A closer look at the five
Five small, single-purpose websites, each doing one useless thing as well as it can be done. Here is what each one is, how it works, and a related read from the blog.
Every day, Today's Rock generates a single three-dimensional rock and shows the same one to everyone who visits, anywhere on Earth. There is no gallery and no archive: at midnight UTC the rock is discarded forever and a new one takes its place. The rock is built procedurally in the browser from a random seed, so its shape, colour and texture are unique to that day and never recur. You can spin it, turn it over, and read a short specimen placard, and that is the whole site. It is a small daily ritual dressed as a mineralogy exhibit, and part of the charm is that missing a day means missing that rock for good.
Related read: This Person Does Not Exist, another site that conjures something new on every visit.
Sandpile runs a live abelian sandpile, the Bak–Tang–Wiesenfeld model that gave the world the phrase self-organized criticality. Grains drop onto a grid one at a time; when any cell holds more than three, it topples to its neighbours, and a single grain can set off a cascade of avalanches that ripples across the whole pattern. The result is a slowly blooming, endlessly recomputing mandala that never settles into repetition. Reload the page and that particular pile is gone for good. It is equal parts screensaver and mathematics demonstration, and it rewards being left open in a background tab.
Related read: Sandspiel, a falling-sand playground where fire, water and plant life interact.
Just Skedaddling is a single generative artwork that would rather you left it alone. A field of glowing particles drifts across a dark canvas; move your cursor and you disturb them, but do nothing and they gradually settle into calmer, more ordered patterns. The longer it is left undisturbed, the more serene it becomes, which makes it less a game than a small exercise in restraint. There is no score, no goal and no end, only a quietly self-organizing system that behaves best when ignored. It suits a corner of a second monitor or a moment between tasks.
Related read: Silk, which turns a single cursor movement into flowing, symmetrical ribbons of light.
The Bureau of Tiny Approvals seats you at a lovingly rendered 1978 desktop console as the sole officer on duty. A steady stream of absurd little petitions arrives, each requesting permission for something harmless and oddly specific, and your entire job is to stamp them APPROVED or DENIED. There is no score and no way to win; the pleasure is in the ritual, the clunk of the stamp, and the deadpan bureaucratic prose. It is a toy about taking pointless things extremely seriously, which happens to be a quality shared by many of the internet's best small sites.
Related read: Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the World Yet?, a page that has answered one question, faithfully, since 2008.
The Bureau of Very Slow News is a newspaper for the slowest stories in existence. Its wire reports real cosmic and geological events, from continental drift to stellar evolution, in the breathless register of breaking news, complete with live-updating figures and datelines. The catch is that none of the headlines will resolve within a human lifetime, or a civilization's. It is a joke about the news cycle that doubles as a quiet lesson in deep time: the events are genuine, only the timescales are cosmic.
Related read: 100,000 Stars, a real three-dimensional map of our stellar neighbourhood.
These are Boring Websites — a tiny webring of five small, self-contained, zero-point websites, all made by one person. Each one does exactly one useless thing well. There's nothing to sign up for and nothing to buy. Pick one, or roll the die. When you're on any of them, the little bar at the bottom will carry you to the next.
They're built and quietly maintained by one person, in spare evenings, for the small pleasure of making things that do nothing in particular — no company, no roadmap, no growth targets. New ones turn up now and then; the daily rock is the only thing here that keeps a schedule. There is also a blog about boring and unusual websites, and a sister project, freebacklinks.club, a directory where any site can claim a free backlink.
