🕯️ Cosy

A countdown of a thousand small good things, from the cold side of the pillow to popping bubble wrap, written daily for years.

A community of personal website makers with tutorials, events and a directory of members' handmade sites to wander between.

Ten sliders — rain, thunder, waves, birds, coffee — mixed on a single page with nothing else on it at all.

Community-built soundscapes of unhinged specificity, including several hundred separate takes on the Hogwarts common room.

An ambient radio station with no announcers, no adverts and nothing that ever resolves, aimed squarely at falling asleep.

Free woodworking plans with cut lists and costed materials, aimed squarely at people who own exactly one saw.

Susan Miller's famously long monthly forecasts — several thousand words per sign, published without fail since 1995.

One astronomy image a day since 1995, each with a paragraph from an actual astronomer and an archive going back decades.

The AstroTwins' horoscopes and explainers, including a decent plain-English guide to what a transit actually is.

The sister site, strong on anime and historical portrait makers, with an unreasonable and very welcome number of hair options.

The front page of Bear, a no-frills blogging platform: a feed of trending and recent posts that are short, personal and free of ads.

Photo editor and collage maker aimed squarely at people who want a decent result without learning anything first.

Browser Minecraft with party modes bolted on — parkour, bed wars, one-block survival — and multiplayer that joins in one click.

Where the bridge world actually plays: free tables at every hour, tournaments, and teaching rooms of remarkable patience.

Enormous plain-text library explaining what every placement and aspect is supposed to mean, unpaywalled since the early 2000s.

Thirty-odd card games with competent bots, no accounts and nothing covering the table. The default answer to fancying a game.

Anime avatar makers with genuinely good line art, including versions that output something usable as a profile picture.

Long branching novels where your stats matter and the prose does not embarrass itself; a good number play free in the browser.

Google's stripped-back sketchpad — pencil, pen, marker, chalk — with pressure support and absolutely no other features.

Run a coffee stand for fourteen days, adjusting recipe and price daily, and learn more about margins than from any lecture.

The murmur of a café without the queue or the cost, built on research that moderate background noise helps creative work.

Ankh-Morpork rendered as a text world, with guilds, working shops and an obsessive attention to what Pratchett actually wrote.

A timer that counts how long you manage to do nothing at all. Move the mouse, press a key, or scroll and it starts again from zero.

Hundreds of dress-up games covering mythology, history and fandoms, drawn by actual artists rather than an asset pipeline.

Pixel canvas designed for thumbs first, fed by a huge stream of daily themed drawings from a mostly Japanese community.

Move the mouse and flowers, mushrooms and grass sprout underneath it while a music box plays. No tools, no undo, no point.

Draw and guess with a room code, or play solo against the clock on the evenings when nobody answers the group chat.

A directory that has been curating this genre since 2004, including a great many games nobody else bothered to archive.

Dashcam footage of a city loop with the local radio playing over it, so you can drive slowly through Istanbul while answering email.

A fantasy city builder with elves, humans and a genuine research tree, played entirely in a browser tab and unusually pretty.

One sincere, specific compliment per click, written by people rather than generated. For days that have not gone well.

Obsessive gallery of what strangers keep in their pockets, photographed from above and argued over at remarkable length.

Hand-drawn-looking diagrams that somehow stay legible, with live collaboration and no account. The whiteboard for people who hate whiteboards.

The largest collection of live nature cams anywhere: bear falls, puppy rooms, osprey nests and coral reefs, all free and always running.

A browser home screen with a clock, timer, lofi and a to-do list, arranged to look calmer than your actual desktop.

A gentler descendant of Diep.io where you assemble a ring of petals around a flower and farm increasingly rude insects.

Plant a virtual tree that dies if you pick up your phone, which works on far more adults than anybody wants to admit.

City building from the Stone Age to the near future, with a tactical battle grid and guilds fighting over a shared continent.

A daily gleaning of curiosities, lateral puzzles and pleasing coincidences, kept up since 2005 without fuss.

A large casual portal aimed squarely at people who want a match-three game and no further conversation about it.

A browsable restoration of the GeoCities neighbourhoods, so you can wander into Area51 or SunsetStrip the way people once did.

Free cryptic, quick and Everyman crosswords every day, plus the setter blogs that explain each diabolical clue afterwards.

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

Turn any photograph into a jigsaw of up to three hundred pieces, then send the link to a relative who will finish it faster.

Multiplayer jigsaws where several people drag pieces around the same table at once, mostly getting in each other's way.

Japanese home cooking explained for people without a Japanese pantry, with substitutions that do not quietly ruin the dish.

Shows one fresh post at a time from a hand-picked list of personal blogs. Press next and you are reading a stranger's corner of the internet.

Seattle public radio with the famous in-studio live sessions, a human DJ on air at all hours and a playlist page that credits everything.