Tagged: my week

Week 44, It Was January and Now It Is Suddenly November?

I’m not gonna make up any excuses for my inactivity!

But… BUT! I have been busy. Also, my personal life is kinda boring anyways, its just work work work. Anyhow, I have updated the design of my blog… well at least a little bit. I have also been figuring out HOW to blog. I spent weeks researching and coming up with “best practices”, but even then it is just overwhelming.

As you can see at the top of the blog, I now have categories as a menu! Makes the blog less cluttery.

There is something I don’t quite understand with blogging though, how do you navigate? Imagine if I had 1000 posts in one category, how do you navigate all that? I imagine having a simple list of all the posts in one endless column. That has to be the only solution… right?

I’ll see what I will do, right now I don’t have much content anyways, but I can already predict how problematic it would be to have thousands of posts.

So what have I been up to eh?

I’ve mostly been working as mentioned earlier. I wrote a lot on both novels that I have been working since last year, and accidentally began on a third story. The initial idea was to submit a short story to some magazine for a puny $100. I am barely surviving right now with a 0 income. Anyways, I fell in love with the story, not that it is a romantic one, oh not at all, it is far from being romantic. But I “shelved” it, don’t have time to work on that right now!

Ah, yes, I also streamed for a month or two, a fun experience. It was a creative stream, where I would show my process for learning to draw. A couple of viewers joined along, which was really fun. Also did a lot of art requests, probably more than I should have. I wanted to continue streaming but life caught up, I just had too much work to do.

I have been reading a lot as well, researching previous “top” authors. It seems that most authors back then did well because there was no television. Because some of the stuff I read had a horrendous prose. No offence to the dead!

Entered a short story competition

…and lost miserably. I didn’t even make it into top 10. Mine was written in first person TELLING mode with some SHOWING. The winner and those in top 10 were all written in THIRD PERSON and were mostly SHOWING rather than TELLING. What a bunch of bullshit. This “Show don’t Tell” mantra is way stuck up peoples black hole.

Anyhow, I began to revise my first novel, rewriting some parts to SHOW more than TELL. I do too much TELLING… sad :(, oops I mean “I sigh and drop my head down, only to catch it by the forehead with my right fist in a timely dare. Reminding me of those brave – or foolish – circus gymnasts, who threw themselves out into the hands of life and death. The weight of my head caused a bone breaking snap from my wrist. My hand was weak, not from the lack of practice, but from resting three whole months away from any practice. The same weakness ran throughout every bone in my body. Shaking, screaming to be put to sweaty use. Maybe tomorrow. I turn my head to examine life outside the window; it showed none. The rain had terrorized the people for days now, everybody was locked up in stacked cages, except for the rich, they had a small garden to mow. My lips sagged down after stretching into a hopeful smile. – No exercise today either then. said I”

A couple more things that I did between week 7 and now

Is – if you remember – I began playing Tibia, but I also stopped after one month of playing it intensively. So that’s one month down the drain.

I wasted time on dating, not actual dates, but finding women and chatting. None of them seemed interesting, too much feminism in their head. So that was wasted time as well.

Wrote a lot of scripts for my upcoming comic, it is something I want to see up and running, but it is on hold now, I want to focus on finishing and publishing my novel first.

I also began a romance type of novel on wattpad, “My Naughty Teachers”. It is a fun experiment. I basically don’t see myself writing these types of romance novels, so I decided to challenge myself and write one. I hope you enjoy it.

Well, that concludes this update in my personal life, I won’t be making these weekly reports anymore. Instead I will update you in a similar fashion as this post, whenever it seems relevant.

Week 7, Finished the RPG Game, Started Playing Tibia

I received an email from Twitch saying that they no longer white-list bots, this means my bot will be affected by regular chat and whisper limitations.

Running a text-based RPG game on my twitch channel will sadly not be possible anymore. However, I will at least finish one section of the game and leave the rest of it for whatever I decide to do with the material. I might turn it into a real game sometimes.

The game is pretty much done, although it is barely 5% of what I had planned originally… damn, I even painted a map and monster sheet, but oh well, that’s life. I might add more content with time, after seeing how it is working out… MAYBE.

Anyhow, my week was very slow, I started playing Tibia after half a year break. Basically, all the botting killed the game for me… but then CipSoft has been investing a lot in anti cheating and banned/deleted thousands of players! So I’m returning to it! It is a lovely retro game, reminds me of those old Super Nintendo RPG games, except it is an MMORPG, best mix ever! I remember discovering the game back in 2002-something-ish, was fun. Returned to it in 2013 during my years of depression, it got me through things until I began working intensively on my projects. Then I returned to it again in 2016 for only one month or even less. And now I’m back again, I will see how long I will last this time… as long as they get rid of cheaters then I my mood will be positive.

Hope your week was fine as well! Feel free to share anything you’ve done over the past week or if there is any book, movie or series you want to recommend. I’ll make sure to check it out and give my opinion.

Thanks for reading, GOD bless!

– A. Wehbe, www.ahmadwehbe.com

Week 6, Making a text-based RPG… I guess I’m a game designer as well now!

Spent whole week working on my twitch channel, I began coding a bunch of mini-games, then decided to create a text-based RPG. And so far so good, the coding took a lot of time, especially the debugging. I had to work within the limitations of AnkhBot; it’s not exactly made for such big tasks! The original game design had many concepts, but I had to be realistic and not spend too much time on the project, so I basically killed off lots of things from the project and focused on making it simple and using the simplicity to its maximum instead.

