Safe at your desk

An ASCII horse whose legs continue for as long as you are willing to keep scrolling, which is longer than you think.

Twenty-five years of accidentally poetic English on packaging and signage, photographed across East Asia.

A daily firehose of new escape games from Japanese and indie developers, with walkthroughs in the comments for when you stall.

Fifty million digitised items from European museums, libraries and archives, behind one search box.

Halo-styled arena shooter running in WebGL, with vehicles, sniping and remarkably few visible compromises.

Thousands of strangers claim to have dreamt the same face. Read the whole thing: the explanation is better than the hoax.

All 2^122 version-four UUIDs listed in order with a working search box, on a page that should not be able to exist.

Obsessive gallery of what strangers keep in their pockets, photographed from above and argued over at remarkable length.

Infinite pixel canvas anybody can paint on live, with no undo, no brief and no moderation queue worth mentioning.

Writing community from 1999 where each subject gets personal essays instead of an encyclopaedia entry, and the tone never settles.

Design a creature from joints and muscles, then watch a genetic algorithm spend hundreds of generations teaching it to limp.

Idle evolution from primordial soup to interstellar empire, with dozens of species branches and an enormous technology tree.

Hand-drawn-looking diagrams that somehow stay legible, with live collaboration and no account. The whiteboard for people who hate whiteboards.

Philosophers dropped into absurd situations, with an explanatory footnote in case you skipped that seminar.

Search any Android app and see the tracking libraries baked into it. The results for the popular ones are routinely grim.

Paste a terrifying shell command and it pulls the whole thing apart, annotating every flag from the relevant man page.

The hub for playable posts — effectively the index for the entire genre of learn-by-fiddling essays.

The largest collection of live nature cams anywhere: bear falls, puppy rooms, osprey nests and coral reefs, all free and always running.

An idle game built on actual differential equations, with optional theory levels that teach you the mathematics as you climb.

NASA's real-time 3D model of every mission in flight, letting you ride along with a probe on its actual trajectory.

Home of the GROW games, where you choose an order for a handful of objects and then watch a tiny world assemble or fail.

Ugly, ancient, and still better than everything else at cutting, resizing, reversing and optimising a GIF.

Short, sourced facts arranged so one leads into the next. Built for the specific pleasure of learning something you can repeat.

Full-screen fake update screens for every operating system, including the blue one, with a bar that never finishes.

London has been dragged underground by bats, and the writing is far better than that sentence suggests. Free, endless, faintly sinister.

Accurately drawn birds swearing at each other about territory, mating and the general indignity of being a bird.

Build a circuit and watch current move through it as coloured dots, with an oscilloscope available on any node.

Home repair guides with proper tool lists and honest time estimates, written for somebody already standing in front of the problem.

Who was born today, ranked by fame, drawn from a database heavy with teenagers famous on exactly one platform.

Tens of thousands of fan-run wikis, each documenting one fictional universe in wholly unreasonable depth.

Build a machine from wheels and rods to push a ball into a zone, and accept that it will topple over the first nine times.

The official fantasy football game: free, enormous, and the reason several million people care deeply about a Wolves fixture.

A fidget spinner you flick with the mouse, with physics good enough that people leave it running in a spare tab.

Two dozen SVG generators in one place — noise, grain, blobs, dots, gradients, mesh — all exportable and all free.

Home of the format that turns text into large letters made of smaller letters, with the whole font archive attached.

British gift shop with a taste for the daft and mildly rude, plus the occasional genuinely good bit of kit hidden among it.

A toy about synchronisation — a few hundred blinking dots that agree on a rhythm with no conductor anywhere.

A fortnightly digest of measurable global progress on disease, energy and conservation, with a source for every claim.

A flag revealed six squares at a time, which sounds straightforward until you meet the fourth consecutive tricolour.

The pipe game its own creator pulled from the app stores for being too addictive, rebuilt and still ruining afternoons.

A preservation project that has rescued more than a hundred thousand Flash games and animations from deletion, all playable.

Aircraft moving across a live map with routes, altitudes and speeds. Startling once you notice how much is up there at once.

Flight tracking with the operational detail attached: delays, diversions, taxi times and the filed route rather than a tidy curve.

Every direct flight from any airport in the world drawn on one map, which is the fastest way to plan an unreasonable journey.

Every aircraft in the sky right now on one map. Click any of them for the route, the aircraft type and how far it still has to go.

The two-person studio behind the entire Papa's restaurant series, with the back catalogue and the odd non-cooking game too.

A browser home screen with a clock, timer, lofi and a to-do list, arranged to look calmer than your actual desktop.

A gentler descendant of Diep.io where you assemble a ring of petals around a flower and farm increasingly rude insects.