Action Button Update 08/30/2024

Hello! I thought I'd provide everyone an update on the status of Action Button video productions.

For those unwilling to read the fullness of this post, consider this paragraph the short version: work continues, full-time. I have not spent a weekday NOT working on these videos since my last post. Yes, I know that was almost two years ago. I am Getting Old so Almost Two Years goes by like that. Well, I work daily on six separate productions, which seeing as I do multiple jobs on each one feels like the most perfectly natural method for me. I feel bad about not providing you production updates or teasers or trailers or bonus features, though to be perfectly honest, I only feel bad about it when someone directly confronts me in one of my various inboxes. I consider the ongoing work The Best Work Of My Many Careers and experience incredible fulfillment every time I open a Premiere project and reckon with its wildness for a minute or so. I turned 45 in June and thus have been frequently throwing around the phrase "I am past the statistical midpoint of my life" during livestreams. However I somewhat recently had the miraculous opportunity to peruse the gravestones at my old family cemetery (???), which shockingly revealed to me that many of my ancestors both fought in World War ONE and died at age ninety-five, so maybe my cardiologist's joke about me living to a hundred and twenty is true, at which point I have for certain defrauded my livestream viewers. It seems my genetic destiny has doomed me to a supercentury of petty frustrations regarding mostly Adobe products. At any rate I recently have happened upon many occasions profound or not to reckon with my own mortality and in the middle of last year quite nonchalantly while typing up a lugubrious narration of an enemy encounter in one of my ten favorite video games of all time I fell down a rabbit hole of the realization that these reviews for the most part represent The Last Time In My Life I Will Ever Talk About This Exact Thing, where "This Exact Thing" of course varies from paragraph to paragraph. Ever since then I've neither cared nor tried to wash the philosophical stain off my ridiculous prose. I work happily and contentedly and feel good all day every day about every little creative-or-not decision I make, whether it be of a video or audio transition applied to a clip, a turn of phrase workshopped with ninety-six repetitions into a microphone, a piece of camera equipment bid for on eBay, a contractor paid, a studio booked, or a potential interview subject emailed. My working life overflows with the joy of perfect control. I wake up every day knowing exactly what to do, and I end every task knowing of six others I can segue onto as my mood declares. Furthermore--and this is a question I get a LOT--no, I do not do freelance work. I am not a freelance consultant for video games. I stopped all that in 2020 when I launched my first video. This is 100% of my job. YouTube ad and Twitch subscriber revenue do not even together cover my apartment's monthly maintenance fee. Also, yes, I did get robbed last week while shooting on location, though I really wish I hadn't told anyone about it. I have done many weekly Friday livestreams during immensely stressful situations without disclosing any personal details. I guess I just couldn't hide it last week. Yes, I lost some valuable equipment and a week of shooting, though we're filming it again next week and it'll go better and cost less money and look better. Please--and I can't believe I'm typing this--I'd really appreciate it if you stopped yelling at me because I got robbed. Yes, I shouldn't have told you, though also: please, and also: come on, man. Yes, the robbery is the main reason I am in a weird enough mental state to write this post right now and I won't gauchely pretend otherwise. Finally, please join the Action Button Discord. It's located at discord.gg/actionbutton. If you connect your Discord and your Patreon accounts you gain access to the backers-only "Fukubukuro" room, where I tend to hang out all day. Also, I do weekly livestreams on twitch.tv/ActionButton. I do these purely for fun, as a way to unwind from a backpainful / neckpainful week of work. However sometimes I use the Discord Fukubukuro chat as the stream chat--allowing me to create a sort of a Patreon Backers Only Chat stream. I will be doing one of those TONIGHT at 7pm Eastern, so get on in there!

Well, that's the end of the Short Version. Let's make some kind of a long version:

FIRST: I LOVE MY COMMUNITY

I don't use the word "love" lightly. So many of you were so nice and encouraging to me when I (stupidly, gauchely) confessed to having been robbed in broad daylight at high noon while traveling. I'll talk more about the robbery later in this post, though for now I just want to thank everyone who reached out with support. It means so much more than even a word-typer of my prolificacy can adequately communicate. Everybody get in Discord Dot GG Slash Action Button please.

