☯

[not a hornets fan @BrosephSZN]

DUNE putting out a full trilogy in 5 years is absolutely insane for modern franchise filmmaking like when is the next time we will get a series with this level of quality in such a short timespan

[ela. @sunligxht]

@sigabruninho A gente só percebe que era pobre MUITO pobre quando começa a receber um salário melhor mas continua sendo pobre

[S🎧 @wellnessgirlyy]

when 20 yo say shit like “i won’t have kids until like 25” but they don’t know that 25 is literally tomorrow

[Garrett @GarrettQuinn]

World Cup loses hit harder as you age. You think about where you will be in four years, how your kids will be older, if you’ll ever see your country win, your own mortality, and how many more of these you’ll see. I have probably 11-12 left in my life. Unsettling thought, really.

[Benjamín Esposito na Copa @giaoselva]

Eu vou falar algo que com certeza é coisa de tiozão, mas, assistindo a esse vídeo, vendo o povo aplaudindo e indo receber a Seleção vice-campeã (que fez uma Copa cheia de altos e baixos, além de ter perdido a final sem ver a cor da bola), sorrindo, feliz e valorizando os jogadores, fica evidente como essa conexão mudou.

A conexão com a Seleção se perdeu primeiro quando ela parou de jogar no Brasil. Hoje, só atua aqui pelas Eliminatórias porque a FIFA obriga; caso contrário, jogaria em Londres ou Miami. A segunda ruptura aconteceu quando os jogadores se tornaram totalmente inacessíveis, restritos às redes sociais e a falas meticulosamente ditadas por assessores de imprensa. A terceira é que você não vê sinceridade por parte dos jogadores: parece um fardo jogar pela Seleção, uma obrigação apenas para ganhar mais dinheiro com patrocinadores e massagear o ego.

Detalhe: a Seleção vice-campeã de 1998 voltou inteira para o Brasil. A de 2026 voltou com apenas dois jogadores. Os outros foram passar as férias em paraísos pelo mundo, dando satisfações cheias de Deus e frases de coach, enquanto se preparam para a próxima Champions League. Afinal, é isso que importa para eles.

[Collingwood 🇬🇧 @admcollingwood]

This is sort of funny, and Brazil have definitely got worse, but it misdiagnoses the problem. In fact, this is a story of what has happened to society and with our economies, and the ideology of our ruling elites.

The first point to accept is that *all* football nations have lost their particular style: there has been a flattening of the way in which teams play. I first started watching football as a very young boy in the late eighties, and through until the early 2000s, most of the big nations maintained a distinct way of playing. The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Brazil and England all spring to mind. But two things have happened -- the first connected to the latter.

First, the Champions League (and later the Europa League) means that the best teams in Europe play each other almost every week during the season. That provides a consistently present interface for an accelerated exchange of ideas, formations, and tactics. But it also acts as a kind of gain of function research for football: there is now an extremely rapid cycle of tactical, transfer policy/player selection, and fitness innovation, response and counter response. The football OODA loop has never been tighter.

Second, and connected to this, there has been an extreme version of the Pareto Principle income inequality that has happened among western societies as a whole. Wealth, partly due to the Champions League, and partly due to the Premier League, has accrued to a smaller and smaller number of teams, even as the size of the pie, due to the massive increase in TV revenue in Europe, has expanded beyond all recognition. This means that all the best players in the world end up in the same handful of clubs. We can name them: Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Juventus, Bayern Munich, PSG, Real Madrid and Barcelona. Furthermore, with the advent of global scouting networks and post-Moneyball databases, this means the best players from anywhere in the world, often at young ages. Remember when an unknown player would have a great World Cup and find himself playing for, say, Tottenham or Monaco or wherever? Those days are gone. We know about every player in the most minute detail. There is no mystery. The good players are already in Europe.

