Growing Up

Posted byRandall 586 Comments on Growing Up

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. ❤ ultraportables.

To the above situation, we can only say:

586 replies on “Growing Up”

  2. Pingback: Øredev 2013
  4. Pingback: When the Party Gets Boring | My Website

  9. Having read this I thought it was extremely enlightening.
    I appreciate you finding the time and energy to put this
    informative article together. I once again find myself spending way too
    much time both reading and leaving comments. But so
    what, it was still worth it!

    Stop by my weblog … 網站行銷

    Like

  11. This site is very great and indispensable to my thank you to expect continued success with the authorities there are millions of people come easy memlunkalan but I guess

    Like

  16. this is so awesome

    btw every comment on here looks like a product of google translate

    Like

  25. But their place is actually depending on both the first and second quad — although the map is sucked in the design of a geographical map, with shaky boundaries. go to website

    Like

  27. of course it hurts, but this product wont get locked or tug slowely, so I think its a product I feel is `quick-n-go`! I recommended this to my friend, and she likes it too! I have cleaned many fish with it. (81 episodes, 1963-1966) Gary Conway … I haven’t worked out in about 6 months so I decided to get this to help with motivation. I couldn’t ask for more. 27 pages per minute is quite a hefty dose of tree. No more pain, sensitivity or open wounds after a popped blister. We promptly drove to a toy store, in search of one of those “rabbit” things. Clean up was a breeze. So far, it has done everything I’ve asked it to do and has several features I really like, such as: you have a choice as to whether your needle stops either up or down, I really like the clear plastic cover over the bobbin so you can see how much thread is left, I use the 1/2 stitch button more then I thought I would, and I like the extra large table for doing quilts and working on extra large flags.

    Like

  30. As expected, with the huge flood of new guests after this post went up, the path is finish of new individuals coming in and experiencing with the bot. visit the website

    Like

  32. The ego cannot think about being deceased. It has no way of it. But there is another aspect of interest that not only can understand it, but already knows about it. Jeremy Schoemaker

    Like

  34. This is BS, Randall. First you work on robots for NASA, but that job wasn’t cool enough. So you become a successful cartoonist who happens to answer weird and interesting physics questions from random strangers (which then leads to a book!!!) instead. Now you get a ball pit in your living room too?!?

    I’m surprised more kids aren’t saying they want to be Randall Munroe when they grow up.

    Like

Comments are closed.