Rabbit hole

An encyclopedia of the world's writing systems, including the invented, the extinct and the barely attested.

Twenty years of large-format photography inside abandoned asylums, power stations and factories, catalogued site by site.

Gallery of Processing and p5.js sketches where every piece runs in the page and the source is right there to fork.

Oxford's open charts on poverty, energy, health and war, with the underlying data downloadable from every single one.

John McLeod's encyclopedia of card game rules, covering every regional variant of everything and settling every dispute.

Home of Submachine and Daymare Town, Mateusz Skutnik's sketched, wordless worlds built entirely out of corridors and quiet dread.

A database of essentially every named summit on Earth, with prominence figures, ascent logs and rankings that fuel very long arguments.

The longest-running games comic on the web, three strips a week since 1998, plus the posts that built an industry.

A crowd-voted encyclopaedia arguing over the MBTI and enneagram type of every fictional character and public figure in existence.

Every adoptable animal in a hundred thousand shelters, searchable by postcode, which is dangerous browsing after 11pm.

Two decades of the pixel art scene's best work, still curated by hand and still running weekly drawing challenges.

Thousands of American industrial, educational and advertising films, all public domain and all quietly extraordinary.

A medieval life simulator where you idle through jobs and skills, die of old age, and are reborn with a small head start.

A quantum computing textbook with spaced repetition built into the page, so what you read has a chance of staying.

Five thousand strips of indie-rock relationship comedy with sarcastic robots, updating every weekday since 2003.

The scene's main feed: databent photos, broken televisions and corrupted video, with the technique usually in the comments.

Horror fiction posted as though it were true, under a rule that commenters must play along. The good threads run for weeks.

A browser railway empire where the whole server races to reach the same era of engines before anybody else does.

The obsessive's music database, where every release is rated, charted and argued over by people with extremely firm opinions.

A snarkier reference work covering pseudoscience, conspiracy theories and the people making a living from them.

A Wikipedia article with every meaningful word blacked out; guess words to reveal them until you can name the subject.

The definitive index of American roadside oddities: the giant fibreglass animals, the museums devoted to exactly one thing.

Archive of notable animation cuts, tagged by the individual animator who drew them. Studying the craft one sequence at a time.

Daily gag strips about science, philosophy and human awfulness, each hiding an extra panel behind the red button.

Collaborative fiction dressed as containment paperwork for anomalous objects, written by thousands of people in one clinical deadpan.

Recipes that explain the science first and then tell you what to do. The food-lab pieces are why it has the reputation it has.

Thousands of full-screen graphics experiments, each one a few hundred lines of maths you can read and edit live.

A persistent economic simulation where thousands of players genuinely supply each other, so prices move for real reasons.

Forty logic puzzles on one page, each generated fresh and each solvable by pure reasoning. The interface is ancient and it does not matter.

The newsroom that trains other newsrooms to cover responses instead of problems, with a searchable tracker of the results.

Hundreds of thousands of user-made timed quizzes: name every element, every country, every Friends character. The genre's warehouse.

Long-form serialised fiction with a reader built for actually reading — chapter memory, no pop-ups, no interruptions.

Real-time First World War grand strategy played over weeks against dozens of other people, most of whom will lie to you.

Breed meat, then drones, then queens, then things with far too many legs. The exponential curve is the entire narrative.

Ascending through increasingly abstract mathematics, with a community that treats optimising it as a competitive spreadsheet sport.

World atlas of traditional dishes and the specific places that still make them properly. Endless, and reliably makes you hungry.

Thousands of browser-playable parser and choice games, plus Quest, the authoring tool most of them were written in.

Everything people typed at each other on bulletin board systems before the web existed, preserved as plain text and left open.

Wiki for an infinite office nobody built, mapped level by level in damp yellow carpet by contributors who take it extremely seriously.

Millions of pages of declassified government documents prised out by freedom of information requests, free to browse.

The gentle way into fragment shaders, with every example editable in the page and redrawing itself as you type.

Profiles of thousands of American cold case disappearances, written and maintained by one person for decades.

A volunteer register of unidentified remains and missing people, matched by amateurs who keep on succeeding.

A scholarly reference to the whole genre, free to read, covering authors nobody else ever bothered to write up.

Complete texts, timelines and scholarship for a writer whose entire output is public domain, on a site that has barely changed since 1994.

Every interactive fiction file anyone thought worth keeping since 1992, in a directory listing that has never once been redesigned.

A catalogue of films, broadcasts and recordings that are known to have existed and cannot now be found. Some entries get solved.

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