Safe at your desk

A Japanese platform hosting tens of thousands of illustrator-made avatar makers, each one in a completely different style.

Sprite and animation editor with onion skinning and a live loop preview, exporting straight to a spritesheet or GIF.

Weather model charts for anywhere in the world, fast and free, of the sort forecasters look at rather than the tidied-up app version.

Names a pixel size and asks you to drag a box exactly that big. Nobody is as good at this as they assume.

Grid, palette, mouse. The whole tool fits on one page and you are drawing about three seconds after it loads.

Draw on the grid and it writes the box-shadow monstrosity that renders your sprite with no image file involved at all.

Feed it a photograph and it hands back a pixel-art version, with block size and palette entirely under your control.

Two decades of the pixel art scene's best work, still curated by hand and still running weekly drawing challenges.

Put one worry into a star and watch it shrink into the distance over sixty seconds. Faintly ridiculous, reliably effective.

Type in the thing you are stressed about, watch it shrink into a distant star over sixty seconds, then close the tab.

Open-source pixel editor with tilemaps, animation and 3D layers, playable in the browser or free to download properly.

Sprite editor with layers and animation frames, wrapped in an unusually friendly community gallery of other people's work.

Two editors in one — a quick one and a layered one — both free in the browser with the usual filters and masks.

Live flight tracking with an augmented-reality view, for pointing a phone at whatever just went over the garden and naming it.

A virtual table with real decks you drag around by hand, for playing whatever house rules your group refuses to drop.

A plain, fast game server that has outlived every redesign trend since 2001 and still hosts chess, draughts and mahjong.

Daily roundups of the funniest things posted elsewhere, a genre this one has been working since 2009.

Every Poe story and poem with annotations, a timeline and a vocabulary tool, kept by one enthusiast since the early web.

Put your cursor anywhere on the page and it finds a photograph of a person pointing at exactly that spot.

Hand-listed index of useless websites, sorted into categories so you can choose your waste of time rather than roll for it.

A noughts-and-crosses grid where every square needs a Pokemon matching two criteria at once, scored on how obscure your picks were.

Spin up a private poker table and send the link round: no accounts, no downloads and no actual money involved.

Clean, fast and mobile-first, with a front page that reads more like a curated shelf than a dump of everything uploaded.

Solitaire where you choose the shape of the tableau and the rules first, then discover whether it was ever solvable.

Low-poly time trials with a built-in track editor, hundredth-of-a-second leaderboards and a restart key you will wear out.

Twenty-five minute cycles with a running log of what you spent each one on, in case you need the evidence later.

A pomodoro timer with a task list bolted on, which is roughly the entire feature set anybody actually uses.

A pastel multiplayer world whose real draw is the character creator, where people spend far longer than in the game itself.

Deadpan absurdism starring bears, birds and mildly disappointed men, published three times a week since 2008.

Age pyramids for any country from 1950 to 2100, which settles most demographic arguments in a single shape.

A properly staffed magazine covering what is going right, funded by its readers rather than by outrage.

A twenty-year-old particle sandbox where wind, fire, magma and ice all interact, with thousands of saved player scenes.

The sequel, with proper solid objects and adjustable gravity, and a public save gallery going back well over a decade.

A shelf of harmless fake screens — cracked display, virus alert, retro desktop — meant for a colleague's unattended laptop.

A fake desktop of virus warnings, satellite feeds and password crackers, all keyboard-mashable in full screen.

Full-screen fake terminals, fake updates and fake system alerts. Harmless, closeable with Escape, and very funny on a colleague's screen.

Threat-model-first advice from the community that succeeded PrivacyTools, so you pick tools for your actual risk rather than a vibe.

Opinionated lists of privacy-respecting software sorted by category, with stated reasons rather than affiliate links.

Britain's satirical fortnightly, half jokes and half genuine investigative reporting, in print since 1961.

A medieval life simulator where you idle through jobs and skills, die of old age, and are reborn with a small head start.

The RPG with the player removed: choose a race, then watch the bars fill for years. Still the sharpest joke about the genre.

Seventy thousand public domain books, plain and free, from the oldest digital library on the internet.

Harvard's implicit association tests, measuring the biases you would never report about yourself. Uncomfortable, rigorous and free.

The Vedic side of the practice: kundli, dasha periods and panchang, calculated free with the underlying reasoning shown.

The colour-word interference test as the real psychology experiment rather than a quiz-site imitation, with your data at the end.

A pug in a rug, plus a timer counting exactly how long you have now watched the pug be in the rug.

The Only Connect connecting wall in thousands of user-made versions: sixteen clues, four groups, two and a half minutes.

Daily nonograms in every size from five squares to fifty, with a timer and no attempt whatsoever at decoration.