Here at Maximum PC, we've always done our fair share of website recommendation articles--including a
couple of
doozies
from the past few years. And of course we're not the only ones who do
this sort of article either; it's a proven popular format. But this
year, we thought we'd mix things up a little bit. Rather than just
focusing on what's services are popular, or which web apps will make you
the most productive, we wanted to take a look at what's
fun on the Internet.
In that spirit, our February cover feature is going to be 100
Websites You Need to Visit Before You Die. These are sites that will
either entertain you, educate you, or just plain blow your mind. They're
not the kind of website you put in your bookmarks bar and come back to
again and again--they're the kind that you email to your friends along
with a note that says "holy s*** check this out."
So today we've got the first 50 of our 100 Websites You Need to See
Before You Die. Where are the other 50? That's where you come in. Once
you've read
our picks, let us know your own. We'll be picking
50 of the best user submissions to round out our list for the magazine.
Anyone who's submission we pick will be in the running to win a whole
bunch of awesome prizes (stay tuned tomorrow for full contest rules,
prizes and limitations).
So, without further ado, here's the list:
Its name taken from John F. Kennedy’s famous
1962 address to Rice University,
We Choose the Moon is an interactive history exhibit from NASA,
allowing you walk through the Apollo 11 Mission, stage by stage. Each
stage has a CG visualization of the mission, as well as real audio from
mission control and the astronauts themselves. If you’re a space buff
and haven’t seen WeChooseTheMoon yet, you need to drop everything and
check it out, stat.
Commissioned to help sell Doritos (of all things), Hotel626 is a
decidedly non-snack-related horror puzzle game, which challenges you to
escape from a haunted hotel while solving challenges and avoiding an
untimely demise. The puzzles aren’t going to thrill seasoned adventure
gamers, but the overall production value is impressive, as is the novel
use of elements like your webcam, microphone, and even your cell phone.
One thing though: you can only play the game at night. (If you’re
sneaky, you might try changing your system clock to sometime after 6PM)
Have you ever wanted to conduct your own miniature trip-hop orchestra of French hipster clones?
Wait, stop, don’t go yet. Actually check out Incredibox, it’s an
awesomely-executed music creation web-app, which lets you create your
own a capella groove by clicking and dragging different parts onto a
lineup of cartoon Frenchmen.
Ok, it’s hard to explain—
just try it out.
The Dionaea House is an example of “hyperfiction,” a story told
through more than just a single running narrative. A bit like an
alternate reality game minus the reader participation, “reading” The
Dionaea House involves following a number of threads on different blogs
and in comments. We won’t tell you anything about what The Dionaea House
is actually about, because figuring that out is the fun part.
Older than the Dionaea house, and less intricately-constructed, Ted’s
Caving Page is nonetheless a marvelously creepy example of how to tell a
story well on the internet. Like the previous example, the less you
know about Ted’s experience in the cave the better, but let’s just say
that those who are claustrophobic or afraid of the dark might want to
avoid this one.
When you were a kid, did you ever play 20 Questions? You know, where
you think of a person, place, or thing, and then your friend gets to ask
20 yes-or-no questions to figure out what it is? Well, it turns out
that 20 questions is one of those games, like chess and reversi, that’s
better played by computers.
Think of any character at all, from a movie, tv show, game—anything.
Then just answer Akinator’s questions to the best of your ability. No
guarantees, but we think you’ll be impressed.
Does your mouse have a scroll wheel on it? You’d better hope it does
(and seriously, what decade are you living in if it doesn’t) because
Record Tripping is a seriously cool, seriously inventive game that pairs
wheel-turning puzzles, record scratching, and Alice in Wonderland. The
whole thing’s played with just the scroll wheel and the left mouse
button, so assuming you’ve got both of those, head on over.
Sure, the annual State of the Union address might seem a little dry
for an afternoon timekiller, but that’s exactly what they’ve done here,
with data visualizations, statistical analysis, and searchable texts of
every single address. History and politics have never been as addictive
as this.
An experiment from MIT’s media lab, Personas takes your first and
last name, scours the internet, then spits out a composite image of what
it thinks you’re like, based on what it found about people with your
name. Of course, unless you happen to have a completely unique name
you’ll see data from lots of people other than yourself, but that’s sort
of the point.
