zero

Bug hunter

[zero @bugghunterr]

@frosteyszn Happy birthday

[zero @bugghunterr]

@Capuong2 @mtucreativity @SafaricomPLC Mpesa app

[The Biblical Man @Biblicalman]

My daughter stopped running to the door.

I don't know when it happened.

One day she was five, sprinting down the hallway the second she heard my keys.

"DADDY'S HOME!"

Every single day.

It was annoying sometimes. I had bags to put down. Emails to check. Dinner to get started.

"Give me a second, sweetheart."

She'd wait.

Then she'd stop waiting.

I came home last Tuesday.

Keys in the door.

Silence.

She was on the couch.

Glanced up.

"Hey."

Then back to her phone.

I stood there.

Bags in hand.

Waiting for something that wasn't coming.

That's when I realized:

She didn't stop running to the door.

I trained her to stop.

Every "give me a second."

Every half-hug while looking at my phone.

Every "not right now, honey."

A thousand tiny rejections.

Until she got the message.

Daddy's home.

But he's not really here.

So why bother?

I put my bags down.

Walked over.

Sat next to her.

"I'm sorry I stopped being excited to see you."

She looked at me like I was crazy.

"What?"

"I used to run to you too. I stopped first. You just followed."

She didn't say anything.

But she put her phone down.

Your kids stop running to the door when you stop being worth running to.

It happens slowly.

Then all at once.

And one day you'll come home to silence.

Wondering what happened.

You happened.

The next time you walk through that door—

Put down your phone before you put down your bags.

Look them in the eyes before you check your inbox.

Run to them first.

Before they forget how.

[Cyprian, Is Nyakundi @C_NyaKundiH]

As men we must learn to love and appreciate ourselves. Do not let life reach a point where your wife and kids have ten pairs of shoes and you’re walking around with one torn pair. They may not even notice your situation because everyone is used to you “sacrificing.” But you must notice yourself. Take care of yourself. Provide, yes, but don’t hustle so hard for your family that you completely forget your own dignity and comfort.

[Silas Nyanchwani @nyanchwani]

You get to a point in adulthood when you have so much in your mind, your heart is heavy, and you really want to open up to someone, then you look around and realise there is no one to talk to.

It is intimate stuff that is eating you up. Gobbling you up like an aggressive cancer. You need a confidant. You need a comforter. A mentor. A spiritual advisor. Someone who can make you see life from a different dimension, or at least introduce new perspectives or lenses to view life with.

Typically such person could be a parent, an uncle or aunt(senje, in that traditional affectionate sense). It could be that wise friend who seems to have figured out life.

Then one day in your adulthood, your parents are gone. The uncle or the aunt who could pump some hope into your life is gone. And you have drifted apart from your friend, or he or she is dead. Another worse situation is when they exist but now your existential problems are misaligned with whatever advice they may offer you. Say, you want to divorce an abusive spouse but your trusted parent or uncle/aunt only believes in kuvumilia. You don't exactly hate or despise their advice. If anything you see their point, but their adamant stance is completely anti-thetical to your angst. You need different gears and levers to move your life forward.

This particular problem can smack you any time after 25, but it gets objectively worse as you age. And then, later in your 30s, the problems become deeply personal. Every man or woman you open up to, is either battling their own demons, or is ill-equipped to offer you the padded shoulder to lean on in such times.

As an adult you will battle a lot of problem. Some could be frivolous, some serious, and some life-threatening. From infertility problems under the probing eyes of relatives and friends, to a diabetic man with other attendant problems causing all manner of problems in his marriage, to unemployment, unrealised and unfulfilled dreams, unmet expectations, disappointments, relationships that didn't work, jobs that didn't deliver the high hopes they promised, can only ruin a person.

But there are higher spiritual problems that we battle with. The question of identity. Who are we? What are we doing here? Is there a point to life? After all this suffering, we die. Just like that. Gone and forgotten.

The internal battles, away from those problems that can be fixed(e.g, if broke, we can fix that if you get a job or money), have a way of isolating us. Hence the friend who stops picking calls. The friend who disappears under the radar. The poor choices like alcoholism or drug abuse, as an escape from the harsh reality of life.

The worst poverty is to be in a place where you have no one to confide to your worst fears, whatever their nature.

Hence later in life, you will learn a certain sad fact about a friend that will break your heart.
"You mean he was going through all that and we didn't know? Poor thing..."

People say when something tragic happens to a friend and with hindsight you start to think it was completely avoidable. It wasn't. We only confide things to people when we feel safe.

That is why kujitia kitanzi is something that I understand. Someone who does that means whatever that that was troubling them, in their assessment, no human being was capable of understanding their pain. People could trivialise the pain, laugh at it, or fail to understand the enormity of the problem. As human beings we are very poor at assessing people and what they are going through.

