the corner
the bigger builds
A workbench for animation easing: draw a cubic-bezier, tune a spring or a bouncing ball, race curves against each other, and copy CSS that works.
Every one-dimensional cellular automaton (all 256 of them) and every
A metronome with every control a metronome has: tempo, time signature, six
Drop a picture in. It comes out as type — every pixel replaced by a
A falling-sand physics sandbox with thirteen materials that actually react
A stack-based virtual machine with a real instruction set, a real two-pass assembler, and a debugger view that shows you every register, every stack slot, and every call frame as the program runs one instruction at a time.
SUREC 1.0.4 compiles C, JavaScript, Python, and Rust. It has opinions about
Paste a bash one-liner. Get the pipeline it actually runs, every flag's meaning, every `$(...)` and `${...}` expansion spelled out, and the handful of ways it might bite you.
A live, draggable editor for SVG path data — paste a `d` attribute, drag its anchors and control handles, watch the commands update underneath you.
A path tracer that runs in plain JavaScript, on the main thread, with no WebGL and no libraries — orbit a scene and watch the image compute itself, sample by sample.
A 2048 variant where the tiles are programming languages, in the order they actually shipped.
WISTFULFISH 11 plays real, legal chess. It just isn't calculating any of it.
A regex tester that also tells you, in plain English, what every piece of your pattern is actually doing.
A parser playground: write a grammar, hand it a string, and watch the parse happen one attempt at a time — every rule call, every backtrack, every packrat cache hit, in the order the engine actually did them.
A guess-the-language lineup. Read a real code snippet, name the language it's written in, before the clock runs out.
A `psql` session with a server that answers every question, and means none of it.
A reference that shows you the actual exchange — not just what a code means, but the exact request and response headers that produce it.
A step-through reducer for the untyped lambda calculus. Paste any λ-expression, watch the active redex highlight in amber, step through each β-reduction, and arrive at the normal form — if one exists.
A 16-step drum sequencer that runs in the browser, makes real sound, and shares a beat in a URL.
A filesystem that isn't quite sure what's in it.
A live GLSL fragment shader playground that runs entirely in your browser. Write a shader, see it render in real time. No build step, no account, no API keys. Just WebGL and a textarea.
A cellular automaton sandbox where nineteen elements interact with each other in ways that reward experimentation. Drop sand into water. Pour oil on fire. Stack gunpowder and light one grain. Pour lava onto ice. Let a cloner loaded with acid do its worst. Melt a metal wall down to glowing runoff and watch it set back into a puddle of metal.
A cron expression playground for developers who write `*/5 * * * *` and
A unit test runner that does its best.
A sorting algorithm visualizer built for people who want to actually understand what's happening — not just watch bars bounce.
the daily ones
A small churchyard for side projects. Lay a stone for each one you've
A steady-hand pouring game. Hold space to tip the bottle; stop at the
A one-screen widget for stretching letters. Type a word, press and
A column generator. Type a mundane claim, set the confidence dial, and the
A donkey between two haystacks, friend, and you with two arrow keys. Each night brings eight small splits — reply or delete, ship it or hold, go or cook in, run the migration in prod or wait till Monday. The donkey has a slight preference for the middle. If you tap only occasionally he drifts back. If you tap in a quick run he commits.
A long tavern table and six patrons. One of them is the lanspresado — he comes in with twopence in his pocket, pats it apologetically when it is his round, and offers the kind of excuse a man offers when he had a crown this morning and does not have one now. The other five pay their rounds. You cannot tell which is which from the hat.
A pub door with an iron sneck. Lift the latch and peek inside. Each lift opens on a different pub, a different century — twelve of them, in order:
A tiny letterpress. Pick type out of a California job case, lock it into
A browser toy. One structural dome, viewed from above, with its beds dipping
A browser toy. One goblet, one slider, one target: pour until all but a single
A browser toy. Fifteen stops on a slider, 1964 → 2024, each a real shipping
A browser rig that converts any volume you give it — millilitres, cups,
A browser almanac for the warmth of the sun. Enter a latitude; the ledger
A browser-based bombast gauge. Paste copy — a bio, a tagline, a product
A procedural grumbler in the browser.
An interactive diagram of the pivoting bar at the front of a two-horse cart. Hover (or hold) on either horse to make it pull harder. The bar rotates, each trace chain lengthens or slackens, and the cart continues forward evenly regardless of how uneven the horses pull. A piece of nineteenth-century mechanical geometry rendered in SVG.
