Ball Pit, Phase II

Posted byRandall 266 Comments on Ball Pit, Phase II

I posted a while back about a ball pit I’d installed in my room. Everything in that post was true, but the pictures were a little misleading.

Looking at that, you don’t necessarily realize how cramped those people are. I framed the pictures to make it look larger than it actually was (THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID). In fact, the ball pit was only about the size of a large bathtub or small jacuzzi. In the pictures on the site, it was barely deep enough to be buried in, and when we shrunk the area to make it deeper, it was barely big enough for two people.

When people came in and saw it, they were always startled at how small it was (also what she said). There was no room for hide and seek, and barely even space for surreptitious ball-pit groping. This was a terrible state of affairs. It was nice to sit in, but really, why bother having a ball pit if we were gonna do such a half-assed job of it?

Well, as of this week, the situation has been rectified.

We all chipped in and quintupled the volume of the ball pit. It’s now set up opposite a hacked-together server-projector system (yes, that means Guitar Hero in the ball pit — that’s a controller you see on the left). It’s lined with blankets and foam padding, and is oh so comfortable. We’ve had two people fall asleep in it already.

For sanitary reasons, we of course have a few rules:

It’s still only half the size of the recently-constructed Last.fm ballpit. But it’s finally big enough to really hide in, stretch out, and grab someone’s ass without them being sure who did it.

On the other hand, it has the slightly unnerving effect that we now have no idea how many people are in the apartment at any given time.

For science, the next experiment will be “what do cats think of ball pits?”

266 replies on “Ball Pit, Phase II”

  1. Cats sink if they let themselves. They generally try not to though. They generally try to escape as quickly as possible.

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  3. I will also, as Courtney has so graciously, volunteer my two cats. They are both feral rescues, so they are partially insane, and they are both under a year old, so they have a lot of energy.

    I would volunteer the third rescue cat, but as she is currently pregnant, I do not think she would approve, nor would my vet.

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  6. So I was thinking about the plastic also.

    The coolness far outstrips the environmental impact.

    PLUS! You can recycle plastic. If you can’t where you live find somewhere you can. If not send them to Canada we recycle.

    😛

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  7. Questions:

    1) Do you have a faq?

    2) Do you do something for living?
    2.1) are you living off the webcomic?
    2.2) would you like to be?
    2.3) do you really draw those three times a week or is there a publishing queue and you’ve kind of a huge stock of those and they just pop from somewhere en masse at uneven intervals?

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  11. Moar pix plx!! ;-D

    Seriously, I want to see more of the pit! How much does it fill in your apartment?

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  12. Turnstile guy (girl? Cant’ find the post now): You can fill your room half way up and put in a child gate ($20) to step over. Less complicated than a turnstile, and a lot less balls. Can’t believe people aren’t making more balls jokes about this one.

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  13. I think that any cat in a ball pit would be tempted to assume itself a mathematical sphere, so it could camouflage itself among the balls and exact its revenge on its owner…I wonder if that only works in theory….

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  14. Seriously, someone needs to make a formula for how much a ball pit will cost, based on area, depth, and crush-proofing. Because I definitely want to build one, but Ii have no idea how much it’d cost.

    Oh, and I instantly recognized the robe & wizard hat reference… I spend way too much time on bash.org… I get 2-3 quotes I’ve read before when I hit “random” now.

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  15. I won the game? Really? I, I’m free?

    I”M FREEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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  18. Today’s comic is the one most significant step towards world peace, or at least towards my personal peace when interacting with 14 year olds, that I have seen in my life.

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  19. “Turnstile guy (girl? Cant’ find the post now): You can fill your room half way up and put in a child gate ($20) to step over.”
    So, kinda like the one in the comic? Randall’s waaay ahead of you.

    “I think that any cat in a ball pit would be tempted to assume itself a mathematical sphere, so it could camouflage itself among the balls and exact its revenge on its owner…I wonder if that only works in theory….”
    I assume its volume and thus diameter would be rather greater than that of the other balls. Either that or it can control its own density, in which case it could just turn into a black hole and get its revenge in a much cooler way.

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  21. I put on my robe and wizard hat!…

    however, NOT for the Socialist Janeane Garafalo.

    Here are a few Garafalo quotes for you:

    “Our country is founded on a sham: our forefathers were slave-owning rich white guys who wanted it their way. So when I see the American flag, I go, ‘Oh my God, you’re insulting me.'”

    “When Communist USSR was a superpower, the world was better off.”

    Sure ball pits are a party, but lets keep them separate from the Communist party thanks.

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  22. “I think that any cat in a ball pit would be tempted to assume itself a mathematical sphere, so it could camouflage itself among the balls and exact its revenge on its owner…I wonder if that only works in theory….”

