This is how good blogs die!

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Ritchie Odak. This is the story of how my last blog died.
Perhaps it may also foreshadow the death of this one (fingers crossed that it doesn’t).

As is customary to this blog, we start with the back-story: At the end of 2008, a strapping young lad (the writer of this piece) with nothing more than a dream (and a brand new suit) graduated from university with a bachelor’s degree in physics.

As many recent graduates might tell you, finding a job legitimately in this current economy is not easy. Some might even say it's nigh-on impossible (and that's for courses more market/employer-desirable than Physics). How many people do you know who answered an advertisement in the papers/online, applied, went through the processes involved, and actually got hired to the said position without greasing the wheels, or getting help from a friend or relative in the right place? I'll hazard a guess: not many; at least not without 7 years of management level experience, superpowers, a published novel, a Fortune 500 CEO's references, and a recommendation letter from the Pope. And for the few of us that did, it's considered a miracle from God (which it honestly is). And it took 3 years to get to the promised land. But that’s a story for another day.

And so for a couple of years after graduating I tried and I tried, I sent application after application but nothing bore fruit. The phrase 'humble background' is so often used in so many people's origin stories that we're almost at the point where the meaning is lost. I won't go into the details of my own, but I will say that as far as humility of backgrounds is concerned, mine is pretty humble. For me, it was gainful employment or bust. There was no plan B; there was no contingency to start a business should work not materialize, there was no internship at my dad's work place to pad the resume. I needed work, and I needed it badly!

Fast forward to 2 years after I had left university, my dreams had turned mostly into despair. I had just one thing still going for me: the suit held up very well. I am not ashamed to say it's still the only suit I own to this day. (Again, story for another post)
During this 2 year job hunt period, I also happened by some miracle to be dating a fairly attractive female at the time. Without too much back-story, I'll just say that just getting from my place to hers, or a neutral locale in the city, for a date was a daily miracle for me. And after about a year of dating me, there wasn't enough love in her world for her to stay with my broke ass; especially after she had found a fairly well paying job, as well as other projects she had going on on the side doing fairly well, and constantly having to fend off the advances of gentlemen in positions to give her a lot more than just the love and affection that I was able offer. I was swiftly, and painlessly (for her), dumped. On the day of our 1-year anniversary.

Side note: Let me just say: fair play to her, and this is all pride talking, but not many women can say they were the ones to leave me, so more power to her.

As a parting shot I encouraged to – and I quote – "stop being lazy and work harder to get a job".

There is much, MUCH more to that story, but I tell just that to say this: it was at this point I truly felt hopeless. Though I like to consider myself a pragmatic optimist, I struggled to see the glass as half full around about this time.

Side note: So as not to dampen the mood of this blog as you continue to read, allow me to put a bit of closure on the above heartbreak. A couple of months after my broke/'lazy' ass was dumped, I started seeing a very close friend, after proverbially realizing that what I really needed had been right next to me all along. That was a fairly tale romance that lasted a solid 3(ish) years.
Yes ladies and gentlemen, I bounced back by conquering the friendzone!

A moment of silence for our brothers and sisters still in the struggle: keep hope alive!

You can all wipe away the tears now, so that we can resume our origin story.

Where were we again? Oh yeah, hope having turned to despair: I've been looking for work for years without luck, nor did I have much hope in terms of future prospects.
As one does in such circumstances, you try and distract yourself as much as possible from your life not going as planned by filling up your time with anything, anything, else!
I spent several hours every day learning how to play the drums, I watched years worth of films, everything from current box office releases to classics from the 80's and 90's. I started working out; or trying to anyway. In the end, I was pretty much just walking incredibly long distances, jumping a skipping rope, and doing a few sit-ups every few days.
But what took up a lot of my waking hours whilst doing most of these things, or chores around the house, was listening to radio; specifically, the BBC World Service. I listened to a lot of the BBC, and would basically schedule my day around sports news bulletins, because out of everything that piqued my curiosity in the world, and there was/is a lot, I loved to follow sports more than anything else.

