The old internet

Bounces a sentence between English and Japanese until the two versions agree, which they rarely do politely.

The browser strategy game half your school was awake at 3am for, still running, still fundamentally about raiding villages.

Medieval village building and tribe politics from 2003, where the real game is coordinating twenty players inside a spreadsheet.

Australia's national archive of newspapers, websites and photographs, digitised back to 1803 and open without an account.

The big one: broadcast radio, sport and podcasts from most of the world, free with adverts and no account needed to listen.

Searchable captions across millions of hours of broadcast news, which makes it possible to find the exact moment something was said.

A taxonomy of every storytelling device ever used, cross-linked so densely that leaving takes actual discipline.

The tool behind half the interactive fiction of the past decade, running in the browser and learnable in about twenty minutes.

Races you against real people typing the same passage, which is the only known method of making a typing test tense.

The British Library's record of the UK web, collected under legal deposit — including sites their owners deleted years ago.

The community record of Cicada 3301, the recruitment puzzle whose final book has still never been deciphered.

An x86 emulator in JavaScript that will boot Linux, FreeBSD or Windows 98 in a tab. Genuinely should not be possible.

Well over a hundred thousand scanned advertisements sorted by decade and subject. A very direct record of what people were told to want.

Daily infographics on markets, commodities and demographics, designed to be understood in a single glance.

A dictionary drawn as a spring-loaded graph, with related meanings pulling away from each word you type.

Which of the world's volcanoes are erupting today, each with webcams, seismic charts and a running diary of what the mountain has been doing.

Four-panel strips whose punchline usually involves death, drawn by two Germans with impeccable comic timing.

Risk against real people across hundreds of maps, played in one sitting or over weeks of daily turns. Formerly Warzone and WarLight.

Irish satire with no interest in restraint, regularly mistaken for real reporting by people who should know better.

Forecasts built on a network of tens of thousands of amateur weather stations, so the reading is often from somebody on your actual street.

Billions of generated puzzles in a layout untouched since 2005, which is precisely why it still loads before you finish blinking.

Software-defined radio receivers around the world you can tune through a browser, listening to shortwave through somebody else's aerial.

The long-running forum where amateur investigators pick apart cold cases, for better and occasionally much worse.

Which record a sample came from, who covered whom and where that drum break originally lived, with the two tracks played side by side.

Instructions for very nearly anything, illustrated in that unmistakable cartoon style. The artwork alone justifies the visit.

The free library of source texts — treaties, speeches and out-of-copyright novels, transcribed and proofread by hand.

A dictionary of every word in every language, including etymologies, declension tables and regional slang.

Answers computed rather than retrieved: integrals, unit conversions, orbital mechanics and the nutritional content of a Mars bar.

Thousands of interactive maths and science notebooks contributed over two decades, each one a single slider-driven idea.

Victorian engravings cut apart and given modern dialogue, producing jokes no other format could quite deliver.

Crazy golf on a floating landscape that unfolds into a new course between shots. Worth playing for the transitions alone.

A dictionary showing real usage, related words and examples pulled from the wild rather than agreed by committee.

Readings from thousands of air monitoring stations worldwide on one map, colour-coded from a calm green to a genuinely alarming maroon.

Free indicators for every country going back decades, with charts, maps and bulk downloads on each series.

Over a hundred solitaire variants with proper undo, statistics and card backs from 2007. Still the most complete one going.

Live counters for population, emissions, water use and books published, ticking faster than is entirely comfortable.

A browser planetarium stitched from real survey data, letting you pan the whole sky in visible light, infrared or radio.

Recordings of very nearly every bird call on earth, uploaded by amateurs and searchable by species, country and even call type.

Stick figures on romance, sarcasm, maths and language, with a second joke in the alt text of every single strip.

A vast, barely filtered pile of browser games including a great many Flash-era oddities kept alive by an emulator.

Nonprofit solutions journalism on climate, housing and democracy — more sober than cheerful, but pointed the same way.

Infinite shared canvas of plain text where anyone can type anywhere. Scroll far enough and you find things nobody meant you to read.

The moral foundations questionnaires run by the psychologists who published them, plotting you against the wider research sample.

The Norwegian met office's forecast, famously accurate across Scandinavia and unusually calm about admitting uncertainty everywhere else.

You can do anything at Zombo.com. The welcome message has been loading since 1999 and it has never once explained itself.

Newborn animals from zoos and aquariums worldwide, with their names, weights and the keepers' notes attached.

The sequel quilt, darker and stranger than the first, still folding into itself with no end and no explanation.

A space shooter where you destroy incoming words by typing them, and rising panic is the entire difficulty curve.