Don’t let this page’s Spanish intro throw you for a loop, you don’t
need to speak a word of it to appreciate the music and visuals contained
here. Even if floating, lyrical melodies aren’t your thing, stick with
it to check out how the “ink” cursor effect changes to reflect what’s
going on in the song’s lyrics.
What are humans, really, but so many bees, buzzing away? That’s the
question (we think) asked by Shape The Hive, a visual “experiment in
digital collaboration.”
In more concrete terms, Shape The Hive is a massive, color-coded hex
grid, where anyone can use a sort of virtual kaleidoscope to fill in
hexes with distorted images or videos. It’s fun to have a look around,
and easy if you’re inclined to participate, so have a look.
We’re not the biggest fans of blurring the line between advertisement
and gaming, but we’re willing to make exceptions in two instances: 1)
When it comes to frosty, delicious milk. 2) When the game in question is
a beautifully imagined and well thought-out virtual board game, with
graphics that still look amazing three years after the fact.
And what do you know—Get The Glass succeeds on both of those counts! It’s almost like we planned it that way.
The Wilderness Downtown is a collaboration between Arcade Fire,
director Chris Milk, and Google that uses the media capabilities of HTML
5 to create an internet music video that’s personalized to the viewer.
Even if you’re not a fan of the music, it’s worth checking out as a
technology demo for HTML 5 from some of the crack engineers at Google.
What we have here is a collection of simple visualizations (most
respond only to the movement of your mouse cursor, and the left mouse
button) from a Japanese graphic designer. You won’t find any deep
content on this page, but we suspect these mesmerizing visualizations
will keep you entertained for longer than you’d like to admit.
Adobe (née Macromedia) Flash technology has allowed for a boom of
rich media on the web, but it’s brought its share of problems as well.
One such problem is the vile loading period, keeping you from enjoying
your web content or video game. Thankfully, some designers realize that
it’s important to keep users engaged during this period, and have
elevated the preloader progress bar to an art form. PrettyLoaded
celebrates these unsung heroes of web development, showcasing the very
best of preloaders from around the web.
Sometimes, you need to be reminded that—no matter how big your
personal problems might seem—you’re just an insignificant mote in an
unfathomably large universe. Other times, you just want to see kick-ass
images from the most righteous piece of optics we’ve ever blasted into
the cosmos. In either case, hubblesite.org has you covered.
Say what you will about the touchy-feely sentiment behind WeFeelFine,
the site is an interesting technological experiment in extracting data
from the far-flung corners of the internet. Just click the big pink
heart for a swirling, up-to-the-minute graph of how everybody’s feeling
on the internet. Click a particle to read the sentence in question, and
click the question to visit the blog it came from.
For some, Line Rider is a canvas. For others, it’s a way of life. But
for most, Line Ride is just a flash game—where you draw out a course
for a little sledder guy to ride on. It’s a kick, and something
everyone should try, if for no other reason than to understand the
effort it takes to make the kind of Line Rider videos that get passed
around on sites like Reddit and Digg.
EyezMaze may not sound familiar to you, but if you’re a fan of
browser games you’ve probably played on of their internet-famous GROW
series. If you haven’t, you should check them out right away. The basic
conceit is this: You have to place a set number of elements into a
scene, in a certain order. The order matters, so you have to follow the
clues in the impossibly-charming animations to figure out the optimal
order and win the game. We recommend you start with GROW v.3
The first thing that’s amazing about Anasomnia: The densely-packed,
surreal dreamscape animations that only play when the lights in your
room are out (although you can trick it if you cover up your webcam with
your hand).
The second thing that’s amazing about Anasomnia: Every dream is
different. Through some sort of procedural generation trickery,
Anasomnia will be a different show every time you turn your lights out.
If you’re in the kind of mood to have your mind blown, allow us to
suggest that you visit the website of the street-artist BLU. Street art
like graffiti? Sort of, but in motion. Check out the “Video” tab on the
BLU website for a collection of four stop-motion street animations that
are as insane as they are long. To see the craziest one first, start
with “Big Bang Big Boom.”
