The Beach is not a great film. Leonardo DiCaprio’s first film after Titanic, it was a commercial success but a critical flop, with a 20% rating on Rotten Tomatoes for its “unfocused and muddled” story.

If you’re a long-time reader, you’ll know I love seeing ’90s internet captured in film and television. There aren’t many examples of real ’90s user interfaces in motion, mostly limited to VHS tutorial videos, some of which I’ve digitized here in the past.

In most movies of the era, filmmakers typically made fake GUIs that bore little resemblance to reality.

But Danny Boyle decided to buck that trend, using real hardware and software available in 1999, including a short capture of the 1990s web. I couldn’t find good quality copies of these clips online, so I made them myself.

At the end of the film, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character goes into a fictional New York cybercafe called 01001HUB, packed full of vintage Apple technology—a sea of iMac G3s of every color and their horrible hockey puck mice.

Leo sits down to an Apple Studio Display in blueberry, checks his mail with Internet Explorer 4.5, and we get a nice split-second glimpse of the 1999-era Excite homepage, before he signs into Excite Mail with its whopping 3MB quota limit.

He downloads a photo attachment in realistically slow fashion, but with a very unlikely animated signature added to it. (Also, his Excite username is just “Richard”? Please.)

Earlier in the film, DiCaprio plays Rampage World Tour, released for the Game Boy Color in 1998, on an original monochrome Game Boy.

Finally, in a sequence that veers stylistically from the rest of the film, DiCaprio’s character hallucinates himself as the main character of a game inspired by Banjo-Kazooie, released the previous year for the Nintendo 64. How did this never become a meme? Seriously.

We released the XOXO 2018 talks over the last few weeks, and like every year, they’re all worth checking out. Everyone brought something special and unique, and getting to work with all these remarkably talented people and putting them on one stage together continues to be a dream.

This year, Demi Adejuyigbe was the first person I reached out to and the first to sign on for the conference. I love his work so much, and he’s exactly the kind of extremely-online multidisciplinary talent I’m drawn to.

Like Neil Cicierega, Demi isn’t easy to classify. He’s a comedian and screenwriter who’s worked on The Good Place and currently writes for The Late Late Show, but if you spend any time online, you probably know him from his September 21 videos, his Will Smith-style end credit raps, his Lando rap, or his podcasts The Gilmore Guys and Punch Up the Jam.

Demi had an idea for a presentation and wanted to try it at XOXO, but it wasn’t a great fit for the conference, which tends to focus on more personal, vulnerable talks about living and working online. He didn’t tell me much about it, except it had to do with jazz.

So we added him at the last minute to our Film & Animation lineup, an evening event normally focused on screenings and Q&As from online video creators. We’ve never released a video from our Film & Animation event, but it was so good, we decided to make an exception.

Please enjoy Demi Adejuyigbe’s Guide to Makin’ and Livin’ Jazz.

Two days later, he opened the final day of the festival with a talk that was so good, so captivating, and so funny, he earned two standing ovations. If you haven’t seen it, take a few minutes to watch it.

Demi is a gem of the internet, and I highly recommend following his work if you don’t already.

Last year, my wife Ami designed and released her first game, a conversational card game called You Think You Know Me, raising nearly $30k from over 600 backers on Kickstarter. I wrote about it when it was still funding on Kickstarter last year, but didn’t follow up with everything since.

The game released on schedule in March this year, and went on to sell out her initial 2,000 unit print run completely by the summer. Her second print run (7,500 games!) just arrived, making its way to all her retailers, and you can once again buy the game directly from her website.

The Peach Pack

Earlier this month, Ami launched a project for The Peach Pack, a deck of 106 new cards themed around sex and sexuality, designed to be played either as a standalone game or as an expansion to the original game.

The project ends tomorrow at 6pm PT/9pm ET — and still has a ways to go. It’s currently at 40% funded, and will take a serious push to get the word out.

It’s $15 for the Peach Pack alone, or you can get both games at a discount. The video below explains more, or you can read more on the project page.

Why I Love It

When Ami started writing the Peach Pack cards, she was intent on making the new game gender-neutral, sex-positive, and queer-friendly.

You’d think that would be a no-brainer in 2018, but I was surprised at how many adult-themed games we looked at make assumptions about gender, sex, and sexual orientation. They assume players are straight and cisgender, and those assumptions rule out so many people.

For me, it was just as interesting to see what kinds of cards weren’t in the deck, as which ones were. There aren’t any cards with references to anatomy or positions that aren’t universal, and never falls into heteronormative tropes.

So, what does that leave? So much! The cards are all about what we love and lust over: what we find sexy, what we prefer, what we dream about, and our past experiences.

Like the original game, many of the questions are playful, designed to provoke conversation and laughter. Would you rather have sex in space or underwater? If you could sleep with any mythological creature, which would it be?

It’s a fun and thoughtful game, and I really hope it gets made. Check it out, spread the word, and consider backing it!