Get Your Low-Cost Kicks Here

August 22, 2022 2:32 AM

OLE, OLE, OLE, this thread is bending it like Beckham! The goalkeeper will never even see us coming.

(And because that video blocks the view of the last (rated #1) kick with recommendation windows, here it is on its own.)

Suit up and chat freely, team!

posted by taz (49 comments total)

Hmmm, was expecting the famous Roberto Carlos one to still be #1. Hadn’t seen the one chosen as #1 in this compilation.
posted by terrapin at 3:51 AM on August 22, 2022

I love Geraldo Pereira's free kick (#3 in the video). The arc is so pleasing, and filmed from such a perfect angle.

I'm also a fan of the flawed beauty of this free kick by Thomas Hässler for Roma, where it hits the post, then the goalkeeper, before just about making across the line before a defender gets to it. This one goal a miniature drama in and of itself.
posted by Kattullus at 4:06 AM on August 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

He's right. Ain't no rule says a dog can't play football.

(Save, not a goal. A beautiful goal is great, but I prefer an impressive save.)
posted by the primroses were over at 4:11 AM on August 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

You can have your lovely arcs, but this tag to win the game last night is just "chef's kiss" after Longoria's barehand catch & rocket and his grand slam home run. Go Giants!
posted by chavenet at 4:28 AM on August 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

I watched so many West Ham matches when Payet was playing for them, just hoping to catch free kick magic live. What a foot on that man.
posted by GamblingBlues at 5:01 AM on August 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Ain't no rule says a dog can't play football.

Futbol is death!!
posted by pompomtom at 5:06 AM on August 22, 2022 [12 favorites]

On the linked video, I can't actually see number 1. The window gets covered by two ads for other football videos, and I can't seem to remove them. Is that just me?

Also on the linked video: I love how the curve is generally barely-noticeable on the first angle, but then you see the second one.
posted by pompomtom at 5:13 AM on August 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Under the fold I've linked to a separate video for that reason.
posted by taz at 5:16 AM on August 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Dear metafilter, how do I stop procrastinating?

*blink*

*ouroboros*
posted by Alex404 at 5:25 AM on August 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

I like #4 the most. That shrugging defender must still think about that.
posted by pompomtom at 5:37 AM on August 22, 2022

I like #1 and #3 especially, but not having that Carlos goal at the top is pretty suspect. Just the big wind up run, the setting, the gobsmack of the French team, it's all so perfect.

My god but Beckham is overrated. Also not having a Riquelme or Zola kick in here some where just bugs me.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 6:01 AM on August 22, 2022

I prefer an impressive save

Back when I were a young'un, I used to love watching Paddy Kisnorbo in the NSL. The thing being: there were no fireworks. There'd just be a scary attack on our goal and Paddy would arrive, acquire the ball, and then clear it. No massive excitement: he'd run up to a striker and explain that their possession of the ball was just some weird error that he was in a position to fix.
posted by pompomtom at 6:03 AM on August 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

Highlights from the gold medal game (Finland vs. Canada, 2022 World Junior Hockey Championships).. the game went to OT and it was intense. GG, Finland.
posted by elkevelvet at 8:02 AM on August 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

As a goalkeeper, this video makes me uncomfortable...
posted by Windopaene at 8:49 AM on August 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

Finally resuming IV iron therapy today after a 3.5 month hiatus. I had so much difficulty getting this scheduled that I (a doctor) looked into treating myself and was literally in the process of ordering myself some iron (only $89/dose) when they called the other day.

It's been 5 weeks since my last blood tests at which time I had moderately low iron and mild anemia, with both things dropping. Iron famously is part of hemoglobin which is how oxygen is ferried throughout the body, but it does a number of other things including being part of myoglobin which holds oxygen in muscle cells for use there and is a cofactor for a number of enzymes especially in mitochondria's energy-generating pathways.

