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. a) my girlfriend threw her birthday party at a fun house with a large pit like this one AND an inflatable slide (no pool though), so I DO have the right kind of friends :P. I’m sure she’d envy you to her death for having one of those in your room. Hmm… I think I got an idea for her next birthday…

    b) The No Velociraptors girl is cute 🙂

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  8. Oooooh, I’ve thought about this for years… Wonderful!

    I think I must do this myself now…

    ;-)))))

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  12. Hehe. Every time you guys do something like this, I say to myself “I wish I had friends that cool.”

    I will probably never be able to find friends that cool, but I’m probably not cool enough to deserve them either. 😉

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  19. Paul Says:
    “I am in awe. I can?t imagine acting out the last frame of that comic IRL.”

    …I can. 😀

    This has brought a substancial ray of sunshine to my day. ^_^

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  20. To clean them, try calling up local kids places and see how they clean and if they’ll let you use their washing machine.

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  22. theres only one responce to that, sir *walks off, get hat, puts hat on, comes back, doths hat to you* you are a genius^_^

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  23. Um… How do I put this? Now, look. I’m as geeky as the next guy. My bachelors in in engineering. I do math just for fun. Thermodynamics was my favorite class. I’m making a Penrose tiling mural on a wall of my house, ’cause everyone else tiles periodically. OK? So those are my geek bonafides.

    Having said that, and since xkcd is also about romance and the bigger things in life, don’t any of you aspire to anything serious? I mean I appreciate the goof-off potential of a ball pit, but it seems much less comfortable than a couch and much higher maintenance. Anyway, I get the impression that no one here is involved in the serious work of either a marriage or raising kids, which is to say you’ve all got way too much free time.

    The comic is very smart, but the throngs of adoring hangers-on, um…

    Carry on…

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  24. Albert: Clearly you didn’t see the comic where the ballpit idea first came up – it’s a discussion on that very topic.

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  25. Albert: The serious work of either a marriage or raising kids?

    The marriage is a distinct possibility regarding the ball-pit comic.
    The kids would love a ball-pit.
    The initial usage of the ball pit as per the comic certainly could result in kids.

    Regarding free time: Of course there is copious free time. If you don’t have such amounts of free time, why have you arranged your life that way? From the tone of your comment, it seems that you think those things that are not practical or “serious” are not worthwhile. In my experience, it is precisely those things that are most precious.

    Sure, they aren’t what “grown-ups” do, but that is precisely the point of the comic: “Because we’re grown-ups now, and it’s our turn to decide what that means.” As long as the basic necessities of life are not being neglected (income/sanitation/hygiene/nutrition/etc), then this _is_ the “serious work” of life.

    Examples of things that I group in with ball-pits: An afternoon couching. An evening fire with dry ice and water-filled bottles. Fancy dress for a no-occasion dinner out. Snow forts/Igloos. Ticklefights. Lego nights. Dress-up parties. Strange-food dinner (eg. peanut butter pizza). Impromptu public plays. The Meetup [http://blag.xkcd.com/2007/10/01/the-meetup/].

    The reason this resonates so intensely with such a large number of people is precisely because it involves the kind of life-definition that seems sadly lacking in the archtypes laid out for us as life-models.

    Then again, maybe I’m just baised. My parents were a musician and an artist, and they did what they loved throughout their lives, and managed to raise children while doing so. They didn’t make the kind of sacrifice that it seems is being implied. I’ve also seen what I feel is the near-inevitable end result of self-sacrifice in the name of “maturity”: People who are burnt-out, inactive, have routines and habits set in stone, and really do not take joy from life.

    I know which life I want. I think that this idea symbolizes the choice of favoring strangeness and joy over practicality and seriousness.

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  26. Neuffy: I grok that, and it’s entirely possible that my stick-in-the-mudness has entirely to do with a gnarly week of too little free time and some hideous unpreventable badness befalling some friends.

    I will chill for a few days and ponder this again.

    (But I’d still like to hear how many of the commenters have a family.)

