The DOOM Review: editing is underway!!

HELLO.

The (four(?)-hour, six-part) Action Button Review of DOOM (1993) is currently being edited!

Those who know me know, first of all, that "editing" by far accounts for the *least* amount of time I spend on any given video. Those who know me know that the vast majority of a video's production time happens in the preproduction, research, game-capturing, footage-wrangling, and scriptwriting phases. So suffice it to say: the DOOM video shall arrive quite shortly. Maybe in two weeks!

Those who know me will also know that I eschew "be" verbs in much of my writing. These me-knowers will look upon the phrase "the video is being edited" with extreme scrutiny. 

So allow me to confirm your speculation: yes, someone else is editing this video.

Let me soothe your fears: no, that doesn't mean it's going to be any shorter. In fact, it might even wind up longer than the last two. It will likely also wind up weirder, louder, wilder, and harder than the previous two.

I've employed an extraordinarily talented editor and producer to help with this video, and he's certainly giving me my money's worth. I will introduce you--and thoroughly--to this fellow by name in a more spectacular fashion than a mere Patreon blog post, when the product is complete and the time is right. We're going to all have us a little party when this DOOM review comes out.

I said a minute ago that this guy is giving me my money's worth, and wow does that phrase sure mean a *whole* lot of things in this context. I'll let his ultimate work speak for itself, though here's a taster: we shot this god darn video on the same cameras they used to film the god darn "HOBBIT" movies. I'm Bilbo as heck, over here!

Of course, said fancy cameras were in the wonderful town of South Bend, Indiana, home of Notre Dame University. So getting in front of them necessitated my boarding an airplane with two double-thick surgical masks covering all three of my breathing holes. Airports occupy the shape of a great many modern miseries at the best of times; at this worst of times I gotta say: I thought that by the age I've achieved I'd have handily run through the full checklist of unique nightmares. It turns out: absolutely nope!

While in the state of Indiana, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to freak out my dad while he was in the middle of doing yard work. My dad figures somewhat heavily as a "character" in the narrative portion of this DOOM review, so it felt like serendipity to have an opportunity to get the old man on camera. He just turned seventy, everybody!

This DOOM review is bigger and weirder than the other reviews have yet been. I'm bursting at the seams to tell you all about it. 

Unfortunately, bursting at the seams is all I can do these days. If you follow me on Twitter, you know where this is going.

If you don't (first of all, well, you can if you want, though) here's a summary briefer and better than the one I'd put on Twitter: I had to move out of my apartment in Brooklyn. I'd lived there for three years, first on a two-year lease and then on a one-year lease. We'd planned to move out at the end of the current lease, and we even had a new apartment picked out. 

Well, I should say that that next apartment was predestined for us. I won't mince words: my girlfriend's grandmother passed away last Fall. She owned a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. We decided we'd move there.

I've personally never inherited anything (not of financial value, anyway). I always presumed that the relative dies and you just get the thing. We began this moving process feverishly Googling "what happens when I break my lease in Brooklyn".

It turns out we didn't have to break the lease: it just ran out. It turns out the paperwork aspect of getting access to a deceased relative's valuable property takes the better part of a year.

Assured we only had two or so more paperweeks to endure, we checked in to a hotel near Times Square in New York Manhattan.

An aside: the current Global Virus Situation has certainly extinguished much of the tourism industry, resulting in such low nightly hotel room rates that we were actually saving money versus what the warden charged us for our cell in Brooklyn.

As I tweeted, "walking the dog" takes on a whole new meaning when you live in a small room on the top floor of an empty hotel in Times Square during a global virus crisis. Letting Bibby run nightly up and down the deserted hotel hallway, feeding my tiny wolf snacks from the ice machine, virus-fearfully venturing no further from the hotel than the Taco Bell, Chipotle, or 2 Bros Pizza less than a block away each, we awaited Paperwork News.

Well, it's been six weeks. At some point we relocated to the empty Winter Vacation Home of another family richer than mine ever dreamed of knowing. Uncannily occupying a ski resort in New Hampshire in the dead hot middle of a summer, we awaited the Manhattan building manager's permission to reserve the elevator long enough to donate grandma's stuff to Goodwill via a large truck.

