When I was a kid, a nerd dad was something to be…well, maybe not ashamed of necessarily, but certainly discussed as rarely as possible, and taken out in public for biannual viewings if you could help it. Dads were supposed to own heavy metal tools and teach you how to use them only after you begged and proved you weren’t actually an idiot, and take you camping, and make you walk the dog. They were only supposed to care about your toys for as long as it took to scream obscenities after accidentally stepping on them. Aside from the occasional Pinewood Derby debacle, they were not supposed to get involved in dorky hobbies.
Things have changed, and the Free Universal Construction Kit offers paradigm-shifting proof.
What’s the Free Universal Construction Kit, you ask? Why, nothing more than “a matrix of nearly 80 adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten popular children’s construction toys.” In other words, as Kottke put it, it’s a new invention that lets kids “connect their LEGO pieces to their Lincoln Logs to their K’Nex.” Which is pretty awesome, and certainly something I would have been interested in, but what’s really interesting is how you make it — by cranking the damn things out on a Makerbot 3D printer.
I ask you: What kind of dad has a 3D printer lying around the house? A nerd dad. And while I can’t say for sure that nerd dads outnumber the lawnmowing, nearly mute, Old Spice-scented dads of my youth, I think we’ve reached some sort of geek nirvana when using an $1800 open source printer to manufacture plastic widgets for interspecies toy mating is regarded as no big deal.
I’d write more, but my four-year-old son wants to play Egg Punch on my old iPad 1. Just watch this trailer and marvel at our brave new world.
Hey, what’s even more jiveass than an album of Smiths songs done lullaby style? If you answered “the same damn thing on vinyl,” then you get today’s gold star of sadness, because that’s what the folks at Rockabye Baby! have planned for their next release, due next month.