The old internet

Popular science headlines with the volume turned up, handy for the fact you half-remember reading somewhere.

A calendar of every conjunction, eclipse and meteor shower coming up, with charts drawn for your own location.

Every plant and animal anybody has photographed and posted, mapped, with a community that will identify your mystery beetle within hours.

Dress beatboxers in different outfits and each one adds a loop, building a full a cappella track by drag and drop.

David McCandless's poster-grade infographics on everything from relative drug harms to the meanings of colours.

Step-by-step build guides for anything from a bookshelf to a plasma cutter, written by the people who actually made the thing.

The annual competition that decides what interactive fiction is this year, with every entry free to play in the browser.

Books, films, software, concerts and the web itself, archived at a scale no other institution has come close to.

A vast and aggressively plain archive of religious and mythological texts, essentially unchanged since the old web.

Answers the question in one word, correctly, in ninety languages, and has done every single day since 2009.

A marketplace of language tutors giving one-to-one video lessons at wildly varying prices and standards.

Every clue from every episode of the American quiz institution, transcribed by fans back to 1984 and playable board by board.

The review site that effectively invented walkthrough culture for escape games, with an archive going back nearly two decades.

Cleaner and more factual than its rivals, strongest on geography and history, and mercifully free of which-character quizzes.

Net art from 1995 that looks precisely like your computer failing. View the source: the mess on screen is hiding the actual work.

Straightforward celebrity photo blogging updated hourly, with none of the editorialising the rest of the genre insists on.

Japanese home cooking explained for people without a Japanese pantry, with substitutions that do not quietly ruin the dish.

Dice-based territory conquest at a table of five strangers, where what happens in the chat matters more than the actual odds.

Teaches touch typing by generating fake words from the letters you keep fumbling, rather than making you copy out prose.

Stick-figure RPG that has been landing daily jokes since 2003, wrapped around a combat and item system far deeper than the drawings imply.

The one most people name as the best tower defence: four tower types, hero units and levels that reward replanning.

The reference desk of internet culture, with sourced origins and dates for jokes you never knew had a paper trail.

Start with one enormous dot; every pass of the cursor splits it into four, until the pixels resolve into a picture.

What remains of the great Flash portal, plus a badge system that once made people finish games out of pure spite.

Jason Kottke has been posting the interesting bits of the web since 1998, with no algorithm involved at any point.

Gossip written as media criticism, tracking how celebrity stories get placed and who stands to benefit from the placing.

Two decades of listening data turned into recommendations, similar-artist chains and neighbours with suspiciously identical taste.

French satire named by scrambling Le Figaro, and taken seriously by French social media with depressing regularity.

Log films, rate them, and read reviews by people trying to be funny rather than professional. The social network cinema deserved.

Photographs, manuscripts, sheet music and film from the largest library in the world, mostly free to reuse.

Thematic collections captured around elections, disasters and cultural moments, chosen by librarians rather than by a crawler.

Public domain books read aloud by volunteers, free to download, uneven in quality and endless in supply.

Free chess with no adverts, no account required and an analysis engine better than the paid ones, funded entirely by donations.

Daily tips on doing ordinary things slightly better, running since 2005 and still occasionally genuinely surprising.

Draw a track and watch a sledder ride it, a physics toy people have spent years turning into hand-drawn music videos.

Read and listen to real material while tapping unknown words, which quietly become your review deck.

Thousands of taper-recorded live concerts released with the bands' blessing, going back to the reel-to-reel era and free to stream.

Daily science news with a weakness for the strange finds — mummies, deep sea oddities, cosmic near misses.

The looser, stranger sibling of the main lost media wiki, with more speculation and considerably more unresolved threads.

The best-known brain-training subscription, with a free daily set of games and rather a lot of graphs about your own decline.

Korean home cooking taught with video for everything, including how to make the kimchi rather than quietly buy a jar of it.

The maker movement's own magazine: projects, tool reviews and the long-running argument about what counts as making something.

The manga-side release tracker, covering scanlation status and licensing across tens of thousands of series since 2001.

Drops you on a random road somewhere on Earth in Street View and leaves you to work out where you are, or simply wander off down it.

Live positions of the world's merchant fleet, container ships down to tugs, most vessels with photographs taken by shore spotters.

Scanned film and broadcasting trade magazines going back to 1904, searchable in full text. The industry writing about itself, live.

The Star Trek wiki, maintained with the rigour of a national archive and roughly the same word count.

Vocabulary drills built around clips of native speakers saying the phrase in an actual street.