Why do rubber bands have to be so round? No reason at all.
Japanese jack-of-all-trades design house Nendo has created a series of reimagined stationery items that include paper clips that come in a long chain that you snap off to use, high contrast rulers that make it easy to measure on light or dark surfaces, beautiful notebooks that are filable by their binder color, and more.
The real star of the show, though, is the cubic rubber band, which Nendo calls "assertively three-dimensional." According to Nendo, the design isn't just a novelty. Since they are cubes when they aren't otherwise stretched around something, Nendo reckons they're easier to pick out of a drawer. And apparently, they lessen the chaotic spaghettification that normally happens with regular rubber bands in a drawer.
Cubic rubber bands don't come cheap though. If you want to have cubic rubber bands of your own, it'll cost you 1,080 yen, or around $10, for just three. Expensive, but hey, just imagine how great these things would be in a geometry-class rubber band fight.
[h/t Spoon Tamago]