ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS CYBERPUNK 2077 is still processing

EDIT: NOOOOOOOOO I accidentally published this with the title I wrote yesterday, which is that it is "now uploading". It had finished uploading and began processing WHILE I was writing this post. I completely rewrote the post and then neglected to change the title. Ah, man. If in your email inbox it says the video is "uploading", that is wildly wrong. It is processing. Ah, man, what a debacle

(Sunday, 17 October 2021, 6:45pm eastern)

It will go live on YouTube Dot Com Slash Action Button as soon as the "2160p60" light turns on in YouTube Studio. I'll let you all know when that is. It has been "processing" for about twenty-four hours at the time of this typing, though I don't reckon it could possibly take too much longer. I base that assumption on, uh, nothing, though sometimes even nothing has to count for something, right?

(This post was written over a 24-hour period. The video is still not processed. It is defying all my expectations about the processing . . . process. The next post from me in here will contain happy news and a link to the video.)

You know, the expression "smooth sailing" usually calls to mind open roads (or water), the feeling of great forward movement, progress, adventure, a breeze, zero roadblocks, brilliant sunshine, and a sparkling future. Though the Boat Men who coined that cliche I reckon intended it less to express carefreedom than to insinuate the absolute brick of nonsense preceding said smoothness. Do you remember in elementary school, when you had to write a definition of a word without using that word in the sentence, and how some kids (maybe even very smart kids!) just couldn't get their head around how to do it? I was for some reason extremely, masterfully good at it, so maybe years of that experience has rewired my brain. I do not define "smooth sailing" as "sailing that is smooth": I define it as "boat movement without a hundred tiny jerky turns or screamed orders to raise or lower or hoist sails whilst exiting port; boat movement in which one huffs the temptation to forget that backbreaking day of hefting and lashing trunks and crates and equipment and perishables".

Sometimes I forget that (for example) dropping a video into YouTube does not begin the smooth sailing stage. I seem to learn anew every time that the only thing that smoothens my sailing is telling you the video is live and that you can watch it right now. Which I can't do right this moment. I wish I could. Though it's gotta be soon, right?!

One task has occupied ninety-nine percent of my waking hours--and ninety percent of my HOURS were waking hours--these past two weeks: making sure this video is able to be exported. Every single wrong-going possibility happened. I maintain to this day that I do not, in the sports-person's sense, "get angry," though I confess with shamelessness I yelled a lot. Past a certain point I neologized a new obscenity--a common practice when Adobe Premiere is open and chuggin RAM slop--slightly too close to the rubes' favorite Real Ones, and so any stethoscope-owning neighbors might have acquired a perplexion about the polite-company use or mis- of the simple exclamation "Crack!" Sometimes, in a Jurassic Parky "Clever Girl"-ly tone, it was "Crack. Smokin'. Daddy."

Ask ten people on the street what Adobe Premiere is and nine of them will tell you to go Adobe your SELF; ask any ten video production professionals loitering around a hospital cafeteria and they'll tell you, "It's a program that crashes." I don't mean to make my job out as involving a degree of technomancy requisite of even a *second*-world-country's space program, though Adobe Premiere be darned if it doesn't tence daily accuse me of knowing a whole lotta stuff I can capably snap-locate to slap and yell like Millennium Falcon dials. "Accuse" being the louder word here: it feels like it's judging me quizzly every time I whip it open after a crash, like it wants me to type into the feedback box Exactly What I Did Wrong. I ain't done nothin, jack, except use a tool the way its instruction manual legibly allows. Everything here doesn't just look like a nail because my skillset is a hammer--it genuinely is All Nails. 

Nonetheless, in hourly spasms of robo-Joker Mode, Adobe Premiere riddles me this or that. More times this one past week than I have ever had grooves to *BE* killed this insipid computer program has told me that, ah, yeah, you're just not gonna be able to see the video play back any more until you shut the computer down. You probably already know what you did wrong, so we won't bother telling you. It ain't the media cache, it ain't the audio device settings, it ain't anything I ever heard of. It's just a lunchbreak punchin you in the side of the head without even callin you a doofus first.

