👽 Weird

Writing community from 1999 where each subject gets personal essays instead of an encyclopaedia entry, and the tone never settles.

London has been dragged underground by bats, and the writing is far better than that sentence suggests. Free, endless, faintly sinister.

Who was born today, ranked by fame, drawn from a database heavy with teenagers famous on exactly one platform.

US government training films liberated from federal vaults. Sincere, badly acted, and occasionally about surviving a nuclear attack.

Searches the web for actual sound files by keyword, in a layout untouched since roughly 2003. Still the fastest route to a duck quack.

British gift shop with a taste for the daft and mildly rude, plus the occasional genuinely good bit of kit hidden among it.

Matches ingredients by shared aroma compounds, which is roughly how chocolate and blue cheese ended up on the same plate.

Plays tracks that nobody has ever streamed, not once. The play counter is the whole point, and the music is exactly as advertised.

Home-video horrors rescued from charity shops and skips, curated by two men with an unhealthy commitment to the format.

A grid of small games and nothing else — no descriptions, no ratings, no explanation, exactly as it was in 2010.

Opens as a dismal educational maths game about a frog eating flies, and then keeps going somewhere else entirely. Say nothing more.

Every symbol, alphabet and text decoration you might want to paste somewhere, organised well enough to find one.

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

A hosting hub for hundreds of amateur incremental games, sorted and playable in the page. Where the genre does its experiments.

Part indie games host, part social network, where horror fan games and unfinished experiments live cheerfully side by side.

Long-running newsletter and link hoard for glitch art — tools, artists and the occasional genuinely disquieting find.

Family Fortunes played against Google autocomplete, which turns out to be a bleaker and much funnier opponent than a studio audience.

Draw a horse, then watch it gallop off to join the herd of terrible horses drawn by everybody else.

Tim Rowett's collection of optical toys and physics oddities, each demonstrated on camera by a man visibly delighted with all of it.

Choose ten items in the right order and the cube blossoms into something absurd; choose the wrong order and it sulks at you.

The official register of the longest, fastest and most improbable things people have done entirely on purpose.

Every known way to lace and tie a shoe, diagrammed by one Australian for over two decades, including a knot he invented himself.

Several hundred psychological tests, from serious personality inventories to deeply unserious ones, all free and all instant.

Popular science headlines with the volume turned up, handy for the fact you half-remember reading somewhere.

Warps a photograph through a draggable mesh, so faces melt by exactly as much as you decide they should.

Post-apocalyptic comedy RPG with turn-based fights, base building and a tone somewhere between Douglas Adams and a mild fever.

The real museum of 25,000 banana-related objects has a website, and it looks exactly as you are already imagining.

A vast and aggressively plain archive of religious and mythological texts, essentially unchanged since the old web.

A fake enterprise interface that rewards clicking dialogue boxes with more dialogue boxes, by an art-games designer.

The indie storefront where thousands of experiments run free in the browser, and where the deeply strange ones are the point.

Every point-and-click game indie developers have uploaded to itch, most playable in the tab, most made by exactly one person.

Kaomoji, dongers and text faces sorted by category, with a copy button attached to every single one of them.

Net art from 1995 that looks precisely like your computer failing. View the source: the mess on screen is hiding the actual work.

Drags the guts of a JPEG around with three sliders, producing the smeared colour blocks that only broken files make.

Thousands of Japanese emoticons sorted by emotion, running from mild confusion all the way to full table flipping.

The Lenny face and its several hundred descendants, catalogued and one click away from your clipboard.

Car leasing sold via the loudest website ever built — animated GIFs, a theme-park aesthetic, and a real business underneath it.

Hundreds of small text translators — pirate, medieval, wingdings, uwu — plus a builder for making your own.

Wikipedia's index of its own indexes, which is either a long-running joke or the purest expression of the site.

Daily science news with a weakness for the strange finds — mummies, deep sea oddities, cosmic near misses.

Drops you on a random road somewhere on Earth in Street View and leaves you to work out where you are, or simply wander off down it.

An index deliberately built to favour text-heavy non-commercial pages. Ranking that punishes ad load instead of rewarding it.

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.

Runs an image through the exact stack of saturation, JPEG damage and stray emoji that makes a meme look reposted eight times.

Long-running blog of illusions and visual puzzles, from classic ambiguous figures to whichever dress the internet is arguing about.

Search the web with the top million most popular sites removed. What is left is the internet nobody bothers optimising for.

Los Angeles museum whose exhibits may or may not be true, with a website built in exactly the same ambiguous spirit.

A non-profit, open-source search engine with its own index, curated by volunteers. Results feel nothing like the big engines, which is the point.