A small, growing cabinet of things built instead of sleeping. No two drawers alike.
Dispatches from twenty-three places that don't exist, each with its own sky. Worm sign on Arrakis, blizzards on Hoth, and a climate officer aboard the Death Star with nothing to report.
A scroll through everything we've built, from the wheel to the microchip, one era at a time.
How near it came in the last 24 hours. Live near-Earth-object and earthquake data, read back in the flat voice of a night-shift monitoring station.
A typing test where the only opponent is your own recorded pace, replayed keystroke by keystroke — stumbles and all.
Names for guilds, bands, shops, taverns, ships and startups, set a dozen at a time like a type specimen sheet.
Start at a random article and follow its real outgoing links until you are somewhere unrecognisable. Keeps the breadcrumb trail of how you got there.
Real sunrise and sunset times for wherever you are, and a straight answer about whether there is enough light left to bother.
A wire service that only carries the other kind of story, relayed live from three real good-news outlets.
Flip for a decision you cannot make, then read what happened in three or four neighbouring universes where you chose otherwise.
A live firehose of every edit being made across Wikipedia this second, counted as it arrives. Nobody involved knows you are watching.
A pinboard for everything you want, from a phone case to a plane to the moon. Kept in your browser, seen by nobody.
Type any noun and get a dry, faintly exasperated encyclopedia entry for it, complete with a footnote nobody asked for.
Form 7-B from a department that does not exist. Eight questions on zombies, robots or kaiju, ending in a percentage and a downloadable card.
Explain something modern to twelve listeners from other centuries. Each one wants to know a different thing about it — what it is made of, whose budget it comes from, whether there is a play in it.
A hundred and seven real sports you have probably never watched, each with a small animated icon of the thing it actually involves. Kabaddi, hornussen, kyykkä, worm charming.
Tomorrow's paper, retrieved rather than printed: a hundred and one headline shapes, a masthead from 2126, and a ticker of things that are still pending.
Sixteen comparisons where the arithmetic is shown and the animation does the explaining. Everest sinks into the trench, paper folds to the Moon, the planets fail to fit the gap.
Thirty-six ordinary objects and the part of them quietly doing something you were never told about, each with a drawing of the mechanism actually working.
Pick the notes you actually like the smell of and find out whose shelf they belong on. Forty-seven of them, from Sherlock to Obi-Wan to a stalker in the rain.
Today's tally from the real record: how many wild things people logged, how many species, how much the ground moved. Every figure cited.
Where the station is this second, on a globe you can turn, and the next time it crosses your sky bright enough to see. Orbit propagated in your browser.
A survey terminal for twenty-six places in the Zone, the reactor and the sarcophagus included. Radiation, an anomaly, an artefact, a flat institutional advisory — and an unmarked catch on the bezel.
A sunny afternoon somewhere real, under a surveillance overlay that is entirely invented and says so. Ninety-six photographs across twelve San Francisco landmarks.
Fourteen stations that do not exist, on a wooden set that does. Drag the needle across the band: invented running orders with the sound off, real Creative Commons records with it on, properly credited.
A scroll up the Kardashev scale, from the twenty terawatts we actually draw to the rungs nobody has any business drawing. Build a Dyson swarm and send a message through a wormhole on the way.
An appraisal desk for things that do not exist. Pull a blade, a helm, a satchel — proper names, flavour and stats — and every one is logged to a compendium that persists.
A wish-you-were-here card from a world that doesn't exist, with an illustrated view on the front and an alien weather report on the back. Turn it over.
Type anything and send it — the code strip lights letter by letter, the lamp blinks it, and a synthesised tone keys it out at a real words-per-minute speed.
A translator with no grasp of figurative language. Feed it an idiom and it hands back exactly what you said, which is never what you meant.
Click the cookie. It cracks in half, crumbs and all, and the slip inside says something you were not expecting to read today.
Type any concept and it green-lights Part Two: a title with a colon in it, a tagline, four or five beats you have definitely seen before, and a note from the eleventh floor.
Put in a role and a company and get the draft nobody sends — the one where the CV is described as "not lying, arranged", stamped DO NOT SEND.
A county news desk filing unverified sightings as they come in. Deadpan, sourced to a dog walker, and always with a flat official comment at the bottom.
An application to be permitted to apply. Complete every field, submit it, and the form grows. The completion bar goes down. It is never finished.
A basement vending machine that has been out of order since 1998 and still works. Insert a coin, get twelve minutes of Tuesday, or a jar of held breath.