Of course any sufficiently transpired Conversation About Work invites an apparition of the Yet You Participate In Society Guy, and I sure got a couple this past month or so. Basically falling over into my Twitter DM inbox flat out asking, "Why don't you just not use Premiere?" Because for one thing, I have to, baby. For another thing, I don't have time Right Now to learn another program. And for a third thing, man, what is a job if not something you complain about sometimes? I don't currently work daily alongside any one particular full-time person, so I gotta scrounge deep for someone to complain near. It's a coping mechanism, et cetera. Though I realize all of this makes for spectacularly dry literature. I realize most people would rather read a story with thrills in it, though right now this is the only story I have. I am trapped inside a small room with a mischievous computer program, though unlike HAL-9000, Adobe Premiere does not have any spiritual lessons that I know of to impart.

Or maybe it does: just before I started to write all this, the one final tiny little audio snippet I intended to noodle-carve off the block of a larger sequence to slap on patch-like above its error-having counterpart in line on the main sequence (titled "product" here at Action Button) materialized with perfect progressive smoothness until suddenly arriving at its exportational conclusion: 100%. There it stayed: stuck at 100%.

"100%" is one of Adobe Premiere's favorite jokes. So often you'll watch the Media Encoder or Adobe Premiere and watch the export freeze right there at the very, very end. If you're exporting from Premiere (as I usually do if it's something literally less than six seconds long), it shows you a lying NUMBER in addition to a lying progress bar. Long (long!) videos can stay stuck at 100% for three seconds or an hour, depending on the software's whim. I had an export stay stuck at 100% for *two* hours once. I was tempted (many times!) to click "cancel", restart the computer, and let it have another shot. I didn't. Suddenly, it decided, "Well, okay," and it exported the thing.

Another strikingly similar time, it decided after two bored hours to crash.

"Stuck At 100%" is a fitting turn of phrase for how I feel about my work at Action Button so far, as I arrive quite effortfully at the conclusion of Season One. "Stuck At 100%" might describe so many . . . textural nuances of my video editing style, sure, though most personally it fits the way I've felt, to be honest, about this Cyberpunk 2077 project for the duration of its making. 

Similarly, the final cut of ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS Cyberpunk 2077 sat with a 100% topped-up progress bar in Adobe Media Encoder (all superstitions taken into account, yes, I had freshly shut down my computer, let it stand for ten minutes, turned it back on and opened exactly zero programs before starting the queue) for one full hour, during which time I napped (that's local slang for "sat there unmoving with eyes full-ball freak-mode"), until it on-a-whimsically decided to, okay, let this guy right here be free of this particular thing.

Yet the "Stuck at 100%" feeling doesn't stop there. The video is currently, 20 hours later, still "processing" on YouTube. Lord (or maybe not even him) knows what "processing" means on a GOOD day, though I hear rumbles of YouTube making algorithm alterations that are affecting processing time. They picked this exact month to do this, which feels unfair given how many processing stopwatchings I did over the duration of this project. At any down moment I'd carve off a slice, send it to my personal YouTube, and see how long it took to process. 

These little clippets tended to process at a decent enough speed to give me hope that this video in its total form will indeed process without YouTube calling the cops on me. I did the math on what percentage of the video's total length such-and-such clip represented, and tried to figure out a processing estimate from there. 

Let's just say that it was like talking to someone else's dog--or a toddler you find crawling out of your trash. I learned nothing about the universe I could share with anyone interesting. A twenty-minute clip might process in four minutes, and then a five-minute clip took an hour. My math wall crumbled.

So heck, I overnight-rendered a rough cut of the whole thing with proxy greenscreen footage a couple times, equalling ultimately an almost identical file size to the absolute final cut of the video, and it processed in six hours. I figured that was a good sign. Furthermore, many, many times during the production of this video, I did quick h.264 exports of just big ugly twelve-hour slabs of raw gameplay just so see how YouTube handled that, and those almost universally processed in less time than their running length. So no, guy in the comments on the post before this one who coldly berated my lack of acquaintance with external factors, you can't predict this nonsense.

