*LONG POST WARNING*

Another decade of my life has come to pass as the calendar turns to the 28th day of October today. Today, as of 6:18 AM PST (9:18 AM EST), I will have existed on this Earth for three full decades.

Thirty years old....my god, where has the time gone these past ten years? It feels just like yesterday I was blowing out the candles on my birthday cake on October 28th, 2010 as I celebrated my twentieth birthday with my family back in simpler times. A lot has happened to me over the course of the past ten years, and as I sit here at my desk composing this post, it all comes rushing back to me like the rising tide of the ocean as the endless onslaught of waves come washing ashore. Friends that I once knew in the days of my youth have moved on and lost touch, a few beloved members of my family have departed this world for the great beyond, getting to experience all of the different things going on in our world through my job at the TV station I work at (lead editor for the afternoon and evening news broadcasts, I cut video from Telemundo, CNN, NBC, and CBS for our shows), and many other things too numerous to list in a simple post (this post would be a small novel if I listed everything I have experienced over the past decade of my life). I am now a older, wiser person than I was back in 2010, but unfortunately it took way too long for me to pull my head out of the sand and see everything in a more serious perspective.

There are a lot of things I did over the past ten years that I am proud of myself for getting to do/experience (getting a job, being made a full-time employee after seven years of part-time work, going to two big anime conventions, attending a NASCAR race in 2016 with 65,000 fellow fans, all of the awesome thousand+ hours of gaming I have enjoyed on multiple consoles and/or my gaming PC, etc). However, there have also been a few things that I deeply regret doing (being a major idiot with my credit card, which resulted in getting $12,000+ into debt, not having the courage to ask quite a few different women that I took interest in over the past seven years of being single out to a dinner date, and some of the people/family members that I hurt due to my poor decision-making), but it is all apart of the human experience (nobody is perfect, after all...we all have our share of strengths and weaknesses that we cope with on a daily basis. How we deal with them and the situations around us is what make all of us unique in our own ways, for better or worse).

Ever since I turned twenty-four, I have been noticing that time seems to be moving past at a ever-increasing rate. Days that used to feel like they dragged on forever back when I was a teenager now fly past at a somewhat alarming rate with each and every passing year. The years of 1996 (the farthest back I can recall memories of) to early 2014 felt like they took an eternity to navigate through, but the past six years (middle of 2014 to 2020) have absolutely flown past at an incredible rate that has somewhat shocked me. Hopefully now that I am entering my thirties, that feeling of time flying past at an accelerating rate will diminish and life will carry on at a somewhat slower pace. I would hate to see the next ten years of my life (if I am fortunate to make it that far with how crazy the world around us can be) rush past in a hectic blur and leave me once again wondering "where did it all go?" ten years from now.

If there was one thing I could change from the past ten years of my life, I would go travel back in time and warn my past self (20 year old me) not to go nuts with the credit card like I did between the years of 2010 to 2015. Nearly five full years after realizing how screwed I was with nearly $13,000 in credit card debt, I am still working to pay off all of the debt I accumulated from all of the expensive shit that I should have never purchased in the first place back in those days. It (that massive debt) prevented me from getting a place of my own (apartment) by the age of 25 like I had originally planned, forced me to wait until 2018 so I could afford to purchase (with help from my parents, who I paid back) a newer used car (2017 Honda Accord) to replace my worn-down 1996 Toyota Camry, and made me cancel a bunch of stuff I had planned to do over the past six years (take a two-week vacation to either Japan/Canada/Europe in 2017, going to the 2018 Daytona 500 in Florida [and/or at least five to seven NASCAR races in California/Arizona/Nevada between the years of 2017 to 2020], going to roughly two dozen San Francisco 49ers home games that I had planned on attending at Levi Stadium in Santa Clara, doing a two-week road trip to the South/East Coast so I could go attend a NASCAR race at Atlanta Motor Speedway & explore the great railroad history on the East coast).

Anyway, the hour grows late (it is nearly 2:15 AM PST as of writing this post), so I bid you all a good night as I close the final chapter on my twenties and turn the first page in what hopefully will be a better ten years during my time in the thirties. Wish me luck!

Surgeon SImulator, the WORST game I did for trophies.
 
Probably will skip I Am Bread.

Rank 33.. Only 17 ranks left on Red Dead Redemption 1. Not a fun grind to be honest, expecially by yourself but you get more points yourself so eh..

(Arkham Knight) Just one more thing to do for the platinum. Huh, a bit far from saying I wasn't going to finish it this year.

I started a personal A-Z platinum challenge with someone today. The rule is we can use any game as long as our current trophy progress is under 10%. Problem is I have so many games I've played for a bit, and gotten higher than that so I can't use them. I have so many games in my backlog I could use for this, but a lot of them are unusable 😰 Anyone have any suggestions off the top of their head? I still need to pick a game for B, E, F, H, I, J, K, M, O, Q, T, X, Y. These don't need to be from my backlog, I'll be using a few new games for this already.