After a while, I realized I was hearing the same sports stories being told the same way over and over again. Even online when I'd go various websites to read up on updates, it'd be the same style of reporting all the time, everywhere I looked.
The factual reporting of events as they happened is very important, and it had its place, but I was looking for something that was a little different, something that added a bit of personal commentary/analysis on what had occurred. Because most analysis/opinion pieces are still very stat/fact based, what I wanted was a lay man's take on the happenings; a person that knows enough about sports to have intelligent opinions, but not so nerded out to just re-report events with more statistics, but actually put it in a fan's perspective.

Then it dawned on me: I want to hear from myself!

No seriously, that was exactly how my thought process went. I realized there might be someone out there that writes what I wanted to read, but I couldn’t find them. Therefore, I decided to write what I wanted to read for myself.
It also occurred to me that I knew a few people that are just as into sports as I am, and whose opinions and perspectives I respect/enjoy. So, I reached out to them with the idea of starting a blog, and just like that, we started writing what and how we wanted to read.

In the beginning, it was mostly Facebook friends that read the blog; articles would have about 50 page views per post. But with time, what I was writing, and how I wrote, really began to catch on. I built up an audience to the point where I'd regularly have over 500 views per article. In addition to that, everyone I talked to – especially people that weren't particularly sports fans, or even followed sports in any regular manner – seemed to really like my posts; or at least enjoy them.
I shared some pieces with journalists from local news outlets (shoutout to Carol Radull for reading my posts, offering constructive feedback, and even a few shares back in the day), I shared some articles with foreign writers and even got to useful feedback from writers for The Guardian & The Times (never the BBC though, sadly).
There was a site for sports writers (most of whom not affiliated with traditional news outlets, like myself) where people publish articles and people would rate each other's work where I regularly charted in the top 10 every week. Suffice it to say the blogging thing was doing well.

About a year into my new pet project, I was quite pleased with my progress. However, if we recall, the genesis of all this was me finding distractions from the fact that I still hadn't "done anything with my life" as some had put it at the time. The blog was going great and all, but it wasn’t putting food on my plate.

I now considered my writing (and following) as having some marketable value, and thus began to investigate means of monetising it.

I had two ideas for how I would go about doing this: 1. Selling advertising space on the blog, and 2. Getting paid by an external outlet for my writing. I did research and sent out feelers, and the response I got for both was pretty much the same: have a site that's active for a certain amount of time, and have empirical evidence of both viewership and following.

This I can say confidently was the moment that my blog began to die.

Why was this the beginning of the end you might ask, given I was just bragging about how many views I was getting and all the positive feedback I was getting?
On the surface it appeared I was doing well, it turned out evidence couldn't be found to suggest things were as hot as I had thought they were. For one, it isn't easy to sell an advertiser the idea of the possibility of 500 people viewing their ad. That just isn't enough eyeballs to spend significant money on (they could spare some change, but it was explained to me that it would be simply that: spare change). Therefore, I had to grow my viewership. Challenge accepted; I had no problem with that. I was tracking well growth-wise and could show based on my progressive trajectory at the time that I had a rapidly growing audience. I was confident with time I could build my audience even further.
THE major issue was the fact that for all my page views, I couldn’t show distinguishability of the viewers.

Side note: My computer has vigorously underlined the word distinguishability; apparently, it isn't a word. But it is the perfect word for me to make my point with, so I'm keeping it. Grammar Nazis (of which I count myself a casual member), please try and keep calm. Or don’t. It's here to stay either way.

What distinguishability means here is that there is no way of telling that 500 page views equates to 500 unique individuals each viewing the page. For all we know, it could be the same person, or a just a handful of people, refreshing the page repeatedly as the page view tracker isn't like say what YouTube uses, which counts views from each individual signed in to their account as a single view no matter how many times one watches a particular video.
And yes, I did have viewers in several countries, but it could have been one person in each refreshing the page several times; the analytics look at number of page views, locations viewed from, and device/operating system used to view. But beyond that, it doesn’t look in any more detail.
So if for example you pay for bots to randomly click and refresh pages a certain number of times you could get your views up to as high as you can afford.

So how could I show I had a consistent fan base? There's 2 avenues: following, and interaction.

The followers aspect is simple to quantify: using this blog as an example, on the right hand side of this article, near the top of the page, there's a dialogue box (as is illustrated in the picture on the right →) that asks you to submit your email address to subscribe to the blog. What that means is that whenever a new article is published, you get an email notification, with a part of the article, the first couple of paragraphs or so in it, so that if the sample snippet intrigues you, you can with a single click from that email go to the full article on the blog and read the rest of the article.

