Good on a phone

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.

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.