Everything here is free. I still print you a receipt.
A thermal receipt that itemises your visit and bills it in the only currency that changed hands: your time.
Scroll to the bottom of my homepage and a receipt prints out. Not a metaphor — a proper thermal receipt, the crinkled kind a corner shop hands you, with a header, line items, a total, and a little “thank you, come again.” It lists everything you did on the site. Read the about section, that's a line. Poked the experiments, another line. Provoked the stick figure, itemised.
At the bottom it totals up. Everything on this site is free, so the bill is in the only currency that actually changed hands while you were here: your time. The receipt is the joke and the honesty at once.
Reading the page is shopping
Every section of the site is a product on the shelf. Each one has a short, all-caps receipt name — HOME BREW, ABOUT READ, WORK INSPECTED, FUN PROJECTS BROWSED, LIVE STATUS WATCHED. Cross into a section and it gets added to your tab. Open one of the alternate sites and you're charged for an ISLAND DAY PASS or a WAHABOS SESSION. Poke the stick figure enough and it shows up as STICK FIGURE, PROVOKED.
There's no database behind any of this. Your tab lives in your own browser for the length of the visit and vanishes when you leave. It's your receipt. I don't keep a copy.
Codes travel, words don't
You can also share your receipt as an image. That's where it got interesting. The image is drawn on the server, and the list of what to print rides along in the link.
If the link carried the actual text of each line, anyone could hand my server a link that prints whatever they want and get back an image served from my domain. So the link only carries short codes, never words. The server keeps the master list of what each code means and draws only from that. Hand it a code it doesn't recognise and it silently drops the line. You cannot make my receipt say something I didn't write.
The one thing that breaks the rules
Almost everything on this site is owned by the section it belongs to — its own code, its own components, no reaching across. The receipt is the deliberate exception. It has to itemise the whole visit, so it's the one piece that watches every surface. When I add a new section, I give it a receipt code, and the moment someone lands there, it rings up.
A gift shop where the only thing for sale is the time you already spent. Take the receipt with you.