🧠 Brainy

Catalogue of impossible figures, ambiguous objects and Escher-adjacent architecture, kept up by one very devoted collector.

A calendar of every conjunction, eclipse and meteor shower coming up, with charts drawn for your own location.

Every plant and animal anybody has photographed and posted, mapped, with a community that will identify your mystery beetle within hours.

Numbers-heavy tower defence with endless mode, research trees and the general energy of a very well-kept spreadsheet.

David McCandless's poster-grade infographics on everything from relative drug harms to the meanings of colours.

The annual competition that decides what interactive fiction is this year, with every entry free to play in the browser.

Books, films, software, concerts and the web itself, archived at a scale no other institution has come close to.

Archived research papers, including preprints and journals that have since folded, kept readable rather than merely cited.

A vast and aggressively plain archive of religious and mythological texts, essentially unchanged since the old web.

Where interactive fiction authors argue about parser design, post works in progress and review each other with alarming thoroughness.

A stock market simulator with real prices and imaginary money, which is very much the correct order to learn that in.

Every clue from every episode of the American quiz institution, transcribed by fans back to 1984 and playable board by board.

Cleaner and more factual than its rivals, strongest on geography and history, and mercifully free of which-character quizzes.

Bare-bones stacking practice with sprint, cheese race and replays, used by people who take block placement very seriously.

Space the letters of a word by eye, then see the typographer's answer laid over the top of yours. Reliably humbling.

Baking recipes given by weight, with a hotline-grade troubleshooting blog attached. Where to go when a loaf has gone wrong.

Stick-figure RPG that has been landing daily jokes since 2003, wrapped around a combat and item system far deeper than the drawings imply.

The one most people name as the best tower defence: four tower types, hero units and levels that reward replanning.

Documentation of the vast Victorian asylums built to one architectural theory of curing madness, most now empty or demolished.

A text-based village of kittens that grows into a civilisation over weeks, with a spreadsheet's soul and startling depth.

The reference desk of internet culture, with sourced origins and dates for jokes you never knew had a paper trail.

Hex-based territory war where every unit costs upkeep, so overextending will kill you considerably faster than the enemy does.

Retail history blog named after the ghost outline a shop sign leaves behind, mapping the slow decline of the American mall.

Fitts, Hick, Jakob and the rest, each with a plain explanation and a poster you will end up printing out.

Ableton's free course on beats, basslines and song structure, taught by handing you the instruments inside the page.

The 1979 economics lesson still intact — buy lemons, read the forecast, set a price, discover the weather has opinions.

Thematic collections captured around elections, disasters and cultural moments, chosen by librarians rather than by a crawler.

Free chess with no adverts, no account required and an analysis engine better than the paid ones, funded entirely by donations.

Millions of chess tactics pulled from real games and served at exactly your rating, entirely free and with no account required.

Read and listen to real material while tapping unknown words, which quietly become your review deck.

Wikipedia's running audit of the things almost everyone believes and almost nobody has ever checked.

Wikipedia's index of its own indexes, which is either a long-running joke or the purest expression of the site.

A quiet turn-based server for abstract strategy games — Hex, TwixT, Amazons — where matches last months and nobody rushes you.

Thousands of taper-recorded live concerts released with the bands' blessing, going back to the reel-to-reel era and free to stream.

Daily science news with a weakness for the strange finds — mummies, deep sea oddities, cosmic near misses.

Live air traffic control audio from towers around the world, so you can listen to a controller sequencing arrivals into Heathrow while you work.

Clickable map quizzes for every region on Earth, unfashionable in design and better than everything that has replaced it.

Draw circles and arrows, press play, and your scribble runs as a working feedback-loop simulation.

The canonical placeholder text, plus the Cicero passage it was cut from and an explanation of what it says.

Thousands of curated palettes, from Game Boy green to 64-colour monsters, each downloadable in every format going.

Browser sprite editor built around palette discipline, with the specific constraints pixel artists keep asking for.

The looser, stranger sibling of the main lost media wiki, with more speculation and considerably more unresolved threads.

The best-known brain-training subscription, with a free daily set of games and rather a lot of graphs about your own decline.

The official Escher archive: the impossible staircases, the tessellations, and his own notes on how he worked them out.

Zoom into the Mandelbrot set as far as the arithmetic allows, with palette controls and no plugin to install.

The manga-side release tracker, covering scanlation status and licensing across tens of thousands of series since 2001.

Every open source project plotted as a landmass, with related repositories clustering into continents you can pan across.

An index deliberately built to favour text-heavy non-commercial pages. Ranking that punishes ad load instead of rewarding it.