"There is No Money in these videos I make except for yours." I keep saying--and meaning--this during my livestreams, though let's put it down here as well for posterity: there is no money in these videos I make except for yours. YouTube's algorithm doesn't exactly like my sort of channel; I have said no to every sponsor who has approached me; heck, I can't imagine a sponsor who'd agree to my terms if I did like them enough to present them my terms. I am making huge, wild things over here and I prefer to keep them secret from you until I release them and I love every one of you who understands and respects that aspect of this thing!

Also, I sincerely apologize for how much I am going to wind up talking about money in this post. Let me clarify up front: money as of right now is good. It is sufficient. Please realize that I am producing, on average, nine hours of video content for the cost of sixteen minutes of The Daily Show. (Yes, I did the math.) I don't mean to brag here. I wouldn't compare myself to Tarkovsky or Orson Welles or anyone extremely impressive, though I don't mind going for Jon Stewart. You haven't even seen me in a suit (yet (unless you were by some chance at the Long Island Retro Gaming Expo earlier this month. Yes, that was Me In A Suit)). We can revisit the discussion of seeing me in a suit in a couple months. For now, let's (once again) talk broadly about my ongoing video production work.

WORK CONTINUES

With "Action Button Reviews Tokimeki Memorial" I figured out what kinds of videos I want to make; with "Action Button Reviews Boku No Natsuyasumi" I made one of the videos I want to make. Now I'm making a couple more of those and loving every stupid minute.

Here I must remind you that I wrote, shot, produced, and edited "Action Button Reviews The Last Of Us" and "Action Button Reviews Pac-Man" in twelve and sixteen days each, respectively, and anyone who likes either of those more than any of the others has not seen literally any of the others. The statute of limitations is up: they are bad. I'm sorry. I made them way too fast. I should have let myself cook.

I changed my Patreon description back around when I released the Boku No Natsuyasumi video to no longer hint at the promise of monthly or even regular videos. I will change it again when the next video launches, and it will be much, much shorter and hopefully more agreeable to everyone. I haven't composed a draft of its wording yet though I reckon it'll go something like "I make big videos about video games. You can watch them at youtube.com/actionbutton. If you like them, please help me make them. I will release bonus features relevant to each video after the video releases. However I formally subscribe to the David Lynch philosophy of Talking About The Film, in that I believe 'The Film Is The Talking'.""

(You may notice I stopped posting on Twitter at the end of 2021. That was not an accident. I got out before that new guy bought it! I never liked posting progress updates about my videos on there because the cool people were all fine waiting and any words aside from "video is uploaded" only made the angry people angrier. So, I will continue to only ever use Twitter to post links to my new videos as they release.)

I apologize for not updating you more often. It's just: I feel like a loser whenever I think about Patreon. I feel like a loser for having to ask people for their money. Yes, yes, I know I have stated that your money is all of my money, so yes, I feel bad about asking for all of my money.

I know that the VAST majority of you gladly give me your money and understand that these things take time and that I use the money carefully. Though it doesn't matter if there's nine hundred and ninety nine of you to every one angry person--I always look at the angry person. What can I say? My profession for the majority portion of my adult life has been "critic". I genuinely can't yell at myself too much for gravitating toward the negatives. Unless I decided to consider this tendency of mine a "negative" . . .

I feel like a loser when I think about Patreon because, well, I love the feeling of releasing a video, and the videos just aren't ready. I love putting a video out and knowing that you who watch it are about to experience a vast landscape of entertainment-surprises. I jam-pack these things, Carl. I don't want to give too much away, though perhaps you noticed the shot of me wearing a Batman T-shirt standing in front of Taco Tico in the Cyberpunk video. It's easy to recognize because I'm standing in front of a Taco Tico wearing a Batman T-shirt and I literally say "Taco Tico". That was a reference to the Boku no Natsuyasumi video, which as of the moment of editing that clip had about a year of production remaining. I am collecting dozens of moments like that into these next six videos. In fact, there already might be two dozen such moments in the Boku No Natsuyasumi video.

