Growing Up

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I was thinking of getting a couch or something for my room, somewhere for guests to lounge around.

Fuck new couches. I now have a ball pit in my room.

I talked a little bit to Mike Machenry, who built a ball pit last year after reading my comic about it. The big problem with ball pits is that they’re expensive. Filling a room costs on the order of $4000, give or take. You can use this calculator (set up by relsqui of #xkcd) to find the cost for a given room. I’d use 64% for the packing efficiency — that’s about what I’ve found.

So given the expense, I didn’t fill my whole room — just an area the size of the bed, to a depth of a couple feet — and even that cost as much as a reasonable couch. The cost was as high as it was largely because Mike strongly recommended crush-proof balls, which allows for a lot more roughhousing but cost about twice as much as regular ones on eBay.

But it was totally worth it. After seeing how much fun it is to lounge around in it, we’ve decided to get together and build a larger one in the living room and throw parties there (though we want to solve the cleaning problem first in a scalable way). The day we put it up, we spent probably twelve hours, on and off, lounging around throwing plastic balls at each other. It’s totally worth it, and everyone’s excited about expanding it. It’s wonderful to be able to wake up and roll sideways, blanket and all, into a ball pit, and sink slowly down to the bottom. I’ve padded it with pillows and blankets to make it more fun to, uhh, wallow, or whatever the appropriate verb is for ball pits.

And before you jump to comment — over the last 24 hours we’ve completely exhausted all the balls-related innuendo, so you needn’t bother.

Here are some more pictures:

Abby, on the left, descends slowly into the balls. We never did find her again.

As Mike discovered, you can sort the balls pretty quickly by throwing only certain colors away from yourself.

Everyone I know seems to use Fujitsu Lifebooks. <3 ultraportables.

To the above situation, we can only say:

546 thoughts on “Growing Up”

  1. With the Direct Selection Tool, we select both the top and bottom points in the segments we want it to make it shadow. After that, fill the points with black. Do this to all the segments we want it to be in shadow.

  2. Now we can start shaping the curtain to give it some curves. Select the Direct Selection Tool and select the point we want to modify and move the anchor points to change it to curve lines. Other things you can do with the points is move them closer or further to other points by clicking the Right/Left Arrow Keys. A realistic fold normally starts narrow at the top and end wide at the bottom. Hence, we can use the arrow keys to shift the points closer or further away form each other.

  4. Now we can start shaping the curtain to give it some curves. Select the Direct Selection Tool and select the point we want to modify and move the anchor points to change it to curve lines. Other things you can do with the points is move them closer or further to other points by clicking the Right/Left Arrow Keys. A realistic fold normally starts narrow at the top and end wide at the bottom. Hence, we can use the arrow keys to shift the points closer or further away form each other.

  5. I don’t there is a great deal they can do about Iran, they will have to wait for the president to make the first move which I beleive will only be a matter of time.

  6. Now we can start shaping the curtain to give it some curves. Select the Direct Selection Tool and select the point we want to modify and move the anchor points to change it to curve lines. Other things you can do with the points is move them closer or further to other points by clicking the Right/Left Arrow Keys. A realis

  10. this is a very fun and cool way to relax. it is very unique and very enjoyable. i’ll be referring this website to my friends. thanks for posting such cool information.

  11. Pingback: » Ball-Pit or Bean bag chair Please

  19. Ball Pit … Awesome, i did it in my room and end up playing for a while with my friend every weekends, in short i do it as stress buster playing, having fun, rolling on the balls. BTW i will try all this illustration (pictures position) with my friends… LOL

  29. Awesome, i did it in my room and end up playing for a while with my friend every weekends, in short i do it as stress buster playing, having fun, rolling on the balls. BTW i will try all this illustration (pictures position) with my friends… LOL
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  49. Other things you can do with the points is move them closer or further to other points by clicking the Right/Left Arrow Keys. A realistic fold normally starts narrow at the top and end wide at the bottom. Hence, we can use the arrow keys to shift the points closer or further away form each other.

  50. Cocktail Party Physics Jennifer Ouellette has a two-part interview (1 and 2) with Eric Roston, author of the upcoming book The Carbon Age. It’s definitely worth a look, and you can definitely expect.

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