Anyhow, I spent two days designing the map, areas, monsters, bosses and how the player progresses through the game. I then almost finished off the coding for one area, just two lines of code missing before I got so tired that it was either falling face-first on the keyboard or the pillow… priorities!

I’m happy with how things are moving along, hopefully my computer can handle more than a couple of players… otherwise I will have to make it V.I.P. only : (

Thanks for reading, GOD bless!

– A. Wehbe, www.ahmadwehbe.com

Monday: 2017-01-30

Applied for a couple of jobs, can’t believe the first month of the new year is almost gone already! I’ve kept myself busy the whole time, but it still feels as if I’ve done nothing. This is why I keep doing this journal thingy, to keep track of what I have been up to. And I must say I have done a lot! All the paintings, the marketing, the trailer, the catalog, the website changes, all the comic scripts and character designs, and so much more. Please pat me on my head and say I’m a good boy! *voff*

Anyhow, today was a fix-the-stream-day, I tried a couple more settings and found what works good for now, might do minor adjustments in the future to find the perfect settings.

I also streamed today, for a couple of hours actually, played League of Legends, although I promised to never play it again. My account got permanently banned for calling someone a fag boy. I guess he took offence… like a little fag boy.

So I made a new account with a completely fresh skill rating, hopefully I will be able to climb the ranks easier now. I’m guessing the reason I kept getting teamed up with bad people is because I used to intentionally lose games whenever someone insulted me, to punish them. This lowers my own skill rating, so that was a bad move; I should’ve just reported them.

Tuesday: 2017-01-31

Still working on the stream, adjusting the twitch alert settings, and tried to find something similar for YouTube but there was none at this moment, I hope they will implement it in the future. Signed up for a 12 month subscription at humblebundle.com to receive games cheap and donate money to various charities, what an interesting combination.

Anyhow, this will quickly fill up my game library so I can stream different kinds of games, which is great!

I managed to only write three comic scripts, it wasn’t due to all the playing, but due to the fact that I was doing so many other things. Money transfers, codes, accounts, adjusting settings to make streaming a better experience. Had to play around with various screen elements, reposition them so they don’t block important aspects of the game. I experimented a lot with the microphone settings, applied a noise reduction and a gate. My current computer sounds like a truck, so I had to set up the microphone properly. Surrounded it with some left over soundproofing that I had saved (good thing I saved it!!!)).

The webcam I’m using is from 2002 or something like that, really old, however it still does its job. However, it requires a lot of lighting, need to figure out a solution for that as well. It will probably be the final piece because it will require investing time into setting up a proper lighting environment; I will probably have to build a light box or something like that.

Wednesday: 2017-02-01

Still working on the stream, tried out a couple of recordings, adjusted the bitrates even more, will have to do more testing.

Managed to write a couple of comic scripts.

Thursday: 2017-02-02

Worked even more on the stream, testing various filters to enhance the quality, it seems like the coloring profile – the streaming services demand – desaturates all the colors, making it look dark and boring. Will have to try out a couple more recordings before I begin streaming online.

There is much to do before it is ready, I can’t believe I left things this unfinished. I believe it was a year ago when I decided I wanted to stream while working. But I got caught up in lots of other projects, like moving, painting the apartment, building a sound booth, decorating and a whole bunch of other things.

Anyhow, I spent the final hours of the day watching other streamers in hopes of learning what makes them successful.

Friday: 2017-02-03

Spent the whole day setting up various streaming tools, I’m using AnkhBot to do many automated commands for me. It is a great tool, but it does have its limitations so I had to spend quite a lot of time researching how to get things done.

It was so time consuming that I stayed awake for 24 hours, coding and trying things out.

Saturday: 2017-02-04

Continued working on the streaming tools, it is a lot of work. I continued on setting up Ankhbot for a couple more hours until I got tired and fixed other minor stuff instead so I don’t get too caught up and forget about the other millions of things that has to be done.

Sunday: 2017-02-05

Today was a pretty chill day, worked on setting up the streaming tools until the afternoon, where I spent time with family instead. Helped my little brother move because his apartment got invaded by ONE mouse, oh well!

I continued my work after sunset, got lots of things done, researched into PHP and decided to learn it… when I find the time for it.

Wrote a game design, a text based RPG people can play in the chat while watching my stream, it will be a lot of work so I’ll first plan and think about possible problems before I even begin coding it.

Thanks for reading, GOD bless!

– A. Wehbe, www.ahmadwehbe.com

Monday: 2017-01-23

Administrative work, checking emails, applied for jobs and such. Managed to finish off the third character for my upcoming comic! The character took quite some time to finish, even though it is simplistic in its design. Was having some issues deciding which design I wanted to go with, so I had to try many different things until I found what was working… this took quite some time, didn’t finish until late in the afternoon. Anyhow, I’m really happy with how the character turned out!

I’m not making ANY type of character… I’m actually putting real design effort into it, making them unique and stand out from the other thousands manmade characters in the world.

Hopefully my characters will stand out and become known worldwide!

Tuesday: 2017-01-24

A very productive day, I did some minor adjustments on the second character and then moved on to begin work on the third character.

It felt good to work on an empty stomach; I’ve basically decided to fast from dawn to sunset every day. It feels great, I feel lighter and more relaxed which helps me focus better.

Anyhow, I managed to finish the third character in one day, worked from 8 AM to 7 PM, so that’s 11 hours of work on the third character, but I’m also including the time it took to cook food, eat and other daily life thingies. So I guess it really only took 9 hours or something like that.

