Action Button Reviews: THE LAST OF US

Hello. My review of THE LAST OF US (Part One) is complete and will premiere at 230pm Eastern today on YouTube Dot Com Slash Action Button! It will be available on demand on YouTube shortly afterward. It will also be available as a VOD on twitch.tv/actionbutton AND (partially) as an audiobook at soundcloud.com/actionbutton at that time.

Did you know we have a custom YouTube URL now, by the way? It's youtube.com/actionbutton. That's nice and clean.

The other day I told all of you here on Patreon that I'd thought of a segment I'd love to add. I said that if a hundred of you commented "spend a day and do the thing" I'd spend a day and do the thing. 200 of you replied. I spent a day doing the thing, and a day reckoning with the thing. The third and fourth day was all frustration: the video took literally twelve hours to upload and about twenty-four hours to process. (I have the fastest possible internet service provider in my neighborhood, though that apparently ain't good enough.)

Though now the video is here and should you choose to watch all two hours, and not immediately close the tab before the "Action Button" logo has faded, you're going to have to live for an *extra hour* with your choice to let me do the thing I didn't dare describe. I did that thing. I can't say I did it "well," because the definition of "well" evades me as pertains to this particular task. I sure "did" it, though.

I'd like to thank Josh Watson again for helping me edit this one. Thank you also to Fred Wood for Photoshopping two of my favorite moments of the video. And of course all of you for backing me on Patreon!

Next month's video subject has been decided. In fact, the selection of it factors quite dubiously into this video in ways that might not be fully apparent until the next video. I told myself The Final Fantasy VII Remake and The Last of Us were warmups, and this next video is the Big Debut (though if you wanna consider these first two "big," thank you).

You'll notice the production values have increased slightly in this video over the last one. I hope they'll increase even more in the next one. I'm also thankfully going to have even more help editing the next one than I've had so far--intriguingly giving me time to more deeply play the game in question, as well as tend to the building of our fancy new website, and see about that excellent merch to which I previously alluded. 

As much as the future excites me, I am still proud of the work we were able to do in just three weeks with this The Last Of Us video.

The next video is going to take a little longer, though I hope it's going to be explosively worth it. I hope to have it ready by the end of July. I won't even bother pretending that it'll be an hour long. Let's just bank on it being two hours long. I already have six segment angles conceived and partially researched. I think there's a neat hook for this one. As I said earlier, I have several "streaming events" planned around this next game. I'm extremely excited to finally begin applying The Action Button Method to a non-modern video game, because man, we're gonna unearth some wild stuff, dude . . .

Wow! I really wanna just tell you what the game is! Though I also don't want to spoil the The Last Of Us review. So maybe we can talk about the game later. 

A lot of you sent me questions about why I picked The Last of Us, and a lot of your questions helped me shape the review, so if you want to ask or say anything about the game I'm doing for next month, please do! You can send me a message here, on Twitter, or on Discord.

By the way! I'm moving next week, so I will probably be more absent from the internet than usual and thus perhaps less responsive to messages, though I promise I read them all!

As for the move: our lease is up here, this apartment is a nightmare, and we have a cheaper, better apartment in a better neighborhood waiting for us. This new apartment has good water pressure, hot water, gas, a working refrigerator, a supermarket less than a mile away, fios internet--all the basic stuff this apartment doesn't.

I planned this move before I even started the Patreon, and now time is up and I gotta pack up all my stuff. As you perhaps will see from this month's video, packing up "all my stuff" isn't actually that difficult . . .

I might as well just keep typing in here like it's a LiveJournal. Uh . . . how about some Patreon Backer Exclusive Sofa Rumination?

Weirdly, I now have to make a sofa-purchasing decision based on photographs on the internet rather than experience sitting on sofas at showrooms. A long time ago, you could just go sit on a sofa and decide whether or not you wanted to buy it. Well, not anymore! There's a virus out there, etc. We sat on like 30 sofas at a West Elm a month or so before the virus--that's (at least) how long we've been planning this move--and I think I liked two of them. There's no way I could remember the name they gave that sofa, or even what color it was, and the furniture business itself doesn't help, with its monochromey websites and scrabble-salad naming conventions. I wish sofas were like refrigerators and I could trust for example a Wirecutter article. Maybe I'll just live at my desk until the world opens again and I can make an informed choice based on corporeal experience. Or maybe if one hundred of you tell me to get the exact same sofa I'll think, "That's probably a good sofa." Please: don't mention IKEA.

I wonder if any of this has anything to do with the nature of my next-next-next video?

Well, I guess that's all the time I got! I gotta get ready for the premiere. If you're reading this in time, come hang out in the chat.