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The internet's scenic route.
Today's pick1,306 websites worth a wrong turn, sorted by how long each one takes to be worth it. Press the button, or steer it first.
Start with a feeling
Start with a clock
Good within five seconds of loading.
257 sites
One quick round, then you can leave.
244 sites
Five to fifteen minutes of proper attention.
591 sites
Clear your evening. We warned you.
214 sites
Built here
Detours that do not leave the building. No redirect, no third party, no tracking you off-site — and they are still online, which is more than the rest of this list can promise.
Games built here rather than embedded from elsewhere — no ads inside the frame and no third party watching you play.
A visual board for collecting images and ideas, without an algorithm deciding what you should have been collecting instead.
Lists, quizzes and the sort of low-stakes internet reading that fills a break without requiring anything of you.
Layer rain, wind, waves, fire and café chatter, then set each one to the level you want. Survives being left open all day.
India's monuments, crafts and regional history laid out as something you explore rather than something you revise.
Mash any keys and immaculate code appears on screen at speed. Enormously convincing to anyone standing more than a metre away.
A timer that counts how long you manage to do nothing at all. Move the mouse, press a key, or scroll and it starts again from zero.
One sincere, specific compliment per click, written by people rather than generated. For days that have not gone well.
91 topics
Cut a different way
You are early for something. These are the right length.
501 sites
The first ten seconds do something you did not expect.
453 sites
Low stimulation, for a day that has had enough.
185 sites
Time on these is not time wasted.
502 sites
Built for handing over a phone.
425 sites
Worth opening on a small screen.
846 sites
Nothing that needs explaining to a colleague.
1161 sites
Open the link, use the thing, close the tab.
1232 sites
Made before the web got tidy.
384 sites
Built here, on AltFTool.
32 sites
If you only ever open ten of these.
139 sites
Scored, replayable, and quietly ruinous.
160 sites
If you only open ten
Fly out through a mapped model of our stellar neighbourhood until the Sun is one unremarkable dot among thousands.
The Myers-Briggs-flavoured test everybody has taken, with a four-letter verdict and profile pages that are unnervingly specific.
The original tile-merging game, written in a weekend and responsible for an enormous amount of lost 2014.
Starts as one button beside a dying fire and quietly becomes something much larger. Best played without reading anything about it first.
Be a cell, eat smaller cells, flee larger ones and split to ambush. The game that invented this entire genre in 2015.
The lab page of the psychologist whose completely static images refuse to stop rotating, added to for over twenty years.
The Swiss Ephemeris people: the technical reference the whole field quietly runs on, plus free charts and very long interpretation texts.
One astronomy image a day since 1995, each with a paragraph from an actual astronomer and an archive going back decades.
Questions
The bar is simple: it has to be worth somebody's time, and it has to still be online.
One button, one detour. Or press Space.
How long have you got?