Action Button Reviews CYBERPUNK 2077 is exporting

The video is exporting. The audio is another matter, though like I always say about Other Matters, we worry about that later. If I proceeded from here to bore you with details about the exact shape of the othermatterly audio issues I might for a blinking moment appear to beg help. I am not begging help. Not here, anyway. For the moment, let's declare that everything happening falls heavily into the Under My Control category, while maybe even ignoring that sometimes "My Control" involves asking a specific person for help with a specific thing. I won't blast him here, though I'll say I do imagine he has to look at Discord some time.

Despite the current usually downward, sometimes-sideways spiraling, happy flickering of an estimated time of arrival within an Adobe Media Encoder window, I see that progress bar more as a highway sign this side of doomsday than any more cheerful prognosis. For what is a creative endeavor at any stage in this life than an opportunity to fail through blooperous mechanisms technical logical or dramatic? Uploading a YouTube video represents, in addition to a chance to wonder once again what "processing" actually means, in addition to the always-fresh thrill of whether or not the exact same piece of "royalty free" music will get you copyright-struck on THIS uploading instance, an invitation sent from one's self to one's self into the dark broom closet of anonymous public conversation, in which as always may lurk one or more large invisible men with aluminum throttlin clubs rhetorical. To export a YouTube video is to dread-fully imagine the impending upload, and to upload a YouTube video is to know full well you about to get your butt beat by baseball bats. So I sit here and bathe in the estimate of 10-some hours changing every other second, knowing that when this segment exports I have another, and then another, until I have exported eight in total. So here I sit, eight full expectations tunnel-removed from the expectation of an expectation of a yelling-down from all sides by my most devoted (and in this, as all cases, encouraged) haters. I do what I do for those that like what I do, though every once in a while I remember I also do it for those who don't and won't like it, because if I ain't doin it, what else are they going to yell about? Well, probably something else. Oops!

All this is to say, I know exactly well that this video will never be perfect. You'd think after six of these monstrous things I'd know a monster for a monster. Nope! Always sliming under the door is that grim superstition that hey, maybe I can make this one without any problems! It grabs you and doesn't let go until you've spent a full 60 hours on one particular element that genuinely nobody notices, much less praises. And then there's still a problem. If you've ever Made A Thing, you understand: you can't look at anything old of yours without wishing you'd done one thing different.

. . . Per, uh, twenty (thirty, if you're lucky) seconds of finished, published video.

Usually one returns to a years-old Art Thing with many lols and even a few Ls MAO --one never quite becomes The Target Audience of one's own work, though one can in fact learn to lol as though they'd never seen the thing with a pretense self-convincing enough. I returned to my DOOM review just the other day, while waiting for a little thing or two to render on this fresh monster, and I did in fact get one genuine shriek out of a "joke" whose very throwaway nature would not convince you I was NOT selecting a line at random. I did in fact drop the needle without looking, though I won't bother saying where relative to that I yelled. All I seek to say here is that I lolled at my own video, and that's good enough for me, for today.

If I'd been looking at the screen, of course I'm sure I'd have hated it.

This is an important perspective to maintain while crafting one of these hideous creatures, because to spend hours daily staring at a thing is to learn every available method for despising it. I take it upon myself to make these videos good in their final product form, which requires me to think (and endlessly) of every specific granular reason why the thing in progress is a bloated disaster. Through constant loud banging with a hammer made of software, the river-mud-drenched, bilge-swollen ox-sized rat carcass becomes a razor blade. The inverse happens to the razor blade of my "vision": here today I sit with a river-mud-drenched bilge-swollen ox-sized rat carcass of self hatred sprawled out in my lap like a bad cat. I've trained myself for lucid dreams before (sharpie-mark a symbol on the back of your hand, wear a rubber band and remember what it's for, set alarms for reality checks) so I'm no stranger to brain training! However this lesson regarding my profession refuses to stick: "try to remember, sometimes, that you definitely lol Years Later".

I've joked before that the Target Audience of my videos is "Me, Three Or More Years From Now". If it sounds like I'm debunking that here, today, I implore you to recognize that different feelings ooze out of different distances. A day after I post one of these videos--every time, so far, without fail--I feel physically ill, like the thing is trash and Detective Inspector Frank Lee Incredible himself couldn't quite explain how it's been live for twenty four hours and nobody's killed me yet. A year later, as with Action Button Reviews DOOM, I lol and sometimes even manage to cackle, though not without the immediate reservation that what I spend my days doing Right Now more or less adheres gluefully to this exact thing in so many micro-places that I can't quite separate my palpations of Today's Superior Method For Making Exactly This from any fondness or even close-range nostalgia I have for the days spent making Exactly That (DOOM on a hotel bed; pizza in New Hampshire). 

