Fahim Farook

A long, vertical screenshot of a direct message conversation between a user and a potential scammer posing as a fellow author. The scammer uses vague, generic praise and eventually pressures the user to "implement a sales funnel" to gain visibility. The user responds with humorous, sci-fi-themed "baiting," claiming they use funnels to transport "green men from Mars." The conversation ends with the user jokingly asking for funding for their interplanetary project, to which the scammer declines with a laughing emoji and saying: "I’ll cheer from Earth for now my investment portfolio doesn’t currently cover interplanetary funnels 😄" The user responds with: "So you're only interested in funnels for sending money from other people's pockets to yours? 😛"

Scammer: "You need a sales funnel for your books."
Me: "I have funnels! I use them to transport green rice from Mars." 🪐

I love the smell of scam-bait in the morning!

Seeing an "author" scammer realize they won’t get my money (or my brain cells) is the best part of my day. #ScamBait #WritingLife

Yep! Regularly get people on TikTok who want to scam writers in one way or another. Even if I say I have no money, they say "You can pay me in installments" etc.

I guess any little bit they can squeeze out of you is enough when the volume is high enough?

I sympathize! Personally, when I feel like that, I feel doing something else is the best way to move forward. Sort of let the batteries re-charge?

If you still own the rights to the book, you can always self-publish, can't you? That might be the easiest way to bring it back?

Yeah, it's either persevere or give up. But these days, given that a lot of people say they do original art and then rely on a generative model, giving up doesn't seem to be an option 🙂

Thanks for the kind words about the wife. It's a longer-term thing. But we persevere there too 🙂

I can never find suitable stock photo images, and my wife who does the art normally, has health issues which prevent her from getting stuff done. So I've been trying to learn to draw too.

Not doing as well as you are though — big gap between imagination and result for me 🙂

This is why I've just started writing a new novel — I don't think AI could come up with the kind of plots that are rolling around in my head 😛

This is something which puzzles me a lot. I loved Asimov's work when I was younger but didn't know about his harassing behaviour till a few years ago. Now I find him distasteful.

But I see others still going on about how great he is. Don't they know? Or care?

I tried the app a few days ago, but they were getting a lot of users at that point and things were not quite working 🙂Might have been sorted out by now but didn't go back since the initial impression was very glitchy ... at least for me.

A painting of an alien landscape with orange sands and a purple sky where a green planet with a golden ring around it hangs on one side of the sky. The landscape is dotted with mounds or stones on which glowing red plants appear. There's a green semi-transparent creature looking down on a yellow-golden plant with glowing branches.

Instead of the usual "Animal Antics" paintings, I did something different this week — I call it "Alien Dreams" 🙂

#Art #Painting

They can still do round the world if the Earth was a disc, right? 😛

Still to find a place like that 🙂Everywhere we've tried, there's sometthin missing ... most notably Sri Lanka fruit 😛

A painting of a furry dog standing in front of a stone archway in a stone wall, possibly that of a castle, with mountains and a river behind him. The dog is standing on two feet and is holding a piece of paper in one hand and has the other hand raised, as if perhaps reading a poem?

Continuing on with my "Animal Antics" series, here's "Doggerel Writer" 🙂

I'm happier with this one than I was with the previous paintings since I see fewer issues, but I still feel there's room for improvement.

#Art #Painting #AnimalAntics

Congratulations 🙂

A screenshot of a web app showing a list of images in pinterest style with a top menu of options that say - Explore, Collections, Favourites, Shared, and Search

Created a quick PHP app with multi-user functionality for managing reference/inspirational art.

It has some features that I really love — the ability to create colour palettes from an image and allow downloading to Procreate as a colour swatch 🙂

#Coding #Art #WebApps

A painting of a tall building with a spire and a mountain covered with vegetation stands in the background while a cat with a red fascia around its midriff stands on two feet with raised hands.

To go along with the previous painting titled "Mouseketeer", I've created a new one called "Catechist" 🙂

In fact, I'm thinking of doing a whole series of these ... Will I get there? Or will my Apple Pencil break? Tune in next time to find out 😛

#Art #Painting #AnimalAntics

I've been slowly building an ecosystem of apps - an issue tracker for bugs, an app to send builds to my android/iOS devices like AirDrop (for Android) which auto installs apps, an ebook reader which actually works etc.

