LogDotZip

Like any good, well-intentioned parent I told myself, before I had kids, that I would not let my child spend its time with its nose in a device.

And like most parents that was a bold faced lie. “No devices” is a fib we unwittingly tell ourselves because we want nothing but the best for our children. But then we ourselves spend all our time with our noses in a device. And guess what?

THEY LEARN FROM US. Children learn by seeing and hearing someone else do it. That’s one of the first ways humans learn. So they see us with a device and they want one too!

My child divides her (device) time between YouTube Kids and Roblox. I have her Roblox account set (I’m pretty sure) so she cannot communicate with strangers. I need to double check that.

But YouTube Kids is pretty well half decent filtered content. But as a grown adult person who has used and posted on The Tube, I have seen some things that can slip through the cracks.

So I decided I would “look into” some of her favorite YouTubers. My first victim—I uh mean subject is LogDotZip.

What’s The Kid Think?

Who is ‘LogDotZip’?

Before getting into the deep research into who this feller is, let’s first state what I know. By side-eyeing The Kid’s device screen, I can gather that he is an expressive, chatty, Minecraft player. He has made her laugh a few times, and his videos are some of the few that she will either watch in their entirety or over again.

When you google “LogDotZip” the first things that come up are, of course, links to YouTube videos. The next thing that comes up is Google’s helpful “People Also Ask” feature. And the first thing right off the bat is his name. “Who is Tyler Pappas?”

Of course I knew his real name isn’t LogDotZip, which, by the way, google has informed me is his gamer tag, which he derived from “LordofGods” which comes from “Yu-Gi-Oh”. After he tweaked it so as to not offend anyone, and added .zip, it became LogDotZip.

To be perfectly frank, the first time I heard The Kid say the name I thought it was jibberish. Lucky for him he picked something super unique.

Mostly because he turned a fun time with some games into a business.

Tyler Pappas now owns what appears to be multiple companies, all because he became popular playing games on the Internet.

I also found an article from 2018 on Tubefilter.com, where he discussed starting out playing RuneScape at 14 years old. It took years for him to start playing Minecraft where he really developed a fan base.

The four year old article also talks about some plans to work with Microsoft (who own Minecraft) and the original creators of the game. This turned out to be his own game, which was released on MineCraft Marketplace, called Block Island. I can only assume my child doesn’t know about it, or else she would have said, “Mommy I wanna play that.”

But lets get to the real dirt shall we? What’s the fastest way to find out what you can about a perfect stranger? Social Media of course! And Mr Pappas has an Instagram!

I have learned several things scrolling through his instagram. First of all dude is in his 30s. I would have guesstimated him to be mid to late twenties at the most. That means half his life has been on YouTube in some form.

Second. He as a beautiful family, who he spends lots of time with. He posted an image from December 2021 where he met some fans. LogDotZip, which is the name of his company, hit 30 staff members that same year.

A quick glance at the only valid next social media site, Twitter, shows me that he is religious. As someone who is decidedly and wholly open about being absolutely not religious, I’m not mad. Or judging. From what I’ve seen he doesn’t seem to put any of it into his videos. But he does display it, not overly, in his social media presence. Which he has every right.

Okay, so I’ve found absolutely nothing to tell me to immediately go block this dude from my child’s YouTube Kid’s account. The next logical step is it *shudders* watch his videos.

The Viewing

While I enjoy playing Minecraft myself, I tend to not watch videos about it, and I also don’t typically watch videos that might be made for kids. That’s not to say that I don’t watch absolutely ridiculous stuff there either. But, it’s time to stop avoiding the high possibility that I will completely ruin the YT algorithm and search for LogDotZip.

The first video that comes up is one from four years ago.

This video is about the number on piece of advice one has for a newbie playing Minecraft. DON’T DIG STRAIGHT DOWN, and when to completely ignore it. To make this short and sweet, you should never dig straight down because you might land yourself right into a situation that, well, might kill ya. From lava to a ravine. This particular video has over 33,000,000 views. If this man made a dollar off each view that’d be over 8 million dollars a year. I don’t know how getting rich of YouTube works, clearly, but that’s a lot.

This post is not about the things you should and shouldn’t do in Minecraft (I mostly just like to build and craft things), it is about the creator of the video. And the first thing I must make note of is one of the things briefly mentioned by The Kid in my video. Tyler Pappas’s voice. Dude has a voice fit for voice work. He has a unique voice that makes watching the video interesting. But he doesn’t do a simple voice over, he does a picture-in-picture type of situation where he floats himself up in the corner as he plays on the screen.

His facial expressions and reactions when something’s not working or doesn’t go the way he wants it too are kinda funny too. That adds to the watchability. I think it adds to it especially for my kid because let’s just say, momma has a funny face, and The Kid likes funny faces.

This video is almost right at 15:00 minutes long, and there wasn’t a single boring moment, there was always something happening, or he was saying or doing something dunny. He describes everything he’s doing and instructing on how things work.

From my brief scrolling and watching of his YouTube page, he does nothing but Minecraft videos there, and those videos are mostly mods or other code related features, and often reviews and detailed descriptions of new updates to the game.

With over fifteen years on YouTube, and more than one channel, the dude is doing something right, and I’ve not encountered anything that could be considered negative at all something children shouldn’t encounter.

While I’m not entirely comfortable with how much device time, whether it be YouTube Kids, Roblox, or whatever my child has, I can with mostly confidence say that I’m not mad at her watching just about anything LogDotZip or Tyler Pappas himself puts out.

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