You guys, I am profoundly tired all the time. I'm having to be in bed for 10-12 hours per 24 and am sleeping for 9-10 of those. I do have to lie down for an hour or more in the afternoon. I'm managing to get to the gym once a week for weight lifting but I have to lie down for at least an hour right before that and go to to bed very early afterward. Ten days ago I did a 6 mile hike with little elevation change; it wasn't hard at the time but it took me 4 days to recover.

Capsule endoscopy is one week from today. We're thinking that I'm losing blood in my small intestine.
posted by neuron at 8:52 AM on August 22, 2022 [16 favorites]

That save from McTavish!!! Insane!
posted by WaterAndPixels at 8:53 AM on August 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

neuron, hope it turns out to be managable and clears up fast.
posted by joannemerriam at 8:55 AM on August 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

On the linked video, I can't actually see number 1. The window gets covered by two ads for other football videos, and I can't seem to remove them. Is that just me?

Same for me.
posted by neuron at 8:57 AM on August 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

wishing you the best, neuron.
posted by clew at 9:01 AM on August 22, 2022

elkevelvet ! You beat me to posting about the World Junior's. Here's a detail of just the Golden Save!
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 9:04 AM on August 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

My personal laptop which was sitting beside me running an idle game (Synergism, for those who might wonder) just made a small clicking noise and died.

It does not appear willing to restart.

So, that was probably a pretty expensive free game.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:43 AM on August 22, 2022

Hail Hail to Michigan. Or, the full sequence. Awesome skills.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 9:51 AM on August 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

→ a small clicking noise and died.

oh no! If you're lucky, it was a polyfuse: unplug, let cool for a couple of hours, and it should have reformed and work again. If you were unlucky, one of the PMICs: their death song is a tiny click, and they can take a good part of the motherboard with them.
posted by scruss at 9:57 AM on August 22, 2022

JohnnyGunn, I yelled "MICHIGAN!!!" when a similar goal happened in the NHL last year.

She asked why I was yelling about a state that wasn't even playing in the game. When I tried to explain the history, she slowly glazed over before telling me, "You know I don't care, right?"
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 10:44 AM on August 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Football blah blah blah…. Hey the Vuelta has started! Can’t wait to see what my man Roglic does in the mountains.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 11:54 AM on August 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

I love how the tone of most of the announcers was "holy shit!!" but the swedish (?) one was like "yup pretty cool" and the german one was like "yes that was a goal as you can plainly see"
posted by cubeb at 12:00 PM on August 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

This is what I know about football (aka:soccer). Messi is from a different planet. But there are a bunch of other players who are from neighboring planets. I’m not trying to start something, but Özil and Lahm and Benzema and Boateng and honestly there are dozens more - the best players change space-time around them (How _does_ Thomas Mueller score? He runs like he‘s wearing galoshes) like MJordan used to. Or the Big Unit.
There was a video of Zidane, just Zidane, running around the field over the course of a game (Douglas Gordon and Phillip Parreno). A nice way of trying to find something interesting in football.
posted by From Bklyn at 12:02 PM on August 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yeah that Michigan goal is pretty absurd...
posted by Windopaene at 1:47 PM on August 22, 2022

📩 Hi folks, this is a note about the voting for the Steering Committee! 📩

A couple of candidates have removed themselves from the Steering Committee ballot, so please see this comment for details to see if you need to change some of your votes on the ballot!

Voting ends at 5pm GMT on August 25th!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:44 PM on August 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Housing market in Canada is crashing and Charlie Stross dourly noting a whole list of doom and gloom from the UK has put me in a mood.
posted by zenon at 2:58 PM on August 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

I played a season of goalie in recreational soccer and trying to stop plain old penalty kicks is hard enough without all the curving, thanks.

But this gives me an excuse to share the Burger King commercial where David Beckham orders a Strawberry Banana Smoothie.
posted by kirkaracha at 4:04 PM on August 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Training for the promotion started today.

