Safe at your desk

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 side by side, one photographed and one generated. A University of Washington project, and your score keeps falling.

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

Search engine for hand-made pages in the spirit of the early web, with a surprise-me button that behaves exactly like 1998.

Instructions for very nearly anything, illustrated in that unmistakable cartoon style. The artwork alone justifies the visit.

A vast library of freely licensed photos, maps, diagrams and sound files, each with its licence spelled out. The picture shelf behind Wikipedia.

One click, one random Wikipedia article, repeated until the afternoon has quietly gone somewhere else.

Wikipedia's own catalogue of the pettiest disputes in its history, including years of war over a hyphen.

The editors' own curated list of the encyclopedia's strangest entries, and the best rabbit hole entrance there is.

The free library of source texts — treaties, speeches and out-of-copyright novels, transcribed and proofread by hand.

Wikipedia articles served as a vertical swipe feed, which is either a public service or the end of civilisation.

Drag Wikipedia cards onto a timeline in the right order. Three lives, and you will lose one to the invention of the fork.