🧠 Brainy

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

A word search with a theme you have to deduce first, and one spangram threading corner to corner through the grid.

The actual cables carrying the internet between continents, each one named, with its landing points and the year it went live.

Clean daily sudoku across five difficulties, with a notes mode that behaves the way a pencil is supposed to.

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

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.

A collaborative database of example sentences translated across languages, better than any dictionary for context.

Train an image or sound classifier from your own webcam in about three minutes, no code involved. The clearest explanation of machine learning built.

Non-commercial web search indexing only pages carrying no ads or trackers at all. A very small and very different internet.

Hundreds of players carve up a real world map using one attack slider. Diplomacy emerges in the chat within ninety seconds.

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.

Teaches the pen tool by making you trace shapes with the fewest possible anchor points. Level nine is genuinely cruel.

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.

Combine shapes with union, subtract and intersect to hit a target silhouette in as few operations as you can manage.

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

Every component you might need to build, with links to how twenty different design systems each named and handled it.

Scroll from the surface to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, meeting every creature at the depth it actually lives.

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.

A playable account of why cooperation appears and then collapses, using game theory and roughly ten minutes of attention.

Bisect angles, find midpoints and judge parallels by eye, then get told in pixels precisely how wrong you were.

The original page describing the World Wide Web project, restored by CERN at its first address. Plain text and a few links.

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.

Jay Alammar's diagram-by-diagram walkthrough of the architecture underneath every modern language model.

Every possible page of text that could ever exist, already written, sitting at a findable address.

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

Community-maintained film and television database with an open API, which is why half the apps you use are quietly built on it.

Five solutions-focused stories a day, from a team that has been running this beat since the mid-nineties.

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

Sixty-odd propositions place you on economic and social axes, then show you exactly where Thatcher and Gandhi ended up.

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.

Ten thousand sheep drawn by anonymous online workers paid two cents each, displayed together as one enormous grid.

Scroll outwards from a human to the observable universe, with each step making the previous one look absurd.

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

A crime you solve by writing database queries, and easily the least painful SQL tutorial ever built.

A team counted every squirrel in Central Park and published the data, the maps and a full illustrated report on the findings.

Cecil Adams' archive of exhaustively answered daft questions, invented decades before you could just ask the internet.

Drag countries across the Mercator projection and watch Greenland shrink to its actual size. Settles the argument in about ten seconds.

Race from one Wikipedia article to another using only links, against a clock and other people online.

Live positions and finder charts for planets, comets and asteroids, updated continuously and free of clutter.

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

A photograph from the last century that you place on both a map and a timeline, which is much harder than either alone.