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Timewasters
In celebration of LJ being down again, here is a complete list of the things in my bookmarks folder labeled "Toys and games."
Do not click on the cut if you have anything important you need to do today. (also, no guarantees on accessibility or compatibility for any of these.)
Actually maybe sort of useful to somebody:
LibraryThing CoverGuess: This is a game that shows you book covers, and prompts you to tag them. You score points based on how closely your tags match the tags that previous players have given. The results are stored in a database, and the dream is that someday, you will be able to go to LT and search for a book based on "The cover was mostly blue, and I think there was a clock on it? And some kind of gold thing, maybe a sword?" and it will find it for you. :D
LibraryThing proposed tag combinations: If you're an LT member, here is where you get to vote on whether two tags are similar enough that they should be combined into one, or not. At some point the LT admins will then actually implement the approved combinations sitewide.
Freerice.com: That trivia quiz that supposedly gives money to the poor for every question you answer. (They have added a bunch more topic categories since the last time it went viral, btw.)
Attempts to recapture the past:
Virtual NES Web-based NES emulator.
World of Solitaire : Online solitaire which has dozens and dozens of different versions of solitaire, with no instructions for any of them, just like the first solitaire package we had on our IBM 286.
*Tetris Utterly basic Tetris implementation, for when you just want to freaking drop blocks without waiting for fancy graphics and widgets and whatevers to load.
Bastet Utterly basic Tetris implementation, except that this one also has an implementation of Murphy's Law: there's a built-in algorithm that ensures that whatever piece you need next is the one that you are least likely to get. (It's amazing how much that changes the optimal strategies.)
Just plain games:
Set daily puzzle : Set is the pattern-finding card game that I love best; the manufacturers post a daily solitaire puzzle using the cardset.
Zilch Vaguely Yahtzee-like dice game that DW chat got me addicted to.
Entanglement A tile-based game where the goal is to lay down the longest path using tangled string; someone posted this on the last LJ-is-down thread on JF and I got addicted fast.
*Interrobang arcade Collection of simple arcade-type games in Silverlight
Boomshine : found through its iPhone app, I swear to you that this is a nuclear chain reaction simulator. There is a chamber containing a sub-critical mass of gas molecules; your goal is to start the chain reaction in the place from which it will spread the farthest.
Torturing small animals:
Spider : A spider appears on your screen. You can do things to it.
Poke the penguin On this site, there is a penguin which you can poke.
Katamari hack: This lets you roll up any website you want into a katamari. It is amazing.
virtual bubblewrap, because sometimes you just need virtual bubblewrap.
*Zombie infection simulation. Simulates a zombie outbreak, allowing you to set certain parameters and then watch the infection spread.
Boxcar2d An evolution simulation where you are trying to evolve cars for the greatest possible fitness by running them along a track and then "breeding" the most effective to create a new generation. You can set parameters and tweak the simulation by giving certain cars extra "fitness points", but the real point is watching the tiny cars try and try to get up the hill and fail (or, finally, succeed!)
Just kind of nifty:
Color quiz : A personality quiz that gives its results as an HTML hexadecimal color code.
Multicolr search lab: Searches Flickr by color - you give it a set of 1-8 colors, and it brings up flickr photos that incorporate those colors.
Codeorgan : Translates the code of any web page into music.
Google ngram viewer : gives word frequency graphs for the English language over 300 years, based on Google's complete corpus (not a terribly useful scientific tool, because it's too biased by what happens to get scanned into Google most often, but still fun to play with.)
Art:
Flame painter : Lets you draw with fire.
Scribbler : Lets you draw with spiderweb.
Artpad A simple paint program which lets you replay your finished drawing stroke-by-stroke.
Most of these were probably linked by people on my reading lists originally, but darned if I can remember who! (Though the starred ones are programmed/hosted by people I know.)
Also I used to have a dollmakers category, but online dollmakers seem to have a comparatively short lifespan. Anybody have any good dollmaker recs? (preferably ones that are useful for making dolls for characters who may not be female, white, thin, gender-conforming, or interested in modern Western fashion?)
Do not click on the cut if you have anything important you need to do today. (also, no guarantees on accessibility or compatibility for any of these.)
Actually maybe sort of useful to somebody:
LibraryThing CoverGuess: This is a game that shows you book covers, and prompts you to tag them. You score points based on how closely your tags match the tags that previous players have given. The results are stored in a database, and the dream is that someday, you will be able to go to LT and search for a book based on "The cover was mostly blue, and I think there was a clock on it? And some kind of gold thing, maybe a sword?" and it will find it for you. :D
LibraryThing proposed tag combinations: If you're an LT member, here is where you get to vote on whether two tags are similar enough that they should be combined into one, or not. At some point the LT admins will then actually implement the approved combinations sitewide.
