When life gives you lemons, most people make lemonade – but when life gives Normal Kint a dog he hates, he serves it up to a Martian with a side of intergalactic chaos. Join the misadventures of Earth's most reluctant pooch hunter.

50% off at SmashWords - https://t.co/tvGASsc4Fy

Other options: https://shop.farook.org

#ScienceFiction #Humour #Bookstodon #FediBooks #IndieAuthor

I've been made redundant from my job, effective tomorrow.

So... if you know anyone who's in need of a bioinformatician to work remotely on small bioinformatics projects, please let me know.

Affinity has a sale on till the 15th of August which is well worth it if you're interested 🙂
https://affinity.serif.com

I have no affiliation to them but I bought two of the Affinity apps back in 2016 or 2017 and I think it might have cost something like $50 and I received updates for all those years for the $50 I paid.

Didn't update to the V2 apps because I had stopped doing anything significantly graphics related for years. Just started working on some artwork and took a look and I could upgrade to their universal suite (all their apps for all supported platforms — macOS, Windows, and iPadOS) for around $65. I did since that seemed like a great deal 🙂

I have not been disappointed so far. Still loving working with their apps to create graphics and artwork. Will post some samples soon ... (possibly).

Now that I've finisehd my second novel and can put off starting on editing till tomorrow, I am going to do some coding today 🙂

I've wanted to add favourites and bookmarks lists to my Flutter Fedi client and I also discovered a bug wtih really long threads and showing the entire thread. Sounds like enough stuff to keep me occupied for today 😛

#CodingLife #WritingLife

And ... The End 🙂(Though I've never actually put that at the end of a novel since the story always continues ...)

I've finally finished novel #2 — "Sir Lanka Files" (no, not a typo).

I thought I had 1.5 chapters to go according to my original plan (and because I like round numbers and 1.5 chapters would have put the chapter count at 30).

But as I finished chapter 29, I realized that I had a better ending with chapter 29 (and a hook for the next novel). So I stopped at chapter 29 even though a part of my brain was screaming at me for ending on 29 😛

Now I begin the editing. So another month or so at least before it's ready for publishing?

#Writing #SciFi #IndieAuthor #FinallyDone

Forgetting things when you are a certain age is normal 🙂I never remember what I had for lunch yesterday and I'm fine with that.

But I vividly remember a lot of stuff from when I was like 2 years old up to about my 20s and it's a little bit more poignant when I think I've forgotten something from that period ...

Yesterday I was talking to a friend from school whom I'd known since the early 80s. I mentioned another friend from the same school that I'd met in the early 90s (but who I hadn't known at school) and this friend said something like "What do you mean? He was in the same class as you!"

I was dumbfounded. Had I known he was my classmate when I met him in the 90s? Or had we not recognized each other at all? All I remember about him was from meeting him in the 90s. Nothing about knowing himi from the 80s.

So I contacted this other friend. He said that he hadn't known me before the 90s even though we'd gone to the same school (it was a big school ...)

You can't imagine how relieved I felt 🙂 I had not lost a chunk of my childhood memories after all.

It later turned out that my first friend had confused the other one with somebody else who had the same name ... But for a while there, I really wasn't sure if I was losing chunks of memory or if my friend was wrong or if something else was going on.

It's funny the things we cling to 🙂

Fantasy, Lore, & More: Lightning & Ember

Hi, I'm indie fantasy author, Melinda Kucsera, and in this episode, E.B. Repetto is joining me to talk about her book, Lightning & Ember. What's it about? Akina de Kitamura and her twin sister Miki, bastard children of a Volandrian nobleman and a Solterrean commoner, struggle for acceptance in Volandrian nobility. Despite their uncle's favor, they face scorn at the prestigious Academy.

http://melindakucsera.com/2024/07/13/fantasy-lore-more-lightning-ember/

I didn't expect much from "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3083016) but I haven't had so much fun in a long time watching a movie 🙂This is old school movies as I remember them!

#Movies #English #BeverlyHillsCop #Action

After waiting like a couple of weeks, my author page on Amazon is finally up 🙂

Only 3 books there (and two are on iOS programming) but hopefully, I'll have one more to join the fiction category soon since I’m 1.5 chapters away from completing my second novel …

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Fahim-Farook/author/B0D7789CLF

#Writing #SupportIndieAuthors #SciFi

I have been using my Flutter Fedi client more and more and it continues to be faster than the Swift version that I wrote previously.