Well.

It's still processing now. I'm sure it'll be fine. I actually uploaded four instances of the video, in four different bit rates, just because I want this thing to be the maximum file size possible for my Big-Boy 4K-TV-havin audience. It will intrigue me if the highest bitrate one finishes processing first. (That particular version is uncomfortably close to YouTube's maximum file size.)

THE END OF AN ERA

Such (the above) are the petty psychological self-wrestling struggles of the more concrete terminal stage of the Stuck At One Hundred Percent lifestyle: you turn every insipid obstacle into a power play. I've been Stuck At One Hundred Percent for about three decades now. It's easier for me than anything else, and I don't mean that as any kind of compliment. It's one thing when your personality problems get in the way of your work, though it's another thing entirely when they get in the way of each other. And they got spaghetti sauce or cherry Jell-O or whatever it is all OVER each other for the duration of Action Button Season One.

As Isaac Newton once pre-paraphrased, sooner or later something has to STOP a man. And I think this video is about it.

ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS Cyberpunk 2077 is many things. Though ultimately it is a video ABOUT *how* I cannot ever make another one like this. I'd formally say "you'll see what I mean", though that would be spoilers.

We will talk about season two later, probably at great length, mostly inside season two itself.

For now, I remain Stuck At One Hundred Percent. Obsessing near-constantly that something might be horribly wrong with this video and that I'll instantly regret posting it and wish people would stop watching it.

I hope with sincerity that Action Button Season Two sees me sailing smoothly 24/7. Though I know of course of whales and octopi and whatnot, so I shouldn't make myself any promises just yet.

IT'S ALWAYS MONDAY NIGHT SOMEWHERE, BABY (or, "A Guide To Goblin Style")

(Monday, 18 October 2021, 6:20pm eastern)

You know, usually I love posting these things on Sundays, though I find it fitting, given the vanished musical legacy of my previous work, to launch this last season one video on Monday. Because as I said once, "it's always Monday Night somewhere, baby." So if it finishes processing before I can post this, I'll blast that theme music over here, privately.

I am excited for you all to watch this video. It represents the culimination of One Full Year spent never engaging sincerely with social media. I put every single possible social media-worthy "take" I had about pretty much everything ice-coldly into this video. 

Of course as a person who *exists* on social media my audience might feel wary of the above declaration. Fun fact: did you know that every time you comment on one of my Patreon posts, Patreon notifies me with an email? I'd filter those emails out of my inbox--because I can read the comments just fine here on the page (when it decides to let me log in, lol)--though Patreon sees fit to send the comments from the same no-reply email address that it sends, for example, hypothetical identity-theft / fraud- / crime-related emails. So I see all your comments in my inbox whether I have this page open in a tab or not. Interesting, right?

Anyway, these past few days I saw many, many upset, frustrated comments about the delays on this video underneath my recent post. Many of the persons participating in that particular comment thread might appreciate a re-reading of paragraph number twenty of the post in question. In that paragraph, I said "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." I intended the "let's say" to soften the estimate of "twenty-four hours". I meant to have the video processed on Saturday night. However, a lot can happen which turns a Saturday night into a Sunday morning.

However the true broad side of that paragraph's barn actually sailed by in five paragraphs earlier, in which I talked about my methods for keeping Patreon posts and tweets separate. I thought the prose was decent, though here it is again, reiterated without any sort of fance: Twitter is Goblin Style. You (yes, you) are literally paying for The Real Stuff. The Real Stuff is this right here. Do not look at Twitter. Not my Twitter, or anyone else's. For God's sake.

As upset as some of those comments were under this last post, they ain't got *nothin* on the DMs I have received on Twitter these past several months. And before you decide to lecture me here about having open Twitter DMs, consider the interesting tactic of not. You don't even want to know what a text message from a committed psychopath accusing you of Hiding From The Public looks like. 

At any rate, I promise I do not take the hugely vast majority of my haters on Twitter seriously. Most of them make it abundantly clear they have not watched any of my videos, for example. I don't need to get into it. Suffice it to say I gave up on having ANY kind of real conversation with literally anyone on Twitter about eight years ago. Maybe we can talk about that in more detail someday. Maybe that'd make for an interesting anecdote for a video. Lord knows I need some more anecdotes in my videos.