It works beautifylly together. Now I can work on my art 🙂

#Planning #Dev #Art

A painting of a mouse wearing a belt and a sash with a sheath and wearing a feathered hat holding a glowing sword up. Behind the mouse there's a big mountain range from which a waterfall comes down and turns into a steam.

This is an image which has been rattling around in my head for a few days now. I call it "Mouseketeer" 😛

#Art #Ideas #Painting

An image with a yellow background where a big blue letter "B" has an orangutan hanging from it with one hand. With its other hand the orangutan is holding on to the letters "ook"

An icon for an app that I'm trying out. Not quite sure if it works or not, but the first bit of drawing I've done in a fair bit ...

#Art #Icon #Ideas

A web-based bug tracker showing a list of project cards where each card shows the name of the project, total issues, active issues and a few other details.

Created a simple, lightweight, and easy to install/deploy issue tracker yesterday for our presonal use. We like it so much that I've decided to release it as an open source project:
github.com/FahimF/Buggy

Let me know if you've any feedback 🙂

#OpenSource #BugTracking #IssueTracking

A web-based bug tracker showing a list of project cards where each card shows the name of the project, total issues, active issues and a few other details.

Created a quick and lightweight bug tracker 🙂 Been using multiple solutions but none of them really worked for us. This one is customized to meet our requirements.

Within an hour of creating it, the wife has already added a bunch of projects - and that's not even half!

#Tools #Development #Web

I've been checking out art courses online and it's interesting how many great artists don't realize that showing "how" to do something isn't the best way to teach 🙂

You need to teachy people "why" - that allows you to re-use the principle in other ways, not learn by rote.

#Learning #Art #Teaching

Now You See Me: Now You Don't (2025) ⭐ 6.1 | Crime, Thriller 1h 53m | PG-13

"Now You See Me: Now You Don't" (www.imdb.com/title/tt4712...) was disappointing. It telegraphed what was coming very early - if you didn't foresee the major reveal at the end, you weren't paying attention 😛

And the sequence in the middle with them each doing tricks? Annoying!

#Movies #English

The Running Man (2025) ⭐ 6.5 | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi 2h 13m | R

"The Running Man" (www.imdb.com/title/tt1410...) seems hyper-violent (like a lot of stuff these days) but on the other hand, it managed to keep my attention to the end. So probably one of the better action movies in the past couple of years?

#Movies #English #Action #SciFi

Aaromaley (2025) ⭐ 8.4 | Comedy, Drama, Romance 2h 8m

"Aaromaley" (www.imdb.com/title/tt3658...) - a slow start but really comes in to its own after the interval. It's a beautiful movie about people, relationships, and feelings. And to suddenly hear SPB singing "Anjali" - a feeling all in its own category ...

#Movies #Tamil #Romance

A web-based library interface showing a book listing with large covers, the title of the book, the author, genres, and series information.

A web-based user profile with tabs for Reading, Books Read, TBR List, Favourites, History, and Comments. The currently open tab is History and shows a calendar view with books read on a given day.

I've been coding a web-based library interface to complement my book reading app.

The library simply shows our books and allows the wife and I to have separate user profiles showing the books we're reading, our reading history, and comments.

Working pretty good.

#Reading #Books #Coding #Library

I keep hearing how Firebase has "generous" usage on the free plan. I started working on a library app with 4000+ books. Two data syncs and I was through my free plan 😛

Switched over to a local server with SQLite immediately. Might look at Parse again maybe?

#Coding #Platforms

Again, not quite the kind of thing I'd want to write myself, but definitely something that will keep me reading!

I'll be coming back to this series. Both Ilona Andrews and Matt make me want to come back and finish the whole series. But there are so many books ....

5/5
#Reading #Books #MiniReviews

For one thing, you know what will happen ultimately based on the premise - you know that Carl will make it to the end of the dungeon 🙂

But the plot twists as he progressed were entertaining and creative. So I kept reading, and reading, and reading.

4/5
#Reading #Books #MiniReviews

Then I read "Dungeon Crawler Carl".

I knew Matt Dinniman a long time ago (before DCC) and he's a great guy. The book was interesting.

What interests me mostly about a book is the plot. Figuring out what will happen before it happens.

Couldn't do that much here 😛

3/5
#Reading #Books #MiniReviews