At the death of my old blog, I had 7 followers signed up.

Seven.

There aren't enough words to possibly quantify – to this day – just how disappointing that number is.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Those are how many people were willing to commit to reading the blog; not were willing to read, there clearly were more of those, but seven people were willing to actually commit to reading the blog regularly. Seven people looked at the blog and said, "You know what, I enjoy this writing. I would like to be notified when new articles come out because I like what I'm reading and would like to continue to do so."

Seven people.

And who exactly were these seven people?
1. Myself
2 & 3. My 2 co-authors
4. My girlfriend
5. My sister
And 2 other people.

The first five basically had to subscribe; to some extent they each had a vested interest in the success of the blog. There were only 2 other people – out of possibly hundreds – that were willing to commit to the blog by subscribing.

To put that in some sort of context: the Facebook fan page for the blog had over 350 people like/follow the page.
If you're confused, join the club.

I still to this day ask myself which of the following 3 scenarios is responsible:
1. Kenyans in 2010/2011 did not understand the concept of subscribing to a blog.
2. A one click like for a Facebook page you'll never return to, and will probably mute from your timeline, is easier to do than the "process" of submitting one's email address and having to actually regularly read the blog.
3. The blog wasn't as good as I've always told myself it was, and people were just being polite in checking it out, or would just visit to see how awful it was.

Like Schrödinger's cat, one of life's great mysteries.

The second means of determining distinguishability would be interaction.
What that means is how many other people were talking about the blog, or various posts, how many likes on the blog post feedback section, how many shares to Facebook/Twitter? If you put the title of the blog into a Google search, how many people (other than the author) would be talking about it, or have shared it online? On how many profiles not my own could articles be found on? How many comments were there on articles commending/recommending/criticising various posts?

I went back and I checked the stats: the 10 articles with the most page views had a total of just over 7,000 unique page views. Of all those readers, there was a sum total of 2 comments left on them.

Two.

Like your hands: one, two.

If any of those readers enjoyed the articles, they certainly didn't say so. If they didn't enjoy them, they didn't say so either. So if after reading a post and you fell into one of these two camps and were curious what other people thought about it, there was nothing to compare your experience to. Maybe it's just me that does that after reading/seeing something online.

The same could be said of likes on the article feedback section, or shares to social media. Other than the 5 people I listed above in the subscribers' section, I know of about 4 people who after reading an article of mine would share it to their own social networks if they had enjoyed it.

I say all that to say this: by the time I had done the inquiries and realised I could not monetise my blog to a level that could sustain me financially, I very quickly lost all motivation to write.
I enjoyed my articles, still do, but just writing for writing's sake was no longer enough. I was putting in a lot of time and effort, but in the end my passion for writing and sport were no longer enough to distract me for my continued lack of a job and perceived future prospects.

Something that made it even more frustrating is that when I stopped writing for prolonged periods, friends of mine and fans of the blog, would quite frequently ask when the next article is coming out. Did they do this by commenting on the blog/the blog's fan page, or on my MULTIPLE social media presences where other people might notice their query and perhaps invite curiosity to lead to a new reader? Nope. People would ask me when we met in person, or in the course of a text/IM conversation, or over the phone.

What this means is if a new reader stumbled on the blog, and perhaps enjoyed a first article, they wouldn't see in the comment/feedback section anything pointing to the fact that people are actually enjoying the blog/looking forward to subsequent articles and perhaps based on that might determine that this is actually a good writer and not that I stumbled onto the one article this person ever wrote (which is perhaps a slanted perspective, but I do personally make a lot of determinations that way). Nope. They'd see what they thought was a good piece, but no one else agreed, and so they kept their opinion to themselves, and maybe didn't feel the need to spend time looking at other articles.
At least that was my reasoning.