To cap off this sequence of paragraphs, I urge you to, if you absolutely MUST look at my or anyone else's Twitter, to think of it as professional wrestling. It's entertainment. These posts right here are Real. My videos, so far, are a higher percentage of Real than Not Real, and I'm trying daily to concoct entertaining methods for getting that number up.

LET'S (not) TALK ABOUT THE CYBERPUNK 2077 VIDEO

I had some notes I wanted to expound upon regarding a couple stylistic and structural choices I made in this review, though I figure I'd be spoiling my own video if I did that. I'll save it for later. All I'll say now is that this video represents the biggest experiment yet. I've written here before about considering my YouTube channel a kind of tiny little art gallery. I don't bloat it with a billion tiny videos. I don't have playlists. Heck, I've even decided not to break off season one and two into separate playlists. This whole channel is going to top out, if all goes well, at fewer videos than lots of big channels fit into each of their many playlists. I like the notion of letting them all stand in there as one thing.

I have much (much!) to talk to you all about regarding season two, our new website, new member benefits, and upcoming exclusive content (ie, that I've figured out a way to do it that doesn't feel gross to me personally!) though I'll save that for later. Because I promised myself--and just because I tweeted about this doesn't make it less true--that I'd take a break after clicking "public" on this video. *Several* of you saw that tweet on Twitter and then messaged me here on Patreon within the HOUR about how I should *not* take a break and that I owe you nine more videos for this year, which literally made ask one guy for his PayPal address, send him the three dollars Patreon's backend failed at letting me refund, and then block him. Following that particular little ugly experience I must admit I genuinely considered NOT taking a break and instead continuing to work on Action Button Reviews Season Two Episode One. Then, days later, I exported "cyber_thumb.jpg" from Photoshop and in an instant I realized how much trash and mail had accumulated on my desk this year. I realized I am still wearing flip flops in my house All Day Every Day, that my bare feet have NEVER touched my "new" apartment floor since moving in Over A Year Ago, because Mimsy's grandma had a LOT of plants and our building requires us to write a heckin declaration of independence every time we have *packages* delivered so scheduling a good power-wash has proved Kafka-esque. I realize I still own no adult furniture. I realized many unfinished material aspects of the human portion of my life. The fact is that as an overachieving person (a "Type A Personality", as the ophthalmologist diagnosing me with work-stress-related Central Serous Chorioretinopathy in 2005 told me) AND as an avid fan of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (yes, the UK one; never the US one) "I never listen to positives". Hearing from a money-committed viewer who is Literally Paying (one-five-thousandth of) My Salary that I am not working enough has the immediate result of me telling myself "Duh". Yet I find myself in the ridiculously privileged position of having turned "life" into "work". I'm gonna try to get a little bit of life, and maybe that just has the direct result of making the video better.

In other words, what I'm sayin is, ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS Cyberpunk 2077 is a video made entirely by one house-stuck human individual who learned basically nothing valuable in the process of making it (except for the Big Thing about what happens to us when we spend a long time not learning anything valuable). And also that person does not own a dresser, and has dressed this year exclusively in clothes picked out from a pile draped over the old busted 55" HDTV on top of some plastic storage bins in the bedroom. I keep thinking, "We should throw that TV away", and then immediately asking myself "then where am I going to put my clothes". As a nutritionist I knew once said of a single daily can of Diet Coke, it's probably okay for you to watch *one* video by This Kind Of Guy, though two? You'd be risking spiritual food-poison, buddy. Hopefully the next video I publish will be made by a guy who has some adult furniture.

For me, "smooth sailing" is the notion of a new pinned tweet--one that makes a clearer declaration of what it is viewers can expect from my YouTube channel--and a new Patreon pitch video. New branding. A new website with a new logo. New contributors. Just, lots of agreeable newness.

