💡 Clever

The original fake newspaper, whose headlines get quoted as fact often enough to sustain a small correction industry.

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

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.

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

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.

One photorealistic portrait of somebody who has never existed, regenerated on every refresh. The page that started the whole genre.

Invented dictionary entries complete with etymology and a usage example, none of them real words. Several of them deserve to be.

Superhot's trick in a browser: time only moves when you do, so every room becomes a slow-motion puzzle with guns.

Reverse image search that finds the oldest copy of a picture rather than visually similar ones. The tool for tracing where a photo began.

One line of maths drives a sixteen-by-sixteen grid of dots, and the gallery of what people fit into that line is humbling.

Tap any key in rhythm and it plays the next chunk of Clair de Lune, so timing is the only skill actually required.

Match-three fused with tower defence, so every swap you make is also the wave you are currently surviving.

Paste a single screenshot and it names the anime, the episode and the exact timestamp. Unreasonably accurate for something free.

Guess the country from a treemap of what it exports, which turns out to be an oddly precise national fingerprint.

Bounces a sentence between English and Japanese until the two versions agree, which they rarely do politely.

Get from one country to another by naming every country in between, with the shortest workable route scoring best.

Write a Turing machine in a few lines and watch the tape head shuffle back and forth carrying it out.

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

A taxonomy of every storytelling device ever used, cross-linked so densely that leaving takes actual discipline.

The tool behind half the interactive fiction of the past decade, running in the browser and learnable in about twenty minutes.

Same idea as typing but with notes rather than drums — write a paragraph, receive a surprisingly pretty melody.

Type words and each letter becomes a drum hit, so your own name comes out as a loop you will struggle to stop playing.

Structured typing lessons with a hand diagram that shows precisely which finger you have been cheating with all along.

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.

A roguelike you escape by editing the JavaScript that builds each level, which is considerably more forgiving than it sounds.

Flips your sentence using Unicode lookalikes, so it survives a paste into anywhere that accepts plain text.

A small publisher of deliberately pointless web projects, including several gag sites you have probably been sent.

An x86 emulator in JavaScript that will boot Linux, FreeBSD or Windows 98 in a tab. Genuinely should not be possible.

Infinite squared paper for sketching layouts and floor plans, with snapping and nothing else getting in the way.

City walking videos, driving tours and a guess-the-city game built on top of them, sorted by country for when you cannot travel.

Home of a long list of absurd browser games and quizzes, several of which have quietly consumed entire office afternoons.

Upscales artwork and photographs without the usual mush, using a network trained specifically on line work.

Guess where a teammate placed a concept on a spectrum between two extremes. The most reliable argument-starter on this list.

Winamp itself, reimplemented faithfully enough that the equaliser works. It really whips the llama's behind, in a browser tab.

Software-defined radio receivers around the world you can tune through a browser, listening to shortwave through somebody else's aerial.

The planet chopped into three-metre squares, each given a three-word name, which is either brilliant or a licensing trap depending who you ask.

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

Search engine that indexes hand-made pages only, surfacing the small quiet web the big engines stopped showing you years ago.

Drag Wikipedia cards onto a timeline in the right order. Three lives, and you will lose one to the invention of the fork.

A working Windows XP desktop in a tab, with Minesweeper, Paint and the startup sound, for pure muscle memory.

Thousands of interactive maths and science notebooks contributed over two decades, each one a single slider-driven idea.

Victorian engravings cut apart and given modern dialogue, producing jokes no other format could quite deliver.

Crazy golf on a floating landscape that unfolds into a new course between shots. Worth playing for the transitions alone.

Renders your text in every font installed on the machine at once, which is the fastest way ever devised to pick one.

Guess the country from its silhouette alone, with each miss handing you the distance and compass bearing to the real answer.

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