ACTION BUTTON PICTURES PRESENTS "LOS ANGELES NOIRE"

Hello everyone. I premiered the new Action Button Video on YouTube. It's running now. It just sort of happened--sorry for no advance notice. It's just, if I didn't get this thing out I didn't know when it was going to happen. I had been sitting on it for a little too long waiting for The Right Time, which as many of us know, almost never exists.

My advice for you right now is to not watch it while it's premiering. The bitrate and video quality is not very good, to be honest. Once it's done premiering--in nine and a half hours, yes--it'll be available to stream in a beautiful high-bitrate 4K60. It really looks great. We worked really hard on it. Consider the premiere Early Access, if you will.

Why did I premiere it in the first place, though? Well, I have many, many fond childhood memories of watching marathons of old movies or TV shows on Easter. Walking into the living room and seeing such and such scene from an old movie. I realize that in America this is just a Holiday Thing in general, though it sticks out to me as specifically an Easter thing--maybe because I always liked watch Ben-Hur on Easter and to this day I tend to watch Ben-Hur on Easter.

I like the idea of this video just playing in the background while you go about your day. People are always telling me they like to "listen" to my videos or they like to "put them on", so I made one specifically suited to that*. And I had been sitting on it for a while and just the other day thought, "You know what? Let's do it Sunday."

(* Please don't consider this encouragement to "listen" to this video. While the sound presentation is luxurious and our friend Choops did a spectacular job mastering my ridiculous sound mix so that it sounds more or less like an old radio play, I also spent a lot of time on the visual effects, and we had some fun with location photography. So try watching it with your eyes in addition to your ears, if you can.)

It's presented as 22 serial episodes of a sort of proto-television-show and while it possesses many (many) deep thematic connections to the next several videos and features a perhaps mind-boggling number of Easter Eggs intended specifically for viewers to understand in the future, I think I did a decent job of making something that feels like its own thing.

It's so much of its own thing that allow me to declare right here, definitively, using the rare-for-me word "promise": I promise I am never going to make another video like this ever again.

Not saying I won't make another long one or another one with a few thousand too many cuts.

Just not one "like this". Absolutely never "like this". If you don't know what I mean by "like this", you might understand (maybe not without a sense of dread) about an hour into the presentation.

A lot went into this video. I would like to explain it all to you though I am very tired (up all night dealing with Export-related stuff (in exciting news: we are 100% on Davinci Resolve now; this video was in fact exported from Davinci Resolve and we are never looking back)).

So at some point in the next couple of weeks me and Goop Lord are going to sit down at that fancy podcast studio you might remember to record a multi-hour discussion of the production of this thing. There's a lot to get into. For example, the exact nature of what was stolen in the robbery, and where I was when I lost it.

Also, I have some bonus features. Some of them are pretty stupid. Though I think you'll enjoy them.

As I have recently (lol) learned, I will not make any promises about the release schedule of upcoming videos. Just rest assured I work on them all day every day and I sincerely love doing so. They have a lot more moving parts now than I envisioned them as having when I started this project, though I deeply love the sort of thing they have become and I appreciate it a lot if you do, too. I consider this the most interesting work I have ever produced in any medium and I am losing my mind at the thought of you all seeing what is coming up in the future.

Just . . . again. Never Another One Like This.

I mean. I will wear a suit from now on in every video. Just, a normal one. I like suits now. Somebody's gotta wear them. It's just the suit alone doesn't qualify this video as one "Like This".

I have other stuff I could talk about here, though I'll just leave you with this: Happy Easter, Smoke A Good One, Enjoy Your Sunday, join the Action Button Discord, tune in to Action Button on Twitch for twice weekly streams featuring discussion of a wide range of topics and occasional appearances by special guests, and as always feel free to message me on Discord. Or here. Though Discord is just better for actually talking to people. And get in the backer-exclusive Fukubukuro Chat!

Anyway, I am going to start offloading these 18TB of camera files into cold storage now.

UPDATE:

Between 10:56pm and 11:17pm Eastern Time multiple viewers reported a scene in which a murderer jumps off a roof to escape police pursuit as me "threatening self harm". I received a handful of emails from YouTube with links to various self-harm related helplines in case I was "feeling alone". It was an interesting new flavor of mild insult that I had honestly not quite experienced before.

The video was still premiering at this point. The exact timestamp of the scene they reported had actually occured about six hours previous. Much as I don't like making assumptions, given the timing of the reports and the distance of the "offending" clip from the timing of the reports, I assume bad faith in this case.

The premiere was ended abruptly and the video was removed from YouTube. I appealed the removal and now the video is back, though my plan to have the most ridiculously dedicated viewers (some of the best viewers, tbh) all witness the thrilling conclusion together has been deflated. It feels weird to apologize for what I can only conclude was Weirdo Behavior on the part of multiple invisible other inviduals, though I'm really sorry it happened this way.

At any (bit!)rate, I appealed the decision and the video was swiftly manually reviewed and restored with an age restriction. So you can now view the video in its entirety on YouTube without having to worry about the premeire's grainier image. And hey--that's nice.

YouTube is offering me the option to trim out the two-second segment of a man jumping off a roof. I do not want to do this. I don't want to grandstand about not wanting to "censor" my video, though it just feels stupid. Also, this is a wildly violent video game. I don't think people under 18 should watch this. I don't think I should have been allowed into the theater to watch RoboCop at god darn age eight, man.

Besides, I feel like deleting the few seconds of footage'll just cause these secret haters to search for something else to report. I feel like I'd almost be bullying them at that point, to make them have to re-engage with something they hate so much. Nonetheless, I'll consider deleting the seconds in question.

Though also, we're going to host a public torrent of the YouTube upload of the video so that you can put it on your own Plex servers in your home without YouTube ads. Numerous users in the Discord are going to seed it. You'll be able to watch it in even better quality than YouTube, honestly. I'll update this post with a link to the torrent when it's ready!

UPDATE 4/21/2025:

We have a torrent of the nicer-quality version of the video. Please feel free to throw it on your Plex server and watch ad-free at your convenience. I (its Primary Creator) here proclaim I have no problem with you doing that. Just don't re-upload it to YouTube pretending you made it, or whatever. lol

Be aware that the file is about 190GB in size. If this file size seems unreasonably large for you, feel free to use a program such as 4K Download to get the video from YouTube. In that case, you'll need to be logged into an age-verified account in order to download the video. Though yeah--I've received a lot of complaints that there are too many ads on the video, which is very funny considering that YouTube has decided to restrict ads on it. So now you have some free ad-free options.

Also currently considering exporting a 24fps 1080p black and white mono audio version of the video just basically For Myself. Though also maybe someone else would enjoy that. If I wind up doing it I'll put it on the Get Bonus Playlist on Channel Two. Also consider this a reminder than Channel Two exists and will hopefully soon have my livestream archives updated on it, as well as some new Fukubukuro content.