Good on a phone

A hand-maintained index of free books online, run out of Penn since before search engines were any good.

Five solutions-focused stories a day, from a team that has been running this beat since the mid-nineties.

A stick-figure Dungeons and Dragons party in a story that turned genuinely epic somewhere around strip four hundred.

Timeline readings that describe periods rather than days, phrased as amateur psychology rather than fortune telling.

Beautifully drawn strips that set up a sweet premise and then take it somewhere very dark in the final panel.

Sixty-odd propositions place you on economic and social axes, then show you exactly where Thatcher and Gandhi ended up.

Essays and picture galleries drawn from the strangest corners of out-of-copyright print, film and illustration.

Visual essays answering questions nobody commissioned, like which pop lyricists have the largest working vocabulary.

Campaigns for the right to repair and runs community fixing parties, publishing the data on what breaks and why.

Australian satire in short sharp headlines, which is roughly the national attention span for domestic politics.

Scroll outwards from a human to the observable universe, with each step making the previous one look absurd.

A team counted every squirrel in Central Park and published the data, the maps and a full illustrated report on the findings.

Cecil Adams' archive of exhaustively answered daft questions, invented decades before you could just ask the internet.

Flick the switch on. A small hand reaches out and turns it off again. That is the entire website and it is somehow enough.

One button, one random pointless website, no explanation offered or needed. The site that turned this whole genre into a genre.

Type anything at all and watch it drift upward and dissolve. Nothing is stored, nothing is sent, nothing can be recovered.

Nearly a trillion saved web pages. Paste any address, pick a year, and see what was there — the single most important archive online.

One family documenting Chinese home cooking across two generations, with real detail on ingredients and what you can substitute.

A painting that zooms into itself forever, assembled by a dozen artists so carefully that the seams never quite show.

A huge, searchable index of AI tools sorted by the task they do, from writing cover letters to cleaning up audio. Useful and a little dizzying.

Live positions and finder charts for planets, comets and asteroids, updated continuously and free of clutter.

Pour coloured sand into layered dunes with the mouse, which is considerably more absorbing than it has any right to be.

Daily gift catalogue for things nobody needs, and the reason several of your friends own a novelty tap they never use.

Fifty years of home renovation broken into how-tos, with actual tradespeople explaining why the obvious shortcut fails.

One photorealistic portrait of somebody who has never existed, regenerated on every refresh. The page that started the whole genre.

Invented dictionary entries complete with etymology and a usage example, none of them real words. Several of them deserve to be.

World clocks, time-zone converters, sunrise and moon times, calendars and countdowns, all on one long-running and reliably accurate site.

A photograph from the last century that you place on both a map and a timeline, which is much harder than either alone.

Wikipedia's calmly written schedule of everything still to happen, ending long after the last star has gone out.

Reverse image search that finds the oldest copy of a picture rather than visually similar ones. The tool for tracing where a photo began.

Cast, catch, sell, upgrade the line, cast deeper. The loop is completely transparent and it still takes forty minutes off you.

A rescue that livestreams its foster kittens and feral colonies around the clock, with vets narrating in the chat.

Drag in PNGs and JPEGs and they come back far smaller with no visible difference. Nothing else to learn.

A daily five-minute roundup of tech, science and programming news, with every issue also readable on the website.

The outlet that breaks the story first and considers taste afterwards, with a documented record of being right.

Reddit's fact firehose, where each post is one verified surprise with the source link attached underneath.

Scanned cereal boxes going back decades, with full career histories for the mascots, maintained purely for its own sake.

Text-based crime MMO running since 2004, where the market, the gyms and the prison are all operated by other extremely committed players.

Tap any key in rhythm and it plays the next chunk of Clair de Lune, so timing is the only skill actually required.

Match-three fused with tower defence, so every swap you make is also the wave you are currently surviving.

Paste a single screenshot and it names the anime, the episode and the exact timestamp. Unreasonably accurate for something free.

Guess the country from a treemap of what it exports, which turns out to be an oddly precise national fingerprint.

Tracks what you have watched across every service and tells you which episode is next in the series you abandoned in March.

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.

Get from one country to another by naming every country in between, with the shortest workable route scoring best.

Drops you into a field recording from a forest somewhere on earth, tells you which forest, then offers you another.

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