Weird websites that are somehow still online
The weird web is not the dark web. It is the ordinary, indexed, perfectly safe internet, occupied by people who built something inexplicable and then paid to keep the domain alive for fifteen years.
A good share of the genuinely strange ones are optical illusions — pages whose entire content is a trick your visual system cannot refuse to fall for, even after you know how it works.
- 1
Lilac Chaseroptical.toys
Stare at the centre. The lilac dots vanish and a green one appears that was never drawn. Your retina is doing this, not the page.
Open it here → - 2
Shepard Toneoptical.toys
A tone that rises forever without ever getting higher. The audio equivalent of a staircase that goes nowhere.
Open it here → - 3
Thatcher Effectoptical.toys
A face that looks normal upside down and deeply wrong the right way up. Nothing about the image changes.
Open it here → - 4
Spinning Duckoptical.toys
A duck that spins clockwise or anticlockwise depending on nothing but which way you decided it was going.
Open it here → - 5
Disappearing Bicyclistoptical.toys
A cyclist who disappears when you are not looking directly at him, which is how peripheral vision actually works.
Open it here → - 6
Blue Ball Machinetheuselessweb.site
An infinite machine of blue balls, animated frame by frame by strangers on a forum in 2005.
Open it here → - 7
This Person Does Not Existthispersondoesnotexist.com
A face that does not belong to anybody. Refresh for another. This was startling in 2019 and is quietly unsettling now.
Open it here → - 8
Maxwell Cat Worldmaxwellcat.world
A cat. A world. No further information is available or necessary.
Open it here →
Weird holds up better than clever. The optical illusions in particular keep working on the hundredth visit, because knowing how they work has no effect on whether they work.
Questions
Are weird websites safe to visit?
The ones here are. Every site in this catalogue is loaded in a real browser and checked before it ships, and none of them asks for a download, a login or a payment. Weird here means unusual, not risky.
Every site above was loaded in a real browser and verified working before this was published. See the full catalogue.