Around the same time as this was happening, three long years after I had left university, I finally got a job. Not the greatest job in the world, not one I particularly enjoyed, but a job it was; and I was grateful for it! The workload there was RIDICULOUS, the hours were LONG, and it did NOT pay anywhere near commensurate to the work done; I still lived with my mom, ate her food. But, it was a job! I could afford bus fare to work every day (and to church on weekends), lunch most days, the ability to take my girlfriend on 2 MODEST (I cannot stress the modesty part enough!) dates a month (always after and close to church, to minimise the need to pay bus fare multiple times to varied and exotic locations), and load up my phone sufficiently to be able to text, and surf the web for the month (calls were an extravagant luxury).
To this day, I still do not call people just out of habit picked up from this period in my life. Today I'd much rather – by choice – text you. Unless a call is absolutely necessary. Or in special circumstances.

So, given the fact that one of my major reasons for starting a blog was to distract myself from the fact that I didn't have a job, now that I had one (which took up 10 to 12 hours of my day), I really struggled to find both motivation and time to write.

A few months later, I got the job I have now (Hallelujah people, Hallelujah!). And this job IS the dream: making a decent wage (with benefits, and a pension) doing physics every single day. Not a lot of people from my graduating class actually got to directly translate what they studied into what they're doing currently: and that doesn't just apply to the physicists. I know chemists, botanists, hospitality management people, statisticians, economists, and so many others who had to re-appropriate whatever knowledge they had to new industries/sectors. Therefore, for me living the dream, I suddenly could not think up a reason, nor muster the motivation, as to why I should spend a couple of hours at my computer writing articles basically for my own amusement.

And just like that, the blog died.

RIP.


Epilogue:

So what changed that I started this blog?
I started writing again mainly to amuse myself. I genuinely find myself quite entertaining.
I also want to have certain things on record so that if I never get the chance to tell my kids about them, or they want to revisit them after I'm gone, they can find them here.
I still struggle for motivation, but I am determined to try.

Will I be more consistent with this blog? Will I give up on it again?
I don’t know.

But this time, I'm just writing for me, and that’s OK.

I spent 12 hours playing video games.

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Ritchie Odak. This is the origin story of my relationship with video games.

I am Kenyan. Pause for shock, awe, and dramatic effect. Or no effect.
I get easily amused. And distracted. I feel for you who has to read through this. Thank you for persevering. It gets good, I promise!

So as I was saying: I am Kenyan. What that means practically is that I grew up in a 3rd world country in the 90's. My 1st interaction with a computer (and subsequently with video games) came rather late in life by today's 3-year-olds-with-iPads-and-a-YouTube-channel standards.
The year was 1993; I was 8 years old. This was at a time when our family was among the fortunate few to (a.) Have a colour TV (which was a very big deal when it first arrived in 1989; people suspected my dad of being a drug dealer!), & (b.) Have a 21-inch colour TV at a time when 14 inches was the de facto standard (again, another huge deal). Therefore, it goes without saying that I felt like the bee's knees on the tech front. This was until the announcement came that the computer lab at school would be made accessible to everyone. Everyone!

First of all: we have a computer lab? Moreover, I will have access to it? Computers were things I saw on TV and in the movies! Was it possible that little old me would be able to see or possibly even TOUCH one!? The excitement in me could not be contained! I had to, and so I set about finding out how to.
To my immense glee, it was not particularly hard! Over lunch hour the computer lab was accessible to all students; all of us!

At this point, I must confess: I honestly cannot remember how exactly I ended up in front of a computer. I cannot quite remember what the rules were to get in, I cannot remember whether I had to pay, I cannot remember whether I had to queue, I cannot even remember if I even managed to get in on day 1 or I had to try a few times! This is one of those memories that I probably remember more fondly than what actually happened, but I don’t care! You cannot take this moment away from me! Ever!

Anyway, as I was saying before I rudely interrupted myself: it got to my turn, and I sat down in front of the black screen.Why was the screen black I hear the children ask? Because in 1993, before the windows/mac age, computers ran on something called MS DOS. And it looked like this (kindly look to your left) all the time until a particular program was executed. Still to this date one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. Man am I old. Sigh. But I digress. Again.

Back to the narrative (for real this time): what I did not know was that everyone that was there was there for one reason: to play the greatest game ever made (up until that point in time): Prince of Persia!