I'd be really curious to see if this is an issue with the Swift code I wrote or if it is an inherent issue with Swift itself. Not trying to start a holy war here, but I am curious.

But given that the Swift codebase is huge and relies on a local database and I had stripped out database functionality from the Flutter app to make it simpler, I can't really say that I'm comparing Apples to Apples.

But ... the Flutter app was faster even before I made any of the optimizations.

Anyway, I guess I'm sticking to the Flutter app since it's more cross-platform friendly and allows me to take the app to a new platform should I decide to leave Apple-land ... and that actually looks like a possibility at this point.

Better poll than the last one!

Which do you prefer? 📚

Boosts welcomed! 🔁❤️

Are you working on a Mac or iOS open source project? Do you want end user documentation written for it? Hit me up 😊

I want to give back to the open source community in a way I can.

I’m a technical writer by trade, and a lot of projects lack good end user documentation. If you have an open source project of a reasonable size, I’d be happy to work on it with you to create documentation for it 😉

I’d really appreciate a boost so developers can see this

#OpenSource #BuildInPublic

Now is your best chance to find my book, "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" available for a promotional price at @Smashwords as part of their Annual Summer/Winter Sale!

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/7491

#SWSale2024 #Smashwords #ScienceFiction #Humour #SciFi #BookPromo #SupportIndieAuthors #FediBooks #Author #Bookstodon #Writing

I have this Fedi-client which does everything that I want that's customized to fit my needs. But it's so molasses-stuck-in-the-mud slow at times 😛

I have a newer Fedi-client which doens't have all the features but is so much faster. While it's great for reading posts on here, if I try to do anything besides read (or write anything besides a post with text) it isn't very useful.

I want to update the new Fedi-client but I'm also trying to write a novel at the same time. Don't you wish you had more time?

I wanted less time as a kid since the days seemed to stretch on to infinity. But now, I want more time all the time 😛

As I completed 10 chpaters on what I thought would be my 2nd novel, I discovered that I had another novel that I had forgotten about which had 20 chapters done 😛

So I started editing that with the hope of finishing it quickly before getting back to what I thought would be my 3rd novel. I got the 20-chapter edit pass done but am now slowing down on getting the last few chapters written.

I probably went too hard at the editing. Need to slow down. It will come when it comes ....

"Monkey Man" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9214772) is I think what John Wick would be if he was Indian 🙂

The movie is bloody, violent, dark, and grimy. But at the same, it expresses the anger of the poor, the downtrodden, and the powerless, so very well. If you can stomach the violence, worth a watching.

#Movies #English #Hindi #Action #Violent

My conference is wrapped up, which means that I have to turn my attention to the serious job-hunting.

I'm a software dev -- generalist, but I've spent a lot of time working on scripting languages, VMs, UIs for VMs, that sort of thing. The past few years I've been in games (Unity/Unreal) but after two big studio layoffs/shutdowns in fourteen months that's not looking rosy. So it's back to general tech for me.

Looking for remote, as that's how I'm most productive.

#GetFediHired

Do you think you might hate my book more than this person did?

Care to try? 😛

https://shop.farook.org

If you do, please let me know what you think? I found this review after 13 years.

#ScienceFiction #Humour #Reviews #SupportIndieAuthors #FediBooks #Author #Bookstodon #Writing

I've been seeing a lot of posts about Apple Vision Pro lately. I waited for the AVP for years thinking that it would change how AR/VR/MR was used, but when it finally arrived, my thought was that it seemed like a cash-grab by Apple.

I stayed away and continue to stay away. The Meta Quest 3 does a lot more than the AVP does and for a fraction of the price. Sure, there are some nice-to-have features on the AVP, but not at that price.

Not sure a model at half the price is going to change my mind, especially given how lukewarm Apple itsefl appears to be on AVP.

An eggcorn is when someone mistakes a word for a different word, often in the context of an idiom. It comes from the surprisingly common mistake of thinking the word "acorn" is actually "eggcorn".

Anyway, my favourite eggcorns are the ones that imply the existence of a powerful and mysterious animal, such as "and their elk" (instead of "and their ilk"), "from the gecko" (instead of "from the get-go"), and, most recently, "locust of control" (instead of "locus of control"). #linguistics