Safe at your desk

A scholarly reference to the whole genre, free to read, covering authors nobody else ever bothered to write up.

A playable account of why cooperation appears and then collapses, using game theory and roughly ten minutes of attention.

Bisect angles, find midpoints and judge parallels by eye, then get told in pixels precisely how wrong you were.

The original page describing the World Wide Web project, restored by CERN at its first address. Plain text and a few links.

Complete texts, timelines and scholarship for a writer whose entire output is public domain, on a site that has barely changed since 1994.

Good news redrawn as illustrations by a designer who got tired of doomscrolling and built the feed he wanted instead.

A quarterly printed newspaper of good news and everyday heroes, illustrated throughout, with the archive online.

Punk and hardcore scene satire, written by people who clearly still go to shows and still resent everyone there.

Two Google search terms, one question: which one gets searched more? Your instincts are far worse than you think they are.

Every interactive fiction file anyone thought worth keeping since 1992, in a directory listing that has never once been redesigned.

Jay Alammar's diagram-by-diagram walkthrough of the architecture underneath every modern language model.

Multiple-choice questions where the correct answer is a pun, a trick or an outright lie, and three wrong ones end the whole run.

One cat looking at a monitor showing a cat looking at a monitor, several thousand cats deep and still accepting submissions.

Every possible page of text that could ever exist, already written, sitting at a findable address.

Scroll the length of an absurdly elongated shiba inu, with checkpoints and a leaderboard for the truly committed.

A catalogue of films, broadcasts and recordings that are known to have existed and cannot now be found. Some entries get solved.

A student sold a million pixels of advertising at a dollar each in 2005. The mosaic is still up, and most of the links now go nowhere.

Community-maintained film and television database with an open API, which is why half the apps you use are quietly built on it.

The listing that has catalogued live text MUDs since 1994, and still tells you which of them have people logged in tonight.

Long-form comics about grammar, cats, running and grief, from the man who also invented Exploding Kittens.

A proxy that serves archived pages as period browsers expected them, so a 1998 machine can still get online and see 1998.

The original fake newspaper, whose headlines get quoted as fact often enough to sustain a small correction industry.

A hand-maintained index of free books online, run out of Penn since before search engines were any good.

Five solutions-focused stories a day, from a team that has been running this beat since the mid-nineties.

A stick-figure Dungeons and Dragons party in a story that turned genuinely epic somewhere around strip four hundred.

Timeline readings that describe periods rather than days, phrased as amateur psychology rather than fortune telling.

Beautifully drawn strips that set up a sweet premise and then take it somewhere very dark in the final panel.

Sixty-odd propositions place you on economic and social axes, then show you exactly where Thatcher and Gandhi ended up.

Essays and picture galleries drawn from the strangest corners of out-of-copyright print, film and illustration.

Visual essays answering questions nobody commissioned, like which pop lyricists have the largest working vocabulary.

Campaigns for the right to repair and runs community fixing parties, publishing the data on what breaks and why.

Ten thousand sheep drawn by anonymous online workers paid two cents each, displayed together as one enormous grid.

Australian satire in short sharp headlines, which is roughly the national attention span for domestic politics.

Scroll outwards from a human to the observable universe, with each step making the previous one look absurd.

Millions of uploaded Minecraft skins plus an editor, which is the closest thing that game has ever had to a fashion scene.

Ripped sprite sheets from thousands of games, sorted by console — half reference library, half nostalgia trap.

A crime you solve by writing database queries, and easily the least painful SQL tutorial ever built.

A team counted every squirrel in Central Park and published the data, the maps and a full illustrated report on the findings.

Cecil Adams' archive of exhaustively answered daft questions, invented decades before you could just ask the internet.

Drag countries across the Mercator projection and watch Greenland shrink to its actual size. Settles the argument in about ten seconds.

A free course that starts on the home row and builds up, with keyboard layouts for whichever language you actually type in.

Flick the switch on. A small hand reaches out and turns it off again. That is the entire website and it is somehow enough.

One button, one random pointless website, no explanation offered or needed. The site that turned this whole genre into a genre.

Type anything at all and watch it drift upward and dissolve. Nothing is stored, nothing is sent, nothing can be recovered.

Nearly a trillion saved web pages. Paste any address, pick a year, and see what was there — the single most important archive online.

Race from one Wikipedia article to another using only links, against a clock and other people online.

One family documenting Chinese home cooking across two generations, with real detail on ingredients and what you can substitute.

A painting that zooms into itself forever, assembled by a dozen artists so carefully that the seams never quite show.