as actually invented for the space program and then found commercial applications?output: title: This Week in Tech History

Some of you may be familiar with McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, which one is tempted to describe as a literary journal, but that term hardly does it justice.

1970s was cutting-edge? Yet they managed to send two probes out of the solar system, Voyager 1 and 2. And they’re still going.output:

Boxing Day: McSweeney’s Celebrates 25 Years with a Lunchbox Issue

Some of you may be familiar with McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, which one is tempted to describe as a literary journal, but that term hardly does it justice. Sure, it regularly (well, quarterly) publishes new literary fiction in an honest-to-goodness physical edition, but one of their hallmarks is using print in unusual and creative ways. They say:

Ever changing, each issue of the quarterly is completely redesigned (there have been hardcovers and paperbacks, an issue with two spines, an issue with a magnetic binding, an issue that looked like a bundle of junk mail, and an issue that looked like a sweaty human head), but always brings you the very best in new literary fiction.

And now they are celebrating their 25th anniversary by publishing their 74th issue as a lunchbox. Says Printmagazine:

McSweeney’s developed, designed, and produced a retro tin lunchbox with a “cover” illustrated by Art Spiegelman (author of the graphic novel Maus). The tin is filled with “author baseball cards,” among other thoughtfully designed trinkets.

The author baseball cards feature a lineup of literary giants, including Sheila Heti, Hanif Abdurraqib, George Saunders, Sarah Vowell, Michael Chabon, Eileen Myles, and more. The pencils feature original pieces by Lydia Davis, Catherine Lacey, and David Horvitz printed on them, with meaning designed to change as you use the pencil. Additional art rounds out the 25th-anniversary issue, in which Art Spiegelman teases out images from random watercolor inkblots.

Pretty neat. Pick up a copy here.

Dime Novel: Ray Bradbury Typed ‘The Fireman’ on a Coin-Operated Typewriter

Once upon a time, if you were an aspiring writer and couldn’t afford your own typewriter, there were actually coin-operated typewriters in places like libraries, hotels, train stations, etc. Says Boing Boing:

To use the typewriter, you would insert a coin or token, and it would unlock for a specific period of time. Once the time was up, the machine would lock again, requiring another coin to continue typing. Typically, these typewriters had a timer mechanism that would stop the carriage return when time ran out, ensuring that users paid for every minute of use.

You can imagine how frustrating that would be if you were on a roll and out of coins. About as frustrating as…using a typewriter these days, perhaps. But any port in a storm, and one famous author who started humbly on a coin-operated typewriter was Ray Bradbury.

In 1949, Ray Bradbury typed a short story, "The Fireman," on a coin-operated typewriter. He spent $9.80, which is equivalent to around $110 today, over a span of nine days in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library to complete his manuscript. The story was the bases for his novel, Fahrenheit 451.

If you have a few hundred euro to drop, you can bid on an IBM coin-operated electric typewriter from 1954.

To be cheeky, you could pay for it in dimes.

Excel-lent Gaming: The World Championship of Competitive Microsoft Excel Spreadsheeting

Here’s the perfect sport for WhatTheyThink’s client engagement coordinator and data wrangler Debbie P.: competitive Microsoft Excel spreadsheeting. We kid you not. The Verge takes a look at the Excel World Championship games, held in Las Vegas. What exactly does competitive spreadsheeting entail?

At 6PM on the dot, Andrew Grigolyunovich, the founder and CEO of the Financial Modeling World Cup

Also, apparently, a thing. Who knew? We continue.

the organization hosting these championships, takes the modular stage in the ballroom. He loads an unlisted YouTube link, which begins explaining today’s challenge, known as a “case.” It’s a puzzle called “Potions Master,” and it goes roughly like this: You’re training to be a potions master in Excelburg, but you’re terrible at it. You have a number of ingredients, each of which has a certain number of associated points; your goal is to get the most points in each potion before it explodes, which it does based on how much of a white ingredient you’ve added.

OK, that’s not even remotely what we would have expected, which would have been something like “format a y-axis for a chart of unemployment claims during a pandemic.” Apparently not.

The Potions Master case, like so many of the puzzles conquered by these competitive Excelers, is not