"Blanket Fort" Discussion

[ivnja]

http://xkcd.com/c219.html

I'm not ashamed to admit that I used to love doing this.

....minus the boyfriend in back piece.

[Gordon]

haha good times. I remember once my older sister and I took every blanket/sheet/pillow we could find and made a huge "fort" in the entire basement. The fun kind of got sucked out of it when we realised all we had done is cut the height of the ceiling by two thirds.

[3.14159265...]

This is the funnest thing in the world!

That gave me the greatest idea... All I need now is a gf

[thefiddler]

Hehe.

I make blanket forts with my 3-year old nephew all the time. It's great fun.

He falls asleep in them and then I fall asleep and apparently it's just "adorable."

I don't have the boyfriend bit, either.

Although the alt-text kind of scares me.
Also, we have a fort out in the woods where we stashed that hooker's body.

[Jwink3101]

I am a freshman on Carnegie Mellon University. The other day, i get back to my dorm and every couch and every blanket us in the lounge making a big blanket fort. I have to say, it is ironic that this is the XKCD only a week later!

[Regulus]

I have always loved making forts. I just don't have enough blankets these days...

[aroon]

re: CMU student. thats awesome. im at CMU too and while i never made a fort here i used to make forts when i was a kid all the time. whats weirder is that i totally emailed the link to the precursor to this comic to my friend last night and then this was todays comic....

its a sign

[bippy]

This comic perfectly crystalizes my experience at 24 and the mouseover text makes it all the better. Not only do I absolutely love dead hooker jokes but the juxtaposition of the fanciful and childish with the gritty and adult... transcendent bliss.

[Oort]

First of all, I too love forts. Haven't made one in a long time though.

Also, I don't know if everyone else noticed, but this is one of the few cases of a character appearing in multiple comics.

[Twasbrillig]

It's impossible to not love making forts. Now all I need is a girlfriend who won't find me stupid if I do make one...

[thedesk]

Also, I don't know if everyone else noticed, but this is one of the few cases of a character appearing in multiple comics.

What about hat-guy?

[Toeofdoom]

Me and my friends did that, that was cool. Although one time at school, there were these large wooden cuboid thingies, which we arranged into a large stack that looked solid until you climbed over it and crawled into the tunnel inside. I brought the torch.

This was either grade 3 or 5... (i skipped grade 4)

[warriorness]

re: CMU student. thats awesome. im at CMU too and while i never made a fort here i used to make forts when i was a kid all the time. whats weirder is that i totally emailed the link to the precursor to this comic to my friend last night and then this was todays comic....

its a sign

Re: CMU students. I applied there a month ago. (I'm pretty sure I'll get in)

Any Halo 2 players here? There must be somebody else who tried making a "pillow fort" out of all the cars and crates on Headlong.

EDIT: Also, it's nice seeing how many people register to post a comment about the latest strip. Perhaps we should have a graph or something showing which strips have been the most successful getting people to register.

[shadebug]

woah, if she and her boyfriend are now recurring characters, they need names so as to go in wikipaedia. Comfortable with childishness girl and comfortable with childishness girl's boyfriend feel a little long though

[Oort]

Also, I don't know if everyone else noticed, but this is one of the few cases of a character appearing in multiple comics.

What about hat-guy?

I don't mean that she is the only recurring character; I just meant that there are few of them.

[aldimond]

Why imply continuity when it's unnecessary? There's no evidence that supports the idea of a continuous character over the idea of multiple people in the XKCD universe that share that particular characteristic.

[Lenale]

I only have one duvet in my dorm

I try to make it up with eleven pillows.

[recurve boy]

I watched lots of the old Batman re-runs when I was a kid (pow! zap!). We made the Bat Mobile out of our cushions.

Good times.

[no-genius]

Why imply continuity when it's unnecessary? There's no evidence that supports the idea of a continuous character over the idea of multiple people in the XKCD universe that share that particular characteristic.

B-but they all look the same !!!

wait, did he use that character art? it looked quite good

[German Sausage]

Why imply continuity when it's unnecessary? There's no evidence that supports the idea of a continuous character over the idea of multiple people in the XKCD universe that share that particular characteristic.

but they refer to the ball-pit

its like that ball pit you made

pay attention, class

[greymantledwolf]

So far the creator of XKCD has "stolen" (j/k) a bunch of my daily idiosyncracys.

Sync-Timing your blinker to the car in front of you at a red light, i don't know how many minutes of my life have been spent doing this, but my guess is that it is high.

Building blanket forts got me to register, and i still maintain that blanket forts are one of the best things of life. Sure i've already got my own apt, superior to a blanket fort, but this is what makes life great, unnecessary complications!

Raptors on a waterslide, but i think DoctorMcNinja might HAVE done that already.

Ballpit in the house, never attempted, again for that same reason, hygiene..

Calculating the shortest distance to walk, on paths that i take often... because lets be honest, if you're going to take a route to lunch everyday, wouldn't you want to see which one gets there fastest?

The list goes on...

EDIT: also, my user name, greymantledwolf is a UIN (unique) just as is XKCD, so i'm always able to find myself or have others find me without trouble http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=greymantledwolf&btnG=Google+Search
...i've had it for years, the similarities are kinda frightening...

Edited again by VSM, because you said "might of" which is a deadly sin, almost as much of a bee in my bonnet as people not using pedestrian crossings.[/u]

[Framling]

I am a freshman on Carnegie Mellon University. The other day, i get back to my dorm and every couch and every blanket us in the lounge making a big blanket fort. I have to say, it is ironic that this is the XKCD only a week later!

Yeah, my girlfriend (now wife) and I did that in our dayroom sophomore year. Had a sleepover there and everything. It was pretty excellent. And we watched some of her old Rocko's Modern Life tapes.

