Yeah, I am surprised too. I joined Gamespot on Jan 9, 2006 and yesterday was Jan 9, 2011. So today isn't really the official day, but it is still past the milestone mark and have to acknowledge such a milestone even if it is one day late. Also, this is my first blog for 2011, I can safely say that I had a better New Years than I did with my Christmas. :D

I went to this party and for the first time since I graduated back in 2009, all of my group was there. In High School, since I did the harder subjects, the cIasses I were in weren't all that full. In fact, the cIasses only had 6 people (the same 6 people throughout each cIass including myself. During the years, we all got to know each other quite well and got along really well. Throughout the year, I have managed to catch up with all of them at one stage or another, but never all together.

At this party, we were all together for one awesome reunion and one big bang to both the end and start of a year. I know this is going to sound corny, but new years was actually a perfect night. It was almost dream-like. Seeing these guys, which I used to see pretty much every day all together again was an experience like no other. It is times like that I start to think back to when I was still in High School and miss it, but I am also glad that we still have managed to keep in touch despite our separate pathways. :)

Anyway, before I continue on, I am still in the process of preparing the trophy list of 2011, I don't really want to rush it and not going to fall into the trap again of making up extremely difficult achievements. :lol: Trying to keep the list as feasible as possible. :P Anyway, since it is the 5 year milestone, I think it is a good idea to highlight some of the events that have occurred during my time on Gamespot.

Consoles Debate Union: More than half the reason why I have stayed on Gamespot for all this time. I have praised this union quite a bit, but it is hard not to. But I think I will just give a bit of a back story as to how I joined the union. I was pretty new to Gamespot at the time and was pretty much on the search for Gamespot friends. By random chance I came across a user named masterchef1000. After commenting on a few of his blogs, he told me about this union (The Next Gen Consoles Debate Union) that he was going to create.

He asked if I would be willing to be charter member and I said sure. Because of the time zone difference, I woke up and received an email from Gamespot and a few from MC asking me to accept the charter member request. If I remember correctly, I was the last to accept the position as charter member because the rest of the people already accepted while I was still at home asleep. This was when the Next Generation Consoles Debate Union was born.

Today though, it is just known as the Consoles Debate Union or CDU for short. The name change was a decision made after the union was created. Today the Next Gen name is still in the URL: http://au.gamespot.com/pages/unions/home.php?union_id=NextGenDebateUnion. So yeah, that is the story of how I joined the CDU, and owe a great debt to MC and our core group in the CDU for making GS as enjoyable as it is. :)

The Blades of Gamespot Union: This was the first and only union I ever created on Gamespot. It is pretty much dead today and I am responsible for the downfall of the union. It was starting to get too big to handle and handing the leadership to someone else wasn't entirely a good idea as they too were overwhelmed by the work needed to run the union. I did get back the leadership to revive the union but the damage was pretty much already done and people were starting to lose interest in the union by that time.

However with this said though, I thought it was a pretty dam good idea at the time and still kind of do. True, I could have done it better, but I could have done it worse as well. Oh and for those who don't know, the union was solely based on the idea of recreating a guild (like the ones portrayed in an elder scrolls game) into union form. There were missions, individual member ranks and each officer had their own thread. It was pretty neat for the time. :)

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It is very hard to compact all the milestones I want to talk about in one blog, so I am going to separate them into a few parts for more readability. Keep in mind, I am not doing them in chronological order so some of the events that I mention will be out of place. :P So, stay tuned. :)