this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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Today I Learned

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[–] axh@lemmy.world 95 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Fun fact: none of them is related to Garfield the cat.

[–] programmer_belch@lemmy.dbzer0.com 32 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Garfield suffered an assassination attempt and died in Monday. This is a clear allusion to Garfield the cat.

Cool video about the assassination

[–] massive_bereavement@fedia.io 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] TheLowestStone@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago

Everyone loves lasagna.

[–] queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone 64 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Fun James Garfield trivia: he wrote a proof of the Pythagorean theorem.

Notable wiki editor burn: "Garfield is thus far the only President of the United States to have contributed anything original to mathematics."

[–] IWW4@lemmy.zip 17 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I looked up Garfield, he was the second US president assassinate and he wasn’t president a year.

[–] queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone 10 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Yep. After Lincoln made it famous people began to see presidential assassination as rather passe. And he loses out on the shortest tenure record to Harrison, so nobody remembers poor Garfield for much other than his mathematical contributions. Or contribution, singular.

[–] MoffKalast@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

And the reason Garfield was shot was complete nonsense. There's a great video on it.

[–] IWW4@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 days ago

Haha!!

Harrison’s was shorter.. Off to wikipedia I go.

[–] missphant@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago

At least he got a 1 hour EmpLemon video out of it.

[–] Dozzi92@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Netflix's Death by Lightning introduced me to history I probably should've learned as a kid but I never paid attention to. I watched the first episode and ended up spoiling the rest of the show for myself by going down a wikipedia rabbit hole.

[–] IWW4@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That has Mathew Mcfadden and Michael Shannon doesn’t it? That has been on my watch list forever and I need to check it out!

[–] Dozzi92@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

That's the one. Michael Shannon is fantastic. First took note of him in Take Shelter, and since then, if I see his name on something I watch it. He's why I watched Death by Lightning. He did great.

[–] Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Oh neat. President from which country?

[–] Raiderkev@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Probably Italy. That's where lasagna is from.

[–] Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 day ago

Ah, so not Mesopotamia?

Cause that is where Magic is from.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 4 points 1 day ago

There's only one country, everyone knows that. Everyone else just exists in the abstract, and they're not to be thought about.

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Nicaragua would be my guess

[–] Magnum@infosec.pub 2 points 1 day ago

Sounds British to me.

[–] mHtt@lemmy.ca 11 points 2 days ago

But does he like lasagna?

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 25 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] somebody_to_love@lemmy.today 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

(T)

I loved playing magic so much in the 90s. I quit and when I looked back at the mid 2010s the game was unrecognizable, so I never tried to come back. Thanks for the fun memories. People hated playing against my blue counterspell deck. I understand now.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I quit and when I looked back at the mid 2010s the game was unrecognizable

I have to say, I've played on and off for a long while - from the mid-90s until a few years ago - and I agree. But that was sort of the appeal of the game. Always evolving. Constantly trying new mechanics and styles of play. It was a kind-of laboratory for game design and implementation that kept me coming back to see what was new.

The thing that has turned me off more now than ever before is the way the game has fully stagnated. Every new release is just a reskinned iteration that calcified at the end of COVID. The mechanics have gotten cookie-cutter and have really divorced themselves from the different styles and themes between sets. The gulf between Common and Rare/Mythic, plus the way Common cards are totally interchangeable across editions, has made Pauper a lot less fun.

And now that AI art is popping up in all the new sets, I can't even enjoy that much.

That's before you get into the shameless cash-grab that was the 30th aniversery set. $999 for a box with four packs in it which, apparently, did so badly that the excess cards were dumped in a landfill rather than going into discount. Really painfully shameless overmarketing and underdeveloping. Heartbreaking to see Hasbro rip the beating heart out of the company, because they saw a golden goose and couldn't be satisfied with just one golden egg a day.

[–] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago

The thing that has turned me off more now than ever before is the way the game has fully stagnated. Every new release is just a reskinned iteration that calcified at the end of COVID. The mechanics have gotten cookie-cutter and have really divorced themselves from the different styles and themes between sets.

fucking a-men.

The most blatant of this was when Android : Netrunner was licenced by Fantasy Flight Games and every set not only DIDN'T HAVE LOOTBOXES/RANDOM PACKS, but almost every card design was unique.

At the very least, until they started trying to get into cycling sets out and new ones in to build standard, and instead of cards being balanced by later cards, they just dumped new broken sweeper shit in there (unavoidable tags into resource sweepers)

And then you compared it to the state of MTG which started becoming :

Every fucking card is either bullshit removal, or “When you resolve this spell turn a land into a 0/0 creature and put a +1/+1 counter on each land that turned into a creature this turn and draw a card if your land creatures have five enchantments”.

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 1 points 2 days ago

i got my firs tpack in the 90s, 90s era magic and played until end of HS, right now its just UB releasing every few months ruining the game. its all very fast paced gaming now, counter this and that,,,etc. yugioh is similar.

[–] FringeTheory999@lemmy.world 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I did my sixth grade presidents project on James Garfield. I just liked the name, I didn’t realize that I had picked the absolute easiest president to write a report on. You can sum it up in one sentence. Garfield was elected president, promptly dies.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 7 points 2 days ago

Skill issue

[–] cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works 17 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

He looks exactly like how I imagined the creator of MTG would look.

[–] Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

Fun fact, he proposed to his wife witha custom magic card that he slipped into the deck.

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

And inspiration for Garfield Arbuckle.

[–] naticus@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago

Coincidentally I just learned where the name Jon Arbuckle came from. Jim Davis had heard the name of Yuban Coffee's founder, John Arbuckle, and thought it sounded funny and distinct enough to base his comic around. I only found this out because of a video explaining the joke on "Airplane!" about the wife having an inner monologue that "Jim never had a second cup of coffee at home..." which was a well known Yuban commercial at the time.

[–] QuandaleDingle@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago

Absolutely no one here is talking about how strong his genetics are. Damn.

[–] gergolippai@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago

nepo baby 🤣

[–] WoodScientist@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I mean, the dude does know magic. Are we sure he isn't actually just president James Garfield, kept alive all these years by dark sorcery? History records President Garfield of dying by an assassin's bullet. But what if it was just an elaborate way for James to fake his own death, so he could step into a younger identity? 😆

[–] Sabata11792@ani.social 4 points 2 days ago

Some one should check how many swamps he owns.

[–] Etterra@discuss.online 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

He needs to step up his facial hair game. That goatee shames his ancestors.

[–] GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I choose to believe both Garfields have very similar faces, which is why James grew that beard and mustache.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

He's actually an immortal and just trims his beard every few decades and pretends to be a descendant.

[–] albbi@piefed.ca 7 points 2 days ago

Now you just have to link Marjorie Taylor Greene to get the full circle, although I suspect you'll have to go. All the way back to when the Neanderthals and Denisovans were interbreeding.

[–] Fontasia@feddit.nl 4 points 2 days ago

I can't wait to watch the documentary on hsi life, Death by Lightning Helix

[–] egrets@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

i.e. one of his sixteen (but possibly fewer) second great grandparents is James Garfield. I think it's easy to have a little tunnel vision when talking about more distant ancestors.

[–] Godric@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Is one of your 16 great+ grandparents a president? Are you contributing something to the world millions have enjoyed?

[–] jdr@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago

Typically one has eight great-grandparents.

And yes, thank you for asking.

[–] egrets@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Guessing from the hostile tone of your response that my own tone was badly conveyed. I was just making a general observation that we seem to automatically treat relatively distant ancestors with the same significance as grandparents. I do the same.