Three years later, however, I'm onto somethin else, baby, so whatever: this old thing rules. This goes especially for music: long ago a guy told me I should get cancer and die because of a song I uploaded to my YouTube channel, and so convincing was his one hateful comment amid the dozen or so of lukewarm praise (at least this guy had PASSION!) that I cracked open the Yellow Pages to the "C" page, (figuratively) called the first Cancer Doctor listed, and (figuratively) got hung up on after a (figurative) "You Misunderstand What We Do Here, Sir". Today, though--well, not exactly today, though like six months ago--I can listen to that song and think, sincerely, "Man, This Owns. McCune, We Shoulda Kept Doin This."

My memory, useless as it is sharp, looms in the darkness behind me like a minefield of "Shoulda Kept Doin That"s. Vast this minefield, and long the time it took me to capitalize my own repetitious advice. If "the point" of this fruitless memory spelunking is the richness of that "I Shoulda Kept Doin That" catharsis, if that's plinko-slotted its way down into a Pathetic Correct Response to reverie, why stomp the hose? Why kink that delicious flow? Ultimately a person realizes (either with dread or whatever other mind-feeling their programming allows), hey, this world ain't actually that big, and someday, you're gonna run out of Something Elses to try doing. So through many attempted careers making games, making videos, performing, or writing, I've ended up Here, doing several of my old Something Elses at the same time, and I suppose this is The Right Place. It just so turns out, for some people wired this kind of wrong way, The Right Place is both The Last Place You Look *and* The Only Place Left--right over there, that one unpainted corner in the same exact room where those many years ago you first learned what a paintbrush was.

All this is taking the long way to say I hate this video so, so, so much. I hate it so much I wish I'd never even had the idea to ever make any of these videos in the first place.

Though of course, I also thought that about the Tokimeki Memorial video. And all the others You Fine People have enabled me to make.

So it's probably pretty good!

AGAIN: THE VIDEO IS DONE (or is it?)

If you follow me on Twitter, you no doubt have noticed my semi-viral tweets pertaining to the status of the video. I made those tweets ahead of this Patreon post for two reasons: one is that people on Twitter--both in my mentions and in my direct message inbox--are terrifying, persistent, and usually quite angrily entitled to even the most micromorsellous updates. To people on Twitter, if something isn't being said constantly, over and over again, it isn't true, and whatever is said the most constantly is the most true. I do not like this world tendency we're in, Jerry. Though there it is. Suffice it to say, making a lengthy post on Patreon after posting a snippy little PNG on Twitter makes it easy for me to not append "also posted about this on my Patreon" to the Twitter thread. Doing that always gets me several irate DMs about how successful my Patreon is, as though I'm sitting over here rubbing my hands together and licking my Rich Man Lips whilst spending zero dollars per day so I can have exactly one billion dollars in Five Thousand Two Hundred Years. Those DMs make me feel weirder than I do at default rest, so I'd rather eschew them with a little schedule-trickery which only requires subconscious elaborations. The less I have to think about the elaborateness or un- of my actions, the tastier!

The other reason is that for the last two months I've been unable to log in to my Patreon. I click "sign in" and just get a 404. Today it worked, so, like, hey, hello. Though on the other hand: uh-oh. I don't see wellness in the bode-ing window re: that.

Mostly I saved the Patreon post for right now because, well, right now I feel better about saying the video is coming than I did when I posted a cryptic image about the video coming.

Yet even my relatively Feeling Better about the video coming cannot erase the specter of grimness from this prose.

Accounting for no slim percentage of the grim tone of this Patreon post is dark notion that this video is still, somehow, "not done". A million things can go wrong during the export process, and about nine hundred and ninety thousand of them usually do. I've not yet met one that has completely stopped me from uploading a Pretty Good Final Product, though what if I did? What would it look like? We'll find out this week (or maybe we won't).

This lugubrious notion of course serves as the primary roadblock defending you all from my declaration of an exact time and day at which you can view the video. I just don't know. I wish I did.

Lordy, I wish I did. Knowing the exact time this video will live would be the closest I felt to a moment of relief this entire YEAR so far. I will know the exact time, let's say, twenty-four hours in advance of said time's arrival, and I will tell you then. Let this post, then, serve as a snapshot of the pain I feel right this minute--the pain of both not knowing when this horrible (to me (Probably Pretty Good, for you)) video will leave my house and get a job, and the pain of having really dry eyes and a sort of low-grade 24/7 migraine that has required me to keep the blackout curtains slammed shut and wear sunglasses indoors for going on six weeks, now. You know: it might just be the case that people aren't supposed to stare at these computer screens this much.

