If you find Skype a little too… polished, then why not use your computer’s abilities in a rather more retro way? p2pvc is a point-to-point colour video chat system, only it runs in terminal and renders the images in ASCII.
Free to download and use on GitHub, the sofware isn’t perhaps for the code-shy, as you’ll need to build the software from source — so if that means nothing to you, maybe convince a nerdy friend to give you a hand. Still, it looks fun enough to be worth it, right? [GutHub]