Colin McKay

Sinclair ZX81. Turbo button. Window seat. Long Drives. Irony. Policy nerd. Xoogler. Autonomous trucks and Gen AI.

[sarah @sceptoire]

Laura Stacey i am extremely endeared by your southern ontario franglais

[Midwest vs. The Rest @midwestern_ope]

Day 1 of starting my junk drawer any tips?

[Michael Warburton @For_Film_Fans]

If I told you how many times I’ve watched every single episode of this world-class Comedy, you’d either pity me or think me mad.

It is, quite simply, one of my favourite things in life.

THE THICK OF IT (2005-12)

It debuted 21yrs ago today.

[@aaronjmars @aaronjmars]

holy fuck, a hair dryer at a Paris airport broke Polymarket weather markets & made someone $34,000 richer

- polymarket was settling Paris temperature bets on a single Météo France sensor sitting near the Charles de Gaulle runway perimeter - basically unguarded

- the guy bought the long-shot outcome (like "22°C" when everyone expected 18°C) for pennies, since nobody thought it'd hit

- then he walked up to the probe and briefly heated the air around it with a portable heat source, spiking the reading just long enough to register as the daily max

- temperature snapped back to normal in minutes, the market resolved in his favor, and he cashed out - twice, on April 6 and April 15, before Météo France caught on and filed charges

hyperstitions.

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

When my wife was in J-school, she had a prof who forced students to learn manual layout design for newspapers. I'm talking X-acto knives, physical plates, glue, etc. This was in the mid 2000s, decades after digital software was common.

They all learned a valuable lesson - that the professor was an out of touch relic and those skills were pointless. Same professor had never himself used InDesign btw, lmao.

[Janel Comeau 🍁 @VeryBadLlama]

Mavis Beacon did not die for this

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The people dunking on this photo have it exactly backwards.

That’s the Outer Sunset, somewhere between the 30s and 40s Avenues. Those rows of identical stucco boxes were built by Henry Doelger, who from 1934 to 1941 was the single largest homebuilder in the United States. His crew finished two houses per day.

Before Doelger showed up, this was literally sand dunes. Maps labeled the entire western half of San Francisco “Great Sand Waste.” Nobody lived there. Nobody wanted to.

What changed: the Twin Peaks streetcar tunnel opened, the FHA started backing mortgages for middle-income buyers, and Doelger figured out assembly-line construction on 25-by-120-foot lots. He sold homes for $5,000. Adjusted for inflation, that’s roughly $125,000 to $175,000. A working-class family could buy one on $32.50 monthly payments.

Those “cookie cutter” homes used redwood framing, which is why they’re still standing 85 years later while many luxury developments from the same era have been torn down twice. Doelger built roughly 25,000 of them across the Sunset and into Daly City, where they inspired Malvina Reynolds to write “Little Boxes.”

The reason 90% of SF looks like this is because 90% of SF’s housing was built to solve an actual problem: where do tens of thousands of postwar families live? The Painted Ladies on Alamo Square and the Victorians in Pacific Heights survived the 1906 earthquake. They represent maybe 10% of the city’s housing stock. The Sunset represents the city that working people actually built and lived in.

Here’s the math that makes this photo funny for a different reason. Those Doelger homes that sold for $5,000 in 1939? Median sale price in the Sunset District is now $1.63 million. That’s a 32,500% return. The Sunset is currently the most competitive neighborhood in San Francisco, with homes selling in under two weeks, often above asking.

The “ugly” part of San Francisco turned out to be the best real estate investment in the city’s history. The fog-covered rows of stucco that tourists never photograph generated more household wealth than the Victorians everyone puts on postcards.

[Gil Meslin @g_meslin]

Today should have been the first day that visitors and employees took the Crosstown to the Ontario Science Centre.

[deaf kennedys @thamosdeaf]

As a boy I always knew I wanted to grow up and use two factor authentication to access fast food reward points on an app

[Colin McKay @Canuckflack]

"how do you have a 4.93 rating on Uber?!?!?" Me:

[Midwest vs. The Rest @midwestern_ope]

Most people getting out of an uber: “thanks”

Midwesterners getting out of an uber: “good luck in divorce court I hope you win the custody battle, there’s no chance the judge won’t side with you. Stay strong Lisa. I love you!”

[Paul Bronks @SlenderSherbet]

"So if I'm reading this right, there's a new cardboard box in the house"

[no @zedonarrival]

clean and functional pay phones still exist in the liminal spaces of ontario. if you’re pure of heart they reveal themselves to you

[Steven Muckley @Midasdeejay]

Hey @OKWildlifeDept should I let it in? It looks cold and hungry!

[Liberty Lyss @liberty_lyss]

New Hallmark movie plot just dropped.

[Colin McKay @Canuckflack]

@mchkzn Remember giving my parents my Christmas list from Consumers (my grandparents out of town had to order from Sears)

[Jake Wolff @Jake_Wolff]

Creative nonfiction writers be like:

I first ate a hotdog when I was six years old. I remember the taste, the scent, the summer.

SECTION BREAK

Hot dogs were invented in 1693 by Steven Hotdog. According to Scientific American, the hotdog is

[Internet of Shit @internetofshit]

hahahaha the bed sends 16gb of data a month oh god

[🏘️ 🏗️ 🇫🇷 Mémoire2Ville 🌆 🚧Sagacité 🏗️ 🏘️ @Memoire2cite]

Rétro trafic automobile 🚘 en 1967 jacques tati

[McSweeney's @mcsweeneys]

"Lloyd Dobler stands outside Diane’s window holding up his phone. He prompts 'Siri, 'Play 'In Your Eyes' by Peter Gabriel.' Siri streams 'Private Eyes' by Hall and Oates, right after playing a thirty-second Geico ad."
https://t.co/Jv7tIRgHmg

[foobar/ @0xfoobar]

2015: type password, login

2020: password autofilled, login

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