This is all to say: the videos are as beautiful as they aren't ready yet. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've woken up and thought, maybe I'll record a little video message to post on the Patreon. Then I start working, and then I realize it's time for dinner and then television while hugging my dog ("My Bedtime Boy"). It turns out Community Management is in fact a nuanced full-time job. I have sacrificed that specific rat's nest of tasks so that I can focus on all other aspects of production. I'm sorry about that, though I hope you'll love the final product when it's done as much as I do while working on it.

THE MONEY

Most comments I receive regarding my job concern my money. In all sincerity, I hate this. I wish we could talk about the work itself, cinematography, editing techniques, or even video games. Though no, most people messaging me want to talk about money. They do so either adversarially or sincerely. They either chide me for making so much money yet not releasing a video, or ask me how THEY can ALSO rise in status to a point where THEY can ALSO make so much money yet not release a video. I don't really have a simple answer for either of these types of people, though seeing as "money" is Topic Number One in the woefully short list of things people want to talk to me about when they, for example, meet me by chance in Whole Foods, let's do it.

Patreon by default displays a dollar amount at the top of the creator's page. When I first started my Patreon, I wanted to turn that off. I felt conflicted. I didn't want to ever appear to be bragging about success. However, I had just left a unionized workplace that valued salary transparency, so I left it on.

It turns out, salary transparency is great among coworkers, though not so much on the internet, where literally no one else is actually your coworker. The daily comments quoting an exact dollar value of my YouTube videos were just relentless. I mentioned considering turning the dollar amount display off. The angry people did not like that idea! So I left it on. In the run up to the Boku no Natsuyasumi video's release, I turned it off. I do not regret the decision.

At its peak, my Patreon was making close to $20,000 a month. It had started to decline in the months before the Boku no Natsuyasumi video release. I decided to turn the display off because I received a message here on Patreon from--actually, let me just go ahead and call him The Worst Guy On Here--I received a message from The Worst Guy On Here quoting the decline in my Patreon dollar amount. He said, and I quote, "Looks like the nosedive has begun, Will. Sweet, sweet schadenfreude." Let's unpack that first sentence a bit: this man knows my first name is "William". I go by my middle name, which is a fairly normal thing for a human person named after his father to do, though this guy has decided it's evidence of criminal fraud and thus has adopted the habit of always using the shortened form of my legal first name. You have to try prettttty hard to "harass" a straight white college-educated American male, so I understand this is kindergarten stuff, though still, even the kindergarten version feels bad! This guy had been a $3 a month backer since the beginning--and he STILL IS. You can't make this stuff up. In summary: something about his tone bothered me. So I toggled the display off.

Anyway, a few days ago, one of the Top Four Worst Guys On Here left a comment saying that "a lowball estimate" of the budget of the next video sits at "500K". This is wildly wrong. I get all of this guy's (and yours!) Patreon comments delivered directly to my inbox, so I see them all, even when Patreon beefs its security and won't let me log in. I sometimes feel like replying directly, and then I consider it gauche to do so. So I stay my hand. This time, I gotta un-stay my hand: this young gentleman's usage of the word "lowball", borrowed perhaps from a close encounter with a film about a hip real-estate agent, represents the chilling exactness of the internet disease: his lowball is actually a ridiculous highball, yet his one-dollar word choice paints him an authority. Trust not, my friends, the One-Dollar Authority!