A small civic office that issues one straightening prescription per visitor. Ring the bell, receive a case card: a case number, a measured angle in degrees, a classification, and a one-paragraph instruction for restoring a specified household or desktop item to true.
A street-wandering compass. Click once and get three things: a direction, a duration in minutes, and a one-sentence instruction for the small thing to do at the far end.
A public register of incidents, in the pastiche-academic style of Paul Jennings's 1948 *Report on Resistentialism,* in which inanimate objects behaved spitefully toward their owners.
A one-click generator for the kind of elaborate 1890s patent-medicine label the mountebank sold off the back of a wagon in the market square. Prof. friend's Celebrated Botanic Compound, in nine serifs, a fistful of dire complaints, a testimonial, a dosage directive, and a batch number.
*Nudiustertian* is a lost English word meaning "of the day before yesterday" — from Latin *nudius tertius*, "today is the third day," Roman inclusive counting.
A pixel tavern with ten drinkers around a fire, playing telephone. You whisper a phrase to the first drinker. It goes all the way round the circle, and each drinker mishears it a little before passing it on. At the end you get what actually arrived.
A browser metal detector on a pixel beach. Sweep the coil across the sand, listen for a tone whose pitch tracks the buried object's conductivity — iron low, copper mid, silver high — and dig when the beep sounds right.
A flock of three hundred dots convened on a rectangle, each running the three-rule Reynolds-1987 boids model against its nearest handful of neighbours: separate to avoid the crush, align to the average heading of the neighbourhood, cohere toward its centre of mass. Move the cursor across the flock and the dots treat it as a predator. Hold still and they resume their shape. Click the stage and they get a campfire.
A pendulum wave in the browser. Fifteen bobs hung from a rack, each tuned to complete one more full swing per minute than the pendulum to its left. Released together, they walk out of phase into a travelling wave, break, re-form, and briefly re-align at exactly sixty seconds.
A browser cloth pinned at the top edge and left to hang in its own gravity.
A browser echolocator for a small dark room.
Ernst Chladni's 1787 experiment, in a browser. Cover a square brass plate
A browser hurdy-gurdy. Turn the crank, the wheel bows the strings, the
A small astrolabe. Where the sun is today, on the sky above your latitude,
A trencher on your screen and forty-one ingredients from the 1670–1770 English
A small typographer's inspector for the whitespace you can't see.
Maury Maverick's 1944 memo, rendered as a working desk.
A Tudor dicing table. Three carved-bone dice on a green felt bed, a
A Victorian parlour bagatelle table. Nine brass pins at the top, five
A Victorian street table with three thimbles, one pea, a lantern, and a
A page from a small imaginary grimoire, in a Latin somewhere between
A large black umbrella, in side view, in the rain. You are dry under it.
A dark field. Words drift up from below, wobble slightly, fade near the
A wooden rocking horse on a curved rocker, standing in a small room in
A rendering of one plaster wall in a small-town county hoosegow, viewed
A small interactive rendering of the eighteenth-century English landscape
A browser dial that takes the plainest possible statement of a workday
A browser toy that convenes a small deliberative body — the Northfield
A browser rendering of Robert FitzRoy's chemical weather glass — the sealed
A split-flap train-station departures board for Slopbowl Central. Ten or
The current moment in nine timekeeping systems, ticking side by side.
A museum registrar's card catalogue. Twenty accession cards from the current
A Victorian correction-book of common wrong beliefs.
A Victorian library card-file on a walnut side-table. One card per pull;
A small window onto a length of an English narrow canal, mid-twentieth-
A pedantic reader that finds fault with whatever you paste into it.
A small nineteenth-century American whistlestop platform, in a browser tab,
A small window that presents one ordinary small anxiety at a time, in the
A small window into a fictional town council that has been discussing
A small nineteenth-century broadside printer, in a browser. Pull the
A small Victorian pendulum-drawing machine, in a browser. Two
A card table already in progress. You are the person standing behind
A lit vitrine. Inside it, on a velvet-draped pedestal, a small object turns slowly and its wall label describes it.
A quiet page of seven drowsing creatures. Click any of them to wake it up. Watch it stretch.
A small wooden marionette on a curtained stage. You are the hand at the top of the strings.
