Safe at your desk

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.

A free browser extension from the EFF that learns which trackers follow you from site to site and blocks them, with no lists to manage.

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

Open-source test results that compare how well each major browser resists tracking and fingerprinting, updated as new versions ship.

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 daily leaderboard of new apps, sites and gadgets, upvoted by the people who make and use them. The place to spot a tool before everyone else does.

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.

Free monthly puzzle sets designed to be solved in a pub, with a decade of archives you can print at home.

A question site where people post original puzzles and strangers solve them properly, with the reasoning shown.

Zach Gage's daily puzzle collection — Cross|word, Flipart, Really Bad Chess — with the best interface in the genre by a distance.

A quantum computing textbook with spaced repetition built into the page, so what you read has a chance of staying.

Five thousand strips of indie-rock relationship comedy with sarcastic robots, updating every weekday since 2003.

Doodle six things in twenty seconds while a neural net shouts guesses at you. The training set it produced now runs to fifty million drawings.

Four Wordle grids solved at the same time with nine shared guesses, which is exactly as stressful as that sounds.

Four keys drive the four thigh and calf muscles of one Olympic sprinter, and none of them cooperate. The original rage game.

The internet's default supply of small animals doing small things, restocked constantly by thirty million subscribers.

The scene's main feed: databent photos, broken televisions and corrupted video, with the technique usually in the comments.

Crowd-sourced feed of well-made and gloriously pointless websites, and the closest thing left to a modern stumble button.

Photographs of corridors, swimming pools and hotel lobbies with nobody in them, which is far more affecting than that sounds.

Strangers being decent to each other, collected into one feed for the days when every other feed has been too much.

Horror fiction posted as though it were true, under a rule that commenters must play along. The good threads run for weeks.

Steady feed of new illusions with the comments doing the debunking, which is usually half of the entertainment.

Home of the shared pixel canvas where millions of people fought surprisingly politely over a few million squares.