"Action Button Reviews 'Action Button Pictures Presents "LOS ANGELES NOIRE'"

Hello! We have a new bonus feature for you. This is the most substantial bonus feature we've ever made. It consists of a four-hour moderated discussion about the production of 'Action Button Pictures Presents "LOS ANGELES NOIRE"'. I'm really pleased with how it turned out. I don't want to hype it up too much, nor do I want to tip my hand about the upcoming videos, though at some point in the future you may in hindsight consider this discussion almost as important as the review itself.

And that is why long, long before finishing "Action Button Pictures Presents 'LOS ANGELES NOIRE'" I decided I wanted to title this eventual project "Action Button Reviews 'Action Button Pictures Presents "LOS ANGELES NOIRE"'.

You can view it here.

(I will also place it on the "Get Bonus" playlist once I have finished exhausting the element of surprise (ie, after I finish posting this post).)

In this feature, Action Button Special Correspondent and Associate Producer Becky Goop interviews me on a variety of subjects related to "Action Button Pictures Presents 'LOS ANGELES NOIRE'". I answer her questions whilst endeavoring to say neither too much nor too little. The result of this exercise might entertain you.

Owing to her exalted status as a moderator (aka a "maven") of the Action Button Discord (aka "The Goblin Bunker" aka "Discord Dot GG Slash Action Button") and moreover as a frequent collaborator (on various podcast projects only one of which prior to today we have released to the semi-public), I trusted Becky with complete control over the format of this program. I trusted her so much, I asked her to write some words for this post, which I will paste now. I will not even read them, such is my trust level, until after this post has gone live.

Hi, dear reader. Becky here, with a minor imploration.

I realize you may see this post-show, post-review, post-whatever - as a podcast, or something approaching same. I even use that word, among others, to describe it in my introduction. However, I would ask - with fluttering eyelashes, and a sincere smile - that you do your level best, pretty please, to watch the show, in however many chunks of its four-hour runtime you feel is appropriate, rather than just listen to it.

If you made it through ACTION BUTTON PICTURES PRESENTS "LOS ANGELES NOIRE", then you can make it through this one. Some of you ought to thank us for providing an entire week's worth of mealtime watching material.

The reasons for this ask are twofold:

First, and most importantly, I'm in this. And I want you to look at me.

Second, I put a nonzero amount of effort into visual aids for this show, and it's my professional opinion that it significantly elevates some parts of the thing. It might even contain exclusive information.

Thanks so much for for reading my post.

-b.g.

In preparation for this post-review project I first invited Becky into the micro-sized focus-group-chat of viewers during the final editing phase of the video so that she could pan for fool's gold in the shallow stream of my constant off-ramping production anecdotes. Most of the questions she asks here are her own, either based on her observations during the final phase of production or simply her feelings toward the video itself as a finished product.

She did also host a thread on the Action Button Discord for fielding viewer questions. She directly asks some viewer questions and of course I presume allows viewer questions which align with her own curiosity amplify the urgency with which she asks her own questions. I make a lot of presumptions in this paragraph. Let me reiterate that I gave her complete creative control. I did not question her direction and am only now looking at it mostly sort of backward.

I waited exactly two months from the publication of the video to book our recording session. At first I wanted to do it two weeks later. Then I changed my mind to a month later. Then I said you know what let's do two months. So we did it two months later. I delayed it like so because I wanted distance from the project. That distance would let me consider it truly finished. I wanted to feel like it was truly finished--as you'll hear me say at length in this presentation, this project had been ongoing as an Idea for quite some time. I intended at first to achieve this holy distance by playing a couple of video games that I both needed to play For Work purposes and also envisioned having a good time with. I didn't play those video games. I instead worked full-time on video production for two more months. As Don Draper says in "Mad Men" season two episode five, "You need to get out of here and move forward. . . . It will shock you how much it never happened." I imagined Jon Hamm saying that to me about the LA Noire video as I worked on the next two videos. Not because the LA Noire video was any kind of unmitigatedly disastrous tragedy, or even something I'm not proud of: just that, for reasons I will explain three videos from now, I needed to make this video this exact way and then not try not to think about it. So I enjoyed two months of not thinking about it at all.

