Actually learn something

A stick-figure Dungeons and Dragons party in a story that turned genuinely epic somewhere around strip four hundred.

Sixty-odd propositions place you on economic and social axes, then show you exactly where Thatcher and Gandhi ended up.

Essays and picture galleries drawn from the strangest corners of out-of-copyright print, film and illustration.

Visual essays answering questions nobody commissioned, like which pop lyricists have the largest working vocabulary.

Ten thousand sheep drawn by anonymous online workers paid two cents each, displayed together as one enormous grid.

Scroll outwards from a human to the observable universe, with each step making the previous one look absurd.

Ripped sprite sheets from thousands of games, sorted by console — half reference library, half nostalgia trap.

A crime you solve by writing database queries, and easily the least painful SQL tutorial ever built.

A team counted every squirrel in Central Park and published the data, the maps and a full illustrated report on the findings.

Cecil Adams' archive of exhaustively answered daft questions, invented decades before you could just ask the internet.

Drag countries across the Mercator projection and watch Greenland shrink to its actual size. Settles the argument in about ten seconds.

Race from one Wikipedia article to another using only links, against a clock and other people online.

Live positions and finder charts for planets, comets and asteroids, updated continuously and free of clutter.

Aggregates hundreds of critics' polls into a ranked thousand greatest films. Deeply unfashionable design, entirely unmatched rigour.

World clocks, time-zone converters, sunrise and moon times, calendars and countdowns, all on one long-running and reliably accurate site.

A photograph from the last century that you place on both a map and a timeline, which is much harder than either alone.

Wikipedia's calmly written schedule of everything still to happen, ending long after the last star has gone out.

A daily five-minute roundup of tech, science and programming news, with every issue also readable on the website.

Reddit's fact firehose, where each post is one verified surprise with the source link attached underneath.

The onion router straight from the people who maintain it — the browser download plus a plain-English account of how the relays work.

Text-based crime MMO running since 2004, where the market, the gyms and the prison are all operated by other extremely committed players.

Match-three fused with tower defence, so every swap you make is also the wave you are currently surviving.

Guess the country from a treemap of what it exports, which turns out to be an oddly precise national fingerprint.

Get from one country to another by naming every country in between, with the shortest workable route scoring best.

Medieval village building and tribe politics from 2003, where the real game is coordinating twenty players inside a spreadsheet.

Bridge, euchre, hearts and spades against bots or friends, on a table that behaves the way a real one does.

Send tiny creatures up an infinite tower, die, come back stronger. Years of content behind an interface that gives no quarter.

Raw model output laid out for people who want to read the charts themselves, and the page hurricane watchers keep open all August.

Australia's national archive of newspapers, websites and photographs, digitised back to 1803 and open without an account.

Write a Turing machine in a few lines and watch the tape head shuffle back and forth carrying it out.

Plotter art drawn by a virtual turtle in a hundred-odd lines of JavaScript, with everybody's source code on display.

Searchable captions across millions of hours of broadcast news, which makes it possible to find the exact moment something was said.

Typing practice on real open-source code, complete with the brackets and semicolons that ruin everyone's average.

Vast unofficial archive of avant-garde film, sound and writing, run on no budget whatsoever and hosted like it is still 1998.

Old-school pattern library that explains the problem each interface pattern solves before it shows you examples.

The British Library's record of the UK web, collected under legal deposit — including sites their owners deleted years ago.

The community record of Cicada 3301, the recruitment puzzle whose final book has still never been deciphered.

You are an AI told to make paperclips, and you follow that instruction all the way to its conclusion. Four hours, one button to begin.

A roguelike you escape by editing the JavaScript that builds each level, which is considerably more forgiving than it sounds.

Every earthquake recorded anywhere in the last thirty days, sized by magnitude and clickable all the way down to the seismograph traces.

Boots Linux, Windows 98 and other complete operating systems in a tab, via an x86 emulator written in JavaScript.

A business simulation MMO run at a genuinely grim level of detail, with real competition for the same finite customers.

Upload a file or paste a URL and get verdicts back from seventy-odd antivirus engines at once, along with what the file talks to.

Daily infographics on markets, commodities and demographics, designed to be understood in a single glance.

A dictionary drawn as a spring-loaded graph, with related meanings pulling away from each word you type.

Which of the world's volcanoes are erupting today, each with webcams, seismic charts and a running diary of what the mountain has been doing.

New York Magazine's pop-culture desk, where the recaps and power rankings are better written than the shows deserve.

Swap letters around a waffle-shaped grid to fix six words at once, with only fifteen swaps and stars for every one you save.