Know this: the Patreon dollar amount now sits at around half of where it was when I turned the number off. This does not bother me. Of course if it were more I'd be able to buy more equipment sooner, though I manage. I work happily and contentedly under the belief that my remaining supporters Understand And Trust The Process. I work sixty hours a week, which yes, is a lot more than I'd recommend you work for Someone Else, though it's a full full-time work-week less than I was working back when I wound up in the hospital. I haven't even been inside a hospital since I pared down my hours, except for the time I visited a friend who had just had a heart attack. I work seven days a week and I don't take days off, which is fine and not a complaint, because I own my business and am in complete creative control of meticulously making things I like which concern things I like. So the blurry gradient between hobby and profession give unto this situation a Work-Life Balance lost of a little granularity. I choose to look past it and keep on truckin.

I have faith that when I start releasing these videos, and their massive packages of bonus features (mild spoiler: one of the videos has Over One Hundred Hours of bonus features, lol), something similar to a "backing" will arise. When my first ten-million-view video arrives (Action Button Season Three Episode Three), I'll likely have enough money to continue doing some variety of This until I die (75 years from now, yes). In the meanwhile I will continue saying no to every potential sponsor (buddy, there have been So Many at this point) and appreciating the god darn heck out of every single one of the dollars you give me. So please don't go away! Partially because I got robbed and need to re-buy some equipment, yes, though let's not make that specifically The Reason. I won't if you don't. Just stick around. If anything, let this factoid entice you: up until now, I have only reviewed games that I either did not know or did not particularly love. Starting from the video after this next video, I will only ever review my absolute favorite games of all time. The video after the next video concerns, for example, a game I have played more than two thousand hours of in the last twenty years. So these things are about to get wacky.

A BRIEF INTERLUDE

Let me pause for a second to shout out the guy who backed for twenty dollars a month and then messaged me asking why I hadn't included backer shoutouts at the end of the Cyberpunk video. I knew someone would ask about this, so I had a response prepared. I asked him if he ordered a Truck Heck T-shirt. He said "I am not giving you more money if you already haven't given me what you agreed to give me". So I said, OK, I'll send you a free T-shirt. Tell me your T-shirt size and your address. He told me to die in a fire (or something to that effect) and un-backed. It's been coming up on three years, so I consider the statute of limitations lifted: that guy's name was on the back of the Truck Heck T-shirt, in a meticulously typographed grid with other top-tier backers facsimulating the racers's names on the back of the 6th Annual Hav-A-Tampa Shoot-Out T-shirt I talked about in the Cyberpunk video. Oh, well. I'll try being less tricky with such guys next time. Though only slightly less tricky.

MORE ABOUT THE MONEY

People sometimes demand full cost breakdowns. I am not going to give you that because that feels like a line-crossing. If One Thousand Patreon Backers sign a letter demanding that, I'll consider paying my Moneybag Lawyer to write a guest post. Though he will probably tell me he advises against that, and dude: that right there is a guy I listen to.

Let me try to give you a ballpark, though. Like I said, the Patreon is down to about half of our friendly commenter's "lowball". Okay. So, I pay taxes. That's scarily close to half of my money out the window by default to pay for cute little diapers to put on hospital bombs. Oh well! Also, I pay my contractors. I have a strict rule to pay at the very least exactly double what I would've made in the same number of hours making videos for A Website. Don't ask where this rule came from (hint: it has something to do with a meeting I had with a guy minutes before filing my resignation). I pay a director of photography to film the on-camera segments. I had to scrap one of these whole shoots because of a change in creative direction (which wound up vastly benefiting the production), so I ended up paying twice. I pay Action Button Discord Pro and YouTuber In His Own Right OniSpumoni a monthly check to compose recaps that I run at the beginning of my livestreams! I have paid Action Button Discord Maven-Emeritus Golok to operate a teleprompter for fifteen consecutive hours, and I will do it again (soon). I have to pay to rent green-screen studios. I have to pay to shoot at some locations. This stuff adds up.

When I made YouTube Videos at A Website, I made a LOT less money than I do now. I know there are people in New York who live on less than I made there, and I feel sorry for them, though I can still admit that it wasn't a lot of money. I gave most of that money to a dentist whom I still visit and a landlord who later withheld my Six-Months'-Rent (!!) security deposit because he pretended to not know we were moving out, when he absolutely totally did and I have all the receipts.

