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:
We Choose the Moon
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.
Hotel 626
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)
Incredibox
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
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.
Ted’s Caving Page
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.
Akinator
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.
Record Tripping
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.
State of the Union
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.
Personas
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.
Soy Tu Aire
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.
Shape the Hive
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.
Get The Glass
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
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.
False.jp
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.
Pretty Loaded
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.
HubbleSite
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.
We Feel Fine
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.
Line Rider
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
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
Anasomnia
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.
BLU
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.”
Mr. Wong’s Soup’Partments
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!
Blue Ball Machine
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
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
80 Gigapixel London
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.
Waybackmachine
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.
Cleverbot
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.
Rules For My Unborn Son
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.
Demoscene.tv
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.
Perry Bible Fellowship
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).
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