l'histoire du Ben

ah, so you're interested in the life 'n' times of little ol' me, huh? well, here's everything i think you need to know.

• January 12, 2005: I am born early in the morning.
• January 10, 2011: I record "Four Effects", my earliest song of which an audio record exists.
• February 17, 2013: I take a photo of myself using the iMac Photo Booth's "Thermal Camera" filter.
• 2014: My dad shows me a video my stepsister took of her cat. The video employed a rapid cutting technique that I was enraptured by. I ask what app she used to make the video, and he tells me it was called Vine. After a lot of begging, I get my first social media app.
• 2014: I saw a vine on Monstercat's Vine account while I was standing in the driveway of my grandparents' house. It was a short clip of "Boombox" by Throttle. I checked out more clips from their Vine account, and eventually found their YouTube channel.
• 2018: That kid tells me to "shut the fuck up."
• 2019: I find two videos by Jack Stauber in a "cursed videos" playlist. Enchanted by his style, I start to watch his other videos.
• July 25, 2019: I finally create my first YouTube channel after fantasizing about owning one for years. I assume the pen name of Tom Warren.
• August 2019: I leave a sarcastic comment on a teaser for E. M. Philyaw's album "Happy Pants". He (understandably) doesn't get that I'm being sarcastic, and starts leaving comments on my videos.
• December 2, 2019: I release "styropyro out of context". 1 year later, it explodes online, gaining over 100,000 views and making it the most viewed thing I've ever uploaded online. Styropyro himself saw it and left a comment.
• March 2020: The COVID-19 lockdown begins, destroying what social ability I once had.
• July 2020: I have a freakout about using the name Tom Warren because people were calling me "Tom" online a lot and it made me feel really not-good.
• January 2021: I resolve on the name Ben Cossack, combining my given name with a surname that I took from somewhere specific. I regret choosing this surname, but at the time I didn't think much about it.
• October 31, 2022: I release npc, a song that I was so incredibly disappointed with that I decide to seriously focus on making full-length songs that I was happy with.
• July 4, 2023: Oily Bastard begins the FAWM 50/90 challenge. The day after, I decided to take it too.
• October 12, 2023: Fuzzy, a user on FAWM.org, sends me a cover he made of one of my 50/90 songs. This is the first cover someone has made of a song I wrote.
• November 27, 2023: I release Reading Machine, an album I had resolved to make around two years earlier. What a feat it was!
• January 13, 2024: Dylan expresses a desire to collaborate with another musician in my discord server. I state that I would be interested in collaborating with him.
• May 23, 2024: Lucas reaches out to me about joining a challenge she wanted to try with some of her friends.
• July 11, 2024: I release There's Nobody Quite. Like. Me., my second "studio" album. In it, I try to play more instruments live and in one take.