It sounds like I'll be in training for most of the rest of the year. Still very excited, despite my mind being a little bit mush right now.
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 4:41 PM on August 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Penalty kicks are a given, unless you guess right. Random free kicks, from a long way away, are a different thing. But you can see what the keeper is thinking is going to happen, and then, nope...

Glad I'm not playing against dudes who can make these kind of shots...

It's so fun. Just full of failure. That dog deserves a win. Wonder how that was ruled.
posted by Windopaene at 5:55 PM on August 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

computech_apolloniajamesHey the Vuelta has started! Can’t wait to see what my man Roglic does in the mountains.
I can never tell how the team are around a rider or how having a bad day in the mountains destroys a rider's GC chances. Except for Team Sky in 2018 having the depth to run Geraint Thomas when Chris Froome crashed out.
posted by k3ninho at 10:48 AM on August 23, 2022

Something has weighed very heavily on my mind over the past couple of nights, and I figure this is as good a place as any to mention it and see what people think. This is kind of rambly, but I felt I needed to get the words aired quickly, and it's a free thread after all. I'm trying not to stress too much about how to put this when I'm already sick of it. Please pardon my barbaric yawps.

Lately, I have become almost morose by how much more limited a place the world wide web seem these days. I have taken to saying lately that more things have now vanished from the World Wide Web than are currently on it, a statement that I have no objective proof of but seems obviously true. I offer as an example of this how many Metafilter links these days lead back to the same kinds of sites. There's the news post, the Twitter thread, the YouTube video. Sometimes we still see a link to someone's blog. Meanwhile the category of Flash Friday has entirely dried up, of course somewhat due to the death of Flash, but whatever happened to the HTML games that were supposed to come after it? I know--a lot of them now jump straight to mobile.

A lot of it (but not all) is due to the rise of social media. It used to be that something awesome that someone made or said would go on their website. Now, it'll probably be something owned by a social media company, or sometimes a video media company. Maybe that's okay, but I don't really think it is.

I understand that some of this is just that social media is a lot more available to people than the old model where you get a site and then put your thing up on it and hope it goes viral. But you could also do a lot more with your own site. Thinking back to things like the Brunching Shuttlecocks and The Sneeze, if something like that arose today, would we even hear about it? It seems like it's a lot harder to break through the noise these days.

Another part of it is the lack of other discoverability, which has been a problem since the early days. Google may be good if A. you already know pretty much exactly what you're looking for (it's awful for finding adjacent things), and B. what you're searching for is not in any way monetizable. Whole flotillas of sites that no one in the world ever visits except from Google searches have SEO'd their way to the top of the heap for almost every tech-related query. I'm sure by now you recognize the pattern: you search for help on something, and almost the first page of hits all take the form [extremely broad overview] [why you might want help with the thing you already know you need help with] [list of options with one particular paid option given specific focus].


I should at least nod to the growing phenomenon of alternative search engines, some, like Marginalia, specifically making discovering semi-adjacent sites a goal. But it's still not great for general exploration.

Even when it was at the top of its game, Google had a counterpart that helped fill in the discoverability gap. I have lately been feeling very strongly that the shuttering of Yahoo Directory, eight years ago now (although it seems much longer) was a terrible thing. Of course it had long been decrepit by that point, infamously overrun by marketers, but in a decision that most would agree was pretty typical of the company, they decided to just kill it off instead of investing the resources to fix it. At that time there was DMOZ, an open competitor, but it's dead now too. As near as I can tell the best thing out there of that nature now is Curlie, which I gather had as its foundation the DMOZ dataset, but it is pretty sad. Go into the video games section and see how many categories there are completely empty. It looks like no one's at the wheel, and looking through their forum seems to confirm that suspecion. Of course, maintaining a web directory is a huge task, one that Yahoo Directory's failure should indicate requires a substantial investment of personpower. But Wikipedia keeps going, doesn't it, and that seems like it requires a lot more time and attention than a simple tree of links would.