To say this experience shadowed and tainted my DOOM review would be to commit Capital Understatement. Our lease ran out while I was in the middle of playing DOOM ETERNAL (after playing DOOM and DOOM II five times each, DOOM 64 twice, DOOM III BFG EDITION once, DOOM (2016) once, Quake once, Quake II once, and Daikatana (what suffices for) once). In the hotel room, I busied myself obsessively replaying DOOM and DOOM II on my Nintendo Switch in the hotel bed while rewatching DOOM (2005) and DOOM ANNIHILATION (2019) alternatingly on the hotel TV and on my laptop. 

As one week turned into two and two weeks turned into four, in the middle of a replay of DOOM 64 after reading all four of the DOOM novelizations a second time each, I decided it was time to write the review.

The review turned out exhaustive and wild--six piping hot stories from six meticulous angles, one of which even amounts to my first foray (of perhaps many) into defamiliarizedly talking about politics. I feel sorry for the individuals who have to edit this cackling monstrosity.

Meanwhile, I wish I could be one of those individuals. However, I trust the people I've hired: it's going to be a slightly slower process than I usually endure in the familiar dark alone, though the ultimate unmistakable quality of the product will be more than worth it. It turns out someone doesn't simply become me in a day: it takes at least two bonecrushing weeks.

We finally obtained a greenlight to move into the new apartment next Tuesday. Unfortunately, it's not so simple as just moving in. We have to get grandma's stuff out of there. We have to have the place cleaned. We want to get the walls painted. We have to relocate a baby grand piano from the middle of the living room (this being Manhattan, it takes up the whole living room) to my girlfriend's parents' apartment a couple avenues over. *THEN* we can move our own stuff in. 

As for our own stuff--most of my stuff was falling apart or broken when we moved out of our house. I threw away a bookshelf, a TV stand, a sofa. (Usually when I say "threw away" I mean "donated" when it comes to Useful Stuff, though this time I sadly do not: though I did entrust the items to a truck-owning organization that offered to donate what it could, it turns out they could only donate my two air conditioners. (The new apartment already has air conditioners.))

So I'm moving into this new apartment with a computer and a nice chair, though no desk. A bed, though no sofa. 

And no TV! (My TV broke.)

I'll somehow get work done those first couple of days, though I promise to purchase a desk before, for example, a sofa and a television. I mean, I already have my excellent Steelcase chair.

Shortly after moving in I'll purchase a new TV and a sofa, and turn the place into a heck of a nice place to live--and shoot videos. And stream! Wow: the new place comes already equipped with Fios. I'm gonna have gigabit. That's 1080p60fps Twitch streaming, Jerry! (The new apartment is blocks away from the diner from the establishing shot in "Seinfeld", so I've started appending "Jerry" to the ends of my sentences in preparation.)

So now that I *can* stream in high quality, I *will*. And not to the detriment of my videos--because now that I'm giving a healthy percentage of this Patreon income to a full-time editor, I've freed up plenty of time to, you know, actually play games. I figure that's going to immensely help the scriptwriting process. (I've been receiving one particular question since I announced I was looking for an editor, so let me answer it: yes, I will still be doing large amount of editing work on the video. It's just, I was doing about six peoples' jobs, and I thought it'd be nice to spend some money to cut that down to four.)

Meanwhile, though, stuck in a limbo away from my precious battlestation, I've had to research and game-play under strenuously unorthodox circumstances. This has resulted in *quite* the angle for the next two videos after DOOM.

Though, as I said, I'll be back behind the wheel of my Big Boy Alienware PC (now with *two* monitors!) in just two weeks, it looks like the stain of this bizarre temporary living experience will taint the next *two* videos.

And though I'll have an excellent video studio set up in my home by the end of this month, I'll gladly fly back to Indianapolis, borrow my mom's car, drive up to Irish Country, and have the full Peter Jackson experience again next month. By which I mean, yes, we're shooting Issues Four and Five back to back, in one session.

Oh, did I just say "issues"? I guess that makes this a good time to say that I decided, even before starting this project, that my videos would structurally evoke my memories of magazines. I'm even currently in talks with a graphic designer about rebranding the videos ever so slightly to maximize my personal nostalgia for 1990s game magazines.

