Video Games and My Life.

SO following my last blog post I'll talk about my recent obsession of video games. In 2007 I had a bit of an alcohol addiction. I rarely went a day without at least a Corona, most of the time my drinking began at lunch time during work hours mind you. After I left my job my drinking continued on and actually got worse. It go to the point where my wife gave me an ultimatum stop drinking or leave. I knew I had gotten bad, but I had no idea it had gotten that bad.

Ok so now the part about the video games, So I had owned an Xbox 360 for 6 months at this time but didn't play it very often. So one day I decided ok I'm going to quit drinking (some say its because my dad moved out of town the same day I quit but I say otherwise.) Anyways I picked up my 360 controller and turned it on to play some Oblivion I was working on the Thieves guild quests at the time and I finished the quests out that night. Then I heard the sound... I'd heard it before but really didn't know what it meant. It was the achievement unlocked sound! So I hit the dashboard button on my controller and started checking out my achievements and saw what I could unlock. I thought hey this is pretty cool! So began my gamerscore whoring, I had only 3 people at that time on my friends list and the highest gamerscore of them was around 3000 I thought way I think I can catch that and I did at about 6500 points I happened to read an article on a website I used to go to called Playfeed about a gamerscore club called the xbl10kclub they were celebrating their 1 year anniversary. I thought to myself no way there is a club for people like me? So I went to the site and checked it out. It looked pretty cool but I had never spent time on any forum before so I figured well I better get my score up to 10k so I can join. In the mean time I decided I better get a little more familiar with forums, so I joined the xbox.com forums. What a mistake that was tons of little asshole kids who troll the forums preying on anyone who's not sure about something then flaming the hell out of them. Anyways back to the 10k a couple of weeks later I hit 10k and signed up. I posted my first welcome thread in the forums just to test the waters and see what kind of response I get as I was a little hesitant after getting flamed damn near daily on the xbox forums. To my surprise I received very welcoming responses from everyone. I thought hey this isn't half bad. So I started checking the forums daily making random replies still a little weary. Pretty soon I started getting friend requests from other forum members on Xbox live. I was really starting to enjoy this forum stuff. Now by this time I had gone 2 months without even a thought of drinking I had a new addiction and it was an excellent one! Then something I thought truly amazing happened I was sitting up late one night listening to the weekly Zunecast and they mentioned a giveaway for a Chris Paladino autographed copy of Shadowrun. While at the time I had no freakin clue who Chris Paladino was but I still thought it was pretty exciting. So I entered the contest, then one day I get an email from Rodsmack 10k saying "congrats bro you won the copy of Shadowrun!" I couldn't believe it! I was shocked, I'd never won anything like this before! That was just the icing on the cake! I knew I'd found my community! I'm a 10k member for life! I even added the 10k to my gamertag twice along with my sons (Outlaw 10k)

just to show my love and appreciation for what they've done for us. Now 7 months later my gamerscore is

and I'm a very active member of all the Xbox communities and have won multiple contest from different communities I stay active in and still not a drop of alcohol! I love seeing my score in the top 20-25 of all the leaderboards I join and hope to one day be at #1 in a few of them! Anyways i want to give a little shout out to The 10k members Rodsmack, DrunknMunkey, ReallyOldPunk, Mistah Clutch, Prestiege, Simon, ContacttheDude and everyone else helping out with the community! I also want to shout out the owner of 360style Avid X, bimbobarbie, and igotgame, for all their hard work! If your not already a member of these communities go there now and get involved NOW!