This sufficed to get me the distance I needed to arrive into the studio on the day of this interview ready for the three hours to wash over me like a haze. Technically the discussion you can view here sort of counts as me Thinking About It, though also it was really hot outside that day and my brain was boiling so who's to say I was even thinking about anything? Let's call it a mistrial.

I of course put on my suit and fedora for the program. I bought that suit. I might as well wear it. It's what Don would want!

I don't want to spoil any of the contents of this interview. Which is an easy way of saying that I didn't even look at it aside from a few kicks of the audio tires. I didn't want to start thinking like a Director or a Producer. I wanted to savor the opportunity to just be an interview subject for once. Having said that I did throw two PNGs on top of a very specific part of the video just because I was listening to the microphone audio over and over again for test purposes and thought of some pictures I could put on there. Feel free to guess where!

And I did drop the needle at one point and see that Becky had replicated my weird newspaper transparency effect, except she couldn't stop herself at simply getting it Exactly Right. She had to go and do it Better. She put a drop shadow on there. I debated putting a drop shadow on mine. I really did. I just ultimately liked the noisiness without it. I figured the drop shadow would make people feel more overwhelmed, because they'd see it and be like, "Am I supposed to be pausing and reading all this?" I wanted it less legible--more "visual effect" and less "visual aid", if that makes sense. I suppose this is the exact sort of little detail I should be revealing in this particular Patreon post!

And what do you know: I have a couple more details to reveal, these pertaining to topics untouched in the program for on-purpose reasons.

YOUR MOST FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

After publishing "Action Button Pictures Presents 'LOS ANGELES NOIRE'" I began receiving a torrent of questions in all my private inboxes. As I on my rare Good Days adhere to David Lynch's The Film Is The Talking mindset I did not answer these questions directly as they materialized in my inboxes. However in the spirit of having acquired delicious distance from the work, let me now touch upon--and tersely--those most frequently asked of your questions (which Becky did not address in some form during the interview).

I swear all these are real.

I kept tally in a text document over here as the questions rolled in. While unfortunately no two of you asked exactly the same question using exactly the same words (Squad Up next time!), most of you asked a question that several other people had also basically asked. I did some quick calculations and will now proceed to address the top five in order from fifth to first.

Again, I swear these are all real. And to be double-clear: these are questions asked to me privately--not ones posted in public venues or shouted during stream chats, or what have you.

Also, there's a Question Number Six, though I really think it was one guy asking it from like 60 different accounts across all platforms. If he PayPals me three dollars, I'll answer it for him, though the answer is just "framerate math" "Adobe Media Encoder glitch" and "Davinci Resolve".

QUESTION NUMBER FIVE: "Did you make this video this way because you specifically hate literally me?"

No! In every case of this question being asked, I had absolutely zero clue who the asker even was! Sorry!

QUESTION NUMBER FOUR: "[REDACTED]???"

I'm sorry. I actually did answer this one in the program. I consider the question too interesting to type it here. Becky did not specifically ask about it during the interview. However I made sure to answer it semi-definitively (and some might even say repetitiously) just so that those who asked might feel something resembling severe powerfulness. It is actually a great question and the one that is of utmost importance to the next couple of videos. So I won't tell you what the question is. I'll just say that I answered it and that if you want to try to decode which brief tangent somewhere in the video suffices as an answer to this phantom inquiry, please feel free to speculate at me in any appropriate public venue, if only to allow me an opportunity to test my at-this-point derangedly tenacious ability to resist Speaking Too Much And Too Soon.

QUESTION NUMBER THREE: "Did you like the game?"

I became a professional YouTube Video Essayist on purpose. I had job security (full dental insurance, PPO health insurance and everything) and I quit that job. I am not making any of these at gunpoint. I would never do anything this ridiculous about something I disliked in the slightest. I love this game sort of an unhealthy amount. I had hoped that would come through in the production value! Anyway I'll more explicitly discuss several design elements of LA Noire two and three videos from this one, so please wait until then.As I believe I mention in this interview, I intended this video as a "Primary Source" for my future bibliography.

QUESTION NUMBER TWO: "When are you releasing your video about LA Noire?"