An invented tactical operator: callsign, drawn sigil, a gadget with a real trade-off, a background, and one line on comms.
The reel spins, slows, and stops. Entirely invented finishes and rarities, a wear value that means something, and the odds printed on the page.
Write something to whoever you are by then, pick a date, and seal it. It stays unreadable in the drawer until the day arrives.
Write down one good thing, watch it fall into the jar and land on the others. Drag to shake it. Take one back out when you need it.
Your to-do list gets a name, a sprite and a health bar. Tick things off and watch THE DEFERRED INBOX lose phases.
A real millisecond stopwatch for things nobody times. Set a category, hit space, empty the dishwasher, hit space again. It remembers your best.
Sit down with a Roman water overseer, a plague physician, a lighthouse keeper and a 1968 computer operator. Ask what you like; the answers were written by hand.
728 real submarine cables on a real map. Hover to pick one out, search by name, and see where it actually comes ashore.
Live from the public catalogue: what was launched in the last thirty days, where it sits, and how many fragments from one 2009 collision are still being tracked.
Twelve empty rooms at four in the morning, drawn from scratch. Swipe on each one. Nobody is coming.
A wooden television that only receives the Prelinger Archives. You always arrive halfway through the film.
Seven people, one unresolved dinner plan, and a conversation that has been going since March. You can join in.
Scroll from the surface to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The blue panels are real. The amber ones are not, and say so.
The same little computer in 1984, 1991, 1995, 2001 and 2013. Drag the windows, doodle, read the files nobody deleted.
A waiting room, a lift, a reading room, a glasshouse and a comms cupboard. Each one has a door, and the door wants something.
A rain-coat detective and a children's puppet in the same room, and neither of them is going to be the one who leaves.
Drop in a photograph and it finds the Old Master portrait lit most like it. Your face never leaves the browser, because it never looks at your face.
A real patch of real sky. Join the stars up however you like, name the shape, and it will tell you how far apart they actually are.
Put any two things in the ring — a goose, a fax machine, the concept of Monday — and get a verdict delivered with total confidence.
Six questions about how you actually behave, then a character you probably will not be flattered by.
Eighteen ants, a tank of sand and nobody driving. They dig real tunnels in real time, and the galleries and spoil heaps are nobody's design but theirs.
Put in the year you were born and find out what else started that year. Sourced, dated, and entirely uninterested in flattering you.
A still pool at night, and a clock that only runs while you are perfectly still. Move the mouse and the water tells on you.
A smooth green stone with a thumb dent worn into it. Rub it. It keeps no record except how many times you did, today.
Six sections of an orchestra that does not exist, all synthesised on the spot. Move over one and it swells; move away and it sits back down.
Ask it anything and it will ask you something back. It has no answers, no model behind it, and no intention of helping.
Twenty current words, defined as they are actually used, each with its own illustrated scene. Several are older than the feeds that spread them, and the notes say so.
Paste anything and the old player will play it. There is no audio and nothing is analysed — the letters are the waveform, and the bars, the scope and the ribbon are three ways of drawing them.
Three categories — how tall, how fast, and how hard the ground pulls. Every figure is a published one, and pairs too close to call are never offered.
One sentence at a time: a person, or a machine. The human half is real and attributed, the machine half is written for you on the spot, and both are asked to work in the same century.
It throws away your words and keeps the gaps between your keystrokes. The measurements are real, the reading is a joke, and the page says which is which.
Write something, hide it, and hand over the link. It comes back warm and uneven where you hold the pointer — or where you tilt the phone, if you are holding one.
Flags, currencies and capitals for the 193 UN member states. The wrong answers come from the same part of the world as the right one, so a lucky guess has to be an informed one.
Twenty-four ways to be wrong on purpose, each with a real definition, two worked examples, and the thing the argument would have to do instead. Quiz it or read the lot.
Eighteen dilemmas, several of them the classical ones in their standard form. It keeps a tally not of what you decided but of which kind of reason you kept reaching for.
A small constructed language built backwards from one requirement: whatever goes in has to come out again. Share a word with a friend and you share a language nobody else can read.
One room, one occupant, one thing worth taking, drawn as a floor plan. Everyone gets the same room today; going deeper is yours alone.
Pick a flag and the country follows from it. The pattern decides how it is governed, the field decides the land, the charge decides what they believe. Change one and only that changes.
Sixty-two thousand public-domain works from the Art Institute of Chicago, one at a time, with a gallery guide who has been given no notes and is not attributed to anyone.
