Mood
👽 Weird
Difficult to explain to somebody standing behind you.
185 sites · page 1 of 4
The largest archive of 360 panoramas anywhere, pinned to a world map and free to browse, covering plenty of places no Street View car reached.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Text adventure with no script at all: the model invents the world as you type at it, and will happily follow you somewhere absurd.
- 1 hr+
Janelle Shane feeds neural networks recipes, paint names and knitting patterns, then reports the wreckage with real affection.
- 1 hr+
Community-built soundscapes of unhinged specificity, including several hundred separate takes on the Hogwarts common room.
- 10 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Genuine industrial surplus sold with the best product copy on the internet: lab glassware, small motors, and 400 unexplained springs.
- 10 min
Type your address and spin the globe back 750 million years to see where that ground sat, and which ocean was sitting on top of it.
- 2 min
Seattle's novelty institution: rubber chickens, emergency moustaches and an unreasonable number of items shaped like tinned meat.
- 10 min
Norwegian classified ads laid out with no grid, no spacing and no mercy, unchanged through every redesign trend since.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Decades of ASCII drawings sorted by subject, from cats to warships, every one of them ready to copy and paste.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Wiki of some seventy thousand birth charts with sourced birth times, each graded by how reliable the underlying record is.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Streams clips uploaded straight from phones with default filenames and no audience, drifting past like a broadcast from nobody.
- 10 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
A gazetteer of the world's odd corners — bone chapels, abandoned observatories, restaurants built inside caves.
- 1 hr+
A company worth hundreds of billions serves a homepage of plain blue links, unchanged since the 1990s and quietly proud of it.
- <1 min
Anonymous celebrity riddles where readers do the detective work in the comments and are occasionally proved right.
- 10 min
A long-running directory of wonderful things: odd gadgets, art, science and internet culture, posted every day by a small team of editors.
Eleven absurd brushes — blobs, tentacles, exploding dots — that make the composition decisions for you the moment you move.
- <1 min
- Desktop
People staple bread to trees and photograph it. There is no deeper explanation available and no sign of it stopping.
- 2 min
Chuck banknotes into an open grave with the mouse, accompanied by an unreasonably committed soundtrack.
- <1 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Opens as ASCII candy counting up on a blank page and quietly becomes a full role-playing game with a sea, a shop and a dragon.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Twenty years of forensic argument about how tall film stars really are, with photographic evidence and footwear analysis.
Estimated fortunes for anybody famous, sourced loosely, and impossible to stop clicking once you look up the first one.
A chihuahua rotating to a dance track, which was apparently a complete website idea in 2013 and somehow still is.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Parody religion with its own prophet, apocalypse date and merchandise, committed to the bit long enough that you stop being sure.
- 10 min
Viral-content parody taken well past the point of sense, including quizzes that insult you for finishing them.
- 10 min
Curated stumble button that sends you somewhere good rather than somewhere random, with categories if you are feeling fussy.
NASA ephemeris data, brutal one-line notifications and a design language everyone copied. Astrology delivered entirely deadpan.
One button that adds unicorns and rainbows to any web page, solving a problem that has never once been reported.
- <1 min
Upload any file and receive a genuinely corrupted version back. Built for missing deadlines, used mostly for art.
- <1 min
The same premise with different flavours of damage — choose the format and how thoroughly you want it ruined.
- <1 min
Blind items published daily since 2006, unverifiable by design, and treated as scripture by a very large comment section.
The tidied-up archive of internet horror folklore, from Slender Man to the stories a school friend swore blind were true.
- 1 hr+
Where every cruise ship in the world currently is, with deck plans and itineraries attached, for reasons entirely your own.
Crude four-panel strips with a mean streak, running since 2005 and still finding fresh ways to end badly.
The animator who taught the internet to be afraid of cows, with every looping nightmare he has made collected in one place.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Long, carefully researched articles on forgotten disasters, obsessives and near misses from history.
- 1 hr+
A weekly newsletter of unusual public datasets, with an archive of thousands you had no idea were collected.
- 10 min
Google's hallucinating network turned into a service, still perfectly capable of putting dog faces into absolutely everything.
- 10 min
Dithering aimed squarely at the chunky, ugly end of the spectrum, with palettes lifted from old hardware.
- 2 min
A 1996 US presidential campaign website, still up, still exactly as it was. An accidental museum of early political web design.
- 2 min
An interface that forbids clicking entirely and makes you navigate by hovering, which is far stranger than it sounds.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Drag left and right to slap a man in the face with an eel, at whatever speed the day seems to call for.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Enormous archive of emoji strings, kaomoji and text arrangements, searchable by whatever you are trying to say.
- 2 min
An ASCII horse whose legs continue for as long as you are willing to keep scrolling, which is longer than you think.
A daily firehose of new escape games from Japanese and indie developers, with walkthroughs in the comments for when you stall.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Thousands of strangers claim to have dreamt the same face. Read the whole thing: the explanation is better than the hoax.
- 2 min
All 2^122 version-four UUIDs listed in order with a working search box, on a page that should not be able to exist.
Infinite pixel canvas anybody can paint on live, with no undo, no brief and no moderation queue worth mentioning.
- 10 min
Found VHS footage cut into collages by a collective that also owns most of the world's remaining copies of Jerry Maguire.
- 10 min
- Sound on
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Weird websites: questions
How many sites are in weird websites?
185 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off. 3 of them are AltF originals that run right here.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
177 of the 185 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
129 of 185 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 181 are safe for work and 162 work with the sound off.