It got demonetized and removed from YouTube's search function. I am not fully sure how this works though this resulted in subscribers to the channel also not receiving a notification that the video had been published. My YouTube channel's Custom URL is literally YouTube Dot Com Slash Action Button. You can find the video there!

QUESTION NUMBER ONE: "Did you use AI to write the script? [Is THAT 'The Joke'?]"

No!

[I just typed three thousand words about how much I hate current "AI" trends. I knew I cared about this topic Sort Of A Lot, though I didn't know it was quite that much. I cut it because it's the sort of thing I'd rather let marinate and turn into something more effective. Also, because I wrote it last night and this morning my new mouse arrived. It has multiple buttons I can remap and the remapping software's big long scrollable list of features I can remap buttons to are all AI-related. "AI brainstorm", "AI email compose", "AI prompt master", "AI launcher". These are all actual functions on here. My brain is on fire again, in the Bad way. I have to reassess and most likely amplify the venom of my three-thousand-word answer to this FA question. If enough commenters beneath this post ask nicely I'll post it as a separate post. Patreon is definitely as ugly a website as 1990s Livejournal, so I might as well use it like I used my 1990s Livejournal.]

Anyway, yeah, I was thinking about a lot of this while working on the video--you know, Zuck in the Hague, Jesuses made of shrimps with thousands of Wow Reacts, Musk's potential to Bud Dwyer someday, etc. I told a friend at one point, "lmao dude people are so going to think I used AI to write this thing" and he bet me fifty bucks that literally nobody would do that. I never asked him for the fifty bucks. If he's reading this, he should PayPal me fifty bucks.

HAVING SAID ALL THAT

Pretty soon we're going to start posting clips and recaps from livestreams at Twitch Dot TV Slash Action Button on TikTok. The username is "ActionButton". You can follow it if you want. Apparently we need 1,000 followers for some kind of a verification thing. So if you want to follow that, please do. I am told we're "leaving money on the table" by not doing this, and if there's more money on the table then I can start giving that money to for example film students who run through traffic away from their student film shoot to shake my hand and ask if I'm hiring.

FA question number nine, by the way, was "were all those names in the credits real people". I feel weird about this question: yes. And they all got paid!

Let's have a couple more small news items:

ACTION BUTTON DOT NET IS GONE (I STILL HAVE ACTION BUTTON DOT COM)

Several viewers have pointed this out and yes: someone somehow got the domain "Action Button Dot Net". Do not go to that website. They've put up a fake page that looks like the original page, only they've got a bunch of weird gambling stuff embedded and the site will try to inject malware of some kind.

I don't know how they got the domain. I had it set up to auto-renew. I had just paid my hosting bills a few days before it happened, so my on-file debit card information was correct. Yes, my domain was registered through the hosting service. I don't know how this happened. The hosting people have been very apologetic. It's a strange thing. It doesn't bother me much. The person who got the domain tried to sell it back to me for $10,000. They sent a peculiar email. I don't want it.

Though suffice it to say I have taken extra precautions about Action Button Dot Com.

(Did you know that Ten Years Ago Bono From U2's Daughter tried to buy Action Button Dot Com from me? She offered (through her lawyer) Five Hundred Dollars. I asked for a million and he literally hung up and they set up on Action Button Dot Org instead. I honestly thought the Dot Com was worth the million and I have a fallback company name picked out (domain secured and everything) in case I ever have to treat the Action Button Name like Robert Deniro's suitcase in "HEAT". Though tbh I'd'a never sold to anyone related to Bono. The Edge's daughter I'd take the million from though not Bono. No offense to anyone reading this from Ireland.)

I have a local backup of Action Button Dot Net's ancient Wordpress and will try to host it somewhere on Action Button Dot Com after we finish rebranding. On the one hand, I still maintain that those reviews are trash written by a child badly attempting performance art and you could read so much better stuff than waste your time with it, though on the other hand Lost Media Weirdos are inboxing me accusations of trying to Hide My Past. I'm not. I'll host my archive somewhere, though we're a lean operation here and I swear to god I just think literally everything else we're doing is multiple orders of magnitude more important. (lol)

(Yes, you can see snapshots of the site on the Internet Archive. Though again, maybe read something else! Come on, man.)