I felt like doing more work after finishing the third character, so I began on the fourth one! And everything went smoothly, worked from 7 PM to 2 AM, so that’s another 7 hours of work and I almost managed to finish the fourth character! Well, actually I did finish it, but decided to add some more design elements that fit the character, so one or two hours more and it would’ve been done as well.

If only sleep wasn’t important!

Wednesday: 2017-01-25

Continued working on the fourth character, apparently it took more time than expected to finish it. The final design element was a bit more complex; I had to make over thirty copies of the same detail LOOK different, took five hours to finish, instead of the predicted two hours.

Anyways, I was pretty much tired after all this work so I spent the rest of the day just chilling, cooking food for my family and tried out a new game “Overwatch” by Blizzard. Played it for six hours straight, but got bored of it, don’t get me wrong, the game is great, but it’s just not my type of game, too much aiming-aid. It removes one important skill that separates bad and good players… which makes it even more difficult to carry a match, WHICH MEANS your success depends on others. And I hate those kinds of games!

That’s why I play CSGO, it is team based, however; it still allows for the opportunity for you to win the game, even if you are alone against a whole team.

I remember one game that I will remember forever, and that is Unreal Tournament, the original. Damn that game was great. Nothing beats it, and I’m afraid playing Overwatch just made me reminisce of the good old times. I remember my aiming skills made clans chase after me and I jumped from clan to clan.

My aim in Counter Strike was also great, however, it doesn’t translate well into CSGO, the latest version of Counter Strike. I kept wondering why… that perhaps my skills suck? However, it turns out that CSGO has a system called “Lagg compensation”, meaning the hitbox (the thing that gets hit when people shoot at you) is always lagging behind depending on the other player’s connection latency.

For example, let’s say an enemy sees you, and you run behind a corner to hide. Well, if the enemy shoots, you will still get hit, even if you are completely behind the corner. Because they are hitting your hitbox, that is lagging behind FOR THEIR SAKE, because THEY have bad latency!

Now, on the other hand, if you play LAN, or on a server where everybody has a equally low latency, then this problem doesn’t exist.

Thursday: 2017-01-26

Not one of my proudest days, did absolutely no work at all.

I did apply for jobs, which I do daily, but other than that I didn’t write any comic scripts, didn’t write anything in my novels and I didn’t design anything either.

I just played the whole day away, no idea why, but I just felt like doing absolutely nothing today. Couldn’t be that I overate yesterday and basically had zero sleep because I would wake up every two hours to visit the restroom.

If I only had a wife or wives to keep track of my eating and make sure I don’t do anything wrong!

Friday: 2017-01-27

Same as yesterday, just not feeling like doing anything… the only solution is taking those daily walks… but it is still too damn cold outside. Oh well, I’m still trying to do some kind of work at least, I keep making to-do lists and jotting down ideas.

For example, I discovered that I need a couple of additional characters, some of them will be re-occurring a lot while others will probably only see light just once or twice (according to the scripts I have written so far). But you never know, I have plenty more scripts to write, I’ve only covered around 10% of the topics and that alone produced almost 100 scripts or so.

Anyhow, I’m leaning towards just making the characters that will be re-occurring more detailed, and other side-characters to be more symbolic. I’m already using a lot of stereotyping for my characters, but the side-characters will be even more so!

Saturday: 2017-01-28

Worked a little on my streaming profile, removed the old design I had on twitch and designed something much simpler. Spent the day designing new elements to go with the new design, which took quite some time.

Sunday: 2017-01-29

Continued from where I left off yesterday, finished up some of the major work on the design for my new streaming “profile”.

I believe it is time to start streaming and stop pushing that to the side all the time, I doubt I will be getting lots of viewers anyways; I’m not exactly a social butterfly. But, I do want to stream, it seems like a fun concept, I’m hoping it will give me more public exposure and thus be another channel for me to market my books and other work.

I streamed for a couple of hours, tried out different settings but was not happy at all with the stream equality. Stayed up to 4 AM! Oh well, will have to do some more experimenting tomorrow.

Thanks for reading!

– A. Wehbe, www.ahmadwehbe.com

Monday: 2017-01-16

Did the usual Monday stuff, applied for a couple of jobs, checked email, also decided to publish these weekly journal blog thingies on Sunday night, or rather at midnight. No clue why, it just happened, deal with it!

Been thinking a lot about the comic, managed to write a few scripts today, but I really had the urge to start drawing out a few strips and perhaps start publishing on a weekly basis. I have enough material to run the comic for one year, and I’m hoping I will manage to write more with time.

If you’ve been reading my blog-journal-thingies, then you will remember that my initial plan was to write twenty scripts a day, and basically have 200 scripts ready in just ten days… yeah, that didn’t happen. Reality kicked in and I simply have to adjust. I believe switching things between writing and drawing will kill downtime. I know I talked about combining playing games and work, but why not combine two different kinds of work instead? Writing will be the intensive work and drawing will be the relaxing work.

Anyways, that’s the plan, and I spent the day gathering resources and such to begin the designs of the other characters.

Tuesday: 2017-01-17

Didn’t do much work today, zero writing basically, spent time mostly on the character designs. Was having trouble with the face and how big the head should be compared to the body. Tried out different version until I found what I was looking for. Then I went ahead and began inking the final design, a very slow and tedious process.

I’m already looking forward to work on the other characters; I know I need a couple more standard characters that I will be re-using over and over. According to the scripts I have written, there will be a couple re-occurring characters, so might as well do those too.

Wednesday: 2017-01-18

Not much to report, continued from where I left off yesterday, the inking process is much more time consuming than I thought. It is coming along nicely though.

