What are some fun/interesting websites that don't involve news or current events?
As the title says, looking for recommendations of fun and interesting websites that don't involve current events/news. Sites where you can spend hours diving down rabbit holes, browsing fun and interesting content, or just otherwise detach from reality for a bit.
This isn't a request for just myself, but just in general. I feel like all the biggest websites just have a bit too much influence from current events and news, which can make browsing pretty stressful. And given how centralized the internet has become, finding sites outside those has become a bit trickier. It'd be fun to see some more focused sites for various topics and niches. Can be an educational site with cool articles, could be entertainment, could be a forum or a blog. Just, what sites could you spend hours on?
Molten Sulfur is a blog that discusses interesting mythology and historical events, suggesting how they can be used as inspirational material for tabletop RPG campaigns. Even for those who don't play TTRPGs though, the author has a knack for finding interesting stories and concepts from all around the world and presenting them in an entertaining and breezy manner. Always enjoy catching up!
JSTOR Daily sometimes touches on current events and news, but I find it has a wide variety of articles that cover lots of interesting topics, and it's pretty easy to overlook / brush past the ones that are a bit too current-events or news-y for my tastes. I especially enjoy their weekly suggested readings, which link to well-researched articles from all around the internet.
Quanta is a magazine that covers the latest research in science and mathematics. The subjects of their articles can be a little heady, but I think that the writing often does a good job of making it quite approachable and understandable. Again, one that I enjoy dipping into occasionally and catching up on, just focusing on the most interesting and fun articles that pop out to me.
If you like LEGO at all, New Elementary is a fun blog where they review new LEGO sets through the lens of their parts and pieces. They do round-ups discussing new LEGO parts that have been introduced recently, demonstrate some of their potential applications in custom builds, and occasionally host themed custom-build contests and review the entrants. I'm not seriously into custom builds myself, but I always enjoy reading the articles. I especially enjoyed their interviews, where they talk with LEGO designers and employees about the process of creating new parts! What cool insight into the company. One of my favorites was this interview about a new shooter brick they'd introduced, where they discuss the evolution of shooter bricks over time, and even show off some prototypes!
While it's sadly very rarely updated nowadays, I often used to read screenshot Let's Plays on the Let's Play Archive. Some SSLPs focused on humor, either making jokes or criticizing terrible games; others were love-letters to their games, showcasing their mechanics, highlighting obscure details, and so on; and sometimes, they were the best of both, where someone loves a game enough to break it in half and give you the joy of watching. While video LPs have dominated the scene, especially now that streamers are a thing, SSLPs allow for deep-dives, and make some games (like turn-based RPGs or strategy games) much more accessible to experience as an LP, since you get to elide past a lot of the grind and whatnot. I could whip up a list of some of my favorite SSLPs, but honestly, I'd just recommend checking out which ones catch your eye! You can filter on the search bar, not just for SSLP, but also for tags like 'humorous', 'completionist', and so on. Again, though, a lot of them are quite old, and uh... you can tell. The SomethingAwful humor of the mid-2000s doesn't always hold up.... but many of them remain a good read to this day.
These are exactly the kinds of sites and rabbit holes I was hoping to show up! I can already tell I can spend hours on Molten Sulfur and JSTOR Daily. I love weird bits of obscure history and folklore, and the front pages of both sites have pretty intriguing article titles right now.
I'll have to share New Elementary with some friends who are into LEGO. Seems like a fun site even as someone who's not heavily into LEGO myself. I just like sites run by clear enthusiasts like that. One of my favorite subreddits is r/HobbyDrama because I love seeing people's enthusiasm for their hobby in their write-ups, even if I know nothing about the hobby. The enthusiasm can be infectious!
And speaking of Let's Play, I just remembered I have this page for a Limbo of the Lost LP open on my phone. Can't even remember when or how I found it, it's been open for a while now. Really need to get around to reading it... Maybe after I read up on the North Rona Island Rat Apocalypse.
Yes, Hobby Drama was a favorite of mine as well! I've always loved deep-dives into obscure minutiae through the lens of a passionate afficionado, even if it's not drama-related. A lot of my favorite podcasts and books are similar in that sense - I just love expanding my worldview to notice things that would have otherwise gone overlooked or been entirely invisible to my perspective.
The Dark Id is a classic LPer, one of the all-time greats. I really loved his playthroughs of the Shadow Hearts series, including Koudelka!
The Molten Sulfur link is broken (%5Bhttps://moltensulfur.com/%5D) and crashes my Three Cheers.
Thanks though, that one sounds interesting!
@talklittle DM me if you want or need additional info.
It's the link, it picked up a space or something
Molten Sulfur
Apologies for that, I've edited it to fix it! I think I accidentally copy-pasted brackets into the parentheses. Thanks for the heads-up!
LP archive! It was basically my home page back in the day. I miss screenshot LPs so much. It's how I discovered games like KOTOR 2 and Crusader Kings.
Cloudhiker is a lot like StumbleUpon from back in the day. It serves you up a potentially interesting site, and if you’re uninterested, you click “next” and it gives you another one.
As an example, I like reading and writing fanfiction, so I spend a lot of time on https://archiveofourown.org. I always have it open in a few tabs on my phone.
For a real time sink, I can spend hours and hours on https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/ reading random SCPs. I haven't checked it out in a while, so obviously there's always new content there. I particularly have fun with the SCP-J's.
