I'm a godforsaken british dude, cishet though potentially asexual (still working that out). I am educated in geology (so I've, albeit timidly, wrote effortposts about China's rare earths industry and carbon capture, and I'll probably do more in the future) but as part of that education I was exposed to basically every other major scientific field. so I guess that also makes me a STEMlord, so in all I'm thrice cursed.

prior to 2016 I was a socdem. while Trump's election didn't directly impact me obviously, it still broke my lib brain quite considerably. by 2018 I had given up entirely on the Democrats and was a Corbynite, and was questioning why people hated Cuba and China so much, but still just vibes-based politics, no theory yet. Corbyn's defeat followed by Bernie's was the one-two punch that fully broke my brain, and with exposure to CTH a month or two before the pandemic began (after seeing somebody talk about the subreddit in terror) I became a socialist. during 2020, with nothing much better to do during the pandemic, I binge-listened to the CTH podcast and kinda adopted their malaise and political depression about the world. I came along on the lifeboat to the discord and was among the first of the people on the site, but still a lurker, and I left a couple months after it started out of boredom. checked back in a month or two after the pronouns struggle session and was pleasantly surprised, then returned later a month or two after the vegan struggle session, once again left a couple months after out of boredom, and then finally got on this account in very early 2022 because (and this is hilarious in hindsight) I was being driven mad by all the mounting rhetoric that Russia was going to invade Ukraine, which obviously wasn't going to happen.

after being owned on February 24th, I felt my political malaise melting away. it was as if the gears of history had finally, finally, begun turning again, after a solid three decades of just gradual, constant, inescapable decline, trapped inside a colossus that was bleeding out. I had no even short-term goals with the first update post I made, it was merely to inform people in the megathreads what was going in on the war (and elsewhere around the world) that day because everything was chaotic and people kept coming in asking "what's been going on". one day turned to the next and within a couple weeks I was The Guy That Does The Update Posts™. then we decided to keep the news megathreads going because everybody could feel the gears of history moving, and they were accelerating as the shockwave from the war reverberated around the world. as time went by, I realized that the western leftists I had been listening to for the last couple years weren't actually constructing anything, and all this time while I (again, a British dude) was caring about the antics of AOC for some reason, I should have been paying attention to the wider world, which I am now in overdrive to try and learn as much as I can about in my free time (though I still do like Matt and listen to him from time to time). this essentially takes us to today, when I spend ~3-4 hours of my time every two days writing up an update post, culled from about a thousand articles each time.

I guess the only other loose end is the reason for my name. I think it was both a) because I just like the number 72 - it has long been my favourite number - and b) a reference to the RIAA lawsuit of Limewire being $72 trillion (this lawsuit never actually happened and at no point was anybody claiming it was that amount of money, it settled for like $100 million, some people were just spreading lies or something, but afterwards it slowly bounced back and forth in my adolescent brain over the years like a Windows screensaver about like, what value really is, and how money wasn't actually this unbiased thing that people got for working hard, and so on).

but it's also very versatile for jokes, so it's like "Stalin personally killed 72 trillion people" or "72 trillion dead landlords" or "I won't stop the megathreads until I get 72 trillion upvotes" so I like it. I hope this isn't too parasocial but I do kinda hope when people see the number 72 or 7.2 or similar out and about, they're reminded of me.

uhh, I listen to predominantly video game soundtracks and electronic music, my favorite band is Owl City, I have beaten every soulsbornering game, and I like factory games.

and if you can't tell, I write in a very longwinded and unnecessarily detailed way.