Yet you know what? Life was easy with that low-paying job. Because that website's office had a full professional TV studio inside it, replete with cameras and microphones and lights and backdrops and guys whose full-time job it was to stand around looking more bored than literally anyone I have ever stood within a hundred feet of in my life while I read insane things off a teleprompter. (You would not believe the look on the guy's face when I did my Death Stranding review desk interludes all in one ultra-fast take. His impatience fueled my speed.)

They also had a sound booth there. Yes, that was the original "Goblin Bunker".

These days, I have to source my own equipment and rent my own studios. I have to own my own lenses and microphones. I have to buy my own airplane tickets (to E3s that do not exist). In other words, please do not consider the Patreon Dollar Amount my "salary". As the Business Owner, yes, I cut a "salary" out of that, with which I buy eggs and underwear. Though the rest of that I have to trickily balance as a "budget". I recorded about twelve hours of voiceover in a studio in Manhattan over the course of 2023 at a studio that charged me $260 an hour. Anyone who's ever tried reading a sentence written by me out loud knows it takes at least six run-throughs to master all of the surprises even with extensive rehearsals. As myself, I have a two-repetition advantage, so it only takes me about four. Though still, multiply twelve by four and then consult the embarrassing number earlier in this paragraph and press your ear against the window and you might hear my Chase bank account weeping. It turns out talking into a Neumann U87 Microphone is a little bit closer to playing the violin than the guitar. Real Audio Heads in the chat know what I mean.

I have talked about all of this exact stuff (okay maybe not the microphone stuff, though the "budget" stuff) in earlier posts. Though it's still a thing, and people still keep asking about it. So there it is.

In summary, when The Fourth-Worst Guy On Here expresses disbelief that a robbery of some of my equipment hurt me financially: guy's just straight up a hater. Please message me your PayPal information so I can completely refund you, and then leave.

Also, while I'm here: the marginally more agreeable guy who replied to him mentioning that my rental car was a Cadillac. First of all, dude, we do not live inside of Glengarry Glen Ross. Cadillacs are no longer Lamborghinis or BMWs. My camera trunk is enormous. I like being able to open it as it lays flat in the bed of an SUV as I drive it between cities, hotels, and remote locations. The camera trunk is so big that the thieves did not even bother with it--and probably wouldn't have bothered with it had, for example, I not been Standing Right There When They Robbed Me. It wouldn't have fit out of any of the windows.

At any rate, have you ever rented a car? You don't go in with a wad of money yelling for "Your Finest Vehicle, Sir, Chop Chop". The way it works is, you ask for a Type of car, and then they give you the worst one of that type while apologizing a lot. I went to Avis Dot Com. I reserved a "Compact SUV: Toyota Rav4 Or Similar". Yes, Cadillac makes an SUV that is not a murdered-out Escalade. It is one of the worst vehicles I have ever driven in my life and I sort of wish the thieves had just pipe-bombed it to spare it the auto glass repair guys's insults as they fix its windows. Cadillac makes a car whose only wish in life is to compete with the Toyota Rav4. The guy at Avis literally winced when he saw the name of the car in the computer. He was like, "Well, it's not a Rav4, though it should do ya." If you're a white man who teenagered in the 1990s and has quoted Ricky Roma most of your adult life, this may come as a blow, though here it is: even a 2022 Toyota Rav4 absolutely slays a 2023 Cadillac XT5, dude. Also, it costs the same to rent them. Just making that clear!

Does anybody else have any questions about how to rent a car!! I have rented a lllllotta cars, Rick!

