Skyfaller

Who I am

Hi, I'm Nelson Chu Pavlosky. I was born in Morristown Memorial Hospital and raised in Morris Plains, New Jersey. I was educated at Morristown High School, Swarthmore College, and George Mason Law (with a visit to New York Law School).

I co-founded Students for Free Culture, which was 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. Free Culture Swarthmore (a.k.a. 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 the precedent-setting OPG v. Diebold. I also co-founded OpenHatch [1], which was an open source community aiming to help newcomers find their way into free software projects.

I'm currently a full-time volunteer environmental activist. I'm working with Sunrise Movement to pass a Green New Deal as a climate change mitigation strategy. I also hope to address climate change adaptation and climate resilience by building cohousing and ecovillages.

In my spare time I make music with my rock band / recording project, Wrong Side of Dawn [2].

Links:

Nelson Pavlosky's Homepage - My Wordpress blog.
Nelson Pavlosky's Mastodon account - I am an admin and mod for a Philadelphia-area Mastodon server, Jawns.club.
Nelson Pavlosky's Pixelfed - Pixelfed is a federated Instagram alternative.

Contributions

Original articles

I originated the articles for:

Images

Some of my pictures were added to Wikipedia by other people and placed in the following articles:

Where my username came from

If you're wondering where "Skyfaller" came from, it originates from A Dry, Quiet War, 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 was raised as a Quaker.

Articles related to classes I've taken

While studying I might make lists of e.g. legal cases related to classes that I am taking.