Action Button Season One Has Ended. Let's Get Ready For Action Button Season Two! (or, a word on "de-branding")

Hello! A little over a month has passed since Action Button Season One ended. I now feel comfortable talking about Action Button Season Two.

THE CHANGING MISSION

Action Button Season Two will feature a remarkably different style than Action Button Season One. In summary, the videos will each aspire more to the categorization of "film" than the previous season's.

Yes, inflated by you-all's support, I have decided to try to at some point in the near future think of myself as a "filmmaker".

I'd been fearing an eventual topple over into the dabble since the first time I clicked "export" on the tiniest corporate-social-media-bound clip at an old day job. Well, too god darn many people on Twitter kept me abreast of every sub-development in the measly non-saga of my videos versus Letterboxd Dot Com that it annoyed me right into full-blown directorial aspiration.

Basically, every other day someone would obnoxify one of my various inboxes with a "you might want to know" of Herculean impossibility--because, you see, I, a busy individual trying to Make Things, actually did not want to know.

"I thought you might want to know that Letterboxd Dot Com de-listed your DOOM review."

"I thought you might want to know that Letterboxd Dot Com listed your Tokimeki Memorial review."

"I thought you might want to know that Letterboxd Dot Com de-listed your Pac-Man review."

The only response I could muster at first took the form of "Do they realize they misspelled 'Letterboxed'?" Though after enough messages and tweets and retweets and DMs on Discord or elsewhere, I started to feel genuine annoyance, the likes of which I have never truly felt personally since switching to a particularly zen private lifestyle something like twenty years ago. I don't talk about it, and we're going to go on for the meanwhile not talking about it, because as then, I now still fear letting anyone I don't see right in front of me every day know anything for certain about me.

Anyway, yeah: I started to get annoyed. Because, all along, I carried on with the mission statement that my videos, which I sub-hyperbolically call "reviews" are actually their own sort of thing. I expect you to view them in multiple sessions. I don't MIND if you don't, though I personally think multiple sessions serves them best. Yet I don't think of them as miniserieses. I don't even think of "Action Button" as a whole as some overarching TV show. I think of the videos as "projects". I check myself every time I accidentally in colloquial conversation with a neurologist or a retina specialist or a neuro-ophthalmologist or a cardiologist describe myself as "I make YouTube videos". I'm saying, don't even like to call them "YouTube videos". Too brand-y. I in all cold honesty like to just think of them as "videos"--though of course this phraseology gets people off-hand presumptuousing me for some serial chessmasterly understater. 

Though that's really it: when I'm working on one, it's a "project". When I put it out, it's a "video". Within my strictly respected Adobe Premiere template, the sequence that consists of all the separately exported ProRes segments and their corresponding mixed-down audio tracks wears the name "product". 

A project climaxes into a product, which becomes a video.

Calling them "projects" throughout perhaps, again, understates their ridiculous size. You are free to read "size" and interpret "ambition". For me to nominate the size of my works as "ambitious" would strike probably pompously. And besides, are any of us really ever that unsuspiciously aware of our own ambitions?

As I've said before, when I started this project--I'm talking about Action Button Reviews as a whole now, not any specific one of the reviews--I had ideas for traveling to foreign countries and other states to film segments to incorporate into the reviews. Of course, these plans supposed that maybe just this once more than a couple governments would work together like adults and a couple very simple, fast social band-aids could end the coronavirus in something resembling a normal or Neo-Zealandian timeframe. Unfortunately, the world sucks and government is big stinky meatwad of nepotism and cousinism (cognatism? cuginism? me no Latin / Italian so good) so any fools who should expect anyone to get anything done pretty much ever'd better waste their time failing to learn how to tie their shoes.

Trapped thus in a room with little opportunity for social creative expressions my videos turned into monsters. I quite like the shape of a few of these monsters. I tried to keep them distinct from one another. Since they are my children I needn't not say which some of them I like better than which others of them. 

Though never once did I consider any of these things "films" or even "movies". I never aspired to that. Again: secretly I aspired to make or help make a film someday. Though when I was five years old and unbenownst to me I'd already seen ALL the good Star Wars movies, when I told my mom I'd like to be a "movie director like Steven Spielberg" someday, she laughed. She told me not to--exact words--"be retarded", because I could never Just Be a film director. You have to have friends, and go to school, and do good in school, she said. 

This experience behind me in that distant past that somehow through re-recollection becomes eventually The Most of all of our memories, I bristled with unease at the repeated reports of obnoxious individuals who took some sick pleasure in pointing out that Letterboxd Dot Com did not consider such and such video of mine a "real" "movie". Perhaps the obnoxious individuals meant well, though you know what? At this point, I don't owe anybody a de-nomination of obnoxiousness, no matter how well they mean or meant. You don't, either. If someone annoys you, maybe just tell them. That's basically what Gen Z is all about, right? I'm gonna get in on a little bit of that.

