The Agony and Ecstasy of being a Viral Trickshot Video Star
August 06, 2025 at 04:38PMOver the past few months, watching people pull off intricate and seemingly impossible trickshots has become my most reliable source of joy on social media. It’s not just the feats itself, but also the particular rhythm they move to—a fail-fail-fail-fail-WHAT cadence that delivers a real sense of satisfaction. For The Guardian, Richard profiles some of the niche’s luminaries; consider the story a fascinating off-ramp from doomscrolling.
These are, however, “super-strange skills”, as David Hulett puts it. Over the hours of practice, you do become incrementally better at, say, tossing ping-pong balls so they play a tune on a series of carefully arranged pans, or dropping paper from a stepladder into a shredder. It was David who had the crucial insight that a small crease across the paper will attenuate the curve of the parabola on its descent, resulting in a greater probability of it sailing into the waiting shredder. Just as Dick Fosbury’s flop at the 1968 Olympics changed the entire discipline of high-jumping, so a trickshooter can alter the history of their sport in a single afternoon.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/08/06/viral-trickshot-video-stars/
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