in 1988 was an economy operating at an inhuman tempo, a society increasingly structured around corporate productivity and the suppression of anything that couldn't be monetised, and what Tetsuo's body does — becoming uncontrollable, violent, then cosmically destructive — is what happens when you run that kind of pressure through a human being long enough.

Against this the film places the institutions that seek to contain and weaponise such power. The Colonel is the most interesting figure in this structure: not a villain in any simple sense, but a man of real, weary integrity who believes he can manage something that was never meant to be managed, and whose tragedy is that he is almost certainly the most competent person in the room and it makes no difference. And then there are the esper children — ancient, childlike, serene — who speak of evolution and the next step in terms the film is careful never to fully decode. Akira itself, the being or the state or the event, remains deliberately unexplained. The film is honest enough to know that explanation would be a lesser thing than the dread of not knowing.

The emotional core, which discussions of the spectacle tend to push aside, is the relationship between Kaneda and Tetsuo. What Otomo understands is that Kaneda's pursuit of Tetsuo throughout the film is not heroic in any clean sense — it is desperate, protective, and ultimately helpless. He cannot save his friend with bravado or a better motorcycle. He cannot match what Tetsuo has become. The final cry of Tetsuo! across the void is one of cinema's most precise expressions of helplessness, and it lands because the film has spent its entire runtime earning it.

The influence on everything that followed is impossible to overstate. The film reached Western audiences through tape trading circuits and a widely distributed dub in 1989, and it rewired expectations of what animation could be. You can trace direct lines through Ghost in the Shell, Evangelion, the visual grammar of the Wachowskis, and a hundred other things.

 For an enormous number of European and North American viewers it was also the first serious contact with anime as a form worth taking seriously — the thing that made subsequent engagement with Miyazaki and Kon and the rest possible. That debt is rarely acknowledged clearly enough.

The limitations are real. Kei is written as a function of plot rather than a person. The compression creates genuine narrative gaps. Some of this is the price of adaptation; some of it is the period. It matters less than you'd expect, because the animation has not aged, the score remains one of cinema's most distinctive and unsettling, and the central argument — about power, suppression, and what a civilisation does when it rebuilds itself on things it refuses to examine — has only become more legible with time.

The 2019 in the film has passed. Neo-Tokyo is still ahead of us, in the ways that matter.

The 4K restoration from 2019, overseen by Otomo himself, is the way to see it if you haven't already. It was also shown in cinemas on the 17th of April 2026 but I was on set and i missed that.