So here goes: if you sent me a message or an email informing me that Letterboxd had listed or delisted any of my reviews, or even sent me a link to a review YOU had written of one of my videos on Letterboxd, I'm sorry: you definitely annoyed me. Again, I'm sorry. It was annoying of you. I have enough trouble thinking of myself as an actual real human being, and now you're adding to me the burden of worrying what formalist definition best suits whatever it is I sit here all day making? Furthermore, ain't no whiplash in the world like a guy with like 8,000 followers sending you a Twitter DM to say, "I've been a fan for a long time, though what you said last night on your livestream about imposter syndrome really left a bad taste in my mouth. Some of us out here really suffer from imposter syndrome. We don't need successful people like you throwing the term around as a joke." It's one thing for a guy like me to have some personal problems feeling like he deserves anything he has, though it's another whole bookshelf of problems altogether when another guy comes in and calls him a phony at being a phony. Can't I even doubt myself in a straight line? Why do you gotta beg me like this to doubt that I doubt myself? Earth has less in common with a place than it does a tornado.

I believe I was talking about Letterboxd, and its ice-cold organizational dismissal of the categorical description of "film" as it applies to my videos!

The worst of the many messages expressed incredulity that I could Just Let This Happen. They wanted me to take action. Do what? Write a letter to Letterboxd officials? I took a brain-bath in your many suggestions. I cared so little about this nonsense so many people evidently DID care about that it spear-tipped into something not unlike an identity crisis. "Should I feel this way that I feel so strongly opposed to feeling?"

At any rate, the torrent of annoyance awoke the sleeping dragon. Encouraged by the most annoying, loudest minority of persons among my viewership, I have decided to try to think of myself as a filmmaker.

In summary: not today, and not tomorrow, though soon I will think of a project as a "film". A "documentary film", though a film nonetheless. I've always openly loved Orson Welles's "'F' For Fake", which simultaneously exists as an art critique, a piece of art, a piece of theater, a dramatic film, a comedy, and a YouTube Video released perplexingly 32 years before YouTube even existed. So I figure, if I have no trouble thinking of *that* as a "film", how hard could it be to make something I personally consider a film?

Of course, I will never, ever insist to literally anyone that my reviews up until this point deserve that categorization in any way. I made those films goblin-style, hunkered down and hunched over in a bad room during a tricky time we all shared. I intended you, more or less (and mostly without thinking about it either way) to enjoy them as I made them: hunched over and hunkered down in during a tricky time, during many sittings, maybe with bigger problems bothering you either successfully or un- throughout.

In the near future, however, I'd like to make something of a humane, one-sitting, zero-bathroom-breaks-needed sort of length that some kind of a movie theater in the New York City area might not mind screening once or twice. For this purpose, I went against the recommendation of every single Camera Guy I approached for advice throughout season one. I'm sorry, guys: I did not buy the user-friendly camera, or the beginner-friendly camera. I did not buy the one that one of you told me doesn't have too many buttons. I bought instead a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro, which three of you had warned me against because "you need to spend like $1,500 extra just to make it usable". I'm sorry, guys: I spent that extra $1,500. I then, lest I assume at last the shape of a guy who owns a fancy thing he never uses, proceeded to put my mouth all OVER (figuratively) where that money went, and conducted some kind of grueling procedure usually reserved for persons half or less my age: I went to film school.

Not literally, of course, because that would be ridiculous: I, indebted to the world re: various privileges, kept my educational struggle to myself and unobtrusively sniped from elsewhere any knowledge tidbits I could not otherwise intuit. Anyway, now I know sort of where to put lights.

Did you see the first two minutes of the Cyberpunk video? I shot that! I mean, that's barely a student film by any stretch, though I think I'm acquiring a couple qualifications. I've shot a couple brief scenes at various locations throughout the United States (eagle-eyed viewers can spot a few of them in the Cyberpunk 2077 review) with the goal of using them for in-production Season Two reviews, though I wouldn't call myself yet fully an Actual Filmmaker of any kind.

At the very least, I think I've learned exactly enough in the past couple months to be able to better communicate my "vision" to a professional camera person, who will most likely be Ryan Taylor of South Bend, Indiana, unless he liked me better before I knew literally anything helpful at all (lmao).

(Note: Ryan Taylor actually *encouraged* me to get the Blackmagic, so.)

