#ActionButton

[baeddoll]

dude you want to FUCK an animal crossing? buddy you couldn’t torture that outta the thoughtform replica i keep to divulge your secrets. and i’ve tried!

[bgm05]

why does tim actionbutton rogers look like beakman's world i'm gonna lose my mind

[hospitalterrorizer]

diary592

5/16/25

friday-saturday

read more soremachi.

it's so great. i really loved, this volume, the chapter about kon and hotori going out together iceskating, and how bad hotori is at it, and how kon has a distrust of people being nice to her. so many of the insecurities people have in this manga feel really, i dunno, handled very well, and they all feel rendered kindly, rather than being cheap jokes, which is really special.

i didn't do much today, i cooked early, and had a nice time cooking. i've been thinking of writing, but, i dunno. well i wrote something into the new thing i did, a detail/image came to me. i'm sad in a very strange way today. i dunno why. also need to sleep soon. need to work out and stuff. maybe i'll just go and approach it.

i wrote a lot, that's good. a lot i didn't expect to come out came out. better images than i thought i'd be capable of.

now i'm doing my skincare stuff... i listened to this today:

more metalcore-y than i'm typically a fan of but it's fucked up enough to be really good. the screams, also, when they are screams and not the growls, are really good and satisfying, they're really screechy, i wish i could sound like that sometimes. i also like how much the songs here are like, just totally psychotic and seem to have little tethering them together, in like, typical song-logic, at least. i think they texturally make a lot of sense though.

the thing the guitars at the right here do at the start of this is so weird, too, it's fun/exciting when this stuff starts coming up with arab on radar style riffing. it's super inspiring. i like that these guys seemed to be obscenely good at their instruments to play music this incoherent.

i watched something funny today, the a maze indie games award thing, cuz i got the @ everyone ping in the actionbutton discord. i was looking at the programming and the games when tim was talking about it a while ago. it was... interesting, to see. i think the games are all interesting, it was just a very awkward event it seemed like, but also rather sweet. i dunno. i like that it wasn't perfect, it feels good that something for experimental art is messy/awkward, it should be that way. it also feels like mostly for the most professional/polished leaning things but really i have no clue. there's a lot of stuff there i'm not super familiar with, but i saw something there that looks good, or really a couple. the game that won the big award, despelote, seems good, as a kind of first person wandering around thing, which it seems like, or wandering with a story. that one... growth spurt, that seems cute.

one thing i thought about, was how it seems a bit like there's a kinda... i dunno, the subject matter feels, in some ways, a bit sanitary? i don't know, for sure, though. also, it's not like that stuff shouldn't exist, it's just something that feels like it prevails, there's a specific sort of like, cuteness, even, a style that feels noticeable/repeated. that's always been something i've noticed w/ indie things that bubble to the surface though. that's just art generally though. some things are just too unpleasant for lots of people. i can't blame them i suppose.

it just makes me think, broadly i suppose, about what an experimental game even is. or maybe that's not even the best term for it? music people describe as experimental is frequently not really like, an experiment, and a game can be an experiment with tech but that being put out for general consumption is maybe not common. strange or avant garde is okay, i suppose, for re-thinking the whole thing. yume nikki isn't really like, an experiment, just like i dunno, this isn't:

but it is particular and strange. this maybe doesn't even qualify as avant garde, well it definitely doesn't, but it's hardcore, which is i think its own kind of confrontation. that feels like a good way to think of things. goblet grotto, is like that too. or like, crypt worlds. i played something the other day, from an artist i reblogged here,

this was cute, and interesting. it's also like, a confrontation with something strange. i think in a lot of ways games are able to confront you w/ and then attune you to a way of seeing/organizing the world/information. i mean i guess that's obvious. still, it's interesting to think about the difference between games that seem to ask something of the player, as in, games like this, and then games in the aaa sphere which seem to, generally, repeat a lot of assumptions so as to quickly introduce players into their flows. instead of, idk, song layer collector is rickety and strange, i played the downloadable version and my mouse was like, something i had to fiddle with, in a weird way, and it's not like that's good, or pleasant, but it's a tiny place to be for a tiny bit of time, it's something worth taking as it is, i feel like. i also played their other little things, i liked the one with the little worms.

idk, these thoughts are rather messy.

i will probably play the growthspurt one, not tomorrow, because pre my gf's birthday sunday, she is having brunch we are going to, she is like having 3-4 birthdays. also tomorrow she is going to see this ateez movie and i will probably get dropped off back home. but i did keep thinking about being dropped off in town square, while they're watching the movie i'd just walk around or something there. not that i'd like that, or think it'd be good. it'd be awful. the people down there always hate me the most. so it was like an abstract way to hurt myself or something. which is strange to imagine doing, i guess. or it would be strange for others. for me that is #normal.

but i'll need to be ready a little earlier tomorrow, so i should sleep now,

so,

byebye!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[politicalaction]

From Texas Freedom to Read project: “ICYMI an elected judge in Montgomery County, Texas fired the public library director after years of complaining about LGBTQ+ children’s books she refused to restrict/relocate.