Apropos of the earlier grim intonations about hating my own work the instant it emerges placenta-shellacked unto YouTube, regarding those many Something Elses and Somewhere Elses, let me say a little more: Young Artists often approach me (as though I were some kind of artist) for advice about making art. They say, "I hate my own art" and I say "lmao yeah dude" and they take bristling instant huffy umbrage. In these cases, I'm not telling them that I personally ALSO hate their art. I'm saying that I don't know and haven't known ever of a person who made good stuff who didn't make good stuff because they're trying to make what they perceive as bad stuff better.

I've pyramid-slalom slip-slid into a general ultimate forward trajectory this first half of my life, though that doesn't mean the scenery must stop changing. Oh no--it must change forever, or I will die. So Action Button Season Two will be (already is, I say, as I sit here poring over a couple ponderous .MP4s in VLC) quite different in tone from Season One. I've talked about this before, though since then much has crystalized about my initial fuzzy notion. Heck, some of it has crystalized so much that it's literally a video I am lazily watching for errors right this minute.

I realize it's some kind of a YouTuber Joke to say "my next video will be shorter", which is why I made that joke three VERY GREAT times during Action Button Season One. Though I have tricked with your emotions too-multiple times throughout this year and a half of Top-Density Content, I say here in this post, directly, to my (objectively) most devoted of viewers, what you will hear me say broadly to all at the conclusion of the impending video presentation: I ain't making any more videos like this one. The System is now *thoroughly* free of this particular impulse. You will see what I mean.

For now, let me end this on a bright note: I am very, very excited for you to see the video after the Cyberpunk video. I've been working on it for over a year. It's precisely the kind of thing I wanted to make when I started this Patreon.

UPDATES FROM THE SALES DEPARTMENT

In other news: there's new merch! It's not live yet, though it will be around the time the video goes up. I'll let you all know.

The website: still doesn't exist. I don't really have any excuse. There are too many ideas, and all of them are too good, for us to have Just Made A Website already. I promise that when the website does exist, it's going to be hilarious. Though when that's going to be, I can't say. It most likely will not be before the end of this year. Oh well!

Here I stop for a moment to recall that the earliest discussion I had with a web designer about ground-up remaking Action Button Dot Net in some Big-Time Moneymaking "Now THIS Is A 'Publication!'" form more polished than its current state was thirteen years ago. Lordy, that's a long time to just not buckle down and make something. Let that be a lesson to aspiring procrastinators: maybe make a draft? Photoshop something and look at it for longer than two seconds? I don't know.

Anyway, hopefully you'll be declaring something "A 'Publication'" before I'm 43 years old. That's a prime number!

KEEP YOUR LETTERS COMING (unless you hate me)

Re: your many messages, comments, and emails: I just can't get enough! Unless you're yelling at me, in which case I had enough in like 1998.

(And, I must add, I had enough of people pretending to yell at me because I asked them not to yell at me in like 1999. Just be cool man)

One of the most frequent questions I get in emails and messages on various platforms (especially here on Patreon) regards streaming. More than a dozen people have used the phrase "at least" in these queries. I'll paraphrase: "I understand the videos are big, bulky-horsely, rhino-chokingly endeavorous workloads, though maybe while working on the video you could at least stream a couple times?"

Here I invite you to think of your best friends. Among them is at least one who, for example, can make you forget you have a headache. You meet them in a public place after weeks of not interfacing and instantly whatever physical ghost of elsewise stress vanishes and you have a conversation free of any burden of duty.

Now I invite you to think of the best job you ever had. Maybe you delighted in the surroundance of a squadron or battalion of otherworldlily lucid and loquacious individuals whose every sentence carried a twist of clever somewhere toward its punctuation point. Around the coffee machine or water cooler you giggled or bellowed! Soon you find yourself in what they call a "group chat", and not long after that you find yourself in a second "group chat" with fewer participants and not horribly too much longer after that you find yourself one-on-onesing with three or four different workplace persons at any given juggling time. One of them gets a puppy and sends you alone a private picture, knowing you a Puppy Person. You lean over on your sofa and show your significant other: "Look at this: my friend just got a dog." There it is: you just called a coworker "friend".

I'll not dare declare that no coworker can become a friend, or even that best friend who relieves your physical stress to see. Everything starts somewhere, Jerry. All I'll say is that when I stream, I do not feel like I'm talking to my best friend. I feel like I'm talking to someone who just texted me a picture of their new puppy. Does that make sense?

