Feels like magic

Tune a car, hold the handbrake and score points for angle rather than lap times. The garage is quietly the actual game.

Dashcam footage of a city loop with the local radio playing over it, so you can drive slowly through Istanbul while answering email.

JavaScript demos in 140 characters. The gap between how little code there is and what appears is the whole appeal.

A rotating globe with every wind current on Earth drawn as moving lines, and layers underneath for ocean currents, particulates and the jet stream.

Thousands of public webcams pointed at squares, harbours, volcanoes and building sites, some with archives stretching back decades.

Interactive classroom illusions you can drag, toggle and pause, which makes the effects considerably harder to dismiss.

A museum of Google easter eggs that Google removed — gravity, the barrel roll, the mirrored search — all restored and working.

Every Google emoji mashup, searchable — pick two and get the official illustrated hybrid back as a PNG.

Upload a photograph and it rebuilds the entire thing out of emoji, colour-matched one tile at a time.

Search, click, paste, with nothing else on the page competing for attention, which is precisely the point.

A scatterplot of six thousand music genres you have never heard of, each one clickable for a sample and a list of its bands.

All 2^122 version-four UUIDs listed in order with a working search box, on a page that should not be able to exist.

Design a creature from joints and muscles, then watch a genetic algorithm spend hundreds of generations teaching it to limp.

Idle evolution from primordial soup to interstellar empire, with dozens of species branches and an enormous technology tree.

Point-and-click cabinet of grotesque curiosities where every drawer you open contains a small, beautifully animated unpleasantness.

The hub for playable posts — effectively the index for the entire genre of learn-by-fiddling essays.

An idle game built on actual differential equations, with optional theory levels that teach you the mathematics as you climb.

NASA's real-time 3D model of every mission in flight, letting you ride along with a probe on its actual trajectory.

Home of the GROW games, where you choose an order for a handful of objects and then watch a tiny world assemble or fail.

Ugly, ancient, and still better than everything else at cutting, resizing, reversing and optimising a GIF.

Short, sourced facts arranged so one leads into the next. Built for the specific pleasure of learning something you can repeat.

Full-screen fake update screens for every operating system, including the blue one, with a bar that never finishes.

Three infinite layers of colour falling forever over a low drone, from the net artist behind half the web's cult toys.

Build a circuit and watch current move through it as coloured dots, with an oscilloscope available on any node.

Build a machine from wheels and rods to push a ball into a zone, and accept that it will topple over the first nine times.

A fidget spinner you flick with the mouse, with physics good enough that people leave it running in a spare tab.

Two dozen SVG generators in one place — noise, grain, blobs, dots, gradients, mesh — all exportable and all free.

A toy about synchronisation — a few hundred blinking dots that agree on a rhythm with no conductor anywhere.

A flag revealed six squares at a time, which sounds straightforward until you meet the fourth consecutive tricolour.

Aircraft moving across a live map with routes, altitudes and speeds. Startling once you notice how much is up there at once.

Every direct flight from any airport in the world drawn on one map, which is the fastest way to plan an unreasonable journey.

Every aircraft in the sky right now on one map. Click any of them for the route, the aircraft type and how far it still has to go.

Nathan Yau's long-running blog on charts done well and badly, plus his own studies of how a day gets spent.

Paint with thick wet oils that pile up, smear and catch the light exactly like the real thing, entirely in a browser tab.

Suggests font pairings from a model trained on type, with locks so you can hold one face and reroll the other.

Plays tracks that nobody has ever streamed, not once. The play counter is the whole point, and the music is exactly as advertised.

Six stills from one film, revealed one at a time. Getting it from the first frame is the only score really worth having.

Draw a track, then ride your own drawing on a BMX. Millions of user-made levels, most of them designed to be cruel.

Opens as a dismal educational maths game about a frog eating flies, and then keeps going somewhere else entirely. Say nothing more.

A search engine that strips every result down to plain HTML so it can be read on a genuinely ancient computer. Also very fast.

A daily gleaning of curiosities, lateral puzzles and pleasing coincidences, kept up since 2005 without fuss.

Conway's cellular automaton with a library of known patterns, still the clearest demonstration that rules alone make worlds.

Seven levels of talking a language model into revealing a password it was told to protect. The best hands-on lesson in prompt injection going.

Hans Rosling's animated bubble chart of the world, still the fastest cure for being wrong about global development.

An interactive world atlas you can scrub year by year from 3000 BC, watching every border redraw itself.

Walks you through rebuilding classic algorithmic pieces — tiled lines, Joy Division, cubic disarray — one step at a time.

A genetic algorithm evolves two-dimensional cars across rough terrain while you watch generations fail forward.

A free flight simulator in the browser using satellite terrain for the entire planet, with real air traffic overhead.