Take action to protect Texas public libraries now.”

[daboom-ru]

Action Button появится на нескольких устройствах Apple Apple представила новую "Action Button" в сентябре этого года. Она появилась на iPhone 16 и 16 Plus. Сама технология была запатентована в м... #ActionButton #Apple https://daboom.ru/action-button-pojavitsja-na-neskolkih-ustrojstvah-apple/?feed_id=38674&_unique_id=674acc7df0478

[corvuscorona]

sometimes I think about how my wife watched Thos Slow Translation of FinalFantasy7 & told me I should also watch it because the guy who made it was insane similar-ways to the way that I am insane, like that there was a venn diagram overlap in there somewhere, & it's easy to forget how TRUE that is when tim actionbutton is in Video Production Hell for forever so anytime I hear him say stuff it's unscripted. unscripted tim actionbutton is basically not very much like me at all; HOWEVER. the second this guy starts writing words down in a selective order on purpose it becomes undeniably clear that he fucking LOVES SENTENCES, and that's where allll the parallels live

[dojimakojima]

One of the most frustrating things in this world, is telling someone about a thing you like and care about, only for them to not even pretend to care a little bit.

My mother does this sometimes. I try to think ahead of all my conversations, if I tell someone about a game/youtuber I'm really fixated on, I try to think ahead and make a "list of points" to go over if I end up talking about it. Really, I'm trying to make the conversation as interesting as possible for the other person, its selfish, because if I do a good enough job, then maybe they'll check it out too, and I'll have someone to talk about it with.

Me and my friends have similar tastes in media, so talking to them about something, even if they aren't interested in it directly, they're interested in me, and in the things I'm passionate about and are willing to listen. I try to keep my tangents short and organized, so they aren't stuck talking about it forever. So it feels good. I used to be way worse, to be clear, and I wouldn't be able to stop talking about one thing for weeks, but now I'm able to control it better.

I try bringing up something I like to my mother and often she just... rolls right past me. If I don't get an abrupt subject change out of disinterest from her, I'll probably get a "just get to the point". It's really frustrating because I try coming up with ways I can share the things I like, in the most abstractified, short (<2mins), interesting way possible and she doesn't bother reaching out to try and listen. I even preface them with "Can I tell you about something I like/game I've been playing/show I've been watching", and she often just says "No, I'm tired" in a stern tone. There's never a time when she isn't tired.

On the other hand, multiple times I've gone to get water/food from my kitchen and have run into my mother in the middle of watching one of her reality dating shows (Usually Single's Inferno, or Love Is Blind). Often, she pauses and unprompted, tells me about what's going on. I try to follow along the best I can and ask questions to show I'm interested. Even on harder days where I can't pay attention as well, I ask more basic questions to try and show her I'm interested, as she describes a season's worth of TV. Often she goes on for 30+ minutes. Eventually I have to say "I have people waiting for me/I have work/I can't talk right now" but I try to hear her out for as long as possible because I am trying to be interested. Sometimes, I'll ask her for updates because she lights up when she talks about her favorite shows. But she can't seem to extend the courtesy of even listening to the things I like.

And its sort of frustrating because I feel so passionate about something, and she doesn't seem to even want to be aware of the things I'm thinking about all day. One time I said two and half sentences describing a game I liked "I've been playing this very interesting game recently called The 25th ward. You follow three storylines. All about people trying to solve a mysterious murder that happens at the beginning of the story, detectives, hitmen and a journali-". Halfway through the word "Journalist", she asked me if I had any work I needed to do in an annoyed tone.

Edit: Because of moments like this, I only end up actually talking about the things I like and am obsessed with, very rarely with my mother. My friends know I've spent the majority of the year consummed by ActionButton/Tim Rogers' videos and essays, and I talk about him all of the time with my friends. I converted one friend into a semi-fan, who watched the Boku video with me, and the other friend doesn't like his style, but is patient with me. I've only brought him up like three times to my mother, one of which was because I ordered a shirt from him that was coming in the mail. Because the one time I watched a video in the same room as her, she called him annoying, and when I told her about his hyperthymesia, she said, "I think he's a liar, he's definitely lying about that." In that "100% positive, you'd have to be really stupid to believe that" tone, only my mother could do. It just made me feel so small. Even if that were the case, she couldn't even pretend to care, or just listen?