I also contemplated a little about using color instead just black and white, I’m not quite sure yet, will research deeper into it tomorrow. I was hoping that using color would stand out from the crowd since most comics are black and white.

Thursday: 2017-01-19

Still working on the inking process of one of the characters, I will probably never make another character like this one with this many details. I want to keep the comic very simple and quick, however, I had to invest this much time on details for this character because it is part of its story and personality. Anyways, it is almost finished, can’t wait to start on the next characters.

Friday: 2017-01-20

Finally finished the character I have been working on, I quickly colored it to test how it would look like and I love how it turned out. However, I will be spending some hours tomorrow, or next week to really figure out the coloring. I’m after a specific kind of style, will have to experiment later on. It is important that the coloring “feels” the same across all characters. So I will probably wait a little with the coloring part until I do more research into it and try out the characters side by side to make sure they don’t clutter things up or take away attention from each other.

I might need to adjust the line-weight as well, to make sure all the designs are uniform and don’t compete for attention.

Saturday: 2017-01-21

Did some minor adjustments to the character I have been working on, it took a couple of hours, had to do some last minute design choices, moved around some stuff and removed whatever wasn’t working for me.

When I was happy with that, I then moved on to work on the third character, which is a much simpler character. The initial design went smoothly; I will be keeping the details to a minimum. However, I know I want freckles on this one, so perhaps only the face will be detailed.

Once I was happy with the concept I then began inking and solve issues along the way such how each part connect etcetera. I did get carried away and added too many details, so I had to go back and redo some of the work.

Sunday: 2017-01-22

Most unproductive day of the week, I had a severe headache since morning.

Spent the first half of the day chilling out and playing some games, and then I watched a classic movie in the afternoon, hoping it would make the headache disappear, but that didn’t work at all. Had to stay in bed the rest of the day, caught up with news and stuff of what is going on in the world. I’ve basically ignored all news for the past month, and honestly, there isn’t any new news. Just a repetition of the same old same old. The only good news is that Donald Trump is president now, I’m really happy about that and I’m not even an American. However, it is sad to see all these racists opening their ugly mouths; they are the devil’s constituents. GOD tells us that we were created different so we can learn from each other and appreciate GOD’s beautiful creations, just like how flowers are different. So, only the devil will tell an individual to hate other people just because they are different.

Anyhow, Trump sure has some very cool ideas, like building the wall. He has gotten a lot of hate because of this, but think about it… imagine if your house didn’t have a door, and people would sneak into your house and take your stuff or hide under your bed… a silly comparison, but logically, it is the same thing.

Oh well, I hope everything works out well and Trump keeps his promises, otherwise GOD will smite him.

Thanks for reading!

– A. Wehbe, www.ahmadwehbe.com

Monday: 2017-01-09

Finally back to writing… and it didn’t go that well, feel a bit rusty! I did write a couple of good scripts for the comic and came up with additional character design. I also figured out that I need one more character, but was having a hard time coming up with something that hasn’t been done to death. Will continue brainstorming tomorrow!

Also did the usual Monday stuff, like administrative work and such. Was really fired up for going out on my daily 8 km walk, but it was quite damp outside with tiny cute raindrops. Oh well… hopefully tomorrow will be different.

Tuesday: 2017-01-10

Yay, finally, went out for my 8 km walk… came back home running after just half an hour! Too windy, too cold and too many distractions! I only managed to write one script during the walk, really disappointing. Oh well, things got better once I got home, tidied things up in the library and sat down to continue where I left off yesterday! And guess what, I managed to come up with the fourth character; the character is hilarious… if you like dark humor. I’m probably going to get a lot of heat from lots of rights groups and shitty humans like that. But oh well, that’s life.

I modified the design of the main character and then began drawing out one of the other characters. I have the concept that I want, but was not happy with any of the designs so far. Wrote a couple more scripts, it is becoming like a chore now, I feel very drained, but I keep pushing myself, really want to complete this project. Sometimes I feel so drained that I contemplate becoming a coffee drinker. But naaah, never.

Wednesday: 2017-01-11

Absolutely no energy today, yet I still managed to write at least eight comic scripts. Confusing, usually I get less done when I’m putting all my focus and energy into it. Oh well, writing works in mysterious ways.

I kept going back and forth between playing games and writing, after every round of CSGO I would sit down and write. Then before the next match starts I look up what topic to write about, so I do most of the thinking during the match. It reminded me a lot about college, I would play World of Warcraft at least 14 hours a day and still managed to get straight A, did the homework while playing! The pvp arena queues back then were very long, like sometimes you had to wait 10 minutes just to get into Warsong Gulch.

Looking for a PvE group was even more tedious, you had to look for people manually through the chat and the social window by searching for people in the level range you are looking for and talk to at least 20 people to form a proper 5 man team. You had to keep track of everybody as well, some people would leave so you had to find replacements and such.

My tactic was simple, since I was a tank, I could basically do what I want and get away with it, good tanks were worshiped back then. Anyhow, I would just find ONE person and then tell him or her to do the rest bwahahaha *evil grin*

But most of the time I would just get spammed daily about doing some tanking for people, so it wasn’t that bad.

Also, usually people would need to go away to eat dinner or use the restroom, so there was plenty of downtime for me to study.

I will try it again tomorrow and see if I can get more done this way.

Thursday: 2017-01-12

A productive day, although I spent too much of it fooling around, I tried the play games while working thingy and managed write at least 10 comic scripts, which is the highest amount so far. I guess the issue is that I get easily bored with repetitive work, my brain kind of goes to sleep, into day-dream-land. And games are unpredictable, anything can happen, which makes my brain stay awake and satisfied. At least this is my theory, because I feel extremely focused after each match of CSGO which makes me able to write a lot, however, after half an hour my brain begins to sink into day-dream-land.