If not, here's this: at the end of my life, I'll look upon a vision of footprints in the sand. My Twitch Dot TV Slash Action Button Audience stands next to me, dressed like Jesus "JC" Christ. Two pairs of footprints stretching along an infinite beach. At the times when I was streaming, perplexingly, I see groups of three footprints instead of four. I ask Jesus, "Why were you hopping on one foot while I was livestreaming?" and he says, "I wasn't. I was repeatedly kicking you."

Much as I've no doubt I could become great friends with literally anyone reading this right now (I could even treat it like a dare, if you want), livestreaming does not feel exactly like hanging out. It does not even feel like playing a video game. It certainly *involves* multiple of my cherished hobbies (Talking To People, Playing A Video Game, Engaging With Difficult Technology Gadgets), though in combination these monstered hobbies become something slurmier than the sum of their respective elements.

In summary, much respect to people who get on Twitch and stream video games all day every day. Streaming is not easy. Sure, it's not exactly Breakin Rocks In The Yard, though on the other hand, who even breaks rocks in the yard anymore? They have robots for that now.

Over streaming, I prefer this curtain of mystery out from behind which I peer once or twice every couple of months to unleash a torrent of calculated, engineered thoughts. Compared to this relative comfort, that constant pressure to commentate every insipid earthly happening WHILE answering the same audience questions nineteen times in twenty minutes WHILE playing a video game fairly well seems like torture.

Having said all that, part of the reason why I'm changing up the format so drastically for season two is, uh, because I want to stream more. I think I found a way to make it more fun for myself. Let's see if I'm any good at it.

Another question I receive often concerns podcasts--ie, whether I will ever start one, or have one, or what. I must confess I've been working on various podcast-like things this past year and a half, though I haven't judged any of them interesting enough yet to share with you. Though I do in fact bristle at the notion of providing substantial backer-exclusive content (oh, hey, there's another Vimeo Bloopers Reel for this Cyberpunk video, and it's like twice as long as the DOOM one), I was thinking, hey, Patreon entitles backers to custom roles on my Discord, and Discord just today (at least, to me) announced role icons for Discord. I was wondering, what would be useful about that? And then I thought, hey, if I were doing some kind of live podcast Q&A-style thing on Discord, I could easily see who was a backer by their Discord icons, which might subconsciously inform my decision to address their question. Is that Backer-Exclusive Content enough for you? Because a little live podcast thing would be way easier than the Deep Heck of livestreaming a video game, I tell you.

Well, this thing is gonna go on forever if I don't snip it off somewhere, so I'll snip it off here. I was gonna make a joke about how I could just keep typing this until this one segment of my video finished exporting, and while I love the feeling of this keyboard a LOT, I realize now it's been one hour and the export still has about ten more to go. I can barely even joke about keeping up with that.

A WORD FROM OUR SPONSORS*

And I also can't joke about MiSTer. I recently purchased a fully configured MiSTer from misteraddons.com and I gotta say: that's one of the best things I've put money down for. Consider MiSTer Addons Dot Com an Official Action Button Sponsor.

(*Note: in the Action Button Universe, "Sponsor" means someone I give a bunch of money to and then say nice stuff about without their asking me to.)

Also, Action Button Sponsor Christa Lee at Sound Retro Co. is doing excellent work modifying and repairing retro video game consoles, if anybody out there is looking to get some Work Done on their "cyberware", as it were. She made me an HDMI Nintendo 64! What do I need that for, though? I don't know. Maybe we'll find out soon.

THE END (of this post)

Hmmm. I don't know what I'm supposed to do while this video exports. I can't play video games--because I capture every video game I play, and I can't quite capture while the PC is as busy as it's gonna be these next couple days. Maybe I could go out for a walk? Maybe I could get a haircut? Or maybe I could finally start shopping for furniture? I still, unfortunately, am living in a mostly empty house. Got a nice TV stand and a good desk chair, though.

Oh, I should attach a still to this.

How's that? Well, you probably saw it BEFORE you started reading. Though yeah, call that a Production Still. Note the ultra-low-res proxy footage of my face. If I showed you the real 6K footage it'd just look too impressive. I can't go setting too-high expectations just yet.

As soon as the video feels Exported Enough (ie, as soon as I get that Hard Gut Feeling that "Yeah, it is actually going to finish successfully exporting") I'll post again with the cover image. I don't want you to have to sit with it for TOO long lmao

IN CLOSING, A LITTLE ADVICE

Nobody owns you. If anybody ever calls you their "boss", even casually, they're the enemy. If the hand that feeds you has delicious, chubby fingers--that's because it's eating YOUR food. Don't just bite that hand. Eat it. However, always, always be sure to never save the middle finger for last.