Two moods and a swipe. Warm golden-hour places, or empty ones at the wrong hour, with a sentence underneath that belongs to the page rather than to the photograph.
Real Soviet-era concrete and abandoned works from Wikimedia Commons, properly credited, each plate filed with a survey note that describes nothing that happened.
Five hundred fictional machines, one written-from-scratch line each. Two in five were invented for the index and say so; the rest name the work they come from.
Sixty-eight lengths at true scale, from a person to a ten-thousand-kilometre ring. Published figures and fan estimates are coloured differently, and the hulls are deliberately generic.
Eight small pixel worlds, Mercury out to Neptune, one at a time. The sunlight on each is the real inverse-square figure, which is why the outer half has to run on reactors.
Write a note, choose how long it drifts, and lose it. It surfaces for a stranger months later. Real notes from real visitors, kept on the server, with no way to take one back.
Everyone who has opened the page today, by city, on a world map. No address is ever stored and the dot is deliberately blunter than the city it came from.
Six places to be, built out of oscillators and noise in real time. A late library, rain on glass, a ship's bridge, a fire, a night train, and one warm dreamy underwater.
It has been called New Group since 2023. Four tones, from fond to passive-aggressive, and the chat reacts to whatever you land on.
Daft questions, real arithmetic. Every figure is marked as measured or assumed, the working is shown, and you can argue with the assumptions and watch the answer move.
Eight questions about how a record sounds — the recording, the low end, where the voice sits — and a decade at the end of it. No song titles anywhere in the matching.
A swatch and four paint names, one of which is genuinely derived from that colour. Hue picks the family, lightness picks the qualifier, and none of them is a paint you can buy.
Pick a rock or photograph your own, name it, and the registry issues a certificate with its temperament and care instructions. Your photo never leaves the tab.
Twelve exhibits, no two of them the same joke. One dodges the cursor, one takes three seconds to press, one comes apart, and exactly one of them does something.
Tell it when you have to be somewhere and describe your morning honestly. It counts backwards and gives you the last possible moment you can get up.
One second of a song, and more only if you ask. A hundred and sixty-four tracks from the Europop, Italian, Russian, Ukrainian and Georgian charts, each one checked against Deezer before it was let in.
Say what sort of evening it is and it deals exactly one film — never a shortlist. You may turn down three of them, and then it stops taking suggestions.
Thirteen games behind one game-select screen, all drawn into the same 320×240 buffer with a hand-set bitmap font, sixteen colours and a scanline over the lot.
Sign it and everyone who comes after reads it. No account, no name behind it — the book tells your entries from everyone else’s by a random string your own browser invented.
Ninety-six by sixty-four cells shared by everybody. You get eight pixels every half hour, any of them can be painted over, and something turns up in it eventually whether anyone planned it or not.
One story, one sentence each, no going back. You cannot write two in a row and you cannot edit anything, so whatever the last person did to the plot is now your problem.
Wikimedia Commons’ own picture of the day, credited properly, with a personal album kept in your browser and a button that makes it the wallpaper in the Windows 98 mode.
Type anything and it is already on a shelf, in a hexagon numbered in the billions, surrounded by eighteen hundred characters of noise. Ask for the same phrase tomorrow and it is in the same place.
Feed it a statement that eats itself and it gives you back a longer one, in eight escalating rungs. Do not feed it the same one twice.
Two things in, and the genuinely shortest path between them through a graph of loose properties — round, kept in a pocket, makes a noise. Or the long way round, if you would rather.
Four pixel dioramas under glass. The falling snow is the almanac’s, the ambience is Room Tone’s, and the snow that settles at the bottom is real rigid-body physics you can shake.
Where the sun is, right now, computed in your browser rather than fetched — plus ten city clocks and twelve real facts about time zones.
Binary, hex, base64, morse and semaphore flags, both directions. The semaphore alphabet is generated from the rule that produces it rather than typed out, so it cannot contain a typo.
A dream in, a confident and completely unfounded folklore reading out. Entertainment, and it says so where you can see it rather than in the small print.
A procedural street map of a place that does not exist, seeded by its own name so it keeps its shape. Medieval spokes one side, a grid the other, and a ring road that gave up.
One evening of somebody’s search history, escalating. There is no data here: no subject, no leak, and no access to yours.
Click the instant it turns green. It measures your display’s refresh rate first, and then tells you how much of your score is the screen and not you.
Real ninety-minute-cycle arithmetic, with the ten minutes it takes to actually fall asleep put back in — and a schematic of the shape a night takes.
