Feels like magic

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.

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

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.

A painting that zooms into itself forever, assembled by a dozen artists so carefully that the seams never quite show.

One photorealistic portrait of somebody who has never existed, regenerated on every refresh. The page that started the whole genre.

Invented dictionary entries complete with etymology and a usage example, none of them real words. Several of them deserve to be.

Superhot's trick in a browser: time only moves when you do, so every room becomes a slow-motion puzzle with guns.

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

Reverse image search that finds the oldest copy of a picture rather than visually similar ones. The tool for tracing where a photo began.

Cast, catch, sell, upgrade the line, cast deeper. The loop is completely transparent and it still takes forty minutes off you.

One line of maths drives a sixteen-by-sixteen grid of dots, and the gallery of what people fit into that line is humbling.

Tap any key in rhythm and it plays the next chunk of Clair de Lune, so timing is the only skill actually required.

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

Paste a single screenshot and it names the anime, the episode and the exact timestamp. Unreasonably accurate for something free.

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

Bounces a sentence between English and Japanese until the two versions agree, which they rarely do politely.

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

Fly down a rotating tunnel of coloured obstacles quickly enough that your eyes take over the steering from your brain.

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.

A taxonomy of every storytelling device ever used, cross-linked so densely that leaving takes actual discipline.

The tool behind half the interactive fiction of the past decade, running in the browser and learnable in about twenty minutes.

Same idea as typing but with notes rather than drums — write a paragraph, receive a surprisingly pretty melody.

Type words and each letter becomes a drum hit, so your own name comes out as a loop you will struggle to stop playing.

Structured typing lessons with a hand diagram that shows precisely which finger you have been cheating with all along.

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.

Flips your sentence using Unicode lookalikes, so it survives a paste into anywhere that accepts plain text.

A small publisher of deliberately pointless web projects, including several gag sites you have probably been sent.

An x86 emulator in JavaScript that will boot Linux, FreeBSD or Windows 98 in a tab. Genuinely should not be possible.

The browser build of the auto-shooter that ate 2022: you only move, everything else fires itself, and the screen fills with skeletons.

Weather models rendered beautifully enough to watch for their own sake, with layers for wind, rain, snow depth and wave height.

Two decades of hand-picked short films, still the most reliable place online to find something beautiful in nine minutes.

Infinite squared paper for sketching layouts and floor plans, with snapping and nothing else getting in the way.

City walking videos, driving tours and a guess-the-city game built on top of them, sorted by country for when you cannot travel.

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

Home of a long list of absurd browser games and quizzes, several of which have quietly consumed entire office afternoons.

Upscales artwork and photographs without the usual mush, using a network trained specifically on line work.

Guess where a teammate placed a concept on a spectrum between two extremes. The most reliable argument-starter on this list.

Winamp itself, reimplemented faithfully enough that the equaliser works. It really whips the llama's behind, in a browser tab.

Drag through a full-screen fluid that swirls and bleeds colour behind the cursor, at full frame rate even on a phone.

Software-defined radio receivers around the world you can tune through a browser, listening to shortwave through somebody else's aerial.

The planet chopped into three-metre squares, each given a three-word name, which is either brilliant or a licensing trap depending who you ask.

The space station's position, ground track and next passes over you, with an orbital countdown that is oddly hard to stop watching.

Which record a sample came from, who covered whom and where that drum break originally lived, with the two tracks played side by side.