Rabbit hole

Essays and picture galleries drawn from the strangest corners of out-of-copyright print, film and illustration.

Visual essays answering questions nobody commissioned, like which pop lyricists have the largest working vocabulary.

Ripped sprite sheets from thousands of games, sorted by console — half reference library, half nostalgia trap.

Aggregates hundreds of critics' polls into a ranked thousand greatest films. Deeply unfashionable design, entirely unmatched rigour.

Text-based crime MMO running since 2004, where the market, the gyms and the prison are all operated by other extremely committed players.

The browser strategy game half your school was awake at 3am for, still running, still fundamentally about raiding villages.

Medieval village building and tribe politics from 2003, where the real game is coordinating twenty players inside a spreadsheet.

Send tiny creatures up an infinite tower, die, come back stronger. Years of content behind an interface that gives no quarter.

Australia's national archive of newspapers, websites and photographs, digitised back to 1803 and open without an account.

Plotter art drawn by a virtual turtle in a hundred-odd lines of JavaScript, with everybody's source code on display.

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.

Vast unofficial archive of avant-garde film, sound and writing, run on no budget whatsoever and hosted like it is still 1998.

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.

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

Well over a hundred thousand scanned advertisements sorted by decade and subject. A very direct record of what people were told to want.

A business simulation MMO run at a genuinely grim level of detail, with real competition for the same finite customers.

New York Magazine's pop-culture desk, where the recaps and power rankings are better written than the shows deserve.

Very long illustrated essays on artificial intelligence, procrastination and the Fermi paradox, drawn in deliberately bad stick figures.

Risk against real people across hundreds of maps, played in one sitting or over weeks of daily turns. Formerly Warzone and WarLight.

Screenshots of thousands of websites from 1991 onward, arranged so you can watch entire interface conventions appear and die.

The long-running forum where amateur investigators pick apart cold cases, for better and occasionally much worse.

A relationship graph of everybody famous, cross-referenced far past the point of reason and updated constantly.

Which record a sample came from, who covered whom and where that drum break originally lived, with the two tracks played side by side.

A vast library of freely licensed photos, maps, diagrams and sound files, each with its licence spelled out. The picture shelf behind Wikipedia.

Live safari drives broadcast twice a day from South African reserves, with guides answering viewer questions over the radio as they go.

Roughly a hundred thousand Winamp skins, all loadable in the browser. An enormous accidental record of amateur graphic design.

Stick figures on romance, sarcasm, maths and language, with a second joke in the alt text of every single strip.

The same deep management sim rebuilt for American football, baseball and hockey, all free and all running in the browser.