FINALLY (?), ABOUT THE ROBBERY

The cop who showed up four hours late told me it's legally OK for me to call it I robbery, because I was

1. present

2. conscious

3. protesting

So, it was a robbery. They double parallel parked their 2020 white Buick Enclave next to my rented Cadillac X(treme)T(rashmobile)5. A dude jumped out, ran around the back, busted one window (with a sharpened, palm-mounted spark plug, research tells me), then another while I screamed like an idiot who had seen too many people (one) get iPhones stolen by dudes who'd just jumped out of cars to NOT know that you shouldn't get physical with these guys because they might (ie, the one time I saw this, the guy did) have a gun. I'm sure he appreciated the luxuriously ample handles on my Peak Design Travel Backpack! I had just remarked moments earlier, "I should take this with us; it is, after all, so comfortable to carry literally everywhere". I had looked into the window and saw it laying face-down on the floor of the car, its rear handle pointing up, ready for easy hoisting. Of all the sponsors I've ever said no to, Peak Design has never asked, though I'd've actually considered it. Heck, maybe I'd even more consider it now.

Anyway, I don't want to talk about this any more. I tried to delay talking about it and then, well, here we are, arrived at the time to talk about it, and I don't want to. Maybe I will later.

FINALLY-FINALLY, ABOUT THE VIDEO

I cannot stress this enough: I shouldn't have bothered telling you about the robbery in my livestream. The impact to the video is minimal. In the moment I merely felt violated and victimized (etc etc etc) and let my Public Mask slip a little bit. I will try not to do it again! Seriously. I regret doing it because I have now endured a week of a million (actually just like twelve, though see my previous comments about focusing on negatives) people blaming me for losing my stuff and calling me a con-artist. I should have just eaten the loss in silence, and maybe turned it into Content for a future video.

Though now that it's out there, I have forced myself into having to update you about the next video: the video is safe. 99.9% of the work finished / produced on the video up until this point is perfectly safe at home on my ultra-secure server. I only lost a couple days of shooting that I'd done on location. We can go back and get it again. It'll be better, now that we know all the angles and setups, etc. The schedule has slipped a little bit, and my intended release window has shifted such that it now bumps up against travel plans for a shoot for another progress, though I can squeeze myself a littttttle bit just this once and we'll see how it goes. Chances are, given the cursedness of this particular one project--lotta reshoots on this one, man--it'll go spectacularly better the second time.

Though yeah. I mustn't let myself focus too much on the "it'll be better this next time", just as I mustn't focus on feeling hurt and victim-blaming myself. I took a couple days this week doing only the most menial, mechanical tasks among my worklog, to allow myself breathing room to feel something while lying on my back, between the angel-devil urge-dyad of silver-lining-seeking and feeling like an idjit. The grim phrase "a complicated day at the silver linings factory" struck me the morning after the robbery, as I looked out on a hotel pool that'd do Action Button Season Two Patron Saints Eiichi Ohtaki and Hiroshi Nagai proud. I almost tagged Nagai in my Instagram upload of that pool, and then figured, man, he must get a lot of that, so I cut him some slack.

All told, I lost my Sony A7SIII, my cheapest lens (serendipitously placed on there for a walking-around shot I wanted to get proximal to a specific historical landmark), my beautiful Macbook, and my DJI Osmo Pocket 3, on which Mimsy and I had vlogged various travels with the intention of filling the whole SD card with twelve hours of bonus features. I will not hurt your feelings by telling you how many hours remained on the card and how many hours tears-in-rained into shards (of lost time). What a phenomenal product that is, by the way. I will eventually get another one and get right back to vlogging with only a slight bittersweetness paid to the lost footy.

(I also lost my Peak Design backpack and Peak Design camera sling, my camera batteries, and two Tiffen filters (Variable ND and CPL))).

(And my passport. I gotta get a new passport.)

Mimsy lost her iPad Pro and her 2022 Macbook Pro. Her data thankfully is a lot more iCloudable than my shoot was. I feel bad that she lost these items on what was ostensibly a Work Trip for me, so I want to help her get new ones, and if you'd like to help out, just, I don't know. Stay backed on this Patreon? That's the most I'm comfortable asking for.

