Safe at your desk

Archive of the experiment where one button and one click each spawned genuine factions, martyrs and a working theology within days.

Two floppy archers, one bow each, and physics that decides the winner considerably more often than aim does.

A browser railway empire where the whole server races to reach the same era of engines before anybody else does.

Rain radar for most of the world with a past-and-future loop, which answers the question of whether to leave now in about four seconds.

Loose-surface rally driving where every corner is taken sideways, largely because there is no other way to take them.

A library of specific, doable kindness ideas and the research on why doing them helps the doer as much as the recipient.

One button, one random inhabited spot on Earth in Street View, most of them somewhere nobody would ever have chosen to look.

Blows one image up into a multi-page halftone poster that you print at home and tape across an entire wall.

A short typing course with a certificate at the end, oddly motivating for something nobody will ever ask you to show.

The obsessive's music database, where every release is rated, charted and argued over by people with extremely firm opinions.

A snarkier reference work covering pseudoscience, conspiracy theories and the people making a living from them.

Paste a spreadsheet, pick from chart types most tools refuse to offer, and export an editable vector file.

Thousands of marketing emails collected and searchable, which is the only sane way to go about designing one.

Every train on the British network with the signalling data attached: which loop it was held in, where it lost four minutes and why.

David Byrne's magazine about things that are demonstrably working somewhere, reported at length rather than as a listicle.

Amit Patel's tutorials on pathfinding, hexagonal grids and noise, with every parameter exposed as a slider you can ruin.

A Wikipedia article with every meaningful word blacked out; guess words to reveal them until you can name the subject.

Women's magazine parody with headlines observed so precisely that they read as criticism rather than jokes.

Wathan and Schoger's rules for making things look designed when you are not, in fact, a designer.

Builds a regular expression while explaining every token in a side panel and highlighting matches as you type. Ends a lot of guessing.

Leaves a trail of emoji behind your cursor. There is nothing more to it than that, and nothing more is needed.

Drop in a photo, get a clean cut-out back. It handles hair, which is the part that used to take an hour.

Finds your nearest free community workshop where volunteers help you fix the thing instead of replacing it. Thousands worldwide now.

Low-poly team shooter with tanks and jetpacks, free and playable the moment the page finishes loading.

Pixel American football hiding a full franchise manager behind six-second passing plays. Has ruined more workdays than it should have.

Rhymes, near rhymes, synonyms and usage examples — quietly the best tool available to anyone writing anything.

The definitive index of American roadside oddities: the giant fibreglass animals, the museums devoted to exactly one thing.

Roguelike tower defence where you lay the map down as you go, and every tile placed narrows the next decision.

Two-button duel on a rooftop where recoil, rather than aim, decides which of you falls off the building first.

Sandwiches rotating slowly on a loop, under a tagline that reads simply, and accurately, that's it.

The percentage that launched a thousand arguments — the share of critics who were positive, which is not an average score.

Three colour fields flipping between red, green and blue as you move, a fixture of the useless-web canon and a strobe risk.

Run through a tunnel in space where the walls become the floor whenever you turn. An entire generation played this instead of maths.

Tells you the best three minutes to leave for the toilet during any film, and summarises exactly what you missed. Absurd, and it works.

The Cube Escape series in full and free — bleak Dutch point-and-click rooms with a lake, a lot of birds and a plot you assemble sideways.

Archive of notable animation cuts, tagged by the individual animator who drew them. Studying the craft one sequence at a time.

Live cameras on pandas, penguins, apes and elephants, with keepers wandering into shot at feeding time and narrating as they go.

A falling-sand game with several hundred materials that all react properly, including a dozen ways to end the world by mistake.

Falling-sand physics with fire, water, plants and lava, plus a public gallery of what everybody else set alight.

Tetris where the blocks collapse into falling sand, so a line only clears when one colour touches both walls. Fiendish and lovely.

Daily gag strips about science, philosophy and human awfulness, each hiding an extra panel behind the red button.

Reverse image search tuned for illustration: hand it a cropped screenshot and it names the artist and the original post.

Conservation campaign for a cephalopod that lives in trees, used for over twenty years to teach children about checking sources.

Drag one slider from quantum foam to the cosmic web, with every object in between labelled at its true size.

Find one to twenty-five scattered across a grid, in order, against the clock. The standard peripheral-vision and attention drill.

Collaborative fiction dressed as containment paperwork for anomalous objects, written by thousands of people in one clinical deadpan.

Rough sketch in, finished image out, with the result following your actual lines rather than politely ignoring them.

Converts your scrolling into real distance and tells you what you have just passed — a giraffe, the Eiffel Tower, low Earth orbit.