I remember having the same issue everywhere I worked, for example when I worked as a metal smith, welding and constructing stuff, I would get bored quickly and being day dreaming if the work was repetitive, predictable and not stimulating my brain with opportunities to solve problems. So I would always demand more difficult tasks on a daily basis, after a couple of months I had learned basically everything about that company’s work and how to do it all by myself. However, this meant they no longer had anything new to offer for me to learn… so I began learning how the company was being run… and yeah, I bet you know where this is going. I learned about the customers and the other companies we did business with, proposed solutions and soon I was telling the CEO how to do his job. Then suddenly I get fired! Oh well, when I look at it from the bright side, then at least it ended with something unpredictable, hah!

Friday: 2017-01-13

Wrote a lot today, think 8 or 9 comic scripts… wanted to write more but felt burned out at the end of the day so I went to bed early. However, going to bed doesn’t mean sleeping – in insomnia terms; going to bed means just lying down on the bed, hoping for the best that can happen! Sleeping happens four hours later.

Saturday: 2017-01-14

Didn’t get much done at all, wrote around four scripts and edited two or three to remove grammar errors and misspellings. Spent the whole day playing CSGO more than I should… I’m starting to hate team-based games, like, any game where you depend on others to succeed. Whenever I trust that someone will cover for me, I end up getting stabbed from behind, like literally, that’s the only realistic part of games I guess. Whenever I trust someone in real life, I’m usually going to be disappointed, I just prepare for the worst and sometimes that’s not even enough because what actually happens is worse than the worst, like something that completely ruins your life. Some humans are disgusting beyond saving; the only way to stop their insanity is locking them up for life. They are the kind of people that destroy pieces of society, and with time as such people grow in numbers and strength; society crumbles.

Sunday: 2017-01-15

A good but slow day, wrote a couple of comic scripts, and also came up with a series which I’m probably going to get 30 scripts out of. Not really proud of how I spent the day, played too much. I’m trying to find good single player adventure games that don’t cost a fortune and work on an old computer with 2010 components. It is basically so bad that it turns off now and then as soon as the graphics-card gets too worked out.

Speaking of worked out, I worked out today; I’m predicting some major burn over the next couple of days.

Thanks for reading!

– A. Wehbe, www.ahmadwehbe.com

Monday: 2017-01-02

First work day of the New Year! I’m pretty happy with how much I got done! Received word from the printing company, the catalog only had one issue which I fixed easily. That was a minor setback, but I fixed it and sent a new updated version, hopefully it will pass through this time.

Other than that, it is a Monday and Monday is typical administrative work. I applied for some jobs and updated some minor misspellings on my painting’s descriptions. I had written it in a regular .txt file, so there was no autocorrect, oopsi… but it was just two words, not a big deal.

I also finished with the online version of the catalog; the images have a lower resolution to prevent theft! You can download it here for free:

https://ahmadwehbe.com/art/ART_WITH_A_PURPOSE_PAINTINGS_BY_AHMAD_WEHBE_online.pdf

You can download, print it and make paper-planes or other origami, actually now that I think of it; the colors will make for beautiful origami, so go ahead and do print it out to make origami!

However, most importantly, share it! Spread the news, help me reach people who might be interested in my art, it would help me a lot.

The catalog as a print will be available as soon as the printing company has approved it and I have proofed a copy.

I worked extensively on the website as well, added a lot of things and tidied things up. Added a FAQ page, check it out, also if you got any questions then don’t hesitate to ask away.

Went to bed around 3 am, and did some reading and YouTubing till I fell asleep at around 4 am, it was a successful day. A really amazing start for my 2017! Go ahead and share your experience, how was your first few days for 2017? Did you break a New Year promise just seconds after promising it?

Tuesday: 2017-01-03

The catalog was accepted so now I only need to proof a physical copy and approve it and then it will be available for purchase!

Spent some time on fixing the website, moved files around, did some cleaning. Discovered a couple of issues as well, but was too lazy to fix them, was thinking of only one thing the whole day… ever since I woke up… how to do a video promotion for my paintings!

I had a couple of ideas in my mind, but when I sat down to figure things out and plan them out, they kind of became their own big projects, so I had to throw away idea after idea until I figured out something less time consuming… the first plan was to model 3D environments, texture them and render them with my paintings in the room, and using animation to showcase different angels and moods. Then the other ideas were about pasting my paintings into photographs and do some color correction and such, but, it didn’t turn out that well. The focus of the photographs made the paintings too much “in the background”, so those ideas didn’t work either.

It was basically night by the time I figured out how I wanted to go about doing the video promotion. Was too tired to work actively, but I did force myself to do the basic stuff, like document size and figure out minor issues to make things flow better tomorrow. Speaking of tomorrow… goodnight!

Wednesday: 2017-01-04

Applied for some jobs, skipped the daily walk as usual… getting really angry with myself about that… but, everything will be back to normal once I finish this entire art project thingy.

Worked the whole day on making the video trailer for my paintings… it’s not exactly normal to see trailers about paintings… I have zero reference for how to make it, I need to invent the wheel so to speak, and it is harder than I thought, but I finally figured out how to make it. Took me the whole day to figure it out, hopefully it will turn out great! And if not, then it will be yet another cut on my chiseling towards that wheel. Damn I’m tired, I have no clue if I’m even using English properly, but one thing I do know, me tired, me bed.