It feels gauche to set up some kind of fundraiser. I feel stupid for in my state of annoyance and shock suggesting I wanted to do that. It's just, that was all equipment I had accumulated slowly, over time. And I'd just done a week of exhausting work that I was realizing I have to now redo. Though I'll be fine biding my time and rebuying those things.

That's not the same case for Mimsy though. She is very close to finishing and releasing her video game for All Major Platforms (!!!) and really does not need this nonsense. I already gave her my own (much newer) iPad Pro and (much older) Macbook Pro so I need to just pump up the newness on that Macbook Pro. My concept is this: Mimsy and I are planning a T-shirt. We will release the T-Shirt and hopefully you will buy it and all proceeds will purchase Mimsy a new Macbook, until the Macbook is purchased, at which point the proceeds will purchase Mimsy a new iPad and give me my iPad back. I personally will just live the Macbookless PC-only life for a while to just let that particular loss snow itself over. Maybe I'll get a lower-spec Macbook Air before my Huge Trip next year. I don't know.

I'm just typin out loud here now.

Anyway, I'll tell you about this T-shirt when it's out. We wanna take our time and make sure it's good, since it's something we technically planned to release after the Next Video. Though I think it's fair to move it up a bit! If that doesn't sound fair to anyone here, let me know.

Man. It looks like this part "about the video" wound up also being about the robbery. Something tells me this topic has Stuck With Me. Maybe I can say something else about it. This thing has fully unspooled as-is, so we might as well embrace it. Rest assured my Actual Work is a lot tighter, I promise.

"A COMPLICATED COUPLE OF DAYS IN THE SILVER LININGS FACTORY"

I bought a new Sony A7SIII just the other day. Starting to feel more frugal than usual, I crawled Craigslist in search of an adequately yet not criminal-suspiciously discounted Sony A7SIII. Having just suffered a robbery of my previous camera and fully aware of the Facebook Marketplace of the robbery's locality, I realize that a lot of people who just joined Facebook four hours ago and look exactly like AI-generated supermodels have had a brother or a son die in a car accident recently. These people cannot stand to look at their dead brother or dead son's Sony A7-series camera, so they are letting it go for the charitable price of a hundred and twenty or a hundred and thirty dollars. I found one beautiful AI-generated Brazilian bikini model who joined Facebook in July who had lost both a brother to whom she had recently gifted a Sony A7iv and a son to whom she had recently gifted an A7R, one in a car accident and one to an unspecified illness, within twelve hours of another. I feel immensely sorry for her loss, and I wonder if proximity to such tragedy might also inspire me to not Google a $4,000 camera before trying to sell it for $150. Well, I went to Craigslist. Good old Craigslist, full of people I can meet in real life in burstulously populated public places. I found an A7SIII for $2,250--well below the MSRP of $3,200. Apparently brand-new, in-box. I knew few thieves had occasion to also obtain the box. So I arranged to meet this fellow, who struck a delightful tone in texts. He arrived at a busy intersection on the Upper East Side in a Silver Honda SUV, and he now salutations his texts "My Friend". He didn't even count the money, and he gave me a hug. He showed me a list of other gear he has back at his storage unit in Jersey City (Golok, let's go hang out with this guy) and told me I could have my pick. When I asked him why he was selling all that studio equipment so cheaply he said he had acquired it all during his long career as a documentary filmmaker, and he had no need of it as he was retiring. I congratulated him on his retirement, and he informed me that he is also terminally ill. The next person I told about the robbery listened patiently, expressed sympathy, and then told me an even worse story than the old documentary filmmaker. So I've never felt a worse "it could be worse" in maybe my whole life. Gauche indeed it feels to bemoan my moneyhole here during this complicated couple of days at the silver linings factory.

FINAL WORDS ABOUT THE VIDEO

I don't want to talk too much about the next video because I am aging into Santa Claus re: how much I love surprising you. I do not want to promise a release date or give you a single detail about its nature. However if I may speak nebulously, know this: I will never, ever make another one like this. Do not consider this a hollow threat: I have, in the past, said "the next video will be shorter", and we all have good laughs about that just about every day even today. It's a good joke and YouTubers are always right when they do it. I am not saying that the next video after this next one will be shorter, or that all the videos will be shorter from now on. I am saying that you will know when you see this . . . thing that it is something the likes of which nobody can make the exact same sort of thing twice without brain hemorrhage disaster. I will NEVER make another one Like This ever again. So please look forward to whatever that phraseology forebodes.