(BTW, one or two of you might be thinking, what about StumbleUpon? Go there and see. I hope you like Youtube and Reddit.)

Anyway. If someone could explain why my sadness at the state of the web is misplaced, please do.
posted by JHarris at 4:25 PM on August 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

Well, that comment certainly seems to have drained the room! Heh, sorry about that.
posted by JHarris at 8:57 PM on August 23, 2022

I overall agree with you JHarris, but I guess it doesn't affect me too much emotionally because I've never been a very online person.

I don't have anything too deep to say about this, other than this pattern feels rather inevitable in a capitalist society. Capitalists will monetize things and find profits. Not that I'm necessarily anti-capitalist... I assume most of us benefit in some way from e.g. the incredible amount of technology and information we can access through our smartphones. They can even be powerfully democratic tools.

It's funny... I guess for me personally, I find things like competition and free trade, when managed correctly, to be overall positive forces. What I tend to object to (and you allude to this as well) is extreme monetization and financialization, where all value collapses down to the single dimension of $. For various reasons I think this has a really corrosive effect on certain kinds of creativity. To put it simply, I would say it limits intrinsic motivation, and inhibits us from appreciating things on their own terms, without clouding our judgment with market value. But since this kind of capitalism is dominant, any group or team or creative endeavour that becomes sufficiently large and well-developed will inevitably be consumed by market forces. And as attention itself has become commodified, we also lose the ability to discover things outside of the market (this is presumably by design).

The only cure to this I can imagine would be a socialist revolution, where large-scale creative endeavours would be directly supported by the state, and IT infrastructure would be nationalized. I'm not holding my breath though, and I think there would be many ways this could go wrong anyway (it would have to be a world state, wouldn't it?).
posted by Alex404 at 1:42 AM on August 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think Wikipedia might have the answer actually, at least as making a workable internet directory goes. It's gone on for many years now and, while it's often defaced, people usually manage to repair it. Maybe custom-written software, but that follows the principles of wiki, and with editors and guidelines to steer its development?
posted by JHarris at 2:52 AM on August 24, 2022

Yah, I mean a lot of fundamental software has stayed or even become open source, but as to why it's hard to say. I think what most developers would say is that open-source development can be faster and more responsive to users due to its distributed nature, whereas the the top-down nature of private software development can easily lead to stagnation. Ultimately, open-source software out-competes privately developed software.

This is probably overly simplistic, and the reason why certain large-scale projects/endeavours survive and thrive as open tools/projects is probably case-by-case. At the end of the day it just seems really hard to monetize fundamental IT (e.g. docker, linux, wikipedia...). Social media on the other hand is eminently monitizable, because you can gather so much data about your users, and most users don't care about privacy and strongly value convenience.

My gut feeling is that some kind of directory structure is probably going to be a non-starter for most people. People want convenience, and they want easy to use infrastructure, it's just that most of that has been captured by capitalists. But let's not forget that the bar used to be much higher to get on the internet. It's less personal now in some ways, but in other ways it's more democratic. The ease with which people can make their own little youtube/TikTok communities is in many ways a good thing, it just also has downsides. But I wouldn't overly romanticize the way the internet used to be.

Anyway, we still have metafilter.
posted by Alex404 at 3:33 AM on August 24, 2022

The few hugely stable free-at-point-of-use projects have benevolent dictators who realise a clear vision of the features they want to deliver. A directory, or even community PageRank computation, might not easily share the same sense of what's more and less relevant -- see the edit wars at Wikipedia.

