🕯️ Cosy

Anime and manga tracker with a friendly interface and a public API, run as an open-source project rather than an ad business.

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

Jason Kottke has been posting the interesting bits of the web since 1998, with no algorithm involved at any point.

Log films, rate them, and read reviews by people trying to be funny rather than professional. The social network cinema deserved.

Public domain books read aloud by volunteers, free to download, uneven in quality and endless in supply.

Start with four elements and work towards seven hundred, most of which are jokes you only understand on arrival.

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

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

The endless study-beats stream that turned into a genre, plus the label archive behind the girl who never stops revising.

A looping animated café with lofi streams and rain sliders, built to be left open in a corner of the screen all day.

Deliberately tiny paint tool inside a fake old window, with fat pixels and a palette that makes clumsy art look intentional.

A hand-built indie web hub with a forum, a club of personal sites and guides to making your own homepage the old-fashioned way.

Old School RuneScape's skill grind distilled into a pure idle game, with a free browser version that genuinely never ends.

The Star Trek wiki, maintained with the rigour of a national archive and roughly the same word count.

Hundreds of matching-pair memory games plus Simon-style sequences, scaled from toddler difficulty to genuinely unpleasant.

A community weblog running since 1999 where members share the best thing they found online today, with thoughtful threads underneath each post.

Proper miniature golf courses with believable putting physics and no time pressure applied at any point.

A simulated television set showing nothing but 1980s programming and adverts, complete with channel dial and static between stations.

The same idea moved a decade forward. Flip channels through the nineties and land somewhere between a cartoon and a cereal advert.

A free host for handmade personal sites in the Neocities spirit, with a browse page full of members' pages to click through.

A free host built as a deliberate successor to GeoCities, full of hand-written personal pages by people who wanted to make one.

A permanent vaporwave station with fake adverts, a virtual room and album art on a CRT, running continuously for about a decade.

Minecraft skin editor with a 3D preview you can spin, plus a gallery of other people's skins to take apart and reuse.

One well-sourced strange story per weekday, told at exactly the length of a cup of coffee.

London online radio with thousands of shows in the archive, most presented by somebody with an unreasonable record collection.

Radio drama, comedy and serials from before television took over, in quantities that would take several lifetimes to finish.

Hand-curated index of several thousand active blogs, sorted by subject, for when you want writing rather than a feed.

A catalogue page for every book ever published, a good many of them borrowable straight in the browser.

A sealed glass sphere of water, sand and brine shrimp that you seed and then leave running, ecosystem permitting.

A plain list of personal websites, each added by its owner. Pick any name and you land on somebody's homepage, built exactly how they like it.

Sprite editor with layers and animation frames, wrapped in an unusually friendly community gallery of other people's work.

A virtual table with real decks you drag around by hand, for playing whatever house rules your group refuses to drop.

A pastel multiplayer world whose real draw is the character creator, where people spend far longer than in the game itself.

An eternal-summer radio station dressed as an old Macintosh desktop, playing the soundtrack to a holiday you never actually took.

A medieval life simulator where you idle through jobs and skills, die of old age, and are reborn with a small head start.

Seventy thousand public domain books, plain and free, from the oldest digital library on the internet.

A cat purr you tune by size, mood and breathing rate, for people who work better with a notional cat on the desk.

Free monthly puzzle sets designed to be solved in a pub, with a decade of archives you can print at home.

Five thousand strips of indie-rock relationship comedy with sarcastic robots, updating every weekday since 2003.

The internet's default supply of small animals doing small things, restocked constantly by thirty million subscribers.

Human-curated and listener-supported, mixed like an album rather than a playlist, at an absurdly high bitrate if you want it.

A browser railway empire where the whole server races to reach the same era of engines before anybody else does.

Half an hour of rain and distant thunder on a loop, running since before background noise was a productivity category.

Live cameras on pandas, penguins, apes and elephants, with keepers wandering into shot at feeding time and narrating as they go.

A daily high-resolution photograph from the early twentieth century, usually with commenters identifying the buildings.

Deb Perelman cooking from a famously tiny New York kitchen since 2006, testing everything obsessively and writing about it well.

Clean solitaire collection with hints, statistics and daily challenges spread across a dozen different variants.

Listener-funded, advert-free channels out of San Francisco, Drone Zone and Groove Salad among them, going since the dial-up era.