Hey, my name's Alaric and I really like music. My favorite genres are post-punk, post-hardcore, art punk, disco, and riot grrrl/queercore. My last.fm and lists are probably better to go off of, if you want to get a sense of my music tastes and my current obsessions.

I started out truly listening to music around Christmas 2005, when I got my first MP3 player and found in my dad's collection of CDs The Wall, after mistaking one of the songs on the album "The Show Must Go On" for a Queen song of the same name that I saw a music video of.
After listening to all of the Pink Floyd albums my dad owned, I began to go onto Wikipedia and look up the other Pink Floyd albums my dad didn't own, and discovered the genre of progressive rock. I used Wikipedia from that point until February 2009, when I made my Rate Your Music account and I've been here ever since, using the site as one of my primary means of discovering new music.


Some general rules for my rating system, 3.0 and above are good albums, ones where I like to listen to again and not just stow them away somewhere, never to be seen again. 2.5s are records that I'm indifferent to, and below that are where I start to really notice more of the negatives of the album than the positives. I tend to research most albums I listen to before I actually acquire them to see if it would be something I'd enjoy, so my rating system has been skewed to accompany all of these albums I like so much.

Quick note, if you look at my tags, there are a few hundred or so tagged "from chris (my guitar instructor)," albums that I got digitally when my old guitar teacher synced my iPod with his computer, basically giving me his entire library.
And as for the dates given on the albums when I added them to RYM, this is usually once I've got the album in my hands. But, for albums in box sets, the 400+ albums from Chris, and albums that I just listened to after downloading them months ago, I refresh the album's listing to the day that I first listen to it.