Safe at your desk

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 giant shelf of old programs and games that boot right in the browser through emulation, from early home computers to forgotten utilities.

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.

Multiplayer jigsaws where several people drag pieces around the same table at once, mostly getting in each other's way.

Home of BombParty, where a bomb passes round the room and you type a word containing the given letters before it goes off.

Net art from 1995 that looks precisely like your computer failing. View the source: the mess on screen is hiding the actual work.

Drags the guts of a JPEG around with three sliders, producing the smeared colour blocks that only broken files make.

Bare-bones stacking practice with sprint, cheese race and replays, used by people who take block placement very seriously.

Straightforward celebrity photo blogging updated hourly, with none of the editorialising the rest of the genre insists on.

Japanese home cooking explained for people without a Japanese pantry, with substitutions that do not quietly ruin the dish.

Tells you which streaming service in your country actually has the film, and whether it is included or a rental.

Shows one fresh post at a time from a hand-picked list of personal blogs. Press next and you are reading a stranger's corner of the internet.

The quiz platform from every classroom and every away-day, with a free tier and a room code that anybody can join in seconds.

Thousands of Japanese emoticons sorted by emotion, running from mild confusion all the way to full table flipping.

Dice-based territory conquest at a table of five strangers, where what happens in the chat matters more than the actual odds.

Space the letters of a word by eye, then see the typographer's answer laid over the top of yours. Reliably humbling.

A typing test built from book passages, with detailed statistics on which keys are quietly costing you whole seconds.

Teaches touch typing by generating fake words from the letters you keep fumbling, rather than making you copy out prose.

One golf hole a day, built to look trivial and then take nine attempts, with a score everybody can compare.

Baking recipes given by weight, with a hotline-grade troubleshooting blog attached. Where to go when a loaf has gone wrong.

Stick-figure RPG that has been landing daily jokes since 2003, wrapped around a combat and item system far deeper than the drawings imply.

The one most people name as the best tower defence: four tower types, hero units and levels that reward replanning.

Blocky arena shooter with skins, ranked play and lobbies that fill in under ten seconds at any hour.

Documentation of the vast Victorian asylums built to one architectural theory of curing madness, most now empty or demolished.

Anime and manga tracker with a friendly interface and a public API, run as an open-source project rather than an ad business.

A text-based village of kittens that grows into a civilisation over weeks, with a spreadsheet's soul and startling depth.

A tidy portal of casual browser games with an unusual amount of care given to which ones are actually finished.

Painting app with layers, symmetry and a genuinely good brush engine, loading instantly and uploading nothing anywhere.

The reference desk of internet culture, with sourced origins and dates for jokes you never knew had a paper trail.