Thursday: 2017-01-05

Another 14 hours work day, except that I took more pauses this time. I believe I got burned out from last week’s intensive work, for example I didn’t feel like doing much the last couple days, but good thing most of the work is just repetitive right now, so I can at least get something done.

Anyhow, today was good. Finished the video trailer, really happy… after 15 different versions and corrections… all this work and revising for a barely 4 minute video clip… I now understand the pain of movie makers and editors, wow, what a bunch of champions… nerds, but champions nonetheless. hah!

Worked out, applied for some jobs, the usual daily stuff… except the 8 km walk thingy, damn I miss it. Almost there though… wait for me… legs; please don’t go all chicken on me… beach 2017. Just kidding, I never go to the beach, it is too people-y for my taste.

So what more can I add… I ripped up some chicken for food, ate lots of candy, chewed a one day old gum, mumbled lots of crazy stuff to myself, laughed at my own jokes and plenty of other things that make people avoid me. hah again!

Anyways, I’m excited for marketing my paintings, it will be good practice for when I release my future projects! Goodnight!

Friday: 2017-01-06

Did some finishing touches to the video trailer, watched it over and over again until everything that bothered me stopped bothering me. For example the overuse of certain words etc, I had to find alternative sentence structure and words. It worked out great in the end.

That was the first half of the day, the other half was spent on the website, fixing some minor issues, added some additional meta data and edited the old ones. Basically every page lacked a description… oops? They only had a title and robots info, took a couple of hours to figure things out. Did lots of research as well to make sure I don’t mess things up by using outdated meta code or write things that will annoy search engines.

After that, I did some corrections on a couple of pages, updated the legal page, one word was misspelled, and I also added a couple of additional information.

A black background was also missing on that page; it is supposed to be placed behind the menu bar to make it look more uniform. The whole ordeal took more time and effort than what I had hoped for. Had a couple more stuff to fix, but I was tired of coding and instead finished off designing the new home page and began working a little on the video page before going to bed.

Saturday: 2017-01-07

Did some minor edits to the promotional video and then uploaded it. Spent the whole day designing and coding some parts of the website, published a new layout on the home page that I had design a couple days back.

I also updated the video page; I designed it to show the latest video as a big wide frame. And then added a list below it with different kinds of videos in smaller frames for different materials, such as trailers, vlogs and other upcoming projects but I had to remove them from the code of course, I will write the code again once I have uploaded such videos.

The whole project was very time consuming, just uploading to youtube took me a couple of hours. The uploading part was simple, however, the editing part takes a lot of time, had to add description, tags, closed captions, had to design a thumbnail and a card image, many details.

Anyhow, I’m happy with how things turned out, go check it out! https://www.ahmadwehbe.com

Uploaded the paintings to Facebook and Twitter, and then started an ad campaign on Facebook for the promotional video. You can check them out here:
https://www.facebook.com/pg/AuthorAhmadWehbe/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1807665782820437
https://twitter.com/AuthorAWehbe/media?lang=en

Sunday: 2017-01-08

Today I uploaded the paintings to Instagram and Pinterest, which took quite some time. Go check it out!
https://www.instagram.com/authorahmadwehbe/
https://www.pinterest.se/authorahmadwehbe/

I quickly noticed how responsive the Instagram community is, lots of likes, some comments and a few new followers. Which is a lot compared to the response I’ve received on Facebook and Twitter.

Pinterest has been super silent on me though, like zero everything. However, I did read ten blog posts about pinterest, and most people report seeing their posts fire up at least one year later, so you got to be in it for the long run I guess. Oh well, I’ll complain again in a year or so.

I also ran an ad campaign on YouTube and Twitter today, let’s see how that will turn out… so far Instagram has been the best marketing place… WITHOUT even running any ad campaign. I do suspect that to succeed on Facebook one has to also participate in groups and do micro marketing by engaging with others… and time grows on trees.

Anyhow, I’m pretty happy with my new year so far, got lots of stuff done. And I can now get back to my writing! I can’t wait until I have to start drawing out each comic strip, now that’s going to be labor intensive! I will start publishing the comic as soon as I feel like I have enough material to keep the show running.

Thanks for reading!

– A. Wehbe, www.ahmadwehbe.com

Monday: 2016-12-26

Interesting… a Monday that doesn’t feel like one! Perhaps staying up late from last week’s Sunday ruined my clock or something. Whatever, I couldn’t fall asleep yesterday, so I stayed up to 8 AM, continued working on the paintings, converting the raw files into uploadable files. Fell asleep instantly once I was done and woke up 5 hours later around 1 PM to finish editing my last week’s blog post before publishing it. Managed to get some administrative work done before that as well!

Anyhow, my brain suddenly tells me to offer the paintings as free wallpapers! Why not? So I’ve been meditating on how to do that without enabling opportunistic thieves from stealing the paintings and selling them. Did a little research and came up with something that will work -GOOD enough.

I stumbled upon some very annoying news as well, my web-host added some weird policy to their web builder tool. They now want me to pay if I want to publish more than 5 pages… my website already has like 15 pages, so when I logged in, I couldn’t even edit those and publish them anymore. Just great… just what I needed, MORE WORK. Now I have to do everything manually, I have to code stuff and make everything the old way.