As for our new, non-ancient website: all ongoing plans regarding an official Action Button Website have been moved over to Action Button Dot Com. It's a better URL, anyway. Many of you have asked if the new website will have a forum, and I must confess that was one of the original plans--though when I made that plan I didn't expect our Discord server to turn into a genuine City of an internet community. My paradigm has shifted a couple of times with regard to my Website ideas, which in the long run is nice. Ultimately what we come of with (post-rebrand, yes) will be quite simple, though I expect you'll enjoy it.

SHOP DOT ACTION BUTTON DOT COM: RENEWED (& TRUCK HECK)

Furthermore, the Action Button merchandise shop, previously located at Shop Dot Action Button Dot Net, has now been moved to Shop Dot Action Button Dot Com. We renewed the design of the TRUCK HECK shirt, even. Printful (the shirt printing service we use) increased the size of the printable design area by quite a lot, so I had Dan Dussault redesign the TRUCK HECK shirt to make maximal use of the print area. I am wearing it right now! We also made the back wilder, in homage to a different one of my favorite old racing shirts. Furthermore, Printful now finally offers shirts in the exact color as my ancient Hav-a-Tampa Shoot Out shirt. Also, their direct-to-garment (DTG) printing quality is improved by a significant degree in their latest updates. So we all win medals in multiple categories here.

(The new Truck Heck shirt has replaced the old one. If you have an old one, please consider it a collector's item. And now that it's been Several Years let me just say here in print that the back of the original shirt, which I kept secret at the time of its release, had the names of all the higher-tier "shoutout"-requesting Patreon backers on it, styled like a list of car race participants. Several thousand people bought the shirt, and many people report wearing it once a week. So, longtime backers who never saw the original Truck Heck shirt: consider yourselves shouted out literally hundreds of thousands of times!)

BEDTIME ISLAND GOT PLAGIARIZED

Welcome back to Shirt Talk, here with news about another shirt:

Yes, Action Button's BEDTIME ISLAND shirt is many things. It's a T-shirt. It's a passport. It's a commercial narrated for some reason by Hbomberguy (a choice eerily appropriate for the enusing anecdote (as well as for the final note in this section)). It's good for sleeping. Many parents report their children love it, and speak often and fondly of "going to Bedtime Island" when they sleep at night. Also, many hardcore Lore Sleuths have begun piecing together Interesting Theories about some link between Bedtime Island and Truck Heck . . . some obsessers have even located the Bedtime Island shirt in some ancienter videos and images elsewhere amongst my back catalog. To all those hushed conspiracy-theoretical inquiries feather-fluttering into my inbox with irregularity, I answer: yes.

Though of late many have pointed me to a "unisex crewneck fleece" shirt titled "Bedtime Island" on the I Can Haz Cheezeburgeresquely named website "Shirtz Dot Cool". Personally they should have just titled the website Epic Dot Bacon if you ask me. I don't know exactly what's going on here, though I think what has happened is slightly less of a felonic plagiarism and more of an Elaine writing a Ziggy. The shirt is also very ugly, though I'm not some kind of an educated, multinationally renowned critic of design or anything so you don't have to take my word on that.

However it is with exasperation that I must now turn to Camera B and address the Lore Gatherers: no, my friends. This ain't it. I had nothing to do with this. This is not canon, and I'm not Just Sayin That.

I do not seek remunerations and I do not yearn to retaliate. The Bedtime Island Wars cannot begin because I have, and with comically easy provability, established myself as THE creator of Bedtime Island and THE originator of its lovely four syllables spoken aloud. I would not (per se) say "no" to an offer of Literally All The Profits From The Sales Of This Shirt To Date simply so I could donate the money to the shirt's designer so that they might afford a Masterclass Dot Com subscription for two months, though I am not going to call my lawyer about it. I mean, I did bring it up to him the last time I talked to him, and we just laughed, and laughed. He didn't even charge me for the time, because I can be such a fun person to talk to In Real Life that people who normally ask me for money forget to start the stopwatch sometimes! He also thought your shirt looked stupid and bad compared to mine. The artist who designed mine has exhibited her illustrations in multiple European fine art museums. You meanwhile paid someone on Fiverr to pretend they didn't know the names of any AI image generators off the top of their head because that's how much they don't even ever think about those.

