Coffee break

Twenty-five years of accidentally poetic English on packaging and signage, photographed across East Asia.

Halo-styled arena shooter running in WebGL, with vehicles, sniping and remarkably few visible compromises.

Obsessive gallery of what strangers keep in their pockets, photographed from above and argued over at remarkable length.

Infinite pixel canvas anybody can paint on live, with no undo, no brief and no moderation queue worth mentioning.

Found VHS footage cut into collages by a collective that also owns most of the world's remaining copies of Jerry Maguire.

Design a creature from joints and muscles, then watch a genetic algorithm spend hundreds of generations teaching it to limp.

Hand-drawn-looking diagrams that somehow stay legible, with live collaboration and no account. The whiteboard for people who hate whiteboards.

Point-and-click cabinet of grotesque curiosities where every drawer you open contains a small, beautifully animated unpleasantness.

Philosophers dropped into absurd situations, with an explanatory footnote in case you skipped that seminar.

NASA's real-time 3D model of every mission in flight, letting you ride along with a probe on its actual trajectory.

Short, sourced facts arranged so one leads into the next. Built for the specific pleasure of learning something you can repeat.

Build a circuit and watch current move through it as coloured dots, with an oscilloscope available on any node.

Home repair guides with proper tool lists and honest time estimates, written for somebody already standing in front of the problem.

Build a machine from wheels and rods to push a ball into a zone, and accept that it will topple over the first nine times.

The official fantasy football game: free, enormous, and the reason several million people care deeply about a Wolves fixture.

US government training films liberated from federal vaults. Sincere, badly acted, and occasionally about surviving a nuclear attack.

Two dozen SVG generators in one place — noise, grain, blobs, dots, gradients, mesh — all exportable and all free.

Home of the format that turns text into large letters made of smaller letters, with the whole font archive attached.

British gift shop with a taste for the daft and mildly rude, plus the occasional genuinely good bit of kit hidden among it.

A fortnightly digest of measurable global progress on disease, energy and conservation, with a source for every claim.

Aircraft moving across a live map with routes, altitudes and speeds. Startling once you notice how much is up there at once.

Every direct flight from any airport in the world drawn on one map, which is the fastest way to plan an unreasonable journey.

A gentler descendant of Diep.io where you assemble a ring of petals around a flower and farm increasingly rude insects.

Animated bar chart races, scrollytelling and story maps built from a spreadsheet without writing any code.

Nathan Yau's long-running blog on charts done well and badly, plus his own studies of how a day gets spent.

Books you a silent video call with a stranger who also needs to work, which turns out to be startlingly effective.

Variable font sandbox where you drag the axes and watch weight, width and optical size move in real time.

Matches ingredients by shared aroma compounds, which is roughly how chocolate and blue cheese ended up on the same plate.

Plant a virtual tree that dies if you pick up your phone, which works on far more adults than anybody wants to admit.

Home-video horrors rescued from charity shops and skips, curated by two men with an unhealthy commitment to the format.

Properly licensed free downloads curated by radio stations, which is how you stop losing your videos to copyright claims.

Draw a track, then ride your own drawing on a BMX. Millions of user-made levels, most of them designed to be cruel.

Competitive FreeCell with timed deals and a global ranking, which should not work as a concept and completely does.

Answer vocabulary questions and the ad revenue goes to the UN World Food Programme. Running since 2007 and still counting grains.

Opens as a dismal educational maths game about a frog eating flies, and then keeps going somewhere else entirely. Say nothing more.

A million questions written and edited by volunteers since 1999, filed under categories nobody would ever think to commission.

A shelf of room-code party games — spy, drawing, word association, trivia — all free, all in one place, none needing an app.

The full arcade — hundreds of browser games sorted by type, all playable immediately with nothing to install.

Seven levels of talking a language model into revealing a password it was told to protect. The best hands-on lesson in prompt injection going.

Hans Rosling's animated bubble chart of the world, still the fastest cure for being wrong about global development.

Broken telephone with drawings: a sentence becomes a picture becomes a sentence, and the album at the end is the whole payoff.

Top-down shooter with class loadouts and destructible cover, still busy years after everybody stopped writing about it.

An interactive world atlas you can scrub year by year from 3000 BC, watching every border redraw itself.

Real-time fog-of-war conquest on a grid, one army tick every half second. Simple rules, brutal depth, matches under ten minutes.

Walks you through rebuilding classic algorithmic pieces — tiled lines, Joy Division, cubic disarray — one step at a time.

A genetic algorithm evolves two-dimensional cars across rough terrain while you watch generations fail forward.

A free flight simulator in the browser using satellite terrain for the entire planet, with real air traffic overhead.

Geometry, algebra and calculus tools in one place, plus a huge shared library of constructions others have built.