User:Skyfaller
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Who I am
User_Skyfaller.jpg
image:User_Skyfaller.jpg
Hi, I'm Nelson Pavlosky, a rising senior at Swarthmore College. I'm the co-founder of FreeCulture.org, an international student movement for free culture. You may have heard of me in connection with the Diebold memos, perhaps in this NY Times article (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1103-04.htm). Free Culture Swarthmore (formerly the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons) was one of the first student groups to host the memos on its website, and I was a plaintiff in a precedent-setting lawsuit against Diebold (http://www.eff.org/Legal/ISP_liability/OPG_v_Diebold/).
Links:
- Nelson's Pad (http://nelson.freeculture.org/) - My homepage.
- FreeCulture.org (http://freeculture.org/)
- Free Culture Swarthmore (http://swarthmore.freeculture.org)
What I do wiki-wise
So far my contributions to the Wikipedia have mostly consisted of spelling and grammar fixes, but I'm starting to write a few articles here and there when I can, such as:
I'm also interested in meta-wikipedia issues of how we can get the whole mess to work better.
I also contribute to other Wikimedia under the same name.
- Mozilla Knowledge Base (http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.phtml?title=User:Skyfaller)
- Wiktionary (http://wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Skyfaller)
- Wikiquote (http://wikiquote.org/wiki/User:Skyfaller)
- Disinfopedia (http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=User:Skyfaller)
Where my username came from
If you're wondering where "Skyfaller" came from, it originates from A Dry, Quiet War (http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/quietwar.htm), a novelette by Tony Daniel. Basically, it's a synonym for "space marine", specifically a "drop trooper" much like the ones from Robert A. Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers. The difference is that the "skyfaller" from Tony Daniel's universe is a multi-dimensional being who has come back from the war at the end of time, and cannot be killed in any normal fashion; a skyfaller is not just a man in a powered suit. Check out this little poem from the story (it's admittedly a bit over the top):
The Skyfaller's Scream
They sucked down my heart to a little black hole You cannot stab me.
They wrote down my brain on a hard knot of space, You cannot turn me.
Icicle spike from the eye of a star I've come to kill you.
As you can see, this is a perfect username for playing online combat games :-) Ironically, I am a Quaker.