"Animal Shelters" for UPPERCASE Magazine

Musings on animals with shells - UPPERCASE Magazine Issue #6

I wrote this piece for UPPERCASE Magazine #6, about the appeal of animals that carry their own accommodation with them: snails, turtles, nautili, hermit crabs, and in particular, the amazing veined octopus, which fashions a portable fortress for itself out of two halves of a coconut shell. 

She looks like she belongs in a Monty Python skit rather than National Geographic, and footage of this creature is a popular selection on Youtube. She seems a little less majestic than those cephalopods who possess the confidence to swim unhindered through the blue, attacking steampunk-era submarines and washing up on shores to seduce fishermen's wives and be immortalized in early Japanese woodcuts. 

There might be times when we wish that we were more like the armadillo: that we had a thick hide and could roll ourselves into a near perfect sphere that would leave antagonists pawing in confusion. There are times when those logarithmic  spiral shells of the snail or nautilus look appealling: to coast along -- fast or slow -- with all the comforts and security of home, and look stylish doing so. And could we fashion our shells like a little reading room or a tiki lounge, then relax, dim the lights and watch luminescent jellyfish drift past.

This piece was gorgeously illustrated by Jing Wei, who's woodcut print is a little bit like what I would look like if I was a veined octopus. 

"Gumball Machines" for UPPERCASE Magazine

Musings on the history of the gumball machine - UPPERCASE Magazine Issue #4

It's amazing that we've become so accepting of the idea of making a transaction with a machine. And yet a century of vending machines has brought us along in little steps to this point. One can imagine first the dubiousness and then the sense of novelty that much have greeted the first automated postcard vending machines in the streets of London in the 1880s. And while those early designs -- and the candy dispensers that came to North America a decade later -- are like crude golems in comparison to the sophisticated automated transactions of today, they were a significant step. A transaction requires two participants, and up until those first vending machines, this meant two people. 

This was a really fun piece, but one that took a while to write. Janine asked me to do a little piece with musings gumball machines, and I struggled for a bit to find the right angle for the piece. In the end, I'm really happy with how this little essay turned out; it's one of my favorites that I've done for UPPERCASE, touching on golems, the Turing test, and random number generators.