Safe at your desk

Risk on hundreds of user-drawn maps, played slowly against a community that has been arguing about dice odds since 2006.

Guess the secret word and be told only how semantically close you got. Rank 4,000 feels like progress, and it very much is not.

Home of Conway's Game of Life — pattern archive, wiki and a board for setting your own cells running.

Click the cookie, buy grandmas, buy portals, accidentally summon something. The game that turned incrementals into a genre.

Recipes laid out as a table of operations instead of prose, so you can see at a glance what combines with what and when.

Generates hero images — gradients, particles, triangles, topography — at whatever resolution you need, free to download.

The site every school network forgot to block, still hosting Run 3, Fireboy and Watergirl and almost no actual mathematics.

Chrome, flames and bevelled gradients — the 2003 logo generator, still online and still producing exactly that.

Hit the space bar for a five-colour palette, lock the ones you like, hit it again. The whole tool is that loop.

Nest and feeder cams run by the Cornell Lab, with ornithologists in the chat explaining what the bird is doing and why it matters.

One button that adds unicorns and rainbows to any web page, solving a problem that has never once been reported.

Upload any file and receive a genuinely corrupted version back. Built for missing deadlines, used mostly for art.

The same premise with different flavours of damage — choose the format and how thoroughly you want it ruined.

The EFF's test showing how uniquely identifiable your browser is from fonts, plugins and screen size alone. Most people are one in millions.

Blind items published daily since 2006, unverifiable by design, and treated as scripture by a very large comment section.

The biggest browser arcade going, with genuinely decent HTML5 ports and a search that mostly finds the game you meant.

A few hundred browser escape rooms in one filtered shelf, all running in the tab with nothing to install and nothing to buy.

The entire tower defence shelf in one place, sorted by how many people are currently playing, none of it requiring an account.

The tidied-up archive of internet horror folklore, from Slender Man to the stories a school friend swore blind were true.

Reader-submitted horror stories with narrated versions, sorted so you can pick your poison: rituals, dolls, or something in the loft.

Scores films for you by finding users whose past ratings track yours, then weighting their opinions. Recommendation with the maths shown.

Translates a cron expression into plain English as you type it, then tells you when it will next fire. Ends a very specific argument.

Wordle in reverse: you are handed the green and yellow clues and have to reconstruct the guesses that could have produced them.

Frogger with better manners: hop a chicken across roads, rivers and railway lines until the inevitable lorry.

An explorable on how ideas and riots spread through a social network, with the contagion thresholds under your control.

Where every cruise ship in the world currently is, with deck plans and itineraries attached, for reasons entirely your own.

Chain encoders and classical ciphers together and watch text transform between formats at each step.

Builds a gradient visually and hands over the CSS, including the awkward multi-stop and radial cases.

Recreate a target image in as few characters of CSS as possible, then watch somebody do it in half as many.

Sugar-coated filler text for wireframes, with sliders for exactly how sweet and how long the nonsense should be.

The volunteer-edited web directory that outlived DMOZ, still organising the internet into a category tree by hand.

Tower defence from the villain's side, defending your gems from heroes using demons, orcs and the undead.

GCHQ's public knife for decoding and decrypting data, built by dragging operations into a pipeline.

A hundred consecutive interface prompts delivered by email — the sign-up flow, the 404 page, the calculator, day by day.

Long, carefully researched articles on forgotten disasters, obsessives and near misses from history.

Screenshots of manipulative interfaces caught in the wild, named and dissected. Grimly entertaining reading.

Space MMO from 2006 still full of people mining, shooting and complaining about the economy, all inside one browser tab.

A weekly newsletter of unusual public datasets, with an archive of thousands you had no idea were collected.

The charting tool most newsrooms quietly rely on, free at the sizes any one person will ever need.

Over a hundred thousand high-resolution scanned maps, georeferenced and free to zoom into more or less indefinitely.

Several hundred cipher, code and puzzle solvers in one place, from Caesar shifts to crossword pattern matching.

Field reports and photographs of American shopping centres in decline, written by people who cared about this long before it was an aesthetic.

Fast browser shooter with no account and no download: click, spawn, and get eliminated by somebody considerably better.

Harry Brignull's catalogue of interfaces built to trick people, complete with a hall of shame and the resulting case law.

Start as a shrimp, eat, evolve into something with teeth, and repeat in an ocean full of players doing exactly the same thing.

Google's hallucinating network turned into a service, still perfectly capable of putting dog faces into absolutely everything.

Fly a helicopter, wall off territory with towers, then defend the shape you just drew from everybody else.

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