[megatreble]

The long video industrial complex has been a disaster for the YouTube video essay economy. Now some mf can be wrong for an even greater period of time. I only want to see 6 hour videos from Tim “ActionButton” Rogers goddamnit.

ah yeah man i love underrated, obscure indie titles. like Bioshock and Outer Worlds. better talk for an hour straight about them

[evilbeepthemeep]

I can recommend ActionButton, Amelie Doree and Hazel.

All three do content on niche Japanese content though Amelie does focus on eroges so be warned

What kinda YouTube do you like?

I especially like informative and educational stuff and like. Video essays and such but ill give anything a go I am chronically content deprived

[primria]

ARMY GREEN Military Nylon Bands on 💪 APPLE WATCH ULTRA 🍎 10%off Promo Code: 2022endsales 👉 https://primria.com . . . #Apple #AppleWatch #AppleWatchUltra #アップルウォッチ #アップルウォッチウルトラ #applewatchseries8 #Titanium #NaturalTitanium #AppleWatchTitanium #applewatchband #Cellular #ActionButton #applewatchfan #49mm #applewatchstrap #wornandwound #ablogtowatch #hodinkee #NylonWeave #applewatch8 #Watchband #California #Watchface #primria #ShotOniPhone https://www.instagram.com/p/Ck-4rUELB6D/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[veenapanijoshi-blog]

“Few tips to keep you ahead of the social media marketing curve.”

[massmechhysteria]

Sometimes I want to sit down and learn how to properly use editing software (Photoshop, GIMP, Premiere etc) but I feel like I would lose the charm of having ideas and then they look awful like this

[pauputoot]

These are some Creator-Based suggestions but maybe there’s something in here you haven’t seen yet

Tim Rogers Action Button has several video game ones and they’re very long: https://youtube.com/@ActionButton

Poseidon Entertainment does Theme Park Stuff and is on a “Disney is actively hostile to the consumer” bent and its extremely entertaining https://youtube.com/@PoseidonEntertainment

Caelann Conrad does Queer Politics and their terf series is very good but tw obvi (they also trigger tag when necessary) https://youtube.com/@caelanconrad

BobbyBroccoli does scandals and controversies in science and shit truly gets wild. As you are learning things about like. Chemistry or something. Big fan. https://youtube.com/@BobbyBroccoli

And his^ style is based off Jon Bois, who covers sports stuff through Secret Base at Vox. And sports isn’t usually my thing but I love his videos. And his video about the 1904 Olympic Marathon is a good starting point https://youtu.be/M4AhABManTw

And there’s Justice Korsgaard who has less than 1,000 subscribers but does a variety of video essay type things, lots of them “check out this weird ass movie you’ve never heard of and I think he deserves way more subs than he currently has!!!! https://youtube.com/@JusticeKorsgaard

i need something to listen to while i fight terranort does anyone have good video essays i haven't heard yet

[eccentric-nucleus]

so there's this old actionbutton review of prototype (that has apparently been removed from the actual website, which i guess is fine b/c on reflection the review overall isn't super good) that has a part that i think about a lot.

Prototype is clearly a game that was originally meant to be a challenging action game that took the concept of super-powered main characters out of the ego-trip where you simply explode in ever greater fireballs the entire universe, like a Final Fantasy character in a platformer, and into the realm of the thoroughbred racer. A realm where the power is a tool that must be used carefully, because there’s so much of it, that there’s too much of it. Restraint is what we play video games for, in a sense. We restrain ourselves from making the wrong choices. We take pleasure in our sense of timing. We enjoy learning and growing and doing and, above all, not doing (the same thing over and over, due to failure).

b/c like... yeah that's the thing with power? power invites complications; that's kind of what power is: the ability to affect change at greater magnitudes, which invariably means a reduction in your fidelity of control. unintended side-effects and all that. but the entire concept of the 'power fantasy' is about not having the drawbacks of power, & that's what video games are all about, so it makes sense that that doesn't really come up that much in games. leveling up is just Good, it makes you better at things, because if it made you worse gamers would find that to be bad design, etc

this also comes up constantly in progression fantasies. unsurprisingly!! b/c their thematic content is entirely the power fantasy, so of course getting more powerful is an unalloyed good.

there's another prose chunk in a similar vein i think about a lot that's from a wizard of earthsea, near the beginning: duny (as a kid, before he's named ged) has his island raided by barbarians and they're gonna burn down the town and kill everybody.

