But even the cursing Minecrafters are better than pre-tween-targeted sitcoms on Disney or Nickelodeon. Let my sweet impressionable kid spend a day with China on AntFarm or Alex on Wizards of Waverly Place and my parental battles erupt. Bad language is easy to curb, but stupid adult stereotypes, sarcasm, backstabbing behavior, and contempt are not.

I wish this wasn’t true, because I love all of the Disney movies, and appreciate the recent releases with strong female characters, but I have yet to see an episode of any tween sitcom (as I’ll call them) in which the adults are not morons and the dialogue between the young characters is not caustic.

To give an idea of the scale of this game for those readers for whom Minecraft is a foreign idea and looks kind of stupid, the people on Twitter she talks about in her article that her daughter watches have 170,000+ and 110,000+ followers on Twitter. SkyDoesMinecraf has 3.2 million subscribers on his YouTube channel and his most popular video as of this post is around 8.4 million views.

Crazy huh?

I’ve opened the Minecraft door with our 5 year old and now endless questions about it have started.

Scott Johnson, of Frog Pants Studios, is a dad who lets his 12 year old son teach him about Minecraft.

Minecraft is hard to explain because it looks and sounds tremendously boring. But at it’s core it’s like having the biggest Lego set in the world that you can build just about anything with. Out of square blocks only. And there’s zombies at night.

I asked folks on Twitter to tell me what Minecraft is:

@ichris computer Lego with zombies.

— David Buglass (@nikephorus) May 24, 2013

@ichris Lego with more explosion

— ADDandy (@ADDandy) May 24, 2013

@ichris CubesExplore the dayBuild your dreamsCraft your sword, make it sharpBuild your dwellingSurvive the nightRespawn

— Darren Moser (@DrSciFi) May 24, 2013

I’m watching videos like this so I can attempt to stay somewhat ahead of my son. For now.

Direct link to video.

Part 2 of Scott’s series is up if you want to continue watching people build stuff.

I showed Damien, my 5 year old son, Minecraft for all of 10 minutes and his eyes lit up and his brain started running with questions.

How do you say ‘nerd’ in Irish?

Wanker.

Direct link to video.

Via Caroline over at prolific.org who’s finally jumped back on the blogging bandwagon.

But while you’re waiting you can read a better response by Michael Cohen over at TidBITS:

The answer to that, I’m afraid, may disappoint those who want cut-and-dried answers to complex questions: it depends on how you use Photoshop, and what you use it for. In my case, and in the cases of other members of the TidBITS staff whom I asked, the answer seems to be “Yes.”

Link via MacSparky

But a lot of that would be a bit, er, inside football to the uninitiated. So I’ve decided to focus on something that’s happening on a more individual level. Right now two men playing in the Spanish League (La Liga) are playing to a sustained level of individual brilliance and one-up-manship that is unparalleled in the history of football, perhaps in the history of sport.

The drama and intensity of football ¹ is more interesting to me than what we see focused on in hockey and other sports here in Canada. It’s just the time zone differences that make it difficult to keep tabs on what’s happening — I need a football friend to remind me of important games coming up.

We promise not to screw it up.

Yahoo has had a bit of a history with screwing up purchases like this — having purchased Geocities back in the day for around a billion dollars as well and then never doing anything with it until they killed it.

And then Flickr, which Yahoo owns, announced a redesign and new plans for the photo sharing service including a free terabyte of storage for every account:

We’re giving your photos room to breathe, and you the space to upload a dizzying number of photos and videos, for free. Just how big is a terabyte? Well, you could take a photo every hour for forty years without filling one.

It’s kind of like way back when Google offered a free gigabyte with Gmail — 1 terabyte is so much space right now that it’s hard to imagine ever needing it.

At one point as I climbed the stairs and approached the second floor, I saw a group of five people wearing Google Glass, all silently staring off into space. I couldn’t tell if they were wirelessly having a conversation through their eyeballs, or just bored by the presence of real humans in front of them.

Nick Bilton writes from the Google I/O 2013 conference.

I love new technology. I love lots of new things Google is doing. But Google Glass scares me because people already disappear from reality into their phones — and that’s with a physical thing they have to make a choice to pull out of their pockets and use. And these are decidedly non-tech people.

Imagine giving those same folks even more immersive, distracting technology that they don’t have to make any sort of obvious external signal that they’re using? At least right now when some dumb parent drives through a school zone with their face down in their phone, you know what they were doing.

If they’re wearing a pair of Google Glass(es), you’d have no idea.

I think a lot of the new stuff we’re being sold in technology is too powerful for the average person. At least on a societal level. It’s like giving a 16 year old a brand new Ferrari for their first vehicle. Or maybe a loaded up semi truck.

And parents can’t teach their kids about proper phone/device usage etiquette because they don’t know how to handle it either.

As someone who loves new technology it worries me how poorly I see people handling and coping with new technology as it invades their lives. And it scares me that it often feels like I, the guy who loves new technology, am the only one noticing it.

It should be the other way around, no?

See also: Technology is Evil, Long Live Technology.

Direct link to video

And while we’re at it, here’s Harrison Ford refusing to answer Star Wars questions on Kimmel:

Direct link to video

Via DaringFireball.net

I was hoping you could give me some tech advice/suggestions: how do you back up your work? External hard drives, I’d imagine? Do you store them on DVDs as well or is that antiquated? My one and only external hard drive decided to quit working today and I store ALL of my stuff (including computer backups) on it. I’m kind of freaking out. I can mount it temporarily but there’s a lot of GBs on there that would take hundreds of disks to back up to. So would it make sense to back up my external hard drive with another external hard drive? I need something that makes the most sense, is cheap, and takes little space on my desk. Please help!

My advice to Crystal went something like this:

• Bite the bullet and buy another hard drive. $130 or so for plenty of space to back up your data. Having local backup that you can quickly access if you need to is important. Plus with Time Machine running you can very easily grab a previous version of a document if you make a mistake on one file — rather than having to re-install everything to get it back.
• I use a paid Dropbox account to store all my client files (images, HTML/CSS files, contracts, meeting notes, etc.). Besides being an offsite backup, it makes it really easy to access something on my iPhone with the iOS app.
• Finally I use Backblaze to keep a backup of my MacBook Air. Backblaze operates in the background, continuously backing up everything important on my laptop. Since I have a Time Machine backup hard drive at home connected to our iMac that I only occasionally connect to my Air, it’s nice to have another backup running in case a week or two goes by.

Backup. Backup. Backup.

May 26th is when we sign up for Netflix again I guess.

Direct link to video

Seen on 512pixels.net and the rest of the internet.