Freerice.com: That trivia quiz that supposedly gives money to the poor for every question you answer. (They have added a bunch more topic categories since the last time it went viral, btw.)
Attempts to recapture the past:
Virtual NES Web-based NES emulator.
World of Solitaire : Online solitaire which has dozens and dozens of different versions of solitaire, with no instructions for any of them, just like the first solitaire package we had on our IBM 286.
*Tetris Utterly basic Tetris implementation, for when you just want to freaking drop blocks without waiting for fancy graphics and widgets and whatevers to load.
Bastet Utterly basic Tetris implementation, except that this one also has an implementation of Murphy's Law: there's a built-in algorithm that ensures that whatever piece you need next is the one that you are least likely to get. (It's amazing how much that changes the optimal strategies.)
Just plain games:
Set daily puzzle : Set is the pattern-finding card game that I love best; the manufacturers post a daily solitaire puzzle using the cardset.
Zilch Vaguely Yahtzee-like dice game that DW chat got me addicted to.
Entanglement A tile-based game where the goal is to lay down the longest path using tangled string; someone posted this on the last LJ-is-down thread on JF and I got addicted fast.
*Interrobang arcade Collection of simple arcade-type games in Silverlight
Boomshine : found through its iPhone app, I swear to you that this is a nuclear chain reaction simulator. There is a chamber containing a sub-critical mass of gas molecules; your goal is to start the chain reaction in the place from which it will spread the farthest.
Torturing small animals:
Spider : A spider appears on your screen. You can do things to it.
Poke the penguin On this site, there is a penguin which you can poke.
Katamari hack: This lets you roll up any website you want into a katamari. It is amazing.
virtual bubblewrap, because sometimes you just need virtual bubblewrap.
*Zombie infection simulation. Simulates a zombie outbreak, allowing you to set certain parameters and then watch the infection spread.
Boxcar2d An evolution simulation where you are trying to evolve cars for the greatest possible fitness by running them along a track and then "breeding" the most effective to create a new generation. You can set parameters and tweak the simulation by giving certain cars extra "fitness points", but the real point is watching the tiny cars try and try to get up the hill and fail (or, finally, succeed!)
Just kind of nifty:
Color quiz : A personality quiz that gives its results as an HTML hexadecimal color code.
Multicolr search lab: Searches Flickr by color - you give it a set of 1-8 colors, and it brings up flickr photos that incorporate those colors.
Codeorgan : Translates the code of any web page into music.
Google ngram viewer : gives word frequency graphs for the English language over 300 years, based on Google's complete corpus (not a terribly useful scientific tool, because it's too biased by what happens to get scanned into Google most often, but still fun to play with.)
Art:
Flame painter : Lets you draw with fire.
Scribbler : Lets you draw with spiderweb.
Artpad A simple paint program which lets you replay your finished drawing stroke-by-stroke.
Most of these were probably linked by people on my reading lists originally, but darned if I can remember who! (Though the starred ones are programmed/hosted by people I know.)
Also I used to have a dollmakers category, but online dollmakers seem to have a comparatively short lifespan. Anybody have any good dollmaker recs? (preferably ones that are useful for making dolls for characters who may not be female, white, thin, gender-conforming, or interested in modern Western fashion?)
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Yeah, and I thought I was going to write fic tonight.
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I'm amused that putting in a right-wing site on Codeorgan plays like a dirge and my husband's corporation is so high-pitched it scared the cats. T. Thorn Coyle (a Pagan priestess)' blog is pretty chill, though.
The fire painting is gorgeous, I'd love to see it in the hands of someone who knows what to do with it.
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I use paper for my offline Sudoku though, so I dunno there (although I think there's actually a version bundled with my latest Puppy Linux liveCD, I suspect that wouldn't help you.)
Quadra is still freeware, and it's what I use when I want offline Tetris, though it's a Tetris-like - it has better gravity, so when a block has no support left, it will fall down and fill in gaps, and you can get really cool cascades set up. (It will screw you up for playing standard Tetris though.) There must be others up, but I've never needed to go looking.
I used Snood as my offline bubble-shooter, but it's no longer freeware. I still have a download of the freeware version, so I've never looked elsewhere. I could probably dig up the shareable .exe from somewhere...
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