In case I didn't say it loudly enough in the previous post: ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS Cyberpunk 2077, as the last video of Action Button Reviews Season One, is the absolute last video of anything resembling this length that I will make on this channel. The rest of them--starting with the very next one--will fall into something much closer to the general template I had in mind when I started this channel.

Apropos of what I said earlier about never believing any work I do is "enough": the vast majority of the haters in my Twitter inbox (etc) yell at me about the apparent effort to money ratio hanging over my head like a sword. "Do you ever wonder how you can make so much on Patreon with so few YouTube subscribers?" more than one person has asked (this week). I ignore these people, though if I decided to reply, I'd say something like, "even though not a lot of people like my videos, the people who like my videos like them a lot". I think that's succinct.

LET'S TALK ABOUT MONEY

Though you know what? I've struggled with that notion. As I explained before, when I started this Patreon I was already in some cases eight emails deep into discussions to contribute freelance content to a variety of publications. I expected--in all brutal honesty!--this Patreon to cap out at about $1,300 per month.

That was literally my projection. I did math, and everything. I suppose this rhymes quite well with my recent experiments in predicting YouTube processing times. Similarly it signals that my era as a consultant has probably come to a crashing end (lmao).

For $1,300, here's what I was going to give you. I was going to basically do what I did for my Animal Crossing Prereview video at Kotaku Dot Com, except I was going to have played the game beforehand. I was going to sit down in front of a camera with some notes printed on paper and news-anchorly make improvised jokes at you for two hours. Then I was going to edit it down to exactly one hour. That's why I did those three "prereview" videos on my last day at Kotaku. I was testing the format! That's two hours of shooting, three videos exactly thirty minutes each. That is what I was going to do for $1,300 a month. 

(Someone inevitably will say that the Animal Crossing video is not "densely scripted", and that I promise "densely scripted" content in my Patreon description. Here all I'll say is that the Cyberpunk 2077 "prereview" video was also improvised from outlined notes.)

However, you all, in your wild generosity, blessed me with bigger expectations. So it was by the time I faced the task of composing notes for my first video--a review of The Final Fantasy Seven Remake--I felt the spiritual need to provide you a Seven Thousand Dollar Product. (This estimate presumed monthly videos, of course. We can get into the "scheduling" thing later.) Your enthusiasm transformed Action Button Reviews from a "thing I can probably manage to do once per month" into an organization with a business bank account and all the little tricky things that come with that.

Much of the hate I began to receive (and continue to receive) accused me of low or no effort. Someone yesterday called me right to my DM inbox "Just another rich white guy with glasses talking about video games". I'd like to think I do something at least slightly more meaningful than "just talking about video games"--I mean, the video editing workflow is *brutal*, man--though I can't help feeling bad about that reduction. I was feeling bad about it before the "rich" part was even half true! I used to see people like Yahtzee or Jim Sterling or even those Kinda Funny guys and think, "They're getting paid SO MUCH!" Now I'm getting paid around about that much, and maybe working about four times harder than anyone associated with any of those people, because I'm an idiot and I don't like myself and don't understand why anyone else would if I worked any less. So I sit here and I ask myself, every thirty seconds, "What is a sixteen-thousand-dollar video? What is a thirty-two-thousand dollar video? What is a forty-eight-thousand dollar video?" And then I realize those thirty seconds are actually whole months. Time flies whether you be having fun or disliking yourself.

I promise I've done decent things with your money. For one thing, I paid some part-timers and contractors, and I expect to pay even MORE part-timers and contractors in the immediate future. It pleases me to announce that I arrive at the end of Action Button Season One as a guy with a normal-sized bank account balance and no furniture in his apartment.

Though on the other hand, I need furniture.

And on the third hand, I *need* to make these new videos. If you'll allow me a little hyperbole: I am more excited about these next six videos than I have ever been about anything in my life. And I literally got a Super Nintendo for Christmas 1991.

FEELING LIKE SEASON ONE IS OVER

(Monday, 18 October 2021, 8:40pm eastern)

Forgive me if this post is a whole lot of idiocy. I'm basically just typing here because I love my keyboard, and also to kill time while the video processes. I keep expecting it to finish processing any second now. All my experience with video-related stuff being Stuck At One Hundred Percent is telling me to believe.