I’m quite mad at them… when I signed up with them, they offered their web-builder tool for free, it was part of the basic package. And the basic package is still quite pricy, at almost $40 a year. But, with this new change, they want me to pay $60 more, which makes it $100 annually. Sure, the tool is worth it, but, my website is supposed to be simple, so spending $60 on a tool, just to update news and such seems beyond stupid at the moment. Perhaps when my website is huge and demands daily attention, then sure, I will gladly pay $60 for a tool that makes my web-editing faster. But for now, I will have to code stuff myself, which sucks. And it took pretty much the whole day to do just that, I didn’t get far either, it took me an hour to edit the legal page… something I could’ve done in the web-builder tool within just 2 minutes. Oh well… like a wise woman once said; work work work work work work *laughs madly at his own joke*

Tuesday: 2016-12-27

Stayed up late from yesterday, finally fell asleep around 4 am. I was continuing work from yesterday. Been working since yesterday on a new design for the main page on the website, I finished just past midnight, only to start working on the wallpapers, I spent three hours after midnight making smaller – resized – copies of each painting, and then adding metadata to every file as well.

Was going to start adding metadata to the bigger files as well, but was too tired, went to bed and then woke up 6 hours later to continue working on the metadata. Don’t you wish your life was exciting just like mine? Don’t you? DON’T YOU? *psycho gaze*

Finished up with the metadata around mid-day, then went on to work on the website… I basically have to do all the coding manually now, so everything takes 10 times longer to do. Will be updating it slowly with time, there will be lots of errors and such, make sure to clear your cache now and then when you visit it, also, if you are using Firefox Mozilla then you can hold down the shift button while left clicking the refresh button, this will force the page to refresh without relying on the cache files you already have.

Anyhow, finished up some coding, but couldn’t go further because I was lacking content. Which brings us to the next phase, artwork! The metadata for all the paintings is finally done, so I went ahead and began uploading my paintings to fineartamerica and pixels, you can find them by following this link: http://pixels.com/profiles/ahmadwehbe.html?tab=artworkgalleries

Anyhow, I managed to upload 11 pieces before the clock struck midnight. Worked for another hour and a half to finish uploading a couple more paintings before I hit the bed…face first.

Wednesday: 2016-12-28

Couldn’t sleep last night, woke up just an hour later, only to find myself firing up the computer to continue uploading my paintings. Managed to finish uploading another set before I felt tired enough to fall asleep again.

Woke up at 9 AM, took a long warm shower, applied for some jobs and then went back to uploading my paintings. Finished uploading everything around lunch time, stressed about what to do next, there is so much that needs to be done before I want to start promoting anything… need to update the website and so much more. But I started from the beginning, went through every setting on the POD platform I’m using (pixels.com, fineartamerica.com), turned on some stuff, turned off other stuff etc… all while thinking about how I want to go about doing things. I also went through every setting on my Facebook page as well. I basically spent hours just going through every detail on all platforms to make sure everything is 100% setup the way I want it, to avoid future issues (due to laziness and ignorance).

Anyways, during this thinking period, I decided to also create a catalog for all my paintings, basically a magazine with my art, which includes available sizes, prices and much more. It will make marketing so much easier; I will make it available for free as a downloadable .pdf, and also make it available for purchase as a magazine. I will then be able to order a few copies and pass them along to local locations.

So there is a lot of work ahead of me… tedious work, hopefully I will be able to finish this whole ordeal this week and be done with everything so I can return to my novel and comic writing.

Thursday: 2016-12-29

Re-did the entire design for the catalogue that I had worked on for hours yesterday! Oh well, it is all part of the process. I’m very happy with how it turned out… and yeah, I started working on the catalogue from 11 AM… it is 1 AM now as of typing this, so that makes it 14 hours of work. Almost no breaks (except for eating food and taking a shower). I’m I done? NO, it’s my first catalogue ever, a lot of research, design testing and trying this and that has gone into it. But I can say this… wow… even I’m impressed with my own work, like, how often am I impressed with my own work? All the time of course… but that’s beside the point! It’s coming together and it is looking hot! Well worth the time invested, can’t wait to share it with y’all. There will be two versions, one that can be ordered from amazon as cheaply as the printing company allows, and one that can be downloaded for free. But the most important thing for now is me going to sleep, goodniihzzzZzzz… *snoring sound*

Friday: 2016-12-30

Yet another 14 hour work day, got a lot of stuff done. Formatting is the big time sink here, it is so damn tedious, took me hours to work things out inside word. The sections system is so cumbersome and annoying at times. But I learned a lot, I could say I’m a Word Section master now. WHICH IS GREAT for my many book projects. I remember having issues while formatting my philosophy book “GOD THE CREATOR”, I redid the formatting at least five times to get it right, had to create a new file every time, because once you mess up the formatting in word… there is basically no coming back from that, just a big mess that would take hours to untangle, might as well make a new file and start over. And that’s what I had to do a couple of times today for the catalogue I’m working on. Took quite a while to figure out how to make things work out the way I want.

There is always something that needs to be changed, or added, or mistakes that need to be corrected… for example, as of writing this, I discovered that I have to redo the images for six pages… that’s like 1 hour of work, just because of a mistake.

But, I’m quite happy with how things are turning out, I hope it will be all worth it in the end.

Saturday: 2016-12-31

And another 14 hour work day, continued from where I left off yesterday. It’s crazy how big word files can get, with all images imported, my word document is almost 200 mb! Anyways, it was tedious work, small changes here and there. Sometimes doing thing in one place will change stuff around in another place, really annoying. I will probably look for a new application to work with, one that doesn’t use a system that automatically moves stuff to other pages… I like my pages to be like strict canvases. Such a small concept, yet it is not allowed in word… stupid decision by the program designers. The whole system just feels heavy and unpredictable at times. Too many time-sinks… oh well, good for text-based work with minimal visual content.