A small late-Victorian telegraph office on the second floor above the tobacconist. The brass key clacks; a coded cable comes off the printer. Each dispatch is procedurally assembled from a bird-named agent, a foreign station, a Foreign Office recipient, a priority stamp, and a body drawn from one of nine templates (silent-agent, request-for-funds, courier-confirmation, cover-blown, meet-instructions, small-correction, etc.). The morse tape above chatters as the body comes in.
A small satirical periodical in the manner of Steele's *Tatler* and Addison's *Spectator*. Each issue features a freshly-drawn coxcomb — name, address, wig-count, defining vanity, defining absurdity, and where he's expected to be tonight — followed by three provincial bulletins, three small advertisements, and three answers to correspondents.
A dark pond in a Wiltshire village at three in the morning. A full moon
A small procedurally-composed front page of a Victorian broadsheet. A
A small illuminated page in the manner of a fourteenth-century English or
A small procedurally-assembled exhibit of extremely questionable artefacts, each
**A spirograph that only winds counter-clockwise.**
**friend's pocket grimoire.** One sigil at a time — with the thing it keeps, the thing it invokes, and the small cost it asks for.
A small shelf of five mismatched cards — a colour swatch, a book spine, a weather blurb, an overheard line, a road sign, a field note, a made-up definition, a two-line classified — assembled without a plan and reshuffled on request.
A quiet field of small figures in two colours, wandering peacefully at their own pace. Click anywhere and drop a squabble.
A wall of twelve small paintings, all hung slightly wrong, in a room with good light.
A small figure paces a paper canvas, drawing a fine line as it wanders.
A tiny in-browser Turing machine.
The standup launderer. Type what actually happened into the sticky note —
A small medieval proclamation generator. Type a deed and hit **Proclaim**,
A penny-arcade oracle. Insert a coin, the machine does its little routine,
A lanyard braider.
A room. Click to add a voice. Add another. Add forty.
A moiré interference sandbox. Two identical patterns are stacked. The
A small drawer with eight fidget things in it. A brass latch, a rotary knob
Four calligraphy pens, in the browser, on a sheet of parchment.
A Chladni plate for friend. A few thousand grains of sand on a membrane vibrating at mode *(n, m)*. The grains hop away from the belly of each standing wave and settle on the nodal lines, where the plate isn't moving. Change the two integers; watch a new pattern build itself out of the same sand. Two plate shapes are built in: a square plate and a circular drumhead.
A field of small dots for friend. Move the cursor into them and they scatter. Stop and they drift back to where they came from.
A small glass vial of coloured liquid for friend. Drag it and the liquid inside sloshes. Let it go and it settles.
A pewter bowl of warm brandy for friend, alight. Raisins float in the flames. Snatch them out with a fingertip before they char.
A drawing toy for friend. Every stroke you make sprouts ornament as it goes — leaves, curls, dots, small berries, tiny stars, the occasional fleuron. You draw the line; the page adds the trim.
A Roman-imperial coin generator for friend. Type a name — or use whatever's in local storage — and get a plausible-looking specimen bearing that name in Latinised form: a silhouette bust on the obverse with a bit of headwear (laurel, radiate crown, diadem, helmet, or veil), a reverse motif (eagle, temple, ship, wreath, altar, sheaf, Victory, cornucopia, standard, or horseman), full legends in the epigraphic register, and a catalog card below with denomination, weight, diameter, mint, grade, and a bit of provenance flavour.
A tiny heraldry generator for friend. Type a name — or use whatever's in local storage — and get a coat of arms seeded from it: a proper heater shield, real heraldic tinctures (metals and colours obeying the rule of tincture), a division of the field, an ordinary, one to five charges, a blazon underneath in the traditional register, and a bit of mock-Latin motto.
A top-down metal-detector prospector for friend. Ten nuggets are hidden in the dirt somewhere on screen. The signal meter climbs as your coil passes over one. Dig when it peaks.
A flow-field particle sandbox. A grid of Perlin-noise vectors defines a
A tiling playground based on the two-tile patterns first written up by
An n-body gravity sandbox. Click to drop a body, drag to give it velocity,
A modular multiplication table drawn as chords on a circle.
A small SVG ornament generator. Every press of *another* — or the spacebar —
A small Galton board. Twelve rows of pegs, one bean at a time. At every
A small wooden fellow, hanging by four strings from a crossbar that
An interactive CORDIC visualiser, in four modes.
A generator of nineteenth-century American patent-medicine advertisements.
Three walnut halves on a green baize table. A pea appears under one. The
A small procedurally-generated stretch of English canal. Narrowboats
RFC 789 in eight nodes.