    For a spherical cat in a vacuum, methinks

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  24. i volunteer my cat. he is experienced in the ways of science and is actually quite smart and compliant. on the other hand my other cat would just cower in fear like an idiot (so i don’t do any experiments with him, it just seems to cruel).
    my cat dealing with a sock http://www.youtube.com/v/nP5BEf4Pcio

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  25. Ooo I am so jealous! Still anxious for the day I get my own.
    It strikes me that I am awfully similar to the main girl in your comics. This is odd.

    Either way, the ‘won the game’ comic has bothered my subconscious. I don’t know how to feel. YOU’VE MESSED WITH MY MIND

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  26. it occurs to me a potential downside to the ball pit…

    does this not create a perfect velociraptor hiding spot INSIDE your house?

    …just something to keep you up at night.

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  28. Something my professor of fluida and soft matter mentioned (and I extended):
    If you would put a device in the balls which could charge them positive or negative alternatively on command, the balls would form a macroscopic crystalline structure from which it would be virtually impossible to escape. Could be very handy if things get out of hand.
    And of course with reference to Jess’s comment, it would be ideal for trapping raptors (not even Randall could go up against such an argument).

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  29. “If you would put a device in the balls which could charge them positive or negative alternatively on command, the balls would form a macroscopic crystalline structure from which it would be virtually impossible to escape. Could be very handy if things get out of hand.”
    Not to mention the process of creating the charges might well involve transferring large quantities of electrons between the balls, thus instantly revealing whether velociraptors or cats are hiding in the pit.

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  30. Pingback: killer-robot-clan.com » Ball Pits

  31. I’m curious as to whether or not you could build up a ball pit by putting in various sized balls – for example, if the standard ball volume is V, a layer of perhaps 3V balls, then 2.5 V, 2 V, 1.5 V, and then fill in the rest with V. That way you still get the ball pit pleasure, but a far lower cost… perhaps. I don’t know if they sell such ball pit balls, but it’d be interesting to look into 🙂

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  32. After using the calulator, it seems like the balls in that pit would only cost ~590 dollars. Granted $590 is not a trivial amount of money, but it’s a lot less than I would expect, here’s my math, incase anyone cares.

    150 square ft (hard to tell from the photo, but it looks like it’s about 12×12)
    4 ft deep
    3in balls
    64% packing efficiency
    10 cents a ball (toys r us has them for $10 per hundred)
    A total of 5867 balls for $586.70

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  33. Update: I mixed up diameter with radius, so if I keep the other numbers the same, then that pit would require 46,936 balls for a cost of about $4,700. Damn it, the dream is dead . . . for now.

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  35. Alex:

    Using TinkerTots as a guide (since that’s what xkcd used as mentioned above):

    http://www.tinkertots.com/500cobapitba.html

    These are the more expensive “crush-proof” type, of course.

    500 balls for $110, claimed to fill about 8 cubic feet. For budget purposes, estimate $14 per cubic foot. 48″ is also kinda deep – almost up to the chest on most people. I think 36″ is more appropriate, being about hip height and makign it possible for most people to climb over the barrier to get in/out. Assuming 3 foot depth, budget $42 per square foot. (Douglas Adams would be proud.)

    So 150 sq.ft. * $42/sq.ft. = $6300. Ouch.

    Going with the Toys-R-Us version ($10 for 100) and the same fill ratio for the same size, $6.25 per cubic foot ($18.75 per sq.ft. @ 36″ deep). The new price for the cheaper balls is now… $2812.50!

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  36. I wasn’t going to say anything, but my reCaptcha is “almost Edmonston”. What, Edmonston ain’t good enough for me?

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  37. Who said ball-pits discriminate against adults? There’s a play area for kids near me – huge thing spread across three floors, with slides, ladders, foam rollers, tunnels, falling-down-hole-rubber-strappy-things and, yes, ballpits. And one evening a month they open it to adults instead of kids. And allow alcohol.

    A friend from work held her birthday party there last year. It was fucking awesome.

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  41. You only lose the game if you thought about it on your own. If someone else mentions it, you have a grace period that you will not be penalized for thinking about it. The game lives on

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  43. The Game, while an ingenious social experiment, stopped being entertaining after about 10 minutes. Then I started cheating, and haven’t stopped.

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  44. The Game is nothing more than an ingenious social experiment. I started cheating about 10 minutes after I started “playing”.

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  45. so apparently I didn’t fuck up the catchpa, but rather am an idiot. that’s what I get for reading xkcd blag comments at 5 AM.

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  46. thats awesome!!!!!
    help me build my population of my mini city
    go to azgardian.myminicity.com
    thank you

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  47. The real question is when Death will be done with that game. I’m already assuming he’ll lose.

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  49. “The real question is when Death will be done with that game. I’m already assuming he’ll lose.”
    What about The Game?

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