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”

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  6. hokay, so i’m going to do this in my room… how deep do you have it there? because i think i want it to be about the height of my bed, so about two feet? is this too little?

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  7. Holy Cow… This idea is genius! My roommate and I gathered some friends and are building a ball pit under our mega-loft in our dorm at school!! People don’t believe it when we say we are gonna do it, but if its as sweet as this one we will be in for a loooong and awesome year!

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  8. Really big fan of the strip, have had a wholly inappropriate crush on Mr. Munroe for years, and this is my first-ever comment. I hope someone actually sees it, since it’s clearly not very timely, but I read this post for the first time just today.“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.”

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  9. I think this would be an awesome senior prank for any seniors trolling the blag! Fill the principal’s office with brightly colored balls? There is only one word for that:
    win.

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  11. one of my best friends just turned 18….since he’s a legal adult i though it would be funny and appropriet to print out the comic on large paper, and fill his room with play pen balls while hes away. im still looking around for the cheapest price but i cant wait to see his face!

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  16. Hey,

    Anybody by any chance know what this error means when I open Firefox in OS X Leopard?

    “Alert – please go to menu, tools,extensions and set valid values for email notifier, from its options”

    Thanks,

    telefon dinleme

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  20. Aww, our ball pit had more colors, but they weren’t uncrushable … many got squished. We filled one side of a very small room about 2-3 feet full =] put a net across 😀

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  46. This idea is genius! My roommate and I gathered some friends and are building a ball pit under our mega-loft in our dorm at school!! People don’t believe it 🙂

    Like

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