I was just going in there to SEE a computer, and maybe with some luck touch one. Little did I know life as I knew it was about to permanently change as I was about to meet what would be one of the greatest loves of my life! (No, that is not hyperbole; I really do look back to that moment and see how my life's entire arch shifted! Life altering I tell you!)
So 8 year old me pressed play and got his first experience of proper gaming. I was hooked from the first jump/slide/fight/whatever exciting thing happened first.
30 year old me thanks 8 year old me for his initiative and perseverance in getting the opportunity!
Self-five!

It happened that the older kids that ran the lab knew that these youngsters getting their first taste of Prince of Persia would probably not be particularly good at it, and so the rule was that you got one chance: make it count. As soon as you exhausted your 3 lives you were out and someone else was in. And because of the length of the queue waiting, it was unlikely you'd get another chance before lunch hour ran out. Mine was to be a fairytale that deserves its own movie one day; the modern day Rocky!

I sat down at the computer, and having watched others before me try (and mostly fail), I picked up tips I thought would prove useful as I watched them play. I started by strategically positioning my fingers to get peak reaction time when pressing keys on the keyboard.

Like many of my contemporaries, my only experience typing up to this point had been on a typewriter – yes those were still a thing back then – and so hand placement at a 'modern' keyboard was still foreign. Making that little tweak meant I was more reactive to sudden keystrokes. Added to that was the fact that the older kids were literally yelling instructions to whomever was playing. Whereas others were quite irritated by this and wanted to 'prove' that they could do it 'on their own' (which almost nobody did), I embraced the coaching yelled at me like a rally driver listening to their co driver in the mist/fog/snow/dust of some far flung exotic race locale.
I climbed when told to climb, I jumped when told to jump, I stabbed when told to stab, I stopped when told to stop. Like Paul Bearer pulling The Undertaker's strings, I was a marionette for the manipulation of whoever was willing to coach me. I was fortunate to have a good coach and at some point a buzz started to go around the room; people gathered around me watching and cheering me on. Queue the Rocky theme music as this 'young unknown/underdog' had suddenly gotten to the end of level one!
This was it!
IT!
This is what IT felt like!

I felt a rush of adrenaline; I was literally shaking with excitement! The energy in the room was palpable! Older kids that would never have looked at me twice if we had crossed paths in the hallway were now patting me on the back and rubbing my head. In a short life with few momentous achievements, I think it is safe to say that on that day I had peaked as a human being! (I have since achieved far greater successes, just FYI).
This was what the TOP looked like.

"Hello mere mortals. I have left you all. I am on a different plane of existence."
{insert royal wave}

I'm probably remembering this a lot more fantastically than what actually happened, but my memory has embedded itself this way, and quite frankly I wouldn’t have it any other way now!
Riding this crest of adulation and achievement, I set my sights on conquering level two.

You can probably tell where this story is going.

Scarcely had I taken three steps (in game) than the bell rang signifying the end of lunch hour.
To say this was probably my first heartbreak may seem a bit extreme, but you cannot measure the volume of sadness I felt when I was tapped on the shoulder and told to stop playing. If I were not so scared of losing face in front of my newly acquired fans and admirers, I would have cried.

In the prime of my life, at the peak of my powers, with the admiration and respect of all my peers, holding the hope of a generation in my hands, I was forced by father time to retire.

Moment of silence.


Epilogue:
A lot has happened between then and now, and I will try as much as possible to fill that gap in time in future posts. But suffice it to say that to this day I am still chasing the high I felt on that day; that sense of achievement, that feeling of victory and invincibility (did I mention I finished level one having never died once? Well I did. I was so awesome).

This is my never-ending story in search of greatness.
I will never be a world-class athlete, but I can conquer the world from the comfort of my sofa/office chair/cell phone.

When I say I spent 12 hours playing video games, that isn't one particular day I'm talking about; that's every weekend and off day I have (whenever I have the time to and other life commitments allow me to).
One day I WILL get back to the mountain top.

I spent 12 hours playing video games, and that's OK.

My gas just ran out.

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Ritchie Odak. This is a story of by friend Barrack Obaga. It is taken from his Facebook profile verbatim.

