Good on a phone

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.

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.

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, get them back visibly identical and roughly seventy per cent smaller. Twenty files at a time, free.

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.

Bridge, euchre, hearts and spades against bots or friends, on a table that behaves the way a real one does.

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.

Fly down a rotating tunnel of coloured obstacles quickly enough that your eyes take over the steering from your brain.

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 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.

You are an AI told to make paperclips, and you follow that instruction all the way to its conclusion. Four hours, one button to begin.

Uno against bots or friends, with the draw-four arguments fully intact and no cards to lose under the sofa.

Flips your sentence using Unicode lookalikes, so it survives a paste into anywhere that accepts plain text.

Where teenagers make the quizzes: which sad indie song are you, which Greek deity would pity you. Anyone can build one in minutes.

A small publisher of deliberately pointless web projects, including several gag sites you have probably been sent.

Curiously awesome products sold through absurd demonstration videos, most of which are more entertaining than the item itself.

Weather models rendered beautifully enough to watch for their own sake, with layers for wind, rain, snow depth and wave height.

Ship positions and port arrivals on a fast, uncluttered map, ideal for watching a delivery of your own crawl across an ocean.

Home-taped VHS uploaded wholesale to the Internet Archive, adverts, tracking lines and accidental recordings included.

Two decades of hand-picked short films, still the most reliable place online to find something beautiful in nine minutes.

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.