Ben profile picture

Ben

Solitary Refinement

About Me

I'm a guitar-playing computer-programming metal-listening black-wearing kind of guy. I write music and maybe one day I'll even go so far as to play it live...

Recently listened to:

My Interests

Metal music (primarily of the doom, gothic, and melodic death varieties... sorry Trivium fans), computer games, home recording, fantasy fiction, software development, guitars, artificial intelligence, linguistics, story writing, history, and various combinations of the above.

I'd like to meet:

People with similar interests, local or remote.

However, I'm VERY UNLIKELY to add you if you don't send me a message beforehand, or if you're a band I'm unlikely to like (check the side panel for examples!). I have better things to do than just collect anonymous photos for my friends page. Introduce yourself and say why you want to add me. Otherwise, don't waste your time sending a friend request. It will just get denied if I don't know you from elsewhere.

Music:

Dark Tranquillity, Swallow The Sun, Paradise Lost, Daylight Dies, My Dying Bride, Primordial, Katatonia, Sirenia, Bruce Dickinson, In Flames, Graveworm, At The Gates, Battlelore, Dragonforce, Iron Maiden, Darkseed, Mourning Beloveth, Forest Stream, Draconian, Tristania, Amon Amarth, Type O Negative, Lacuna Coil, Morgion, Charon, Sentenced, and various other metal bands. Also, the occasional soundtrack from films or computer games.

You'll find a more empirically accurate answer over on my Last.fm page.

Movies:

Lord of the Rings trilogy, Gladiator, Bladerunner, Conan the Barbarian, eXistenZ, Pi, The Matrix, De Noorderlingen, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Terminator trilogy. Ideally it'll feature swords, robots, or robots with swords.

Television:

I watch about an hour of television every month. If it seems like I'm out of touch with modern culture, this is why.

Books:

Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings", George R. R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire", Tad Williams's "Otherland" and "Memory Sorrow and Thorn", Weis & Hickman's "The Death Gate Cycle", Terry Brooks's "Shannara", and other assorted fantasy fiction. I also read a lot of non-fiction, especially books on computing, language, psychology (popular and academic), sociology, and history, but really anything except arts and 'literature'.

Heroes:

Ordinary men, doing extraordinary things...

My Blog

Layout

Aaaargh, they changed the HTML again, so much of my lovingly-crafted CSS is broken. :(
Posted by Ben on Thu, 13 Sep 2007 10:28:00 PST

HTML comments disabled and deleted

I got bored of having my MySpace page used as other people's billboards. If you have something to show to everybody that requires some sort of graphic, that's what bulletins are for. I will read your ...
Posted by Ben on Sun, 07 Jan 2007 09:17:00 PST

New song posted on my 'band' page

Look over here: http://myspace.com/twilightsembrace, where I posted a (vocal-less) track I've been working on for ages. Comments and opinions welcomed. I'm still looking for the right singer for the m...
Posted by Ben on Sun, 22 Oct 2006 05:43:00 PST

MySpace friends

It's annoying how you notice that you have one friend less than yesterday, and then you have to play a memory game with your friends pictures to try and guess which one is missing. Why can't this poxy...
Posted by Ben on Sun, 10 Sep 2006 03:53:00 PST

Wrestling with MySpace formatting

Because the page customisation is so dire here, it's taken far more effort than it should have to customise this page. I've got it looking marginally less garish than before, while learning far more a...
Posted by Ben on Sun, 27 Aug 2006 01:54:00 PST

This time it worked

...and I made absolutely no changes to the images. MySpace just fixed itself magically overnight. Useless!Oh, and I'm pretty disgusted that the little 'music search' button below can't find Paradise L...
Posted by Ben on Wed, 11 Jan 2006 01:17:00 PST

Why is Myspace so unreliable?

It's giving me 'unknown error' when I upload some pictures. So you'll all have to do without. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the pictures, just something wrong with the heap of junk that runs t...
Posted by Ben on Tue, 10 Jan 2006 03:22:00 PST

What's this all about then?

So... someone explain MySpace to me. I've added some cool people but I have no idea what to say to them. And many interesting people have added me but say nothing either. I do see a lot of 'if you don...
Posted by Ben on Wed, 17 Aug 2005 12:23:00 PST