Every time someone would come in, they'd see a big pillow fort and say something along the lines of "Hey, who made the oh nevermind, it's Ben and Jordyn, huh?"

[Myself]

I just finished updating my OkCupid profile to include the fact that I used to make blanket balloon forts by trapping the air from an in-floor furnace register. How fortuitous!

[_glook]

Edit: Ah, nm. It seems I misunderstood what I was looking at.

[Iluvatar]

You haven't had fun until you've made forts out of a stack of 200+ bales of hay. They get delivered in a cubish arrangement, and each bale is maybe 2 feet by 2 feet by 5 feet. You can restack them to make tunnels and small rooms and amphitheaters. Unfortunately, when it was most fun was when I was also too small to lift the bales quickly. Fortunately, this meant that a few friends could blow a whole day making these huge forts. In retrospect, it was probably wildly dangerous due to the risk of collapse.

Back to the comic at hand... only females can get away with this, I suspect.

[thomasjmaccoll]

Why imply continuity when it's unnecessary? There's no evidence that supports the idea of a continuous character over the idea of multiple people in the XKCD universe that share that particular characteristic.

Yeah, I think you're right... I think the more we try to MAKE SENSE OF ALL THESE COMICS the closer we stray to obsessive fan status, pointing out continuity errors to Randall at comic cons. And I for one want to steer pretty damn far clear of that.

Also, this comic was excellent, I am totally going to make a fort later. The wonderful thing about wireless internet is that I will be able to report from inside with no hassle!

And the hay bales thing: I've never had any to play about with, but we have friends who own a farm, and they always have hay bales stacked so that there are tunnels and caves throughout this huge pile, it is the best fun ever. They certainly used to anyway, I haven't been for years...

[space_raptor]

Wow, xkcd is reading my mind too.

I've got dead hookers stashed in the woods RIGHT NOW. Dude, get out of my head!

What?

- Actually, yesterday I made a fort OUT OF dead... hey, where's everybody going?

[thegreathal]

Woah. The philosophical implications of fort-girl* possibly reneging her ballpen challenge and eventually reaffirm my psyche.



*It was either that or ball-girl.

[SNAFU]

Blanket forts are for the uninspired. Forts made out of tapped together boxes were much cooler (albeit harder to clean).

[ohki]

My apartment has no cushions. Wonder if my mates would be bothered if I 'borrowed' all their mattresses >.>

[Grincement]

Well thats my weekend sorted with my boyfriend...so much cheaper than cinema and eating out!!

[dekonstruct]

The wife and I have been turning our apartment into a fort all weekend... weird how this topic synced with my life. We were more concerned with surviving the sub zero temps. It's great how survival can make children out of all of us.

[Grincement]

The wife and I have been turning our apartment into a fort all weekend... weird how this topic synced with my life. We were more concerned with surviving the sub zero temps. It's great how survival can make children out of all of us.

Haha at first I read that as how survival can make children for all of us...

[thomasjmaccoll]

Also, this comic was excellent, I am totally going to make a fort later. The wonderful thing about wireless internet is that I will be able to report from inside with no hassle!

OK, I'm going for this, I'll report as progress develops... I don't have many cushions, but I have plenty blankets/sheets, and a rough starting point in the frame of my high bed. Finishing touches are currently being made to the entrance tunnel design.

[tylerni7]

I've always loved snow forts. It would be so easy to go in the mountains somewhere where there's 10+ feet of snow and just bring a torch or something and build tunnels. Seriously, how awesome would that be? The water from the melting snow would turn to ice and freeze over the inside and support it.

And as an added bonus, if it's somewhere cold enough all year long that the snow won't melt, you can put dead hookers in the tunnels and collapse them. (It would be harder to detect than if you just dug a hole in the snow, because then it would be packed down and what not.)

[Daniel]

Yeah, you NEVER stop loving forts As the saying goes, you don't stop playing because you get old... You get old because you stop playing!

[shadebug]

the simplicity of the blanket fort is, certainly, where it's at. Mine used to be made with my desk as the framework, i would hide away in there with a radio and a bowl of pringles, it was the only way for me to do my homework at home.

As for alternative forts. Bails of hay are itchy. Now, my parents run a childrenswear company, as such when I was little and their company was at the height of its power we'd end up with a warehouse with over 400 big boxes, followed by over 400 big empty boxes. The possibilities were endless.

[darkzealot89]

Forts were one of the greatest parts of my childhood. However it always made me sad when my little brother would run through and tear down the precious equilibrium of pillows and blankets.

[thomasjmaccoll]

OK, done

It feels better than it looks, being inside here is lovely, but I think it kind of just looks like some strung up sheets. Takes me back, only now I have internet in here too, last time I made one of these I don't think I even had an email address. Thankyou, XKCD

I have some pictures, but they're fairly big and now I've uploaded them I can't be bothered going back and resizing them, so I'll just link to them.

1)The view from the outside:
My fort.
(The supporting structure is my bed.)

2)A few interior shots:
1
2
3
This is where I think it looks a little rubbish, it's basically just like that on 4 sides, but it feels really nice being inside here.

3)My exit/entrance tunnel, replete with wires giving me SOUND and ELECTRICITY:
Tunnel

To sum up, I'm really glad I did this, and I hope more people are suitably inspired by the comic to build their own and beat mine in terms of originality and structure... it shouldn't be too hard.

[thefiddler]

*wants to crawl into thomasjmaccoll's blanket fort 'cause it looks comfy*

Now I'm tempted to build one. Go figure.

I'm staring at my bed... which is a loft with a desk underneath... and wondering how this is going to work. Desks, as far as I know, are not too comfy to sleep on.