I remember looking at this for the first time many years ago. I don't remember the exact steps that caused the circumstance to appear but I left the page open with the sound on. For quite some time after that I spent ages trying to figure out where the intermittent clicking sound was coming from. It drove me nuts. I felt very silly when I figured it out.
Would be cool to get a system and contribute. I find it crazy just how far some of the sensors are triggered.
I've always toyed with the idea of making some stories for my kids in Ren'Py. Although, I've been toying with the idea for so long that I might get them done in time for the time I have grandchildren.
Visual Novels (whether Ren'Py or otherwise) can be roughly divided into 3 groups:
1. Zero-or-minimal interactivity. A sequence of scenes with the occasional multiple-choice menu. When you get the occasional branch or maybe some randomness, it quickly leads to either a merge with the other branch (sometimes: just missed content on one side) or a Bad End. These are probably the vast majority of VNs, and the reason VNs have such a bad reputation - they're basically equivalent in complexity to the dialogue of a single NPC in a real videogame, just with more useless filler. At best these can be a way of the author showing off their ability to draw.
2. Moderate interactivity. Although still clearly based on a DAG of menus connected by scenes, these have a little state and long-term consequences from early choices. You might get a concept of player stats or custom menus (see #3) for a change, but they're not critical. Most "good" VNs aspire to this.
3. High interactivity. Since they have all the essential complexity of a real videogame, these really don't deserve the stigma of being called Visual Novels (even though they're implemented on a VN engine), and it's unfortunate when they are tagged as such (because that means people will filter them out). This doesn't actually make them good (many of them comparable to the slop that comes out of RPGMaker etc.), but at least they're meaningfully called games. The critical factor here is you revisit the same "menus" multiple times in a playthrough; often these menus have custom UI (for example "click where you want to go on the map"). Usually you have some kind of resources to manage and there's a meaningful day counter (where each day you get roughly the same choices).
Visual Novels is typically somewhere between just keep clicking to read (like a ebook) or some choices (like a choose -your-own-adventure book). But I've also seen one Ren'Py game with a strategy game (hex grid turn based, IIRC) in it, because after all it's still a programming language.
The idea of being more creative by being limited reminds me of the journaling style solo TTRPG's.
I like to dabble in fiction writing, but give me a blank piece of paper and I freeze. With the journaling solo TTRPG's you are essentially given a list of prompts which are quite often set in a predefined world. Somehow by being forced to write a story with these prompts I can write so much more and far quicker then I could by staring at my own piece of paper.
Why y'all going to your fav search engine first to search with another search engine? This is built into chrome and probably Firefox and every other browser
Bangs make searching third-party sites easier. For HN, for example:
!hn by:dredmorbius ddg bangs
(I don't know how to force that to search comments by default, but that's a toggle on the results page.)
Others are image, weather, and Wikipedia searches.
You can share your bang searches with others. Since the syntax is centralised, you're not working through other people's individual search shortcuts.
DDG maintain the bangs and generally update the ones that break. Since more people are effectively testing these all the time, this is more effective than your own ability to keep your own search shortcuts in working order.
My claim isn't that these are necessarily overwhelming advantages. But they are benefits which some of us have noted and appreciate, and show that the concept has more than nil value.
And: DDG have over 13,500 bangs and counting, and you can search for relevant bangs using, of course, the !bang bang search, e.g.,
My usual use case is to search HN comments. Problem is that there doesn't seem to be a way to specify comments on the bang search itself, so you have to toggle the results page option, or click "search for comments" to get the 57 (at this writing) comment hits:
I really wish the bang would default to comment search, as it's a much broader search target. Posts are limited to 80 characters, comments to rather more than that (there is a max comment length, and I've hit it, but it's fairly generous). So your odds of matching term(s) in a comment are higher than for posts.
I don't know how the syncing works for that, but all my custom bangs (which for me includes bangs for Kagi lenses / filters and non search engine sites at this point) sync using my Kagi account which is pretty nice.
Also I use Firefox Focus on mobile, which doesn't have many settings, and I don't think I've seen that features there.
One thing I enjoyed about TIS-100 was trying to get the low cycles or low instruction count. I remember the "Aha!" moment when I discovered that it often not possible to get both at the same time.
I still haven't finished all the levels, I should really finish it one day.