We could reinvent DNS+BGP on the blockchain with proof-of-work being a PageRank calculation ... and then 'invert the killfile'to have only reputable and trusted peers on the chain. Somebody send a VC my MeMail details.
posted by k3ninho at 6:25 AM on August 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

So after a work Slack conversation about "unicorn muffins" and someone posting a link to the unicorn poop Squatty Potty ads, I have gone down a ...super special... unicorn hole. Unfortunately, this entire concept has already made Metafilter twice, so no fresh poop post for y'all. But for those who never heard of this, hooooooo boy.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:10 PM on August 24, 2022

Hoo boy indeed.

It's not really possible for advertising to ruin soft-serve ice cream because soft-serve ice cream just slaps, but wow does that outfit give it the old college try.

My personal instant response on first exposure to the concept of a shit milkshake was not "hey, great, we should try to monetize that!" which probably explains why I'm not in advertising.
posted by flabdablet at 4:07 AM on August 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

In a dream last night, I was in a group or class or something, and the teacher/leader asked, "What is unchanged after it has been cleaned?" Dream-me answered, "A recidivist criminal" and thought I had very cleverly avoided a semantic trap of some sort.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:55 AM on August 25, 2022

My personal instant response on first exposure to the concept of a shit milkshake was not "hey, great, we should try to monetize that!" which probably explains why I'm not in advertising.

Honestly, the people making the commercial looked a whole lot happier in their job than I do. Literally working on poop was making them happier.

On a related note, I found out that yet another computer system broke AGAIN and screwed up everyone's documents AGAIN.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:42 AM on August 25, 2022

You know what you should do today?

Today, you should buy tickets to the zoo. Not your local zoo, but the Mykolaiv Zoo in Ukraine. You're not going to go, of course. But buying these tickets (for $2.74 USD each, roughly) helps the zoo feed the animals while they are being shelled and not bringing in visitors.

This is the real zoo's site and you can pay by Google Pay. Entirely safe. Do a nice thing for the animals.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:22 PM on August 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

Nachan Nu Ji Karda | Kaka Bhainiawala | Latest Punjabi Bhangra Song | MUSIC PEARLS | Bahn Parh Ke just because it jams

and j harris - it's been my sneaking suspicion for the last 3 or 4 years that the cool kids are no longer on the web and are doing their cool kid stuff somewhere else

i don't know if the web could be said to be a smaller place now - but it sure seems a lot flatter
posted by pyramid termite at 4:13 PM on August 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think there's still fun stuff happening out there, but it's a lot harder to find? Someone on Mastodon told me about a couple of projects they've worked on that seem fun, but I'd never have heard of them if they hadn't reached out.
posted by JHarris at 5:02 PM on August 25, 2022

last week thoroughburro posted a recipe for jalapeno hot sauce. this week, among other, beachy, things, i have a glut of unidentified peppers from a turkish hot pepper seed kit which approach my hiccough reflex experience of habaneros or perhaps scotch bonnets and which i can eat, but not in the volume i'm producing them. so i have just completed making about 4 oz. of hot sauce. it is approaching room temperature, post simmer, and is quite tasty. thanks, thoroughburro. (also working on drying all those seeds for next year).

gardenwise the squash all died of wet feet i think; the bean plants, after first flush, appear to have been eaten (maybe got a few viable seeds); the cherry tomatoes and basil thrive (a couple bolt, looking for opportunity to take seed). kale appears to subsist. enormous sunflowers gaze at their shoes, leaning and yellowing. more radishes and beets planted.
posted by 20 year lurk at 5:45 PM on August 26, 2022

the squash all died of wet feet i think

The present La Niña regime looks like it will be sticking around for quite some way into next year, and in our part of the world that's been making things get very squelchy indeed.

On the upside, the Bambusa Oldhamii I planted twenty years ago has really hit its straps this year and is throwing up fat new stalks that stick way out of the top of the clump. I won't have exact measurements until I start cutting those down, which I won't be doing until next year because I want to give them time to die back and dry out, but I reckon a few of them are already topping 15 metres and that's all been winter growth. Really looking forward to seeing what it can do this coming summer.
posted by flabdablet at 6:58 AM on August 27, 2022