Just curious. I finally got back into it yesterday after a long time away.

Yesterday everything was fine.

Today, my "cobblestone" blocks don't work - ie, they've got the same exact graphic as the "stone" blocks. I have no idea why. It says "cobblestone" and looks like cobblestone in my inventory, but in my hand and when I place it, it looks like a stone block. How can I build like that? Arrghh!

Ok, I'm done now.

You could always copy your save files from the %AppData%/.minecraft/ folder, delete and redownload the game. With all of the changes recently it may be worth it anyway.

Are you playing it vanilla or with mods/texture packs/etc?

Psyched about the new plants and biomes in 1.7 btw. :)

I don't play it anymore, as i'm really dissapointed in the direction it's heading, but i try to keep up with the changes, hoping for a miracle. I'm that naive.

Anyhow, Your problem might be due to some texture packs, since MC changed it's format recently.
Here's some info on that: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Resource_pack#Texture_Packs

Ok, thanks! I did have one texture pack, but that was with the old launcher. The new one doesn't give me the option, so yeah, I'll mess around with both suggestions. Appreciate it.

Since the security breach of Java a couple months ago I'm too scared to install Java to my PC.

Why? What's been happening ? I haven't played in a while.

The lack of a designer and direction stopped showing, it's now glaring, shining like the roads of Caesar IV with bloom enabled. The horror, the horror! The whole thing is a mess of loose ideas, some completely redundant. I mean, they added the comparator and trapped chest in the same update, and the game still has low block ID count. Then there's the overall lack of challange and motivation, and gawd does that show. Sorry for the rant, the game had such potential, and now it's a hopeless mess of things. 'Make a poll, ask 10 people what they want to see, add it, see what comes out, leave it in' seems to be the design philosophy there.

Do I still play Minecraft? Hm, well yes and no. I was done with vanilla Minecraft a long time ago, now I play it with the Better than Wolves overhaul. At this point, compared to vanilla it's basically a different game, "what Minecraft could have been" + a big layer of challenge. I'm currently on hold waiting for the final version of the mod and my only concern is "How will I survive?"

I never have!

Sometimes I think I would like it, sometimes I think I wouldn't. And then I just never get around to it.

Completely understandable. I simply disable the web plugin because I need Java for other applications. Never had issues with it though. Untrained users with browsers, however, are a nightmare that I have to deal with regularly. :)

I don't play Vanilla anymore. I do play various modpacks though. Currently I'm playing Magic Farm from the Feed The Beast launcher, and The Aether II from it's own launcher.

I do appreciate the updates that are made to Vanilla, if only because they add some stuff to all the modded versions as well (since they are extensions of Vanilla). At this point, I think the game lives through mods. There just isn't enough content in Vanilla to keep people playing it, but the mod scene keeps churning out tons of new content. That also means that people can adapt the game to their liking. And the comparatively recent development of standalone launchers managing complete packs of mods makes it very easy to do so, compared to the "old days" where you had to manually modify your minecraft.jar file to install a mod.

still playing, but no vanilla. instead using the yogcraft modpack from feed the beast. in vanilla there's just not enough to tinker around with.

Used to play indev and infdev, but after that i stopped (Notch became a ****** after getting my money)

Edit: I work in retail and nowadays I only see kids playing it on iPads and other tablets we have put out, a year ago some people even asked if a laptop could run it.

I mostly poke at it. I should probably see about playing the Beta versions since the new launcher recently enabled that.

My kids play it on 360 they havent had any problems.