Constantly being plugged into the news grind is mentally exhausting. Sometimes we just need to take a break, unwind, and do something fun. That’s why we’ve built up a collection of distracting time-wasters for when we need a break from being obsessively online. We figured you might enjoy these harmless rabbit holes, mildly addictive browser games, and internet curiosities, too, so we’ve been writing about them when we find them.
Can you beat our score in I’m Not a Robot or did you find a gem of an academic paper on motherhood and body horror on Horror Lex? Tell us in the comments.
The goal here isn’t to get engrossed in a game that you’ll lose hundreds of hours to, or become an expert on dialectical materialism. It’s to have a little fun on your lunch break, decompress between emails, or give you an interesting repository of art to dig through on a slow Sunday afternoon. So check back often to see the latest light-hearted (well, mostly light-hearted) time waster we’re passing around the office.
The Virtual OS Museum isn’t a physical place, it’s a collection of over 1,700 distinct installations of over 600 operating systems for over 250 platforms that you can download and run via emulation right on your computer. It’s largely the work of one man, Andrew Warkentin, a developer and OS historian who has been slowly building his collection of OS images since 2003.
The library spans nearly the entire history of computing from 1948’s Manchester Baby, the first stored computer program, to early builds of Android from 2011. Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of obscure OSes in there, including countless DOS variants, MOS for the Acorn BBC Master, and a number of hobby OSes like NitrOS-9, which brings a host of modern features to the ‘80s Tandy Radio Shack CoCo line.
82-0 marries the stat nerd fun of fantasy basketball with instant gratification and a bit of dumb luck. The goal is to draft a team of players that could (theoretically) have a perfect 82-0 season.
Obviously, if you just had free rein to pick whoever you wanted from throughout history, there would be little challenge. The twist is that the site randomly selects a team and an era, and then you pick a single player. So, for example, if you pulled the Knicks and 2020s, you might pick Jalen Brunson as your point guard, then you’d get a new team and era to select your center from.
Mechanical Pencil is the new cross-section book.
If you grew up enjoying Stephen Biesty’s cross-sections like me, you’ll appreciate this brilliant project from Google engineer Bryan Macomber. The website breaks down mechanical objects, like the G2 retractable pen (my favorite), the PEZ dispenser, and the Zippo lighter. I can’t wait to see what comes next. (h/t to Kottke for spotting it.)
I’m beginning to wonder, am I a robot?
I’m Not a Robot has a simple premise: Finish a series of CAPTCHA to prove your humanity. But quickly, your usual click-a-box or identify-the-stop-sign gives way to Where’s Waldo, Tic-Tac-Toe, and word searches. I got stuck at level 17, and now I’m not sure if I actually am a human.
New Art City is a free virtual gallery filled with beautifully bizarre art.
There are dozens of exhibitions that you can walk through in your browser. Some feature 3D scanned sculptures, others are glitchy worlds populated by sound experiments, and some have branching poetry for you to explore. Each 3D world is “multiplayer”, so you can visit a virtual opening and chat with other art fans.
Horror Lex is a free database of academic literature for horror nerds.
I love horror movies and overanalyzing things, so Horror Lex scratches a really specific itch. It doesn’t actually host any papers or books. Instead, it’s a hand-selected index of over 13,000 documents, many of them from peer-reviewed journals. A lot of them are free to read, too.
Spotify Wrapped? No. Welcome to Tax Wrapped.
Okay: almost nobody wants a year-end “wrapped” for most things we do — food delivery, subscriptions, you name it. It’d be too embarrassing to look into that mirror. But this one seems legitimately useful to help Americans understand how their taxes are being spent. Enter Tax Wrapped, from Riley Walz. Find out how much of your money is going to health, war, and more.
I can’t stop playing this annoyingly hard color memory game.
You get a few seconds to sear a color into your brain. Then you have to find it again with a set of hue, saturation, and brightness sliders. Then you do it four more times. You can challenge yourself, your friends, or play against the entire world.
Binary Piano is an addictive way to make algorithmic music in your browser.
I love tools that let you make music based on a simple set of rules. Tim Holman created this one based on a YouTube video in which notes are triggered by a simple binary counter. Now if only I could get this out of Chrome and into my DAW.
Relive the glory days when MTV played music videos.
MTV Rewind collects broadcast clips and music videos from YouTube and strings them together to recreate the experience of actually watching MTV in its heyday. There’s even a collection of 98 videos that attempts to piece together the first full day of broadcast, complete with classic bumpers.
A Swedish hot dog with shrimp salad is the most chaotic evil sandwich ever and I will hear no arguments to the contrary.
The Sandwich Alignment Game is the time-waster you didn’t know you needed this weekend. You could lose serious time placing these 57 sandwiches on a D&D-style alignment grid. Now, some people might say this isn’t really a game, but I disagree. Deciding whether an eggplant parm or a meatball parm is more lawful than the other requires real mental dexterity.
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