Artifice Magazine Staff

James Tadd Adcox, Editor-in-Chief, grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. One of his earliest memories is walking with his mother to an ATM near a local grocery store when he was three years old. He recalls his mother pressing some buttons on the machine, then sliding open the plastic cover of what James Tadd Adcox now realizes would be the slot for deposits. Inside was an ice cream cone, which James Tadd Adcox’s mother removed and gave to her son. Of course, James Tadd Adcox now realizes that this could not have actually happened, and must have been a dream, or a reconstruction of something his three-year-old mind could not make sense of at the time. Nonetheless, to this day the event persists in his mind as a memory, and, whenever he thinks of it—for example, whenever he withdraws money from an ATM—there is a moment between the memory and his rational assessment of the memory, when the event described above seems perfectly natural.

Ian McCarty, Managing Editor, grew up in Denver, Colorado, the Centennial State, where the residue of western expansion driven by mining and prospecting was implicit in cities like Golden, Leadville, Silverthorne, Gypsum, Basalt, Larkspur, Marble, and Bonanza. The 2010 US Census lists the population of Bonanza as 16. It is the least densely populated municipality in Colorado with 31.9 people per square mile, which is an illusion of statistics creating 15.9 ghost individuals to fill up the necessary unit of land, an inadvertent memorial to those who perished in journey or in conflict. As an elementary schooler, Ian M McCarty was never able to beat the game "Oregon Trail," although he excelled at other 5 ¼" floppy disk games, including a Pac-Man variation where a green, frog-like avatar devoured prime numbers. He would often spend excess funds on replacement axles for his Conestoga Wagon, relying too much on his meager hunting skills to supply the pioneers with food—though it mattered little when other party members broke legs during what Ian assumed must have been reckless and unnecessary trail hijinks. No amount of Bison would set those bones.

Eirill Alvilde Falck, Deputy Editor, Distribution & Sales, grew up in Oslo, Norway, home to the inventors of aerosol spray and ski jumping, an official Winter Olympic Games discipline. The paper clip would be a dubious addition, as there is a controversy surrounding the legitimacy of this invention, which most Norwegians would rather not get into. Eirill Alvilde prefers to look at the sky, mainly for the non-romantic reason that she is the proprietor of extraterrestrial real estate. According to the Celestial Registry® of Aldie, Virginia, an Orion constellation star with coordinates 5h 36m 12.4 degrees was named after her once a check of $34.95 cleared in the summer of '07. According to the International Astronomical Union, this has no formal value or official validity whatsoever. Still, the star, a gift from an aspiring computer scientist, made her believe, at sixteen, that it was possible and legal to purchase galactic matter. Her plan for the future is to sell advertising space on her star, or become an interstellar imperialist. Other hobbies include watching Americans pronounce her name.

Rebekah Silverman, Editor Emeritus, grew up in Conway, South Carolina. She understands both implicitly and explicitly the difference between money and ice cream. She is highly aware, for example, of the transaction by which money is turned into ice cream, preferably in a bowl or cup rather than a cone, as she tends to make a mess. This is a sort of alchemy that she is sure very few self-proclaimed alchemists would appreciate, although Johann Friedrich Böttger might have admired it. Böttger was imprisoned by Augustus the Strong of Saxony after he boasted of his ability to create gold, but when his forced trials failed, he was put to the task of finding the formula for porcelain, then known as "China's white gold," on pain of death. He did die, eventually, of dysentery.