With the recent rise of "Geek culture," the long-held misperception that computer users are solitary, electronic slaves is slowly receding like a ten percent drop shadow. Geeks have asserted for years that they can party as hard as any testosterone-filled football player. To prove it, we present the TidBITS Web Surfing Party Game (TBWSPG, pronounced "Fred").

Fred is best experienced in a group setting (say, a rack of office cubicles at lunchtime), but you can also play at home alone or networked, of course. To play, choose your favorite drink, connect to your ISP, and start surfing the Web. Remember to be responsible, and hand over the mouse when you've drunk too much.

Drink once if:

• your modem has to redial when connecting to your ISP (if more than five times, stop drinking and cancel that darn AOL account already!).
• you see a "Best Viewed With..." tag (twice if it's animated)
• you get any error message (bad URL, etc.)
• you see an under construction sign
• you view a page with a Web counter (twice if it's a broken graphic)
• you view a blink tag (not necessary to drink for every blink)
• you come across a Java applet (twice if it doesn't load)
• you see the phrase "cool links"
• a background sound loads (you also must dance with drink in hand)
• your browser crashes
• you have to resize the browser window
• a graphic doesn't load

Drink twice if:

• you hit a JavaScript error
• you arrive at a password-protected site (if you can guess the password in three tries, collect a dollar from everyone in the room and chug drink)
• you find a home page purportedly belonging to someone's pet.
• "cool" is spelled "kewl"
• you have to download a plug-in and restart your browser
• the graphics are broken on a Web designer's home pages

Special:

• If you hit a Shockwave project, you have to wait to drink until it's downloaded. (This is a good chance to walk to the store for more drinks, render 3D images, or write a new operating system.)