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  27. Oh jeez. I totally understand the whole busy week thing. I actually feel like a bit of a hypocrite since my life has been work-work-work-what-do-you-mean-play for some time now. Seeing as how I’m coming up on finals in rather a heavy genetics program though, it’s something I truly intend to be temporary.

    I’m engaged (proposed this summer on the top level of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London while the noon bells rang – God, I’m still giddy about it) so I guess while I don’t fall into the “with-kids” family category, I’ll certainly be getting married and am in an essentially permanent relationship. You’re probably right though, as I’d guess the average age of comment-posters is rather low, and virtually all are not married/don’t have kids.

    And, ah, commiserations regarding your friends.

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  29. Neuffy: Congrats. I wish you both much happiness. I’m going to take my dentures out now, put on a fresh pair of Depends and hit the sack!

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  30. Married with kid (and another on the way). I think Neuffy has the right of it, there is a terrible trap in becoming too grown-up to have fun. It should be possible to do silly things and still pay your bills and have kids that don’t turn into criminals or politicians.

    Totally unrelated, the Captcha text for my post was ‘are delicious’. I keep having to resist the urge to start that sentence and totally confuse the lot of you.

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  31. I once got to dive into a pool size pit filled completely with that squishy, fuzzy, itchy styrofoam like material(that’s the best I got) from of a diving board. Yeah, it had a diving board. It was also paded around the edges.

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  32. “I obviously don’t have the right type of friends… the type who make ball pits in their houses… and then throw parties with them. :(”

    LOL I feel the same

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  35. For those who need a higher purpose to all this:
    read this site.
    http://www.reversibledestiny.org/home.php

    It’s about architecture that offers physical and intellectual challenges as
    a way to live longer and retain more of your mental and physical faculties longer.
    Ball pits fit the bill. Ball pits are a path to immortality. For the nonbelievers, it’s flat monochromatic floors and an early grave…

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  36. Haha! I was thinking of throwing my lounge out and getting pillows but then a friend sent me this URL and now I’m thinking nothing but BALLS!!!

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  40. ThemePark: sorry what did i say again? i can’t seem to find any posts i may have made 🙂

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  44. Love those balls! They bring back happy memories of my youth, and birthdays at Chuck ‘E Cheese’s. Good for you! 🙂

    P.S. Been a long-time reader/fan. Keep up the good work.

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  45. I’m an SDET at Zillow, and I looked into building a pit in one of our office common spaces. The space I had envisioned for the ball pit would have put the cost around $1000. The funny thing is that most of that cost is in shipping. Who would have thought that the expense would have been in shipping something that is mostly air. We don’t have our ball pit yet, but I still dream.

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  46. Do you remember those little toy cars that you pull backwards on the ground and when you let them go they speed away.
    The place I worked over the summer had linoleum floors in the corridor.
    Every morning I spent the first twenty minutes, at least, daydreaming about little toy car races.
    I’m still undergrad though, couldn’t go doing that..
    Anyways your ball pit reminded me of that. Congratulations on being you.

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  47. Gotta go with Adam’s comment November 26th, 2007 at 11:04 pm : someone posts something about “crush-proof balls” and only ONE GUY makes a joke about it?!? I mean COME ON! Are we not MEN?!? By the end of the week I wanna see at least two-dozen jokes along the lines of “every guy needs crush-proof balls”. Go.

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  48. jeszjesz, I think that is due to this:

    “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.”

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  49. I read your comic a while back and decided I wanted to do the same thing. However, since I am but a poor college student, I chose to fill my tiny little apartment with beach balls instead. I found them on sale after the summer season and loaded up for only a moderate amount of moolah.

    Thanks for the inspiration!!

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  50. @xxv
    Hey Steve!
    Why does it not surprise me that:
    A) You’re friends with the author of this fine comic
    B) That you played in a giant adult ball pit

    Nice newer lifebook, how do you like it? The last time I saw you I think you were stil using your classic one. IM me sometime.

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