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”

  3. You know, I tried to convince a few people to do this for their sophomore year of college dorm room. We had plans for a slide that would fall down into a ball pit, and we got to the point where we seriously looked into the pricing. That’s when we decided not to do it. :/

    Other crazy plans I wanted to do at the time were a sky-pool (literally putting a little kiddie pool on the top bunk of a set of bunked beds — we ended up literally doing this with couches in a couple rooms, and I ended up sleeping on one of the sky-couches once!), some kind of a hot-tub-esque thing to work with a laptop in, and some other crazy things. I miss those days sometimes!

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  8. Pingback: Will’s Blog - The Death of Couches

  9. > > you can sort the balls pretty quickly by throwing only certain colors away from yourself

    > better than O(n log n)? Is that what she found?

    Actually this is kind of a degenerate case of bucket sort where the items in the initial bucketing are indistinguishable. Sorting playpen balls by color is actually O(n).

    -mike

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  10. I know I’m technically a minor.

    But i’m in love with you. (Not in a creepy “oh my god i’m going to google map your house (though it probably wouldn’t be effective anyway since you have all the raptor protection anyway…but i digress)”

    Your blag/comics make me giggle. Just thought you should know?

    Good day to you, sir.

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  12. Pingback: Unlikely Words : Balls

  13. i wonder what sex in a ball pit would be like.
    it would be on the lookout for chuck-e-cheese constantly.
    that might either:
    a) ruin the fun
    b) make it awesome.

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  15. In the last picture, you can see a window over the ball pit. I wonder what people will think when they see the pit through there, if they can. Info on placement, perhaps?

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  19. List of things I must do before I die (in no particular order):
    […]
    3792. Obtain copy of BLUE BIRD “HARDERGROUND REMIX” by Ayumi Hamasaki
    3793. Throw dance party with Miki and anyone else I can round up
    3794. Tell stepmother to go jump in a lake
    3795. Install large ball pit in bedroom
    3796. Throw party in said ball pit

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  20. How much did this cost? I totally really really want one now, but I’d like to know how much it actually *cost* before I get my hopes up.

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  21. to clean them , just put them in a dish washer and unload it into a washbasket. a wahing machine might work. or just dump vodka all over them (its anti-bacterial!)

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  22. Nice use of screen-message on the last two laptops! It’s one of my favorite packages – thanks to Debian package of the day.

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  23. This is a singular gravity well of awesomeness. And crumbs.

    To the person (Lena) suggesting that this is the first post with Randall’s picture in it, I guess that is technically true, but the link off of the blog for the kite flying page had a picture, if I recall correctly.

    In any case, Mr. Munroe, thank you for sharing your life with us.

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  25. Wow. The sheer awesomeness of that is … dumbfounding. There are not words for the coolness!

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  26. @WPI Guy: I didn’t use screen-message – just Open Office. Thanks for the tip, though – I’ve been looking for something like it (Debian package “sm”).

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  30. “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.”

    You bought them on ebay? You’re lucky you didn’t receive bobcats instead.

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  32. Irony of Ironies! I just did this myself not too long ago.
    I went with the cheap balls on ebay though. I made a 12 long, 4 wide, 3 high pen. I’ll take some pics later and throw them up online.

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  33. OMG !!! As said above, you are living my dream life. I should hate you, but cannot, due to admiration of pure genius and a few remaining bits of ethics. And because you may give me the Jabber address of the very cute Mistress in the fourth picture. If you do not, I will hate you.

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  34. Do you think my school would get upset if I used radio funds to turn the station into a giant broadcasting ball pit?

    I really don’t think the DJ’s would mind at all.

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  35. Truly awesome.

    As a side-note, Firefox 3 does indeed eliminate the long alt-text problem.

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  36. It DOES seem to have advantages over couches, which must be cut in half before they can be fit into the desired room.

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  37. Say, why is it that every time I see a picture of you you’re wearing a green shirt?

    I guess I just notice random things like that. Now I’m trying to get my parents to buy balls for me (please, the jokes will get old really fast)

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  39. “I would worry about…having such a large and suitable spider habitat directly beside my bed.”

    You’ve ruined for me. I will never look at a ball pit the same way again…

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  42. Must…have. As usual, the much-used “Stop reading my mind…” comes into play. Followed shortly by “never stop.”

    As usual, thanks for the ideas, implementations and content.

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  44. Pingback: Forget Couches… | Honk if you love justice!

  45. One of my fondest memories is the time I actually had the opportunity to have free reign over the pit full of foam cubes at my brother’s gymnastics class. Oh, how heavenly that was. You should look into it.

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  49. Pingback: BoPL » Blog Archive » Things I Didn’t Know Existed, Part Something
  50. Pingback: BoPL » Blog Archive » Things I Didn’t Know Existed, Part Something

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