17 Websites To Visit When You're Bored Out Of Your Mind

This text-based role-playing game based on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is really hard. Like really hard. I have been playing this game on and off for a couple of years, and have yet to get past the first spaceship.

Despite how tricky it is, it's tremendously funny, seldom literal, and a must for all towel-remembers.

Play it here.

Jump! Climb! Kill the baddies! Save the princess! Play this classic game online for free, but remember to turn off the sound, or put headphones in. Not only is the soundtrack a little bit tinny, the sword swipes make a lot of noise.

Play it here.

This physics-based doodle game is fiercely addictive. You have to push a red ball across the screen, using only shapes you draw. You can add in hinges and pins, and erase some poor choices if you must. One note: This is best suited to playing on graphics tablets (or even touchscreens) – with a mouse it's a bit tricky.

Play it here.

Excit is a very simple navigation/maze game that gets more fiendish with each level. But the brilliant thing about Excit is that is looks like an Excel spreadsheet. Not that we're saying you should play this at work, but if you *did* then it would look like you were very absorbed in finessing your formulas.

Play it here.

Truly addictive, Little Alchemy challenges you to create 550 elements from just the basics: water, earth, air, and fire. Basically, you combine elements to make new ones (so for example, water + water = sea). It doesn't take long to get sucked in.

Play it here.

Click on to your fave property website (like Rightmove, The Modern House (for architecture buffs), Waterside Properties, (for, you guessed it, those seeking a waterside property) and slide that pricing scale right up. Money is no object. What will you choose?

"Weather?" you say. "Zzzzzz." Let us prove you wrong with forecast.io. Super accurate, and helpful for your local area, but also weirdly absorbing for guessing temperatures around the world.

Radiooooo is a really neat concept. Click on an era and a location, and listen to the music that was popular there and then. So, if you click 1950 + United Kingdomn, you'll get a swing track. But 1930 + Australia digs up a folk song. Easy to while away a whole afternoon.

Created by the author Married to the Sea (more on that later), TWTFS is updated daily with the worst things for sale on Amazon. Check in and see if anything takes your fancy (like perhaps these ~unisex~ Chewbacca Crocs).

This gem of a website curates famous historical letters – including those from celebrities, poets, writers, politicians, scientists, and more. It's easy to do a deep dive and only come up for air 30 minutes later, having read Marie Curie's letter of recommendation for Albert Einstein.

The author also runs Lists of Note, which focuses on lists, and Letterheady, which focuses on beautiful stationary.

Project Gutenberg has over 49,000 e-books for free, with more being added regularly. You can download them to your phone or Kindle – or just keep one open in a tab to dip in and out of. All the books featured are out of copyright, so you can expect plenty of Sherlock Holmes, as well as The Call of the Wild, Wuthering Heights, and more.

Here are some to get you started: SMBC, Dinosaur Comics, XKCD, Hark! A Vagrant, Married to the Sea, and QuestionableContent (my personal favourite).

Just keep clicking, man. If you need some direction, here's a good place to start.

Keep it open in a tab all day long for a paw-some energy boost.

Just click here.