Then there's Saya in Underworld, which is a neat blog that translates Japanese content that's typically horror or occult-related. I like creepy stuff, and Japan is a goldmine for that. I particularly like reading the cryptic stories, which are stories with a hidden, darker implication that you have to puzzle out. I used to call them "creepy riddle stories" since the site Scary for Kids had some described as "scary riddles". Looking for those is actually how I first discovered the blog.
Wiby is a search engine for Web 1.0 (basically, early internet) websites, and I can definitely spend some time hitting the "surprise me" button over and over again. You come across websites for niche interests, personal webpages, directories of useful information for things you didn't even know existed, art projects, so on.
On that note, Defacto2 is a repository of old software, BBS adverts, demoscene stuff, cracking intros, ANSI art, interviews and more. It is more or less a museum of warez culture and everything is neatly organised.
One of my favourite "small" websites is the Digital Museum of Plugs and Sockets, which does a fairly good job at keeping track of different plug, socket and electrical standards all across the world. It's not horribly technical and it can provide lots of amusement even if you don't have lots of electrics knowledge.
Abandoned Southeast is a blog dedicated to documenting abandoned buildings in the American Southeast, often providing not only pictures, but also a glimpse of the historical significance of that building in the form of a short "context" paragraph.
It's funny because the first site Wiby served me when I clicked "surprise me" looked like it came from 1998, but turns out was updated not two weeks ago!
https://www.lkessler.com/
Edit to add: actually lots of sites I'm coming across are still updated recently or until recently! There's plenty that haven't had one since the early aughties too though.
Huh, I might have stumbled upon the Museum of Plugs and Sockets a few weeks ago. My neighbor had an old toy iron (we dated it back to the 40's I think?) which had a plug that none of us recognized. It made me think of those old cigarette burner plugs, for using in cars, but it wasn't the right size for that. I may need to check that site some more to see if I can find that plug...
Also, you sharing Abandoned Southwest reminded me of Abandoned Kansai, an urban exploration blog for Japan. I found while looking for photos of abandoned karaoke bars for a story. It started out as focused on the Kansai region, but expanded to include more of Japan and some non-abandoned but lesser-known places too. (And also Chernobyl, apparently??) It doesn't go into the amount of detail about the history of each location as the site you linked, but it's still a cool glimpse at foreign culture since the creator likes to seek out more obscure places.
Urban exploration sites in general tend to be pretty neat!
Not that obscure but the Atlas Obscura. Want to find a neat place near you or on a trip? A local food? Just learn something neat? I like the Atlas Obscura. They also did a Gastro Obscura book specifically about food.
As someone who spends far too much time thinking and reading about current events, thank you for this post. I will bookmark this for places to go when I need a break from the news and politics cycle.
There's Drew Curtis' Fark.com https://www.fark.com/ about absolutely nothing of importance and almost always taken in a lighter vein. Kind of like watching Survivor for the 100th time - a mindless time waster.
I really like how they have a serious upvote and a funny upvote, that is a great idea.
Ha. I think everyone is feeling overloaded these days.
I'm on a tight news drought. I have my Wikipedia daily international news update, some locals news feeds, and no more. No more news podcasts or doomscrolling the Guardian. It's seriously improved my QOL, and I'm still fairly informed.
I noticed that you are not completely cut off from the news.
That sounds a lot like me when I get overloaded. I can't cut myself off completely.
Scrolling through the headlines at /r/politics is a big daily habit for me. The news has gotten so overwhelming it pushed me away from there.
I never want to be completely in the dark. I want to know the broad strokes of what's happened in Palestine, Ukraine, the US, because that affects my voting patterns. But being just so plugged in was wreaking havoc on my mental health.
I still engage for big events, but I'm trying to stop even that. It's not good for me and I can't do anything about it.
It is the big events that overwhelm me.
I watch out for headlines that are not about facts, but suppositions, usually exaggerations. Those are the ones that affect my mental health the most. "This means___", "this will lead to__", etc. It often doesn't turn out like the supposition headlines or life after that isn't bad. However, it is easy for me to get caught up in the hype.
Open Culture is a blog about culture in all its forms, popular and obscure, through the centuries, music, movies, illustration, artists, installations, all the stuff.
Colossal, a blog about art and an endless stream of creativity.
Battle of the Bits is a community revolved around partaking in the many, many user-hosted battles, where you upload your music creation produced through one of the numerous retro game console soundchips that fits within the specific criteria. The listeners will vote on how well yours performed in different aspects, and whichever earns the most points will be declared as the winner.
You usually have little time at your disposal to come up with a good music, so don't always expect to consistently pump out masterpiece after masterpiece. But that is the beauty of the experimental nature of soundchip-produced sound, perhaps best demonstrated by Jakerson's SPC700 (SNES) piece, LightShow YEAH.
In case you need feedback for improving your skills at churning out pieces, there's the dedicated BotB Discord server maintained by the site's owner for this purpose and more.
Be warned, this site has some early 00s website design quirks, obtuse design choices and community-specific jargon that makes for a steep learning curve to navigate properly. It can be argued that this is done to require significantly more dedication on your part compared to the mainstream social medias, as a measure to weed out much of the undesirable Internet users away.
I think Neal.fun might work for this. It's mostly light entertainment games, but they tend to be pretty good.
Bit of shameless self promotion but I built AntGame.io a couple years ago and I think it fits the bill for what you’re looking for. It’s a web game with the goal of placing ant ‘homes’ strategically to help them bring home the most food in the allotted time. There is a new challenge every day and a championship each month to reward regular players. Happy to answer any questions if you've got them!