The old internet

Fly out through a mapped model of our stellar neighbourhood until the Sun is one unremarkable dot among thousands.

A countdown of a thousand small good things, from the cold side of the pillow to popping bubble wrap, written daily for years.

The blunt one-minute word test that has served as the internet's default words-per-minute benchmark for over a decade.

The Myers-Briggs-flavoured test everybody has taken, with a four-letter verdict and profile pages that are unnervingly specific.

The meme feed that reposts everything eventually, sorted into channels so you can choose your particular poison.

Ten sliders — rain, thunder, waves, birds, coffee — mixed on a single page with nothing else on it at all.

Text MUD running continuously since 1997, with a player-run economy, real politics and a genuinely intimidating combat system.

One of the oldest portals still standing, from the era when a game loading in thirty seconds counted as instant.

Browser MMO that has shipped a story release nearly every week since 2008 and looks exactly as Flash-era as you remember.

Waterhole cameras in southern African reserves, running since the nineties, where nothing happens for an hour and then everything does.

A famously unforgiving airline simulation that keeps running in real time whether or not you are logged in to watch.

Professional reviews, genre family trees and similar-artist chains inherited from the print era, which is how you get from one band to fifty.

Vast crowd-sourced recipe database where the comments are the actual feature — thousands of people telling you what to change.

Community-built soundscapes of unhinged specificity, including several hundred separate takes on the Hogwarts common room.

Obsessively detailed database going down to individual episode credits and file hashes. Built for cataloguers, not for browsing.

Industry news since 1998, plus an encyclopedia with staff and voice credits that nothing else in the space matches.

Recommendation-led catalogue with if-you-liked-this chains going back to 2001, plus legal streaming links for each title.

The spaced repetition flashcard system serious learners settle on, with shared decks for nearly every subject.

Thousands of themed collections built by libraries and museums, each one somebody's deliberate decision about what to keep.

Takes a permanent snapshot of a page on demand, including ones the Wayback Machine will not capture. Useful when a page is about to change.

A survivor of the Flash era that converted its best strategy and adventure titles rather than letting them quietly die.

The Portuguese web archive, notable for full-text search across its whole history rather than only address lookup.

The preprint server where most physics, maths and computer science appears long before a journal touches it.

The Swiss Ephemeris people: the technical reference the whole field quietly runs on, plus free charts and very long interpretation texts.

Susan Miller's famously long monthly forecasts — several thousand words per sign, published without fail since 1995.

One astronomy image a day since 1995, each with a paragraph from an actual astronomer and an archive going back decades.

A gazetteer of the world's odd corners — bone chapels, abandoned observatories, restaurants built inside caves.

Two decades of other people's terrible family portraits, submitted willingly and captioned by the people in them.

Filter by genre, format and city to find records sold directly by the people who made them, with full streams before you buy anything.

Eight hours on the networks that existed before the internet reached homes, released free by the person who made 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A stocked chemistry bench in the browser where you can mix reagents and get it badly wrong at no cost.

Chess tactics training with a rating that goes down, plus an endgame trainer that reveals exactly how much you do not know.