An interactive **Gerhardt–Schuster hodgepodge machine** — a cellular automaton
A small black cat on a windowsill under a moon.
A small n-body orbit sandbox for a Sunday.
A small fireworks toy for a Saturday.
A live aggregation sandbox with three interchangeable growth models. Particles spawn outside the growing cluster and freeze in place the instant they touch a stuck neighbour — the three models disagree on how a particle gets there. Colour is by arrival index, so you can read the growth order off the tree — early trunk in reds, late fringe in blues and back around.
A small generator of made-up English words, presented as a random page of a fictional dictionary.
Christopher Langton's ant, on a grid. Two rules:
A two-dimensional ripple tank. Drop point sources into the surface; watch their
A flow-field particle simulator. Three thousand small things drift through a
a tiny additive synthesiser. eight harmonics of a 220 Hz fundamental,
A single windowpane with the weather running down it.
Two oscillators on perpendicular axes:
Two concentric rings, one rotating hand.
A small generative sunflower head. Each seed *n* is placed at polar
Four one-parameter maps, shown two ways at once: a bifurcation diagram
Two coherent point sources, one 2D field, sixty frames a second. Drag
A 24-hour solar-time dial for any latitude on any day of the year.
A working three-pendulum harmonograph, in the browser, on a sheet of
A top-down Foucault pendulum that precesses with latitude. Set the
A working slide rule. Logarithmic C and D scales, a hairline cursor on a
A Victorian patent-medicine label generator. Press the button on the
A single slider, zero to ten, that takes any text and gradually breaks it.
An interactive 64-bit field for looking at the 53 spare bits inside an
A small flummery engine, for friend.
A small Truchet-tile generator, for friend.
The Princess Card Trick, for friend.
A small spirograph, for friend.
A small commotion in a glass box, for friend.
A small generator of grand-sounding titles for friend.
A small cross-section of a crater lake on the slow boil.
A small fixed view of Lake Maracaibo at night. The Catatumbo cell sits over
A small green-phosphor terminal that prints text at exactly the rate Bill
A small balloon-navigation toy set on the 1897 Andrée polar expedition.
A small classification instrument in the manner of Dr. Samuel Johnson's
A small simulator of the Panjandrum — the British coastal-assault weapon
A verlet-physics chain of characters that hangs from a pin and swings under
The eastern horizon, with a dot for the moon's monthly northernmost rise, swept across the 18.6-year lunar standstill cycle.
A daily reminder, presented one professional discipline at a time, that you are not qualified to opine on it.
A small buttering machine.
A small Jabberwocky verse forge.
A small garden of demons.
A small drone synth.
A slicing canvas.
A working IBM 1620 Model 1, more or less.
A small canal lock you can stand beside. Boats arrive on their own
A small top-down approach simulator. You're flying Soyuz T-13 toward
A decoder for the Control key. Pick a key, watch the Control key strip it
A small game of computing-history fact-checking. Ten claims per round.
A small encoder/decoder for hiding a message inside any sentence using
A small tour of twelve breakfasts being eaten somewhere in the world this
An interactive hex inspector for the magic numbers of nine common file
A hands-on 32-bit integer. Toggle individual bits, scrub the slider across
A tiny office-tabloid generator. One headline at a time, with a tag
A graceful-exit phrase generator. Pick where you are (a meeting, a video call,
A browser typewriter. Type into the page, the page makes the sounds.
A pond. A stone. Drag, release, watch it bounce.
A soft place to catch a word.
A digital chamber pot. Open `index.html` in any browser. No build, no deps, no fetches, no analytics. State is local-only (`localStorage`).
Open `index.html` in any browser. No build, no deps, no fetches, no analytics. Works offline. State lives in `localStorage`.
Open `index.html` in any browser. That's the install. No build, no deps, no fetches, no analytics. Works offline.
A single-file, zero-dependency morning command center. Open `index.html` in any browser. That's the install.
A single-file rubber duck for when you're stuck and the actual rubber duck on your desk is failing you.
A single-file, self-contained terminal landing page. Open `index.html` in any browser. No build step, no dependencies, no network calls — just HTML, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript pretending to be a shell. The prompt picks up your name from the slopbowl shell (friend@morning), or falls back to "friend" if you've never been here before.
A single-file, self-contained tarot deck for software developers. Sixteen cards, each one a small slap on the shoulder for a situation you are absolutely currently in.