At some point during your session, a pop-up will appear.
Maybe immediately. Maybe three minutes in. Maybe never — there is a 1-in-5 chance it skips you entirely. This is intentional. The randomness is the point. The pop-up is a recreation of the era's most hated UI pattern: the unsolicited floating window that appeared unbidden, demanded your attention, and offered you something you did not want.
The pop-up rotates through six themes, each referencing a real artifact of early-2000s internet life:
PUNCH THE MONKEY — One of the most iconic banner ads of the era. A monkey swung back and forth across a Flash animation; the goal was to click it at the right moment. It appeared on nearly every ad-supported site from roughly 1999 to 2002. Winning did nothing. The prize was an email list subscription.
FREE RINGTONES — The ringtone business was enormous in the early 2000s. Carriers charged per download, most ringtones were MIDI renditions of pop songs, and ads promoting "free" ringtones were everywhere. The fine print invariably revealed a subscription that billed your phone bill monthly.
YOUR PC HAS 14 VIRUSES — A category of scare-ware that remained common well into the 2010s. Pop a fake warning over whatever you are doing, make the number large and specific, and watch the clicks come in. The scan was always instantaneous. The results were always dire.
MURICA WEB 5.0 — A reference to the Murica Web app elsewhere on this desktop, itself a parody of AOL (America Online). The real AOL distributed installation CDs with escalating free-hour counts — 100 hours, 500 hours, 1,000 hours — throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. Getting one in the mail was essentially guaranteed. 1,776 hours seemed appropriate.
WORK FROM HOME — Guaranteed income from home, skeptical math presented confidently, and a testimonial from someone's mother. This ad format predates the internet and survived it.
WIN A FREE iPOD — From approximately 2003 onward, the iPod replaced cash as the default promised prize for any contest that was not a contest. Fill out a survey. Click through an offer wall. Win an iPod. Nobody ever explained what happened to the iPod.
THE IRONY
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AdBot Find & Fry — elsewhere on this desktop — is a parody of the tools people used to remove exactly this kind of software. The pop-up and the removal tool coexist on the same machine. This is also how it worked in real life: the adware shipped first, the anti-adware tools responded, and you ran both simultaneously for years.
Close the pop-up and it is gone for the session. Reload and the timer resets.