Curiosities

Time Wasters

Sites that do nothing useful, on purpose — for the ten-minute break.

Playgrounds

H.H.Roses (Interactive) — a personal site built as a working Windows 98 desktop — hit the enter button and you get draggable windows, a Start bar, a functioning MS Paint, an iPod playing the owner's own tracks, and a guestbook drawn as an illuminated manuscript. Made by H.H.Roses (a.k.a. hailee.jpeg), artist, author, stagehand and dev; desktop only, as the site itself warns.
  • Games (Interactive) — the desktop’s icons are the attraction: Minesweeper, Solitaire, Connect Four, Tic Tac Toe, a sliding puzzle, a dress-up game, a Game Boy, a Magic 8 Ball, and one called The Backrooms.
  • 2D Art (Gallery) — the owner’s illustration work, fairies and pixies mostly, in the same handmade register as the site around it.
  • 3D Art (Gallery) — the newer, still-growing half of the gallery.
  • Music (Media) — original tracks, the same ones the desktop iPod is playing.
  • Blob Opera (Interactive) — David Li’s machine-learning toy for Google Arts & Culture: four blobs you drag up and down for pitch and back and forth for vowel sounds, singing in a voice learned from 16 hours of recordings by tenor Christian Joel, bass Frederick Tong, mezzo-soprano Joanna Gamble, and soprano Olivia Doutney. A second model harmonises the other three around whatever you’re doing.

Directories

  • The Useless Web Index (Interactive) — a catalogue of deliberately pointless websites with a button that fires you at a random one, plus a daily top 10 and reader submissions: virtual grass to watch grow, a virtual fidget spinner, and 15 million redirects served.

Rabbit holes

  • List of lists of lists (Article) — Wikipedia’s index of its own indexes, three levels deep and organised by everything from “Mathematics and logic” to “Miscellaneous”: lists of films by country, lists of mountains, lists of television programs.
  • The Archive (Website) — endwalker’s hand-picked list of 500+ of the most fascinating, morbid and unusual articles on Wikipedia, each carrying a one-line hook (“1593 transported soldier legend: did a Spanish soldier teleport from the Philippines to Mexico?”), an asterisk on the compiler’s own favourites, and an Open a Random Article button. Fair warning: much of it is murder, disaster and mass loss of life.