Safe at your desk

Start with one enormous dot; every pass of the cursor splits it into four, until the pixels resolve into a picture.

What remains of the great Flash portal, plus a badge system that once made people finish games out of pure spite.

Hex-based territory war where every unit costs upkeep, so overextending will kill you considerably faster than the enemy does.

Jason Kottke has been posting the interesting bits of the web since 1998, with no algorithm involved at any point.

Class-based arena shooter with grenades and blocky maps, running smoothly on a work laptop that struggles with spreadsheets.

A voxel arena shooter that holds a high frame rate in a browser tab, with custom lobbies, a map editor and no install.

Retail history blog named after the ghost outline a shop sign leaves behind, mapping the slow decline of the American mall.

Tarot taught properly, with free card meanings, a clean illustrated deck and lessons that never ask you to believe anything.

Gossip written as media criticism, tracking how celebrity stories get placed and who stands to benefit from the placing.

Thousands of landing pages sorted by industry and style, which makes it the reference for anyone writing one.

Two decades of listening data turned into recommendations, similar-artist chains and neighbours with suspiciously identical taste.

Fitts, Hick, Jakob and the rest, each with a plain explanation and a poster you will end up printing out.

French satire named by scrambling Le Figaro, and taken seriously by French social media with depressing regularity.

The 1979 economics lesson still intact — buy lemons, read the forecast, set a price, discover the weather has opinions.

The Lenny face and its several hundred descendants, catalogued and one click away from your clipboard.

Turns a question into a link that mimes typing it into a search box, for colleagues who never quite learn.

Log films, rate them, and read reviews by people trying to be funny rather than professional. The social network cinema deserved.

Looks like a plain platformer until the floor vanishes, the ceiling drops and the exit walks away. Trolling you is the actual mechanic.

Photographs, manuscripts, sheet music and film from the largest library in the world, mostly free to reuse.

Thematic collections captured around elections, disasters and cultural moments, chosen by librarians rather than by a crawler.

Free chess with no adverts, no account required and an analysis engine better than the paid ones, funded entirely by donations.

Millions of chess tactics pulled from real games and served at exactly your rating, entirely free and with no account required.

Enter your birthday and watch a live tally of the heartbeats, blinks and steps you have got through so far.

Daily tips on doing ordinary things slightly better, running since 2005 and still occasionally genuinely surprising.

Every lightning strike detected worldwide appears within seconds of the flash, triangulated by a volunteer network of home-built receivers.

Draw a track and watch a sledder ride it, a physics toy people have spent years turning into hand-drawn music videos.

Car leasing sold via the loudest website ever built — animated GIFs, a theme-park aesthetic, and a real business underneath it.

Hundreds of small text translators — pirate, medieval, wingdings, uwu — plus a builder for making your own.

Wikipedia's running audit of the things almost everyone believes and almost nobody has ever checked.

Wikipedia's index of its own indexes, which is either a long-running joke or the purest expression of the site.

Start with four elements and work towards seven hundred, most of which are jokes you only understand on arrival.

A quiet turn-based server for abstract strategy games — Hex, TwixT, Amazons — where matches last months and nobody rushes you.

A full WarCraft-style real-time strategy game running in a browser tab, complete with multiplayer, a map editor and a scripting API.

Cameras pointed at geysers, glaciers, harbours and whichever volcano is currently misbehaving, plus a northern lights feed in winter.

Daily science news with a weakness for the strange finds — mummies, deep sea oddities, cosmic near misses.

Seasonal chart of everything currently airing, with countdowns to the next episode and which service is carrying it.

A clean one-minute test built by a support software company that had a very direct professional interest in typing speed.

Clickable map quizzes for every region on Earth, unfashionable in design and better than everything that has replaced it.

A link aggregator about computing that anyone can read: smaller, quieter and more carefully tagged than the big tech news sites.

A fake executive dashboard of charts and metrics that keeps updating itself while you stare thoughtfully past it.

Draw circles and arrows, press play, and your scribble runs as a working feedback-loop simulation.

The canonical placeholder text, plus the Cicero passage it was cut from and an explanation of what it says.

Thousands of curated palettes, from Game Boy green to 64-colour monsters, each downloadable in every format going.

Browser sprite editor built around palette discipline, with the specific constraints pixel artists keep asking for.

The looser, stranger sibling of the main lost media wiki, with more speculation and considerably more unresolved threads.

A solar-powered website that can go offline in bad weather, publishing long, careful articles on old and low-energy technologies.

The best-known brain-training subscription, with a free daily set of games and rather a lot of graphs about your own decline.

The official Escher archive: the impossible staircases, the tessellations, and his own notes on how he worked them out.