SEASON TWO APPROACHES

At any rate, the next video concerns the Japanese PlayStation video game "Boku no Natsuyasumi" (2000), which never received an official English localization. You can find its title fan-translated one particular way in many places on the internet. Having played the game, I firmly believe that the common translation of the game's title has a glaring problem, though I dare not spoil the segment of my review that concerns that problem.

It will be a little over a month, at least, before you see this review, so let me make a little statement right now to either incite or extinguish hype: If not necessarily a "film" or even a "documentary", this first review of Season Two will constitute a "de-branding" of Action Button. I don't know if any professional advertisers or marketers have thrown around the phrase "de-branding" in any meetings these past ten years or so or if I myself invented it, though the core concept doesn't beg confusion, I don't think: rather than whiplash you with a sudden re-brand, I'll ease you in with one whole video of de-brand. Branding will return to Action Button--it's just that The Brand has been put on vacation for the duration of exactly one production. I'll say no more, lest I spoil the heart of the whole thing.

The ideas contained in this next review have percolated a long, long time. I dared not let my new "cinematic" vision interfere with those old ideas. All I'll say is that I've wanted to do this review for a long time, and that I've also wanted to specifically make a video about Boku no Natsuyasumi since right about the time I decided to make a video about Tokimeki Memorial.

YOUR HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT: NOTHING

As with my Tokimeki Memorial video, I do not believe you need any knowledge of the game at all in order to enjoy my review of Boku no Natsuyasumi. You do not need to play it, because I have played it for you. Last time I said something like this, huge numbers of you cursed me for my cosmic trickster's ways. More than one guy told me he just couldn't tell if I was joking or not when I said he didn't need to play Tokimeki Memorial before watching my video about Tokimeki Memorial, so he played Tokimeki Memorial for Windows 98 while pointing his Google Translate camera app at the screen and having a thoroughly horrible time. I've said it before, and I hate how much I know I'll have to say it again: the line between "joke" and "sincerity" isn't just fine in me--it is fine on earth. Besides, I swear I never have considered myself some cosmic chessmaster of Ironic Jokes. Please. If you can imagine only someone who looks exactly like Heath Ledger's Joker (let's leave Joaquin Phoenix out of this for a minute) making any particular joke, chances are I'm really just trying to tell you something. I don't know, man. It's not my job to design litmus tests that Experience Hanging Out could en masse denecessitate.

"You SAID I didn't need to play Tokimeki Memorial or even know anything about it before watching your review though I couldn't tell if you were joking so I watched like 40 hours of gameplay in Japanese on YouTube and I didn't understand any of it" --a guy to whom I should have replied, "Have you considered Hanging Out with A Person at least once?"

Maybe I was less strict than I should have been, with that Tokimeki Memorial video. So I'll go one step further with this Boku no Natsuyasumi video: don't bother learning anything about it. I know someone is working on a fan translation, though I'd go so far as to tell you to not bother looking at any trailers. If the fan translation comes out before my video, feel absolutely no need to rush into playing it before watching my video.

I take all this care to point this stuff out because, lol, I've spent the past couple nights loopy on ZzzQuil, eyes glazed at Marvel Cinematic Homework. I just wanna watch that new Spider-Man because maybe Tobey's in there, and you're telling me large chunks of it aren't going to probably make any sense unless I finish letting The Falcon and the Winter Soldier's various "Oh Snap: This Guy's Here Now; Pat Yourself On The Back If You Remember Him" supporting characters shout information at each other? It's one thing when two characters speculate about stuff they don't know. It's another when they speculate about stuff both of them know so that you experience an iota of the conspiracy-theoretical thrill. David Mamet once said in his famous viral memo apropos of THE UNIT that "the audience will not tune in every week to watch information". The Marvel-Cinematic-Universe-hungry Homework Generation of film buffs has that man rolling in his grave, and he ain't even dead yet.

In case the point wasn't clear from that last paragraph: I require no homework before watching my reviews, because *I* do the homework for you. 

Before releasing my Cyberpunk 2077 review, I received many concerned messages asking what parts of Cyberpunk 2077 my review would visually and discussionally spoil, and I made sure to tell those people which parts of the story they had to play in order to watch my whole review without getting spoiled. I did this because Cyberpunk 2077 is a current game and many people are, in fact, in the middle of a massive-long playthrough.

As I stated much more ornately in my Cyberpunk 2077 review, I henceforth no longer want to make videos about games that "spoil" anything. This has a little to do with my having a complicated relationship with spoilers (I don't watch trailers for movies I want to watch, and I don't think you should, either) though it's more to do with my wanting to just make videos that stand as experiences on their own. Pushing aside the conversation of whether it is a "movie" or a "film" or "art" or not, I can confidently declade that while my Tokimeki Memorial video is not, in fact, a substitute for playing the game, it is a substitute for itself.