The first time I noticed this process of wealth accumulation was with the great Ajax team of 1995. I was only just a teenager, and that team was like a revelation for me in terms of the way football could be played. All of them (bar Danny Blind and Frank Rijkaard, who were an earlier generation) came up through the Ajax academy system and blossomed at the same time. They played in the Ajax/Dutch style (4-3-3, with two wingers that stayed very wide, and a centre back pushing into midfield when they had the ball, holding possession playing in the opponent's final third). But within two seasons, the entire team was broken up: Davids, Seedorf, Klijvert, Ovremars, Rijzeger, Kanu, Litmanen, even Van Gaal, the young manager -- they'd all gone to richer clubs elsewhere. In the 1960s or 70s, they'd have stayed together and won multiple European trophies. In England, we saw a similar thing with Southampton. Newcastle are suffering the same now.

All this means that players don't stay in their home environments and countries, with their clubs, and the process of mimesis breaks down. Add that to the first point, related to the way intra-European football forces a flattening through various mechanisms, and you have what we see now.

A couple of World Cups ago, the Netherlands played a 3-5-2, to my absolute horror. The Netherlands playing without proper wingers! Now we have a Brazilian team that has two Arsenal players, two Man U players, one Newcastle player -- even a Bournemouth player, for goodness sake. And they'll all have had the majority of their careers outside Brazil. Some will have left when they were 15 or 16, scouted by Shaktar Donetsk (famous for bringing in young Brazilian players) or Real Madrid. Why are we therefore surprised that they play like any other European team?

The Netherlands style lives on -- but through Barcelona and therefore the Spain national team (via Cruyff, and thence Guardiola), not in the Netherlands national team. But the Brazil style (a languid slow, slow, slow, punctuated by sudden bursts of incredible skill, raking passes, speed, and crackerjack long shots) is dead. When better Brazilian players emerge in future, and maybe they return to winning World Cups, they'll do so as Europeans would, not Brazilians. The German and Italian styles are also dead. The English style is also pretty much dead, although that was an evolutionary dead end in terms of International Football, so we do not lament it.

This, rather than boozing or religion, is the reason for what we see with the Brazil national team. I find it deeply sad. But no doubt the neoliberal progressives who run our countries will view it as a great success.

@AaronBastani @WilliamClouston @georgegalloway @jj_bull

[Chess.com @chesscom]

can't even en passant without offsides anymore

[Museum @DailyClassicArt]

Gustave Doré - "Now was the Day Departing" (1890)

[沒女 @corpsewannabe_]

Quando gato come mato

[☯ @1ts23]

eu nasci em 1999 então meio que sou filho deles

[Anime Posts @AnimeePost]

The ultimate manga power couple

[isaiah @tlop444]

the goat spiderman debate is over

[☯ @1ts23]

Togashi apenas leve minha coluna

[HxH HQ @Hxh_leaks]

The extra pages

Togashi's comment: ​I would like to express my deepest gratitude to everyone who has kept a place for my work within a corner of their hearts.

Thank you very much.

#hxh #hunterxhunter

[Pablo Rua @PabloRaphaelRUA]

As análises da Falha de Cobertura são as melhores. Nota 10/10 para esse roteiro aqui. 😅

[lulu monegata @FORMULALECLRC]

AI ELE POUSANDO IGUAL O HOMEM ARANHA

[BlackSmear @BlackSmearBilka]

One of the main reason why soccer is so popular and such a loved game across the world is because Americans have had so little to do with its development.

[jackie trackmarx @jackietrackmarx]

as I walked by a group of teenagers, one of them said to the others "remember that time u stuck ur finger in my butthole." it caught me off guard and I burst out laughing, and when I turned back to look at them they all cheered and laughed that they got me, and I laughed too

[Ruan Lucas @ruanlucas_fla]

Pô, que vídeo lindo

[greg @gandalf_thegreg]

toddlers to people with deformities in the grocery store

[Iain Whyte @ArabestUSA]

28 years apart off to see Scotland v Brazil 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇧🇷

[lulu @17luj]

My chrollo oil paintings #hxh