Feels like magic

Random design briefs with a countdown attached, for when the problem is not skill but having nothing to work on.

A full year of merchant shipping movements animated on one dark globe and split by cargo type, which turns global trade into a visible swarm.

A live feed of OpenStreetMap edits as they happen, zooming to each contributor's patch of the world one small correction at a time.

Doom compiled to WebAssembly and running at full speed in a tab, which is either nostalgia or a small engineering miracle.

Forty logic puzzles on one page, each generated fresh and each solvable by pure reasoning. The interface is ancient and it does not matter.

Enter any two articles and get every shortest path of links between them, drawn as a graph you can drag.

An infinite canvas for rough diagrams and flows. Opens instantly with nothing to configure and no file to save first.

Full paint program in a tab — brushes, layers, filters and a stamp library — with nothing to install and nothing to pay.

Roll a ball down an endless neon slope at rising speed until the geometry wins, which it always eventually does.

An endless sheet of virtual bubble wrap that pops under the cursor and quietly refills itself behind you.

Push crates into place in rooms built to punish the obvious first move, with thousands of community-made levels behind them.

Grid sequencer with a marimba and a drum kit, tuned so that anything you tap sounds passable, then shared as a link.

Ride a lift from the ground to geostationary orbit, passing every layer of atmosphere and satellite on the way.

Extrudes type into three dimensions, wraps it round shapes and lets it drift, exporting the result as a loop.

A hundred billion dollars and a shopping list running from Big Macs to aircraft carriers, and it is harder to spend than you expect.

Paste any text and it flashes one word at a time at a speed you pick, which is either speed reading or a mild trance.

Tilemap editor for small games — paint a level from a tileset, then export it straight into Godot or Unity.

Everyone knows the location except the spy, who has to bluff through the questioning without ever revealing they have no idea.

Compress an image with a live before-and-after slider and every codec knob exposed. Runs entirely in the browser, so nothing is uploaded.

Wiggle the mouse and a black worm follows; wiggle harder and it strobes violently, so treat the epilepsy warning seriously.

Swing a stick figure between grapple points using one button, then trust momentum to carry the mistake.

An idle game that keeps buying you more stimulation until the page is a lo-fi stream, a podcast and a fidget spinner at once.

Drop fruit into a box, merge matching pairs and watch the pile creep towards the line. Physics does the rest of the work.

Tick off what is genuinely in your cupboards and it ranks the recipes you can make right now, with nothing missing.

The seven-day jam build where time only moves when you do, still free in the browser and still one of the decade's best ideas.

Breed meat, then drones, then queens, then things with far too many legs. The exponential curve is the entire narrative.

Ascending through increasingly abstract mathematics, with a community that treats optimising it as a competitive spreadsheet sport.

Board games rendered as physical objects on a 3D table with no rules enforcement, so you can still play badly like at home.

World atlas of traditional dishes and the specific places that still make them properly. Endless, and reliably makes you hungry.

Name something you liked and it returns things with the same texture, spanning films, books, music and games at once.

Graded summaries of the terms you agreed to without reading, with the specific alarming clause quoted. Volunteer-run since 2012.

Type a word, pick from several hundred FIGlet fonts, and get the enormous ASCII banner your terminal deserves.

Converts an uploaded photograph into ASCII, HTML or coloured text art, with the character density under your control.

Canadian satire that assumes you follow Canadian politics, and rewards you handsomely if you happen to.

Australia's oldest newspaper, filed from a town with no remaining population, covering the nation with dead-eyed accuracy.

Teaches the pen tool by making you trace shapes with the fewest possible anchor points. Level nine is genuinely cruel.

Combine shapes with union, subtract and intersect to hit a target silhouette in as few operations as you can manage.

Every component you might need to build, with links to how twenty different design systems each named and handled it.

A reference of every chart type and what each is genuinely for, worth reading before defaulting to a bar chart.

A playable account of why cooperation appears and then collapses, using game theory and roughly ten minutes of attention.

Bisect angles, find midpoints and judge parallels by eye, then get told in pixels precisely how wrong you were.

Punk and hardcore scene satire, written by people who clearly still go to shows and still resent everyone there.

Multiple-choice questions where the correct answer is a pun, a trick or an outright lie, and three wrong ones end the whole run.

A student sold a million pixels of advertising at a dollar each in 2005. The mosaic is still up, and most of the links now go nowhere.

Long-form comics about grammar, cats, running and grief, from the man who also invented Exploding Kittens.

A proxy that serves archived pages as period browsers expected them, so a 1998 machine can still get online and see 1998.

The original fake newspaper, whose headlines get quoted as fact often enough to sustain a small correction industry.

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