I also believe it's time to thank the people who helped out with this first season of videos. First of all, without the money-encouragement of you Patreon backers, I'd probably be literally dead. Whatever that means. No, seriously, thank you very much for slapping me in the face with a Soul-Sucking Lawyer's Income and forcing me to loathe myself in a just-healthy-enough way to make a couple dozen hours of densely scripted video content that has perhaps helped many people through an entertainment-deprived Bad Couple Of Years. 

I'd also like to thank Ryan Taylor for filming DOOM, Pac-Man, Tokimeki Memorial, and Cyberpunk 2077 in his studio in Indiana. At first the notion of getting on an airplane to film one of these videos occurred to me as ridiculous, though he was just so matter-of-fact about it that I realized a thing or two about the perception of others. Basically, what he meant to say was that my review of The Final Fantasy VII Remake looked okay, though the review of The Last Of Us looked *so much* worse that he figured no predictions were able to be made, and a pro had better step in. (That's a joke.) Without Ryan Taylor's expert knowledge of where to put lights and microphones, these videos would be weird webcam trash. Ryan Taylor's work has gone the distance toward making these videos look worthy of their very public budgets. 

Similarly, I must thank Josh Watson for his help editing. I enter every professional endeavor--even (especially) those superficially resembling Stuff I Done Before--under the weighted blanket of a knowledge that I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. And these videos were the heaviest instance of that feeling yet. Josh Watson came to me early expressing trust that I'd figure it out, and he helped me figure out what figuring it out might mean.

I'd also like to thank Alex Jaffe for contributing to several research-related jokes over the course of the season (most notably, perhaps, the "long way since Pac-Man" opening bit), and for serving as an early test audience for the roughest cuts of the trickiest segments of this Cyberpunk 2077 video. You see, in order to turn one of these things into a finished video, you need to pick one part and really drill down on it until you get the style and texture right. It's painful. After that, everything is just work--sometimes-crushing, sometimes-frustrating, sometimes-shuttering hermit-making work, though work nonetheless. By numerously test-viewing my first completed segments, Alex Jaffe helped me find that tone, after which point I am quite sorry for mostly ignoring him on Discord. I'm sorry, Alex Jaffe: if it's any consolation, I was also ignoring a *lot* of other people. Only I'm not naming them here: I'm just naming you.

Special thanks also to Michael "Truck Heck" Kerwin for performing the final sanity check on each segment of the Cyberpunk 2077 video. I consider this an arduous task--especially because I'd just done it myself. Premiere exported this video like a dog exports a fine shoe. Every two or three minutes had either a video or audio hole I needed to painstakingly re-export various little pieces to patch over. This video arrives to you an airport-sized slab of Jell-O with a couple hundred toothpicks sticking up out of it. Though past a certain point, a man can't jab too many toothpicks himself. I mean, after three full viewings of each segment on my television, pausing in loud frustration every time I noticed something (sometimes-newly) wrong, I just couldn't take it anymore, so I called MK in over from the Truck Heck Laboratory, and he did a valuable service. Coincidentally, if you notice any audio-related errors in this video, they're all Michael Kerwin's fault because he didn't notice them. (That's a joke. Let's all blame Adobe.) 

. . . . . . I really hoped the video would have finished processing while I was typing all this. It did not. I actually exported and uploaded ANOTHER version of the video at a slightly lower bitrate, to see if that might process faster. Though I've gotta reiterate: I uploaded PLENTY of test clips even longer (!) than this video, at the exact same resolution / framerate / bitrate as this final export over the past couple of months, and all of them had long since processed by now. I'm upset about this. In a better world, I'd not have to defend myself about this, because in a better world I just wouldn't have let myself make any public statements (even Goblin-Style ones) about this nonsense. It's just, man, I got broken over there on Twitter, man. I just had *hundreds* of people asking about it. "Don't You CARE Enough To Give YoUr PuBlIc An UpDaTe?!?!" I let it get to me. After years of training myself to not let it get to me. That's how they getcha.

