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:

523 thoughts on “Growing Up”

  4. Weird question……I’ve bought 500 balls, 300 from Walmart and 200 from Toys ‘r’ us. They all say “enor” on them. Are these the ones that you have? If so, do yours smell like a diaper? We haven’t even used them yet, because there are so few, but it just reeks!

  5. So… Walmart is having a sale 250 balls for 20 dollars, that comes out to 8 cents a ball which is cheaper than any website I have seen, just bought out every walmart where I live.

  30. Learn to satisfy, so-called he who is content is always happy.
    love life, love sports, lovers nature ,lovegoogle
    Learn to independence, can’t blindly bother other people, their own things done, so-called heaven hel those who help themselves.
    Learn to forget, cannot live in the past time, memory has gone, continue to present life.
    Learn to grow up, can’t again so capricious, so naive, so childish.

  44. Second, I read here that this is a no pictures theme. Ooops… I’ve used lots of images and I think it looks fine. Third, Google Webmaster has reported to me that I have 22 broken links on the site as a result of the tabbed box. I’ve sit-e.org

  50. First, we create Rectangle and fill it with red. Select the Mesh Tool and start clicking along the edge of the rectangle. Creating 3 segments close together will give good results as we can simply change the middle segment to black for shadows.

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