In another testament to the fact that nobody wastes time as
spectacularly as hundreds of people wasting time together, Mr. Wong’s
Soup’Parments is a collaborative pixel-art image of a tower—each
individual floor drawn and submitted by a different person. The final
product is the “tallest virtual tower in the world” and a great way to
kill a few minutes. Prepare to wear out that scroll wheel!
Another example of community-driven pixel art, the Blue Ball Machine
consists of tiled animated gifs representing the Rube Goldberg-esque
workings of a giant blue-ball-processing facility. Originally spawned as
part of a challenge on the Something Awful forums, the original Blue
Ball Machine image became a popular YTMND site, and spawned a
number of
follow-ups.
The Million Dollar Homepage contains only a single image. That image
is a giant, ugly, expensive advertisement. And that giant, ugly
advertisement made some college kid in the UK one MILLION dollars.
The idea is simple: Create a 1,000,000 pixel image, and sell those
pixels off for a dollar each (in blocks of 100). People are free to use
those pixels to link to advertise whatever they want (online casinos and
scams mostly, it seems). Every single pixel sold out, and Alex Tew of
Wilshire England made a cool milli. How could he make so much off of
something so dumb? Because he thought of it first
It can be hard to keep up with who’s currently winning the “world’s largest photo” race, but right now the king is
this360-degree panorama of London.
Clocking in at 80 Gigapixels (that’s 8,000 times the resolution of your
average point-n-shoot camera, for reference) this panaroma is detailed
enough to read the license plate on a faraway bus.
Another piece of internet history (both itself, and as a tool for
exploring internet history) is the Wayback Machine. Simply put, the
Wayback Machine will take any URL, and create a gallery of historical
versions of that website for you to explore. Check out some of your
favorite websites, and marvel at how far we’ve come in just 5 or 10
years.
You can’t call yourself a true connoisseur of internet curios until
you’ve attempted to have a full-fledged conversation with a chatbot.
People have been trying to make convincing Chatbots since the 70s, and
even though we’re still far from something that’ll pass the Turing Test,
it can be a real kick to try talking to one of these. Like it’s
predecessor Jaberwocky, Cleverbot learns more with each conversation it
has.
After you’ve fooled around for a while, check out the “
cleverness” section for a collection of funny or impressive conversations between Chatbot and other people.
We don’t have a whole lot of blogs on this list because—by their very
nature—they’re not really a single-serving kind of thing. All the same,
Rules For My Unborn Son’s been getting regularly updated for long
enough that pretty much anyone can get a healthy dose of awesome advice
just by spending an hour or two paging through the archives.
If you’re not familiar with the demoscene, here’s what you need to
know: there’s a subset of computer programs, musicians and artists who
engage in competitions to fit the most impressive and extravagant visual
displays (and sometimes even games) into teeny-tiny chunks of script.
We’re talking whole music videos crammed down into 64K or smaller. At
Demoscene.tv, you can get a feel for what the demoscene is all about
without having to run any strange code on your computer—all the demos
are streamed, a la YouTube.
One of the few truly classic webcomics, The Perry Bible Fellowship is
a pitch-perfect mixture of whimsical art, extra-dark humor and good,
old-fashioned surrealism. The author Nicholas Gurewitch still updates
sporadically, but you can absorb the whole archive in one sitting (if
you’ve got an afternoon to spare).
EnlargeCupertino, CA — If you thought Apple’s customers were smiling before, wait till you see them now.
For
all the laundry we do in a week, we accumulate a massive amount of
dryer lint. Wouldn't it be better off going toward something useful?
Whether you're 
Steve Jobs may not approve of stylus usage, but sometimes 
I
dread the days when I have to reach behind my desk to move some cables
around, since I can never figure out which one is which. Eliminate that
annoyance by 
While we recommend 
Old newspapers are good for more than just 
If
you've tried exercising with your smartphone or MP3 player, you know
how much of a pain they can be bouncing around in your pocket or clipped
onto your shorts. Clipping it on your arm really is the best way to go,
and if you don't want to buy an armband, just 
We
all have one or two devices we dump out of our pockets as soon as we
get home, and what better place to put them than in the wall? With an
old shampoo or lotion bottle, you can create a 
We
tech nerds amass tons of extra cables over time, and we're afraid to
get rid of them for fear we might need them one day. The solution? Take
all those toilet paper tubes you use up and turn them into an 
We're always looking for ways to 