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Deep archives, long games and sites with no natural stopping point. Open these when you have the time to lose.
214 sites · page 1 of 5
A countdown of a thousand small good things, from the cold side of the pillow to popping bubble wrap, written daily for years.
The meme feed that reposts everything eventually, sorted into channels so you can choose your particular poison.
Starts as one button beside a dying fire and quietly becomes something much larger. Best played without reading anything about it first.
Enormous free MUD with hundreds of areas and a browser client, so you can be killed by a wandering mob without installing anything.
Text MUD running continuously since 1997, with a player-run economy, real politics and a genuinely intimidating combat system.
Browser MMO that has shipped a story release nearly every week since 2008 and looks exactly as Flash-era as you remember.
Text adventure with no script at all: the model invents the world as you type at it, and will happily follow you somewhere absurd.
Janelle Shane feeds neural networks recipes, paint names and knitting patterns, then reports the wreckage with real affection.
Buy aircraft, plot routes and slowly discover that fuel price is the only variable that ever really mattered.
A famously unforgiving airline simulation that keeps running in real time whether or not you are logged in to watch.
Professional reviews, genre family trees and similar-artist chains inherited from the print era, which is how you get from one band to fifty.
Free MUD with multiclassing, a web client and a player base that has been levelling the same characters since the nineties.
The prestige-layer masterpiece: reset everything for a multiplier, then reset the resets, until the numbers stop having names.
The preprint server where most physics, maths and computer science appears long before a journal touches it.
Decades of ASCII drawings sorted by subject, from cats to warships, every one of them ready to copy and paste.
Wiki of some seventy thousand birth charts with sourced birth times, each graded by how reliable the underlying record is.
A gazetteer of the world's odd corners — bone chapels, abandoned observatories, restaurants built inside caves.
The industry's awards site, and the fastest way to find out what the ambitious end of web design is doing this month.
Engineering essays with live diagrams you drag — gears, lenses, GPS, sound — each the clearest thing ever written on its subject.
Run a basketball franchise through thirty simulated seasons in an afternoon: drafts, trades, contracts and ageing, all free.
Eight hours on the networks that existed before the internet reached homes, released free by the person who made it.
India's monuments, crafts and regional history laid out as something you explore rather than something you revise.
Centuries of natural history books scanned page by page, including illustrations nobody has looked at in decades.
Cyberpunk progression game where the way forward is writing real JavaScript to automate your own hacking. Learning it is the game.
A blog that has been finding the best browser escape and point-and-click games every week since 2005, and is still posting.
Endless listicles of art, design mishaps and comment-section drama, engineered to eat a lunch break whole.
Where the bridge world actually plays: free tables at every hour, tournaments, and teaching rooms of remarkable patience.
The Second World War version of the same slow, sprawling map game, with research trees and alliances that rarely survive contact.
Opens as ASCII candy counting up on a blank page and quietly becomes a full role-playing game with a sea, a shop and a dragon.
Twenty years of forensic argument about how tall film stars really are, with photographic evidence and footwear analysis.
Estimated fortunes for anybody famous, sourced loosely, and impossible to stop clicking once you look up the first one.
Nearly a million recorded games from four centuries of chess, replayable move by move, with the real arguments in the comments.
Long branching novels where your stats matter and the prose does not embarrass itself; a good number play free in the browser.
A history map with a timeline slider, layered with rulers, religions, battles and linked encyclopedia articles.
Scanned American newspapers from 1770 to 1963, full-text searchable, which is a dangerous thing to discover on a weeknight.
Click monsters, hire heroes to click for you, then ascend for souls. The clicker that dragged the whole genre onto Steam.
Petabytes of crawled web pages released free for anyone to analyse. Most of the language models you have used started here.
Interactive models of what complexity science likes best — epidemics, flocking, synchronisation, forest fires.
Risk on hundreds of user-drawn maps, played slowly against a community that has been arguing about dice odds since 2006.
Click the cookie, buy grandmas, buy portals, accidentally summon something. The game that turned incrementals into a genre.
Blind items published daily since 2006, unverifiable by design, and treated as scripture by a very large comment section.
The tidied-up archive of internet horror folklore, from Slender Man to the stories a school friend swore blind were true.
Recreate a target image in as few characters of CSS as possible, then watch somebody do it in half as many.
A hundred consecutive interface prompts delivered by email — the sign-up flow, the 404 page, the calculator, day by day.
Long, carefully researched articles on forgotten disasters, obsessives and near misses from history.
Space MMO from 2006 still full of people mining, shooting and complaining about the economy, all inside one browser tab.
Over a hundred thousand high-resolution scanned maps, georeferenced and free to zoom into more or less indefinitely.
Field reports and photographs of American shopping centres in decline, written by people who cared about this long before it was an aesthetic.
One button, one detour. Press it as often as you like.