Safe at your desk

Reaction time, sequence memory, the chimp test and verbal memory, each scored against millions of other people's attempts.

Charts and datasets tracking long-run trends in health, income and violence, useful ammunition for pessimistic dinner parties.

Allie Brosh's illustrated essays, including the two on depression that remain the best thing written about it.

The lolcat archive that taught the internet its first grammar, still posting captioned animals two decades later.

Spot the serif among the sans-serifs before the timer runs out. Ten seconds long and disproportionately stressful.

Every known way to lace and tie a shoe, diagrammed by one Australian for over two decades, including a knot he invented himself.

Several hundred psychological tests, from serious personality inventories to deeply unserious ones, all free and all instant.

Overlays one country on another to scale, then works out how your life expectancy, income and odds of various things would change there.

A map of the solar system drawn to true scale, meaning most of your scrolling is spent crossing absolutely nothing.

Mocks up a screenshot of a conversation that never happened, for jokes and design mock-ups rather than anything serious.

Catalogue, reviews and play links for four decades of interactive fiction, maintained by people who take the form extremely seriously.

Free illustrated repair manuals for phones, laptops, cars and appliances, plus teardowns that name and shame every glued-in battery.

Popular science headlines with the volume turned up, handy for the fact you half-remember reading somewhere.

A philosophy department's catalogue of illusions, each with what it is, what it demonstrates, and the argument still going about it.

Merge, split, compress, rotate, sign and convert PDFs from a single page. Covers nearly everything Acrobat charges a subscription for.

Warps a photograph through a draggable mesh, so faces melt by exactly as much as you decide they should.

Rebuilds a photograph out of coloured triangles, with sliders controlling exactly how abstract you want to get.

The canonical crowd-ranked list of 250 films, weighted to resist review bombing. A reliable way to spot the gap in your viewing.

Every meme template with the text boxes already in the right places, and no watermark once you find the setting.

Catalogue of impossible figures, ambiguous objects and Escher-adjacent architecture, kept up by one very devoted collector.

Post-apocalyptic comedy RPG with turn-based fights, base building and a tone somewhere between Douglas Adams and a mild fever.

A calendar of every conjunction, eclipse and meteor shower coming up, with charts drawn for your own location.

Every plant and animal anybody has photographed and posted, mapped, with a community that will identify your mystery beetle within hours.

A sheet of bubble wrap that never runs out. Pop with a click or drag across a row, and it refills the moment you finish.

Combine two things to make a third, forever, until you have coaxed a language model into inventing something absurd.

Classic Mac OS booting instantly in a browser, with the software of the period already installed and ready to open.

Numbers-heavy tower defence with endless mode, research trees and the general energy of a very well-kept spreadsheet.

David McCandless's poster-grade infographics on everything from relative drug harms to the meanings of colours.

Step-by-step build guides for anything from a bookshelf to a plasma cutter, written by the people who actually made the thing.

The annual competition that decides what interactive fiction is this year, with every entry free to play in the browser.

The real museum of 25,000 banana-related objects has a website, and it looks exactly as you are already imagining.

Books, films, software, concerts and the web itself, archived at a scale no other institution has come close to.

The Archive's Flash collection, running thousands of dead games inside an emulator so the whole era stays clickable.

Archived research papers, including preprints and journals that have since folded, kept readable rather than merely cited.

A vast and aggressively plain archive of religious and mythological texts, essentially unchanged since the old web.

Where interactive fiction authors argue about parser design, post works in progress and review each other with alarming thoroughness.

A stock market simulator with real prices and imaginary money, which is very much the correct order to learn that in.

Point it at any classic story file and it runs in the tab, which makes the whole Infocom era playable without installing an interpreter.

Answers the question in one word, correctly, in ninety languages, and has done every single day since 2009.

Answers the question with a single word, and has been right every single time anybody has checked.

A fake enterprise interface that rewards clicking dialogue boxes with more dialogue boxes, by an art-games designer.

The indie storefront where thousands of experiments run free in the browser, and where the deeply strange ones are the point.

Every point-and-click game indie developers have uploaded to itch, most playable in the tab, most made by exactly one person.

Every clue from every episode of the American quiz institution, transcribed by fans back to 1984 and playable board by board.

Kaomoji, dongers and text faces sorted by category, with a copy button attached to every single one of them.

The review site that effectively invented walkthrough culture for escape games, with an archive going back nearly two decades.

Cleaner and more factual than its rivals, strongest on geography and history, and mercifully free of which-character quizzes.

Turn any photograph into a jigsaw of up to three hundred pieces, then send the link to a relative who will finish it faster.