AIDN

What it is

AIDN is the contents page of a Japanese musician and web-toy maker: three grids of animated tiles, sixty-odd browser toys under WEB, a row of music videos under MV, and a handful of odds and ends under OTHERS. The toys are small, loud and strange: a talking tofu, a sword-drawing game, an endless swipe, a wow button with a global counter, gif makers, a cat-run game, a fortune draw, a toy that measures the angle of a twin-tail hairstyle.

How to play

Scroll the grid and click a tile. Each toy opens on its own page, many with a click-to-play screen and a request to turn the sound on. Most explain themselves in a second or two, and some have a help button. Come back to the grid for the next one. Titles are a mix of Japanese and English, and the tiles are looping previews, so you can tell what a thing is before you open it.

What makes it different

Everything here is made by one maker with one sensibility, and the sound is the point: the toys are built around loops, taps and beats, and several are music videos you can play with. A famous virtual singer character stars in a lot of them, along with the maker's own cat and green-haired mascots. It is the kind of collection where the fifth tile is as good as the first and there are sixty.

Why it is on Bored

A whole shelf of loud, pointless toys from a corner of the web most people never reach. Sound on, headphones ideally. There is nothing to read, so the language does not matter.

Tips

• Sound on before you click anything, it is the whole point
• The wow button is the quickest way to understand the site
• The MV row is music videos, some interactive, save them for when you have five minutes
• Tiles loop, so watch before you click

FAQ