Awesome Time Waster

Stressed after a long day at work? Head over to the Pluvior website, go full screen, and unwind to the pitter-patter of raindrops on your screen. As the virtual rain falls, you can tweak other sounds like wind, lightning, and urban ambiance. We wish the raindrop simulation was tied to the sound intensity, though.

This clever online clock by The Pudding automatically plays songs with the current time in the title. While we’ve heard of 12:51 by The Strokes and 10:15 Saturday Night by The Cure, we had no idea there were so many other time-titled tunes out there. The album art on the turntable is a neat idea, too.

If there’s one thing that’s super-frustrating about websites and apps, it’s the increasingly-complex password requirements brought about by the need to thwart hackers. Developer Neal Agarwal decided to turn the challenging process of selecting a password that meets all requirements into a game. Good luck getting past Rule 10 without breaking Rule 5.

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.

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!

When you play SimCity, you have to constantly make more simoleons before you can expand your city. If you don’t have the patience for that, try Infinitown, a browser-based plaything that lets you explore an endless, isometric city. There’s no objective other than to kill time.

Elastic Man is a goofy time-waster which lets you stretch, bend, and deform the character’s face right in your web browser. It’s a fun, interactive way to kill a couple of minutes, courtesy of Adult Swim and none other than Rick and Morty’s Morty.