A FINAL NOTE

Reddit has a quadrant occupied by persons who refer to themselves as the "Ultrawide Master Race". These people love their big wide monitors. I have one such big wide monitor. I acquired it after some lurkulous consulting of said Ultrawide Master Race Reddit zone. Since I never posted there, of course I am not any sort of member of that Master Race. So I'm wondering if they all have better Neck DNA than I do, because lordy, I have hurt my neck a LOT in the year since getting this monitor. I doubt it's just the monitor to blame--for example, I have a new glasses prescription just collecting dust somewhere on my desktop (or maybe it's buried so deep as to avoid dust, and remains unscathed) and I've edited these past four videos (get ready for a Wild Fact) with my glasses off. I did a lot of craning and leaning this past year, and I only back in January, AFTER finishing the Tokimeki Memorial project, installed a monitor arm that lets me pull the monitor closer and angle it better when I want to exercise my arms instead of my neck. Well, that didn't stop the craning and leaning: it just slightly altered its texture. I had a Neck Scare earlier this year, and I'm currently still, unfortunately, under observation by a Final Fantasy Party of physicians for it. I have an appointment tomorrow, in fact. To summarize, I have a Tonsil Thing in one of my secret tonsils. I might need a little surgery, and that's not going to be fun for anyone except the surgeon. (I have to assume Doctor House's description of surgeons as like race car drivers is at least a tiny bit accurate. I wouldn't feel comfortable with a guy rippin somethin outta my neck who wasn't getting at least a little bit of a thrill out of it.) Though one of the upsides of having a certified Neck Problem is that a primary care doctor was able to identify what she casually described as Multiple Trigger Points in my sternocleidomastoid muscle. I wouldn't have Googled the muscle if she hadn't flat-out TOLD me to (she told me to look up stretches), though when I did Google it I found that every single blog post about stretching your sternocleidomastoid muscle, like my doctor, invites the reader to "try saying that one five times fast". My doctor mentioned the muscle, I Solid-Snaked it back at her, and she said, "Yeah, it's a mouthful." To which I replied, "It is!" To which she replied, "Try saying THAT one five times fast", and then I did, and she seemed mildly insulted. "Have you heard of it before?" "Not really," I said, "I just deal with mouthfuls for a living," which I realize now made me sound like a food critic or something even wilder than what I actually am. At any rate, wow, my neck hurts. And it hurts a lot. It turns out that the sternocleidomastoid muscle does a lot of stuff. Nodding, shaking your head--it's a Yes Muscle *and* a No Muscle!--it pulls your lungs upward when you take a deep breath, it helps you swallow. Recently, it's been responsible for making the whole left side of my face turn numb. I couldn't smile in a non-scary way, and my left eye wasn't blinking. I thought I had Bell's Palsy or even a stroke, so I did what the doctors tell you to do at the first sign of facial paralysis and I saw a doctor. It turns out I wasn't having a stroke. I just need physical therapy. So that's something I'm genuinely interested to start doing as soon as this video is safely on your televisions. Another thing I'm going to do is watch all four Shrek movies, because Mimsy always jokes about wanting to marathon-watch all four Shrek movies and I said I'd do it when I finished my video. Interestingly my doctor prescribed me muscle relaxers, which I told myself I would take only when my video was live. So in summary, it looks like while Mimsy watches Shrek, I shall be watching Big Shrek.

Anyway, another day draws to an end. My dreams of MONDAY NIGHT ACTION BUTTON, BABY are fast fading. I have reached out to every available YouTube official about this processing issue. I reckon it's not every day they get such a large 4K60 video uploaded. I'm staring at the clock, ready to call it a day. When the clock strikes 10pm eastern, I'll look at YouTube, and if it's not processed, I'll send this post with a heavy sadness. If it is, well, then, we're gonna have a little party in the next paragraph. I'm suddenly feeling excited about this next paragraph. 

. . . . . . . ah, heck. Oh, well. Here's to tomorrow. As I would say on Twitter, "Definitely tomorrow". Lord. (In other words, no, not "definitely tomorrow". Though hopefully tomorrow. I'll let you know the instant I know.)