Anyway, I won't get nasty. Or at least I won't stay nasty starting, uh, now. All I'll say is--and here we prove, I hope, that I do in fact know a thing or two about hosting websites and paying for domain registrations--I own the domain BEDTIMEISLAND.COM, and I have redirected it to Shop Dot Action Button Dot Com. So I win by sort of a lot, tbh. Thank You.

(We've also renewed the Bedtime Island shirt to make maximal use of Printful's new, larger print area and higher print quality. And the shirt is a new, lighter shade of pink that we like more. Nice.)

MORE TO COME . . .

I hate to Just-When-I-Thought-I-Was-Out-They-Pull-Me-Back-In-post, though today's bonus video is not the last time you'll see me wear this godforsaken detective outfit. It's getting to be like a freakin Venom Symbiote at this point. I have two more bonus features coming up. Well, two-point-two bonus features, if you count the full uncut vlog Becky and I recorded for the intermission. (We didn't mean to vlog for nearly an hour. We just wanted to vlog for like ten minutes. It's just, once you start vlogging, it's hard to stop. We love vlogging around here. It's like hanging out, except a camera might overheat.) As hinted in the video presentation itself, I'll upload the full vlog without fanfare, so please refresh the playlist at some point next week and it'll probably have appeared in there. (Oops!) The other two features I'll make nice "normal" blog posts about.

After that, the LA Noire video officially goes into the Disney Vault forever (again: by design!)

Meanwhile, yes, work continues (and quite strenuously) on the next several videos. I continue to believe this ridiculous stuff I'm making now is The Best Work Of My Life, and I continue to yearn for that misshapen possibility that someday this process will become even half as easy as it appears to you the viewer of the final product. Action Button Stream Recap Editor and YouTuber In His Own Right Amante "OniSpumoni" Douglas is helping with the next videos, as is YouTuber LowercaseJai, whose help I appreciate especially because once they're richer than Mister Beast it's going to look really crazy having my name on their resume.

FINALLY . . .

Please. Consider joining Discord Dot GG Slash Action Button, aka The Action Button Goblin Bunker. It is an enthrallingly lovely community of big-minded individuals. There's a guy in there named Golok who often pings @Everyone though you can easily mute notifications. He's allowed to do it because I have hung out with him in reali life multiple times and he's ridiculously chill. So if you keep your notifications on, know that the guy pinging you is like one of the top nine chillest people I have ever seen in my freaking life. Besides, you don't have to have all your notifications on all the time. "Too many notifications" is the number one reason people quit the server. You can turn the notifications off. You can even turn all of the notifications off on your phone and put it in your pocket and Just Live out there, man! Ah the world, oh the world! You can just live in it, Jerry! And you can take a treat-peek inside the phone when the fancy strikes. Just try telling that fancy to behave, to strike more sparingly in the interest of your tender psycho-humours. The Action Button Goblin Bunker is my one-stop internet. I don't look at anything else. There's even a thread where people talk about F1. I don't need a Twitter or a Bluesky or anything! Come on in!

. . . AND POST-FINALLY!

One dear member of this Discord server is having some financial trouble, and so many of the other members of the Discord are just such good people they're hosting a fundraiser for them. They doing a 24-hour stream on Twitch Dot TV Slash GoblinBunker starting on Saturday 12 July 2025 at 12PM Eastern. Eagle-eyed viewers who dare to maintain shrill impossible attentiveness might even catch a glimpse of a hint of a morsel about the next Action Button video . . .

Though maybe don't tune in just for that. Tune in for community! Tune in to donate to a good cause. Tune in to bask in just how cool and good-taste-having the people of the Action Button Discord server are. And also hey how about this--I thought of this just as I was about to post this post. If you message me (@actionbutton) on Discord with proof that you donated to the fundraiser, I'll send you that 3,000-word rant about how much I hate AI. There's some fun prose in there, I think. How's that for a deal???