Appearances
Workshops and talks I’m giving!
Connecting With Unnamed Deities: deep relationship with gods lost to time
Mystic South 2024 (Atlanta, GA) — Saturday, July 27, 4:30 PM, Dunwoody A
Links:
Many of us are called by deities; sometimes we struggle to find out who it is. But what if a name eludes us? What if we are called by a new deity, or one lost to time?
For the past five years, Arya has been devoted to an unnamed Storm Goddess, and is now oathed to Her and serves as Her priest.
In this workshop, we discuss creating a devotional practice from the ground up, using experimentation and personal experience. Getting to know our deities; building a trusting relationship; learning directly from Them; using Unverified Personal Gnosis to guide research; connecting with others on similar paths; being part of a community. All of these are possible without a name or established practice, and we will go over specific approaches, techniques, and challenges.
The Gods are returning now more than ever. If their worship is lost to time, we can bring it back.
Just don’t fuck up: Cybersecurity lessons from engineering disasters
Summercon 2022 (Brooklyn, NY) — Friday, July 8, 11:00 AM, Main Stage
Links:
A chemical spill in Kansas. A plutonium accident in the USSR. Mechanical failures, human errors, tragedies. Traditional engineering — mechanical, civil, industrial — has been dealing with risk for far longer than we have. And over there, the stakes are high. The cost of a mistake can be devastating. Over decades, the industry has matured and processes have standardized. Risk reduction is now a highly formalized (and regulated) affair. There are lessons we can learn, and approaches we can use.
In this talk, we’re going to go over real engineering disasters. We’ll talk details: what went wrong, and how, and what we have learned. We will then adapt these lessons to cybersecurity and see how industrial hazard reduction concepts apply to actual security incidents.
Content note: this talk will cover actual, real engineering disasters. In some of these cases, people have died, or been seriously injured. There won’t be any graphic images — but there will be details, and some of this content may be distressing.