Skyfaller.space

Recently a friend of a friend asked to be put in touch with me, saying:

I’ve been trying to think of ways to raise money so I can purchase land, and I thought of your friend from (highschool?) who sued a few large corporations on his own.

I’m thinking about filing a lawsuit against large herbicide/pesticide companies (Monsanto)… I would use the settlement funds to reclaim land, and restore ecosystems.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve been approached by people who wanted to sue a corporation just like I did. Therefore I wrote a long, detailed reply, and I am publishing it here so that everyone hankering to sue a corporation can “benefit” from my experience. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer (yet) and this is not legal advice.

With no further ado:

Nelson’s guide to suing a corporation

“Bands are like marriages. Or maybe only good ones are. Who knows why a good one works, let alone why it stops working.”

William Gibson, “Spook Country”

A couple weeks ago I resigned from the internet startup that I founded and moved to Atlanta to work on, OpenHatch. (It may give you a sense of how complex and awkward this was when I tell you that Karen was hired as an intern and is still working at the company.) All that the interwebs need to know about this is that “I left to pursue other opportunities.” If you want to know more about why I resigned, I can tell you the story over a drink sometime, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why it reached the point where I had to resign. I’m reminded of a scene from Spook Country by William Gibson, when Garreth asks Hollis Henry why her band The Curfew broke up. Hollis says “Bands are like marriages. Or maybe only good ones are. Who knows why a good one works, let alone why it stops working.” I suppose you could say the same thing about startups.

Today is demo day, the day when the product OpenHatch has been building all summer is revealed to the press and potential investors. I have been invited by OpenHatch to attend, and I will be doing so, even though this is something of a bittersweet experience. If a startup is like a marriage, then this is like attending my ex’s wedding. I’m still on good terms with everyone involved, and I’m happy for them and I want them to be successful, but I can’t help but wish that I were the one getting married. Nevertheless, the launch of OpenHatch is something I put a lot of time and energy into, and I want to see how it turns out.

I will be liveblogging/tweeting/denting about the event as it happens, you can follow my updates here and on Identica.

So sorry it’s over
So sorry it’s over
There’s so much more that I wanted and
There’s so much more that I needed and
Time keeps moving on and on and on
Soon we’ll all be gone

Blink-182, “Man Overboard”

UPDATE: I lied, I’m just going to live update my microblog, blogging is so 20th century.

I’ve decided on a naming scheme for my computers for the immediate future: monstrous and highly dangerous women.

My Macbook Pro which was recently stolen (more on that later) was named Sveethot, which is “Sweetheart” when spoken with a thick German accent, as the Jägermonsters do in Girl Genius. I imagined Sveethot as a female Jägermonster, which implies a predilection for hand-to-hand combat and a great deal of raw “processing power”, where by processing I mean the ability to dice you up into little pieces and serve you for dinner.

I am currently borrowing an IBM Thinkpad laptop from Prerna (whom I cannot thank enough for her generosity), and after backing up her data I wiped it and installed Ubuntu on it. A newly installed computer needs a name, and I decided on Terminatrix. This is in part a homage to my old old Dell desktop, which had a model number beginning with a “T”, something like a T-1000. This also reveals that I am really interested in seeing Summer Glau in the Sarah Connor Chronicles, and in seeing Terminator:Salvation, even though I expect to be rather disappointed by both of them. Surely thinking of Summer Glau and deadly robots when I look at my laptop can’t be a bad thing! Terminatrix brings to mind a machine that keeps going and going despite whatever punishment you might deal out to it, and I hope that this laptop will be similarly indestructible so that it will always continue to work when Prerna (or her friends) need it.

Really I just like the combination of attraction and fear that these names imply. I love computers, but they are fickle creatures that can arbitrarily destroy you whenever they feel like it. Treat them with the respect they deserve.