Safe at your desk

A company worth hundreds of billions serves a homepage of plain blue links, unchanged since the 1990s and quietly proud of it.

Annual contest in which vision scientists compete to fool you, with every finalist since 2005 still watchable.

Maths explained by intuition first and formulas second, by someone who clearly resented how he was taught it.

India's monuments, crafts and regional history laid out as something you explore rather than something you revise.

The personality model psychologists actually use, in a clean 120-question version with a proper breakdown of every facet.

Centuries of natural history books scanned page by page, including illustrations nobody has looked at in decades.

Cyberpunk progression game where the way forward is writing real JavaScript to automate your own hacking. Learning it is the game.

Anonymous celebrity riddles where readers do the detective work in the comments and are occasionally proved right.

Community for adding glitter, sparkles and animated hearts to photographs, still busily active long after the trend died.

The volunteer lightning detection network behind most live strike maps, with raw data and instructions for building your own receiver.

Sculpt a glossy blob with sliders for noise, light and iridescence, then leave it rotating and admire your handiwork.

Monkeys pop balloons along a fixed path, and the upgrade trees behind that sentence are deep enough to justify the reputation.

Browser Minecraft with party modes bolted on — parkour, bed wars, one-block survival — and multiplayer that joins in one click.

Roll a rectangular block across floating tiles into a hole, with switches placed to force you to think in three dimensions.

Several hundred properly licensed board games with the rules enforced for you, so nobody argues about whether that move was legal.

Ben Eater's flocking simulation with the three rules exposed as sliders, so you can break the flock deliberately.

Eleven absurd brushes — blobs, tentacles, exploding dots — that make the composition decisions for you the moment you move.

Physics sumo where everybody is a circle, the only verb is shove, and the arena keeps getting smaller until someone falls off.

A blog that has been finding the best browser escape and point-and-click games every week since 2005, and is still posting.

Endless listicles of art, design mishaps and comment-section drama, engineered to eat a lunch break whole.

The original boredom portal, still sorting thousands of time-wasters into categories with no discernible editorial filter.

The screensaver logo in full screen, with a counter for how many times it has hit the corner while you waited.

Code-breaking tools and a cipher identifier for when you have a string of nonsense and no idea what it is.

Plain, well-sorted illusion collection with the explanation directly underneath each one, from café walls to impossible triangles.

Tens of thousands of riddles, brain teasers and lateral thinking problems submitted by users since 1999.

Dual n-back, the working-memory drill psychologists keep arguing about, implemented properly and charted over time.

A scrappy free collection of brain teasers and n-back drills that has been quietly online since long before the app stores existed.

People staple bread to trees and photograph it. There is no deeper explanation available and no sign of it stopping.

A German board game world that has hosted Carcassonne and Puerto Rico since 2001, complete with a slightly baffling lobby.

Where the bridge world actually plays: free tables at every hour, tournaments, and teaching rooms of remarkable patience.

The write-draw-write chain game that predates the current crop, still running, still free and still producing pure nonsense.

Brown bears standing in an Alaskan waterfall catching salmon in mid-air, live from Katmai, and the reason Fat Bear Week exists.

One page per leak channel — WebGL, canvas, WebRTC, DNS — each showing precisely what your browser hands over without being asked.

Every recipe costed per serving and per batch, with step photos throughout. Built for people cooking against an actual number.

Weaponised arcade racing around an open city, with the loud handling model of a mid-2000s console game.

Enormous plain-text library explaining what every placement and aspect is supposed to mean, unpaywalled since the early 2000s.

The Second World War version of the same slow, sprawling map game, with research trees and alliances that rarely survive contact.

A breathing bubble with adjustable pace, sitting on a page that mercifully does not require the app to work.

A collage assembled entirely from GeoCities pages — every GIF, marquee and tiled background salvaged and put back to work.

Two near-identical interfaces, one of them subtly wrong. Getting past the third level takes an unreasonable amount of care.

Opens as ASCII candy counting up on a blank page and quietly becomes a full role-playing game with a sea, a shop and a dragon.

Thirty-odd card games with competent bots, no accounts and nothing covering the table. The default answer to fancying a game.

Cut-out cats rain down and bounce off the bottom of the screen, and you can grab one and fling it at the others.

A free endpoint that returns one cat fact per request, which is how every cat-facts prank bot ever built gets built.

Twenty years of forensic argument about how tall film stars really are, with photographic evidence and footwear analysis.

Estimated fortunes for anybody famous, sourced loosely, and impossible to stop clicking once you look up the first one.

The four-day jam game that grew into Celeste: thirty screens of very precise dashing, running in the page at PICO-8 resolution.

Anime avatar makers with genuinely good line art, including versions that output something usable as a profile picture.