Six invented fish that swim by steering rather than by animation. Nothing is hungry, nothing decays, and it is exactly as well as you left it.
Five folds, four trim settings, and a real longitudinal flight model at half-millisecond steps. The porpoising is the phugoid, not an animation.
A few hundred real grains falling through a real neck. It does not know how long it runs, so it times each flip and works it out from your own runs.
Stand them up and tip the first. The growing chain is set at the largest step this table will actually carry, which was found by trying it, not assumed.
Draw ramps, drop pegs, aim for the bucket. The marbles bounce off what you drew rather than following it, so a run can fail the way a real one does.
Six tasks about mass times distance, on a beam integrated as a real pendulum — it slams to the stop, hunts about, and settles where the moments cancel.
Draw, turn the page, draw it slightly moved. Onion skin underneath, up to sixty pages, and every one kept as strokes rather than as a picture.
Scroll and there is more. Some of them are stubborn and need a second push, because real wrap has those and it is the second push that is satisfying.
One knob sideways, one up and down, and the stylus never leaves the glass — so every drawing is a single unbroken line. Shaking really does clear it.
Sixty seconds. The tortoises cost you five and a second of your time, and they come up more often the better you are doing.
A bonsai, a pot of basil and a succulent, each growing at its own real speed by the calendar rather than the visit. Nothing here needs you and nothing here can die.
The clinical arrangement format, with caps spaced evenly in CIELAB rather than in RGB, at the largest chroma this screen can hold at every hue.
Eight silhouettes cast by a point of flame. The shadow grows by D over D minus d and the edge softens by the same ratio, which is why a close one is sharp.
Ten documented perceptual effects, each drawn from its own rules, and each with a switch that turns the trick off so you can prove it to yourself.
One recipe, written fresh against four choices, with the model told it may not make a health claim, give a calorie figure, or teach you to can anything.
Fifteen voices in one drawer — the escalating excuse, the corkboard, the memo in triplicate, the talking gun and eleven more. Each brings its own room, so the whole page changes when you change voice.
Four presses in one room — an album sleeve, a wanted poster, a stamp on a collector's baize, and a banknote that tilts in the light. Each keeps the bench it was built on.
Four things you play: a theremin with nothing to touch, a Chladni plate finding the lines that are not moving, a colour organ, and a sequencer made of falling balls. Nothing is sampled.
Five ways of looking at the past in one drawer — what happened today, the day on which least happened, two things closer than you think, one thing going differently, and the same trick played on games.
Break a bowl on purpose, gather the pieces back, then run gold down every crack. The shards are real Voronoi cells, so the seams meet exactly.
The weather actually falling on you, from Open-Meteo, turned into five layers of generated noise. Nothing is sampled. No rain gets you a clear-sky hum instead.
One real species a day on a specimen card. The only thing written into the page is the name — the Red List category, the classification and the records all come from GBIF as you open it.
Eighty real coastlines, islands and lakes from public-domain survey data, with everything but the outline taken away. Every shape drawn the same size, so size is not a clue.
One real public-domain painting from the Met, uncovering itself square by square over seven real days. There is deliberately nothing to press.
A particle fire drawn from scratch and a crackle made out of noise and a very sharp filter. Adjustable logs and flame height, nothing to achieve, and it never goes out.
Eleven teas with the steeping ranges that are actually published for them, and a cup whose colour arrives over the real minutes. Matcha is on the list and is honest about not being steeped.
A soft glow that drifts along the real blackbody curve, tied to your actual sunrise and sunset. Everything but the light fades away if you leave it alone.
A rainbow spring you can stretch, twist and send down the stairs. It manages a step or two end over end and then thinks better of it, which is what real ones do.
Sixty-three folded notes, one a day. Written for this jar and attributed to nobody, because nobody else said them.
Write a short anonymous one, pick a stamp and an invented postmark, and pin it to a board everybody shares. No names, no accounts, and no location of any kind.
Thirteen things in a box — chairs, quilts, fairy lights, a sleeping cat — and a dim room to build in. The lamp is a real light, so moving it changes everything.
Four real NOAA hydrophone recordings and two generated beds, layered at their own depths. Every channel says which of the two it is.
Drawer 167 is stillbeing built.
Each one switches on its own. Drift sits behind everything and takes no room at all. A rail with more in it than fits can also be dragged apart — pick a widget up by its title bar and put it anywhere.
Knocks every icon askew, near where it already was. Auto Arrange puts them back.