Safe at your desk

A roguelike you escape by editing the JavaScript that builds each level, which is considerably more forgiving than it sounds.

Flips your sentence using Unicode lookalikes, so it survives a paste into anywhere that accepts plain text.

Where teenagers make the quizzes: which sad indie song are you, which Greek deity would pity you. Anyone can build one in minutes.

A small publisher of deliberately pointless web projects, including several gag sites you have probably been sent.

Every earthquake recorded anywhere in the last thirty days, sized by magnitude and clickable all the way down to the seismograph traces.

An x86 emulator in JavaScript that will boot Linux, FreeBSD or Windows 98 in a tab. Genuinely should not be possible.

The browser build of the auto-shooter that ate 2022: you only move, everything else fires itself, and the screen fills with skeletons.

Curiously awesome products sold through absurd demonstration videos, most of which are more entertaining than the item itself.

Hero-shooter pacing in a browser tab, with abilities, a ranked ladder and matches short enough to fit a coffee break.

Weather models rendered beautifully enough to watch for their own sake, with layers for wind, rain, snow depth and wave height.

Ship positions and port arrivals on a fast, uncluttered map, ideal for watching a delivery of your own crawl across an ocean.

Precision stickman platforming with spikes, saw blades and checkpoints positioned by somebody who enjoys watching people suffer.

Well over a hundred thousand scanned advertisements sorted by decade and subject. A very direct record of what people were told to want.

A business simulation MMO run at a genuinely grim level of detail, with real competition for the same finite customers.

Infinite squared paper for sketching layouts and floor plans, with snapping and nothing else getting in the way.

City walking videos, driving tours and a guess-the-city game built on top of them, sorted by country for when you cannot travel.

Upload a file or paste a URL and get verdicts back from seventy-odd antivirus engines at once, along with what the file talks to.

Daily infographics on markets, commodities and demographics, designed to be understood in a single glance.

A dictionary drawn as a spring-loaded graph, with related meanings pulling away from each word you type.

Which of the world's volcanoes are erupting today, each with webcams, seismic charts and a running diary of what the mountain has been doing.

Home of a long list of absurd browser games and quizzes, several of which have quietly consumed entire office afternoons.

New York Magazine's pop-culture desk, where the recaps and power rankings are better written than the shows deserve.

Swap letters around a waffle-shaped grid to fix six words at once, with only fifteen swaps and stars for every one you save.

Upscales artwork and photographs without the usual mush, using a network trained specifically on line work.

Very long illustrated essays on artificial intelligence, procrastination and the Fermi paradox, drawn in deliberately bad stick figures.

Four-panel strips whose punchline usually involves death, drawn by two Germans with impeccable comic timing.

Low-poly military shooter with tanks, helicopters and a battle royale mode, all somehow inside a browser tab.

Risk against real people across hundreds of maps, played in one sitting or over weeks of daily turns. Formerly Warzone and WarLight.

A live room of service-dog puppies in training, which is the single most reliable meeting-break on the internet.

Wildfire incidents across the western United States, mapped and annotated in near real time by volunteers who sit listening to fire radio.

Irish satire with no interest in restraint, regularly mistaken for real reporting by people who should know better.

Guess where a teammate placed a concept on a spectrum between two extremes. The most reliable argument-starter on this list.

Climate averages for any city as gorgeous year-round charts: sunshine hours, muggy days, wind, and precisely when the good weather ends.

Forecasts built on a network of tens of thousands of amateur weather stations, so the reading is often from somebody on your actual street.

Screenshots of thousands of websites from 1991 onward, arranged so you can watch entire interface conventions appear and die.

Billions of generated puzzles in a layout untouched since 2005, which is precisely why it still loads before you finish blinking.

Full-resolution images from the James Webb telescope, with the explanations of what you are actually looking at.

Live webcams sorted by country and theme, from Alpine passes to Caribbean beach bars, with a great many pointed at completely empty roads.

Eighty live webcam effects, most of them terrible, all of them fun for exactly the ninety seconds required.

Drag through a full-screen fluid that swirls and bleeds colour behind the cursor, at full frame rate even on a phone.

The long-running forum where amateur investigators pick apart cold cases, for better and occasionally much worse.

Genuinely baffling real product listings pulled from the big marketplaces and presented with almost no commentary.

The account that rates every dog above ten out of ten and has defended that scale in public for over a decade.

The planet chopped into three-metre squares, each given a three-word name, which is either brilliant or a licensing trap depending who you ask.

The space station's position, ground track and next passes over you, with an orbital countdown that is oddly hard to stop watching.

Two portraits, one of them generated. Built by University of Washington researchers to show how badly people score at telling the difference.

A relationship graph of everybody famous, cross-referenced far past the point of reason and updated constantly.

Search engine that indexes hand-made pages only, surfacing the small quiet web the big engines stopped showing you years ago.