I genuinely actually promise you I will announce its release date here on this Patreon at least forty-eight hours before launch, and I will only compose that announcement when the video is confirmed as uploaded, processed, and copyright-issue-free on YouTube.

IN CLOSING

Shout out to Geno, who I ran into at a truck stop. Literally the most random Viewer Sighting I have ever experienced. Usually it's in a big city. The Highway is a new one for me. Also shout out to his friend Cole, for whom I recorded a Video Message.

I'd like to Give You More for you backer dollar, though like I've said, Community Management is a luxury I can't afford with the shoestring-Hollywood guerrilla production style I'm doing over here. I don't know what to give you. I can't think of anything that'd NOT compromise my video quality or that wouldn't just completely suck compared to the videos itself. Or that wouldn't make zero sense without a just-released video to give it context. Imagine the "Mimsy Illustrates The Pizza Karl Cartoon" bonus feature without the Boku no Natsuyasumi video. That makes sense, right?

So here's where I say: I've recorded a lot of podcast episodes the past two years. I just don't feel like the quality is extreme enough to paywall. Paywalling them feels gauche. So I've balked on releasing or even talking about them and now time has just silently unspooled on the back burner while I front-burner these ridiculous video troves. One podcast is called Action Button Monthly, in which me and a (secret) co-host discuss the video game news of the month two months before the month in which we record. The other podcast is Action Button One-on-One, in which I interview somebody. We have these just sitting around, and I'm not doing anything with them, because I keep thinking it'd be gauche (there's that word again) to release bonus features before a real video. Though maybe it's not. I don't know. The appeal of the "concept" of me and (secret) co-host discussing April 2023's Video Game News In June of 2023 released in [Month] of 202[5] is just very funny to me. I feel like it'd go a long way toward proving why I do things the way I do them. Though another part of me just wants to release this stuff now so that I have something to give you. Then I think of the guy who'd get mad that it's not enough, and et cetera et cetera et cetera. I promise I'll work it out. Also I promise I'll tell you later about the third podcast, which is even better. Suffice it to say this Customer Service thing is all a real pickle and a half.

So here's where I say I respect the heck out of anyone who watched Action Button Reviews [Video Game Name] and decided to monetarily encourage me to make lots (and lots (and too much)) more like it. I will continue putting your names onto T-shirts and bonus features when you least expect it. And if you ever feel the need to flex your generous dollar, just message me on Discord. I'm "actionbutton". Preface your message with "Q&A: " if you want me to read it out loud during a livestream. (You may even message them to me here on Patreon, though Discord really works better for me, I promise.) Then, just watch the beginnings of my livestreams--ie, the pre-vide-game part--and I'll try to address your questions. Also, I'll try to do at least one monthly Discord.GG/ActionButton #Fukubukuro Chat Only stream.

Twitch.tv archives streams for a couple of months. I archive them locally, too, and I'll upload em all to Action Button Channel Two on YouTube at some point around when the next video comes out (gotta clean off my server, etc). Though if you can't catch the show live, the archives do work pretty well.

Well, I'm just talkin here. I told myself I'd try to post this before 6pm on Friday so that you have an hour's notice about the livestream. Maybe I'm runnin a bit late. Might as well just post this. I hope you don't mind however many typos are in here. Well, bye for now.

Oh, wait, I almost forgot to explain the picture at the top of the post. Hmmm. You're probably tired from all this reading and not interested.

Oh, I also almost forgot (or did I just post this at the bottom to make it more visible?) to tell you to check out LowercaseJai's YouTube videos as well. Extremely good YouTube videos! You can also back them on Patreon.