This is my fourth gas cylinder. I bought it two days ago. For anyone who started out from the bottom right after campus, there are two things that will always last in your memory as far as the gas cooker is concerned.
One, you'll never forget the feeling you had the day you bought your first gas cylinder together with the burner and the stand that holds the sufuria (saucepan) in place as you cook.
Two, you can forget the first reason above BUT you'll never forget the way gas runs out on you. Never ever. The embarrassing moments that result from this will haunt you forever.
I bought my first gas cylinder on 30th June 2013. I still have the receipt stashed somewhere. This was almost a full month after I'd left campus and moved out into the bedsitter which you are, by now, familiar with. It was the small 'house' that would make a chic raised in a castle ask: "Kwani where's the rest of the house?"

I was excited at the idea of starting to cook. I'd missed my own cooking. I used to buy food from Tuskys Supermarket at T-Mall, that kitchen of theirs. Since I didn't have a microwave, I'd give the packed food to the guys in the main house from whom I was subletting my small 'house' to warm for me. I still don't understand where I got all that money to survive on supermarket pre-cooked food.
At the time, I was lucky to be dating a chic that's seen through the hard start and she'd occasionally pack up some food and forcibly deliver it to my official residence. I'd save some coins and notes on such days.
On other days, since I was still attached to campus, I'd pass through Senses aka Student Centre after dropping my job applications all over the place. I'd call up a few pals who were still in campus and we'd eat a meal and wash it down with sodas. Then I'd stroll into town, full, focused on sleeping upon arrival at the house.
One day, I bought mutton and vegetable rice from T-Mall. That was the day I said, nay, I declared that enough was enough! It tasted so bad that I threw all of it in the bin. I did the math. I multiplied, added, divided, subtracted and I realized that I'd wasted cash buying ready food. I'd have comfortably bought a cooker.
So on 30th June, armed with cash, I walked to the guy selling gas near the entrance of Langata's Onyonka Estate.
"Nipatie hio ya 6kg (Gimme that 6kg one)" I said. I gave him the cash. He delivered it to the house.
Setting it up was drama. But I got it right. It had been long since I had last used a gas cooker. So I did all the installation outside. This was a safety precaution.
"Just in case it explodes," I lied to myself. "The whole world should explode with me"
The good thing with this single burner is that you focus on cooking one dish at a time. With the singularity of focus your bachelor meal deserves.
I couldn't stop talking about the first meal I'd prepared in my house after leaving campus. That was the tastiest meal ever since I left campus. And I couldn't stop toying with the idea of making meat, chicken or fish stew in the days to come. That feeling lingers in you forever too. Hehe...
Fast-forward to a random Saturday. Remember all my Saturdays were set aside for laundry and chores. Then lunch.
On this particular day, I decided to make ugali, sukuma wiki and eggs for lunch. That's the staple food for anyone in campus and fresh from campus. It never gets old.
I can't recall the order in which I was preparing them, but when I got to eggs, I failed to realize that I was taking too long for them to cook. I thought maybe the perforations on the burner had blocked.
Long story short, I was left with eggs that were barely halfway cooked.
"Why does this gas decide to run out right in the middle of the month?" I pondered.
The middle of the month is relative. Often, it's determined by the time when you have money only enough to shuttle you between home and work. And maybe eggs and veggies once in a while.
You know you're smack in the middle of the month when you don't have cash to refill a cylinder of gas. You know you're knee deep in starvation when, upon noticing those last kicks of the dying flames and all you can say is: "Lord, please, not today. Not now... Please... Please..." But those prayers echo back to you. And the fire dies off. And there's nothing you can do. Nothing.
The second gas cylinder ran out when I was cooking ugali. I was left with a crossbreed of porridge and ugali; a substance so thick that a snail would outpace it if they were to race.
I laughed at myself. I laughed at my folly.
Somewhere in between the first and the second one, I got a microwave from my friend Jose. This appliance became a big asset in the kitchen. While I was waiting for the next cash to come in to buy gas, I'd always throw any food that's eaten warm into the microwave. Milk. Tea. Some chapati I bought. All in the microwave.
Anyway, the third one ran out when making tea. Thank God, it was at night. I knew that the next morning I'd have had to rush to the office early and fix a mug of coffee before anyone could read the problems I had in kitchen back at home.
This is the fourth one. Many meals later. And to many more ugalis before the wife comes into my life and throws it out.
Hey, every time it happens it makes for a great story, and so it's OK.