I don't know if I am making sense.
But I know many adults have so many battles inside them, some they will win with time and creative adjustments to their situation. But some, may take time and unfortunately the pain may never be resolved.

Resentment is permanent human condition, and mastering how to handle it is not an easy thing.

To understand the loneliness of internal battles, allow me to use the example of Jesus.

Remember when he went to Gethsmane to pray.

I often think about his last days before being crucified.

He took three disciples with him to pray. When he moved away from them to pray, asking God to take the cup from him, he asked the disciples(John, James and Peter) to pray so as not to fall into temptations. Two times he came back to find them asleep. Later that night, Peter even denied him, and Judas did betray him eventually.

Sometimes you can tell your friends what you are going through and they can laugh at you, deny you, or betray you and now that we live in the tea culture, you become the hot tea.

Motivational speakers will tell you to be there for yourself. But what if the self is scared, afraid and inadequate?

We used to seek refuge in family, but family in some cases the source of the pain you are going through.

A believer can turn to God. What A Friend We Have in Jesus? the old beautiful hymn asks, and answers more profoundly what a friendship with Jesus means.

But what does a non-believer do when walking through that Valley of Darkness?

By and large, we get by, human beings are surprisingly resilient.

What we never talk about is the mental scars we accumulate as we age. From the heartbreaks, the betrayal of friends, the unmet expectations, unfulfilled dreams, the realisation that there isn't so much to life, unless you assign meaning to it, and the many things beyond our control that are thrown at us.

But finding a comforter, a confidant, a trusted friend, is truly one of the most blessed gifts life can grant you.

Not all of us can be stoics( though I encourage it).

Count yourself lucky if you do become a stoic. Count yourself lucky if you escape crippling internal battles.

Blessed Sabbbath.

[The Ragamuffins @TheRagamuffins]

ALEX ISAK
WELL HE PLAYS IN ATTACK
AND HE PLAYS IN ATTACK FOR LIVERPOOL

BOUNCE!

#lfc @lfc #LiverpoolFC #tetris #Sweden

[Silas Nyanchwani @nyanchwani]

As a man, things that are likely to wreck your life are likely to come later in life. Your late 30s or 40s. Even in your 50s and 60s, things can irrevocably go wrong.

Some of the rudderless, dysfunctional male folks in their late 30s and 40s, that I know, were the most ruthlessly focused, most ambitious guys who had everything going for them barely 12 years ago: beautiful wife, famil, job, business, climbing that social ladder with absolute certainty of conquering the world. They were unstoppable. They were untouchable.

Then something happened.
They lost an election.
A regime changed and they lost all the deals.
A divorce.
Lost a job or a business deal.
Or their practice licence got revoked.
Some gambled their fortune away, never recovered.
Lost a key person in their life-parent, sibling, friend, or whoever held it down for them when the going got tough.

The sad thing about their situation is that you can never prepare for a divorce, a job loss, a licence revocation, or whatever that is likely to send your life into a tailspin, with no room of recovery.

You can end up homeless.
You can be auctioned.
You can end up family-less.
Like you will find yourself in the village. Or reduced to a single room in Dandora. Hiding from friends who knew you in your "Prime".

Last week, I saw a young, swashbuckling lawyer, with a cute family, write with the cocky confidence of a late 20s young man with everything going for him. He was dismissive of seemingly older men with no sense of direction. My immediate wish to him was not for him to lose all he has in order to learn the hard way. I want him to succeed, so much, such that he never has to see the ugly side of the coin of life that most men later experience in life.

In deed, more men do just fine, with a few knocks, here and there, but they survive. But those who survive, are helped the more by certain guardrails; family (coming from a good family background helps a lot, give your children that, please), they have friends or networks that get them out of the hole, they have abundant luck, and I do believe those who believe in God, God has a way of opening doors).

But you can have all that, and still things go wrong.

You can end up an addict.
You can end up a conman and you don't even see it coming. You can end up a beggar. Or anything.

My Kisii people say, "oborema n'igoro bore", loosely translated, "disability comes with old age" or "as you grow older". Commonly it refers to physical disabilities, like spraining your leg when climbing down a flight of stairs. Or when you step on a slippery floor.

But I have been thinking of the phrase in terms of the psychological defeat or disability that come with older age.

That time in your 40s when you realise that you have efed up a big one. And there is no way out. That time when life has defeated you, and you have to move from Lang'ata toll Utawala(initially), before you end up in Kibera, or some dusty outpost in the outskirts of Nairobi. Humiliated and humbled.