He had worked all night at the forge-bellows, pushing and pulling the two long sleeves of goathide that fed the fire with a blast of air. Now his arms so ached and trembled from that work that he could not hold out the spear he had chosen. He did not see how he could fight or be of any good to himself or the villagers. It rankled at his heart that he should die, spitted on a Kargish lance, while still a boy: that he should go into the dark land without ever having known his own name, his true name as a man. He looked down at his thin arms, wet with cold fog-dew, and raged at his weakness, for he knew his strength. There was power in him, if he knew how to use it, and he sought among all the spells he knew for some device that might give him and his companions an advantage, or at least a chance. But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.

(incidentally i think reading progression fantasies has made me a worse reader. they're frequently so wordy and yet nothing happens, and the writing never really says anything or has specific sentences that capture the mind, and so i've gotten into this really bad habit of skim-reading through them snatching out nouns and verbs. so now when i go back to reading prose that's actually, you know, good, i still end up skimming it and missing out on relevant details, since relevant details actually matter in real stories, instead of just being wordcount padding.)

anyway the rest of a wizard of earthsea is basically all about the relationship between knowledge and power and what responsibility comes with that.

i guess this is yet another post all about how i really don't like the thematic simplicity of all the progression fantasy but boy have i been thinking about that a lot as i've been writing other stuff. fun fact, 'goblin cave', my royalroad story, and 'blinded by the summer sun', the tmnt porn i've been writing, have basically the same themes b/c they're both actually about the blunt nature of power + the problem of needing power to exist in the world vs. the grotesque nature of people who seek only power. b/c as you can see by all the above that is kind of a thing i've been thinking about a lot recently. it's just one of them has turtle porn.

i mean i'm fairly sure i've mentioned it here also but they're very heavily influenced by dead zones of the imagination, which i would recommend everybody read. it's only like 20 pages.

To be more precise: violence may well be the only form of human action by which it is possible to have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom you understand nothing. Pretty much any other way one might try to influence another’s actions, one at least has to have some idea who they think they are, who they think you are, what they might want out of the situation, and what their aversions and proclivities are. Hit them over the head hard enough and all of this becomes irrelevant.

It is true that the effects one can have by disabling or killing someone are very limited, but they are real enough—and critically, it is possible to know in advance exactly what they will be. Any alternative form of action cannot, without some sort of appeal to shared meanings or understandings, have any predictable effects at all.

[...]

As long as one remains within the domain of theory, then, I would argue that simplification can be a form of intelligence. The problems arise when the violence is no longer metaphorical. Here let me turn from imaginary cops to real ones. A former LAPD officer turned sociologist (Cooper 1991), observed that the overwhelming majority of those beaten by police turn out not to be guilty of any crime. “Cops don’t beat up burglars,” he observed. The reason, he explained, is simple: the one thing most guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to “define the situation.” If what I’ve been saying is true, then this is just what we’d expect. The police truncheon is precisely the point where the state’s bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema, and its monopoly of coercive force, come together. It only makes sense then that bureaucratic violence should consist first and foremost of attacks on those who insist on alternative schemas or interpretations. At the same time, if one accepts Piaget’s (1936) famous definition of mature intelligence as the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives (or possible perspectives) one can see, here, precisely how bureaucratic power, at the moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity.

and so on. that's power, baby! the power to define a situation and stop anybody else from objecting to your framing. by killing them!

[rileryk]

EGX NO NATSUYASUMI [september 2022]

my second year of game art kicked off with a project all about self-improvement, and so i got to work on practicing more environment art - mainly on procreate. (i included a couple of examples of this environment practice at the bottom)

here’s the deal though. in late september, two big inspirational events happened: 

-i went to EGX on a college-organized trip and met kareem ettouney from media molecule for a portfolio review/career advice talk. this was a huge deal for me, as i’ve been a fan of the games he’s worked on for most of my life, so the surrealism of meeting him and his wise advice gave me this unprecedented motivational power that i really still can’t get over. love that guy

-the seventh video in the actionbutton review series by tim rogers, action button reviews boku no natsuyasumi, released a few days after that (EGX was thursday, boku was the following sunday). this video was HUGE for me, as a fan of the channel already it caught my attention and had me hooked, but the subject matter of millenium kitchen’s 2000 playstation game boku no natsuyasumi was itself inspirational. seeing the different background art and intimate portrayal of a mid-70s japanese summer in crunchy PSX pixels and polygons made me wanna try to draw one of its gorgeous environment scenes myself.

and so the following thursday i produced this, all in one straight college day between 10am to 4pm, out of a pure force of passion provided to me by two titans of artistic influence. it means a lot to me, even if the outcome could be a lot better :,)