In summary, I won't ever ask you to do homework before watching one of my videos. This is why I don't leave archives of my livestreams up on my Twitch channel--too many comments on my review of The Final Fantasy VII Remake expressed anger that I hadn't archived my livestreamed playthrough of the game. More than one probably perfectly friendly chap emailed me to express utter disgust that I would deprive them of the livestreamed playthrough, which they considered monumentally essential prerequisite viewing. "I don't want to watch the review unless I know how you felt when you played the game." I told the guy, well, it's all there in the review. He said it felt like "cheating" to just watch the review without having been present in the chat during the streams, so the least he could do was watch the archives.

Do you see what I'm saying about homework? I have little conversations like this every day. I do not intend any of my videos as homework, though people are out there making homework for themselves all around the world, every day.

Yet I cannot in good conscience deny you your birth-given right to do your imagination's contentiousness's homework, so that you can get every reference, experience the genesis of every two- or three-word phrase that the ever-elusive Those In The Know appreciate best. Some of you out there have a timestamp branded on your grey matter: the date of the first broadcasted instance of the phrase "Goblin Bunker", for example. Some eight hundred or so of you know what a "Pig In The Grass" is. As an older person, I deal neither in memes nor references; I think not fondly on any words I utter impromptu surviving beyond the atmosphere immediately outside my lips. I prefer to let only those painfully typed and rehearsed and reshaped and recorded words live on. However, some of you love to multipl-y hear me say something I said exactly once, and feel thrillulous that I might be Saying The Words Again. Much as I like to only Say Again words that conform workshoppedly to my brand (Welcome Back To Video Games, etc), I will today in the spirit of the Holidays, gift you an opportunity to infinitely relisten and rewatch those ancient broadcasts, until you triangulate your own personal definition of tedium's content. It's public, though unadvertised (everything's unlisted; check the playlists). Maybe I'll put several dozen hours of bonus content For Backers Only into a secret playlist someday, if that ever seems like a natural action to take.

For now, I'd like to announce as loosely as I can that I might stream a little bit more starting somewhat soon. I hope I have been very clear that this Patreon exists to fund my production of densely meticulicious video game reviews, and that any streams I happen to execute exist purely as a bonus--for everyone involved (even me). Every time I stream on Twitch Dot TV Slash Action Button, someone messages me on some platform or another to complain, usually with words that seem directed at a manager, that they weren't correctly informed and that my career is catastrophically doomed if I keep being so bad about my own PR. I keep telling people: I'm not a streamer. I make videos. I stream for fun. So of course this means my streams slowed down in frequency because people kept making it feel like my job ("Might I request you stream in a time slot that coincides better with the Eastern European weekday office work shift?"), and my job already felt like my job.  It doesn't help that my job and my hobby have so many similarities--or that they literally sell semi-professional-grade equipment for doing My Job at the "Gift Ideas For Nephews" section of every Target in America. Add to all that the incessantly endless begs to make a "sixty-hour review" of any god darn game I so much as allude to touching, and you get yourself a guy who just can't feel too much too often like streaming. Though whatever the state of my own pride may be, heck, I'm gonna stream some more. I'm gonna play Final Fantasy XIV, and I will mute literally everyone on Twitter who asks if I'm reviewing the game. (For one thing, I already said I am not.) I just wanna play it, man. And I might as well stream some of it while I do so--at literally any time during the day I feel like it, I guess. So just follow or subscribe or whatever to Twitch Dot TV Slash Action Button, and we'll see what happens.

Oh, I suppose I should update my Patreon pitch post and profile imagery and such.

Okay, I did it. I left the old pitch down under the new one because, hey, I guess there's nowhere else to present it to anybody. I'll make a new Patreon pitch video at some point soonish. I will try to have some fun with it. I'll try to make it ultra-simple. I like the highly refined, new sales pitch I came up with for the new post. It's a pretty good, terse paragraph.

Well, I think another Patreon post has successfully reached its end. Thank you as always for reading.

At any rate, as we head toward the holidays my sense of inborn punctuality begs me hotly to jump upon the opportunity to embody the very first person in the world to wish you a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukah, or generally just a good late December in which you do not get sick or die, as I did (and almost did) many times too many in the year leading up to this. I'll be in Indianapolis, Indiana from the 20th to the 30th--NOT filming a video, unfortunately for all of us--if anyone wants to compliment my coat, or shoes, or hat maybe while seated at a Waffle House. Harry Nelson, that means you. I'm gonna text you. I mean it.