There is the economic disability that comes with age: losing a job and you are no longer marketable, or your skills are no longer that attractive in the market place. You send your CVs out but you soon realise, any company worth its salt, is better off employing a recent college graduate who is agile, ambitious and cheaper. Also, you could be the best businessman today, only to be out of season next year, ending up in debt with no possibility of recovery.

And then there is the social disability that comes with losing your wife in your 40s

How do you show up in the village to explain that your wife of 17 years has left with your teenage children?

First of all, you can't explain a divorce to anyone. Worse, if you have to move out of your matrimonial home. You show up in an apartment in Eastlands, man solo, like mudfish, and starting to cook for yourself. Hiding from relatives is not uncommon. But that is the least of your worries. Society judges men the hardest when older and unmarried. They ask questions. Where has he been? What was he doing? What did he do? And lately, people can draw conclusions that you are a Sim 2 merchant, as if the situation wasn't worse enough. I think of men who have to hide from their childreb(it is a thing) because they have nowhere to host their children. NOTE: if you are a man, don't ever do that, your children can love you even when you live in a single room in Gachie or some place. But I understand the necessiry of the "shame".

Dating in your 40s can be tricky, especially if you have meagre means. I recently saw a 20-something girl complain about dating a late 40s teacher who lives in a single room, and uses that wicker-stove to cook. Have you ever used that wicker-stove to cook? Despite the living conditions of that teacher for late 40s dude, the chick said that the man did know his Google maps between the shits.

Enter the middle-age nihilism of most millennial men(though it has been like that throughout the ages: men can be nihilistic as they grow older).

A few men when confronted with obvious defeat, fight back, and bounce back with enviable resilience.

Some accept the average sadness of life, adjust their sails, and live accordingly to what life throws at them.

Yet more sink into oblivion. Absorbed by alcohol, drugs and other addictions that swallow them whole, accelerating their death.

Long story short.
If you are a young man today with a flying career, do your level best to build a solid foundation for your life. You will certainly get a few things wrong. Buy the wrong piece of land. Invest in what seems as the next big deal (that will end up like Cytonn), or Crypto against all good judgement. You could marry wrong. Or she could turn up rogue down the line. The number of men in the 30s suddenly realising they are in dead marriages is not even alarming. It is the norm, lately and many extricating themselves.

I want to finish with those whose lives could be irrevocably ruined by marriage for reasons they have no control: wife cheating with their boss, wife moving abroad, wife suddenly realising she wants better for herself.

Some men tend to take it too personal and never recover when she eventually leaves. They become the sad shells of their former selves, rudderless and hopeless.

I pray that no man will ever have to end up hopeless because wife (and kids left).

All in all, regardless of the curveball, wherever life throws you, keep your head up.

As the old riddle says, if you are in a desert, and a lion is chasing you, just run and climb the tree. But there are no trees in the desert, you say. The philosopher said: there is always a tree.

Find it.

Find the damn tree.

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

Researchers placed 1,000 Al agents in a Minecraft server, and they developed their own civilization with government, culture, and economy.

It is amazing…

[Travis @travs35mm]

Billy, the AI-powered fish is a faster now after a few tweaks to reduce latency. Been having some fun playing some games like this one. @Figure_robot #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #AGI #Robot

[Desert Eagle ���🇸 @deserteagle291]

You think this is smart until you meet the Korean kids in college and they don’t want to have kids because they fundamentally hate living and don’t think it’s ethical to bring new kids into the world because their life will just be suffering

[zero @bugghunterr]

@arsen_bt Chain

[Liverpool FC @LFC]

Alisson Becker.

[zero @bugghunterr]

@wambuiey Looks great, is the seat good for your back and neck? If so how much was it?

[blue @bluewmist]

time and consistency is a powerful combination.

because the passing of time is already an absolute,

and now its up to you to do a little bit everyday,

just understand doing a little bit is not hard,
but you gotta do it everyday that's the hard part.

and whether you choose to do it or not,
the time will pass anyways.

"it's not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently"

[Saad Shots 📸 @saadShots]

Support my hustle with just a retweet 🙏🏾

[MaThings @KelMaundu]

Hapa ni kama nilijijinx😪

Hii imeisha. Kitu nimepata ni sifa na woows haziishi

[Dalai Lawama 🦙 @Trackmann2]

Standing on business, daily.

[Thomas van Linge @ThomasVLinge]

#DRCongo 🇨🇩: apocalyptic scenes in #Goma as hundreds of thousands of people are forced to flee, desperate to escape from the advancing #M23 and Rwandan forces.

Many of the people have been on the run for over 30 years at this point.

[zero @bugghunterr]

@_lennoxomondi Since irudi latency imerudi usual 100 ama it's now 30ish ms?