See that image at the top of this post? I made that! That's only one of the many brazenly bizarre mood board materials I sent to the graphic designer to get the ball rolling.

Though also, what if that image at the top of this post is related somehow to some grand merch plans for the future? What could that merch be? Feel free to speculate in the comments.

Man, I feel like I have nine hundred other things to tell you about: the website is  being constructed; T-shirts are being designed; future celebrity guests are being talked to; a podcast is in the planning stages; the next twelve months of videos are being planned; travel to various foreign countries (such as Japan and North Carolina) is having its viability weighed.

Also, I might be starting a Vimeo. Tell me if you think this is gross: I want to start a backers-only Vimeo that contains a podcast's-worth of outtakes for each video. What do you think? Some of the outtakes for this DOOM video were, I think, pretty funny. For example, I talk for some time about police officers, in a manner that might intrigue some of you. It turns out when you have two other humans behind the camera, you have somebody to talk to between takes, and you wind up thinking about Vimeo.

The thing is, I don't want to "paywall" my "content." Furthermore, I refuse to bloat the Action Button YouTube channel with any video whose title doesn't begin with the words "Action Button Reviews." So these outtakes, which I presume would be of minimal interest to the public at large, would need to go somewhere else. Vimeo, in fact, lets me limit access (and post directly to Patreon backers). Of course I'd make these Vimeo-embedded Patreon posts public when the NEXT month's video launched. I mean, why not!

Curiously strange backer perks *are* coming--with the website, in fact, which you're gonna love (because *I* love it)--though also I think this Vimeo thing is a good idea for an additional something backer-exclusive. Let me know in the comments if you think it's not gross!

Oh! Also, it pleases me to report that I did NOT receive enough votes to do the Bioshock review. I set you all a secret time limit of one month. I did receive many messages both on Patreon and on Discord, though they didn't amount to the 600 points necessary (Patreon direct messages were worth three points; Discord DMs were worth one point). 

The first day, I was scared. A *lot* of you messaged me that first day. Though by day two, some of you started casted negative votes. I made a quick judgment and decided that only Patreon backer direct messages could count for negative votes. (I wanted the backers to have most of the power by design, for some reason that has something to do with money.)

Even without counting the negative votes, however, the numbers simply weren't there, proving to me that my viewers would rather watch me appreciate something than make fun of it. That's a nice feeling!

Also, a lot of you sent Twitter direct messages, or Patreon / Discord messages specifically asking for a review of Bioshock Infinite, or asking me "Which Bioshock is it you'll review if I ask you?" In my review I clearly specified you had to message me on Patreon or on Discord, and that the review was definitively for Bioshock One, not Bioshock Infinite, or not the entire Bioshock series in general. I did not count any of these votes. I also did not message you to answer your questions, or correct you if you specifically said "Here's one more vote for a Bioshock Infinite Review!"

To be fair, even if I *had* counted these votes, it wouldn't have been enough votes. I'm just pointing it out here to say, next time I ask you to vote for something, please follow the rules and make sure your vote gets counted! 

At any rate, thanks for the money! I've finally started spending it. Action Button Reviews has grown from Just Me to me, a part-time editor, a full-time editor, a web designer, a graphic designer, and a T-shirt artist. Furthermore, I'll hopefully use your money to buy a television and a desk in a couple of weeks.

Viruses and landlords have conspired to see that the DOOM review is running a little behind schedule, though holy lord, this thing is huge--based on more than 400 hours of game-playing research! And the next two videos will arrive a little more promptly, being edited on my soon-to-be finalized workstation. By October's issue, I hope to finally have aligned our production with its regular schedule. And what the heck: maybe December's issue is going to be Cybepunk 2077. I mean, why wouldn't it be? We'll find out soon!

Anyway, that's enough about December. While you all speculate about the four-video pathway I'm gonna hack between DOOM and Cyberpunk 2077 in our undying journey into the heart of the jungle of video games, I'm gonna continue spectating the editing of the DOOM video in this private chatroom over here.

. . . Wow, I can't believe I got through this whole thing without mentioning that I got COVID-19 again (confirmed positive with a test! (not nearly as bad the second time)), got prescribed prednisolone for lung damage due to pneumonia, and then got shingles (possibly because of the prednisolone). Wow, shingles hurts.

Bye for now!