Sunday: 2017-01-01

This time I only had to work 12 hours before finishing the whole catalog! I even uploaded it to my printer, and it is going through the proofing process at the moment, hopefully everything will go fine and I can finalize some details and then publish it.

I also began working on the ONLINE FREE version, it will probably take two days to finish… or I will try one of those online PDF resize services, if those really work, then the online version will be ready the same day I publish the paper version.

Oh well, what can I say, it feels great; it has been an interesting experience. I never realized how important catalogs can be… unless I made one. I highly recommend everyone who got products for sale to make a catalog.

It is time for me to go to bed, it has been a very intense week. 14 hour work days take their toll. I gained weight from 76 kg to 80 kg this week alone! That’s crazy.

Anyways, Happy New Year!
I wish you all a wonderfully new productive year!

Thanks for reading!

– A. Wehbe, www.ahmadwehbe.com

Monday: 2016-12-19

Oh, what a wonderful day! Just kidding, it is yet another Monday! Administration work as usual, applied for a couple of jobs, posted last week’s journal on my blog and many other small things that needs to be done.

I spent the first half of the day feeling really good and energized! Got lots of work done, fine tuned a couple of paintings, like title and removed one that didn’t satisfy me. Went back to the paintings that didn’t work out for me the last time I looked at them and found something new in them that suddenly made them work for me! I guess I will be repeating this process until I eliminate every piece. It is important not to fall in love with your work, you got to kill or change anything that isn’t perfect.

Anyhow, I also worked for a couple of hours on the metadata for all the paintings. It is a lot of data… and I thought I would finish today, but got caught up in other things. I had to go out and buy groceries and make food *sad face*, a man shouldn’t have to do this nonsense, what cruel world is this, madness I tell ya, madness! Oh well, I made ice-cream, so I’m happy as can be at the end of the day.

Tuesday: 2016-12-20

Began working on my old; very first painting set, I talked about it last week, but I will repeat it! It had five paintings but I removed two, so it feels kind of empty and doesn’t offer much variety.

I worked on it for six hours, got a couple of concepts worked out so far. Moved on to work on the metadata to rest my mind, there are around 60 paintings in total, so the metadata is going to take a while. Each painting is unique and needs its own description. But I’m not even there yet, I only got to finish how I want to structure the data to make everything easier to work with and avoid clutter!

Cooking food is really becoming an annoyance, it takes too much of my time, I’m thinking of focusing on making soups from now on, big pot of soup that lasts two or three days, cooking that much food in one go should reduce my overall time spent on cooking.

Wednesday: 2016-12-21

Continued working on the metadata, it is more time consuming than I thought.

Thursday: 2016-12-22

Still working on the metadata, got a whole bunch of stuff done, it is so repetitive and boring that it leaves me easily distracted, my thoughts kept wandering away towards all other projects that I want to finish up.

Friday: 2016-12-23

Continued work on the paintings, all sets are finished now, did a little of brush work on the first paintings I did back in 2014, really happy with how everything turned up.

Finished up most of the metadata as well, but I’m far from done, I still want to add a description for each painting, to share what I experienced while I painted them.

Spent a couple of hours past midnight researching the platform I will be uploading my paintings to. I had to check how their system works, to be absolutely certain that I want to use their service. I didn’t any issues with their service so far, but I discovered additional things that need to be done to make sure everything goes smoothly. Turns out there is a lot to be done, so I saved it for tomorrow and went to bed instead.

Saturday: 2016-12-24

My body is screaming for physical activity and those daily 8 km walks seem like a miracle work, but I’m stuck right now, need to finish the paintings-project.

I continued working from where I left off yesterday, three hours of just calculating canvas sizes and prices. I hate math, because I love it, I’m enough nerdy as is, why become a mathematician too? That would just make it easier for people to tease me! Hah!

Anyhow, everything on the platform is ready, except for a couple of minor details, which can only be set once I start uploading my paintings. It’s just a smooth sailing after that, or rather, returning to my daily walks and writing *cries happy tears*. I’ve been literally jumping and shouting “YES, YEEES” every time I think about the comic I’m working on, can’t wait to return to it and finish things up so I can begin drawing and publishing it.

Spent an hour writing descriptions for a couple of paintings, but then it hit me, I don’t want to make people biased for what to feel when they look at my paintings… also the titles give away quite a lot anyways. So I decided not to write any descriptions, I hope I won’t regret this decision later on!

Oh well, had to spend some time to edit all the metadata to adjust to this newest revelation!

Sunday: 2016-12-25

Well well well, final day of the week, and I must say, it has been a very productive week! All the paintings are done, but I was having trouble getting the raw files down into manageable sizes… the platform (pixels.com / fineartamerica.com) only accept a maximum size of 25 MB, that’s quite small… but it worked out in the end.

Spent the day going through all the paintings one by one to correct issues digitally, didn’t find much, except for two paintings… one had a shape sticking out too much, which ruined the balance for me, so I hit it with some digital brushing to balance it out.

Other than all that, it’s all done. Well, almost, still need to covert the raw files into files that can be uploaded.

Time really flies by when you’re having fun! Anyways, I feel really excited about getting this project wrapped up so I can continue with my many other projects. Will have to continue the file converting tomorrow, just a couple more days I guess, and then it’s all done… Still need to figure out how I will be presenting my paintings on my website… I don’t want to use the provided shopping widget, I don’t want customers to buy anything directly from my website, I want my website to only provide information about my work and where to buy it, that’s all. I guess time will tell… I could at least try it out and see how it goes.

Thanks for reading!

– A. Wehbe, www.ahmadwehbe.com