Awesome Playthings

This unique fidget toy is shaped like a beetle with giant pincers. Its stonewashed titanium body has three sections that rock and click into place, giving your fingers something to focus on. Its pincers also double as a bottle opener, and it has a hole for hanging from a lanyard.

This concave metal coin from MetonBoss feels good in the hand and is a great place to focus nervous energy. It’s made from aerospace-grade aluminum and engraved with a detailed topographic map pattern. Available in 1″ dia x 0.15″ thick and 2.15″ dia x 0.35″ thick versions. Personalization is also available.

The 1982 movie Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance was a fascinating experimental film that combined slow motion and time-lapse footage with music by Phillip Glass to illustrate humanity’s impact on the world. Monkeon’s Gifaanisqatsi generates movies using a similar technique, only with random animated GIFs.

This desktop plaything is a tiny marble track under a dome. It’s a great distraction from work and stress as its marbles climb to the top and roll down its track with the push of a lever. Its mechanism uses no electricity, and it’s built with quality parts including glass, metal, and cork. Measures 10.5″ H x 6.3″ Diameter.

This online time-waster is an endless canvas where anyone can post messages and create art entirely from ASCII characters. It provides an ever-changing environment that will have you coming back to see how it evolves. Be aware, since it’s unmoderated, you can expect some offensive text and images to sneak in.

No time to go to the beach? Creative coder Neal Agarwal’s online toy Rocks lets you enjoy a soothing oceanside pastime from the comfort of your computer screen. The browser-based rock simulator offers sounds of the surf and four virtual rocks for your balancing enjoyment.

Developer Dylan Turner’s online music maker lets you build sequences by placing sound blocks in 3-dimensional space. Each composition doubles as a work of visual art. Intimidated? Try their community-submitted tracks, including Coldplay’s Clocks, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata 3rd Movement, and the Nyan Cat theme.

Google Arts and Culture and David Li present an experimental plaything that lets anyone create their own opera masterpiece. Blob Opera uses machine learning tech to create operatic sounds as you play with four blobby creatures that produce bass, tenor, mezzo-soprano, and soprano vocals. Sing and share!

AltDynamic’s wonderfully tactile plaything is CNC-machined from a solid block of aluminum. Each one features an open-structure geometry inspired by a design found among Leonardo daVinci’s drawings. It measures 2.5″ at its widest point, and is available in raw aluminum, bead-blasted satin, or anodized colors.