hal tweets ·1:04 PM
Indie comics in 80s LA, a homage featuring Groening, Panter, Hernandez bros…. http://bit.ly/b1FcGM
Privacy
2009,
20:59 GMT
They Want to Watch Me Where I Pee Pee: Surveillance in Hal’s House
Posted by: Hal
On Friday the producers of the upcoming documentary based on my upcoming book dropped by along with a surveillance camera expert. They wandered around my house discussing the best places to put surveillance cameras. The plan is for there to be two weeks this summer when the camera streams will be live on the web for all to see. Meanwhile, I’ll be blogging and ruminating about what it’s like to live life in a fish bowl. And you’ll be posting comments about my bed head and absent minded propensity for nose picking when I think nobody else is around.
First Jennicam, then DotComGuy, and then…me? As the Peep Diaries book makes clear, despite my attempts to enter into the Peep world and reveal myself, I never quite managed to do it. Obviously, the documentary is going to take things a step further by, for instance, installing cameras in my house and broadcasting live to the web. Will I like this? I suspect it will be pretty annoying and I won’t like it all. But I think I’ll also like it quite a bit. Oh dear.
Anyway, there were a few tense moments, like when we got down to the nitty gritty and producer Jeannette started talking about cameras in the bedroom and bathroom. (You can read her more polite post about all this here.) At which point I had to remind her that W. had already announced that because of her work (she works in mental health) she cannot be actually seen on camera, and we’d have to obscure her face. This, I think, was a factor that Jeannette was hoping to just ignore until it was dropped. W. isn’t going to drop it, of course, so we needed a work-around. How can Hal be on camera 24/7 for two weeks, but not his wife (and his kid, for that matter?).
The answer: Hal moves into the basement. Yes, for two weeks this summer I’ll live in the basement. I’ll move my office down there (I work from home) I’ll sleep down there and there’s even going to be a bathroom cam to capture my doings in the basement bathroom (which already lacks a door anyway, so I’m used to that). And there’s got to be infrared, announced Jeanette. I want to see him while he sleeps!
In the end, Jeannette was happy to just monitor the basement and first floor and leave the upstairs to W. and the kid, especially when she found out how much each camera was going to cost. So everyone’s happy. Except, uh, me.
Anyway, it’s begun.
2009,
11:24 GMT
Naked Wizard Tasered: The Case Against Peep TV
Posted by: Hal
You can debate the actions of the police in this video all you want. But what I want you to think about are two things:
1) 250,000 have watched this video on Vimeo in 3 days. Yesterday Huffington Post put it up. Now its on Digg, on LiveNews Australia, and who knows how many blogs (like this one). By the end of the day today, I’m sure more than 1 million people will have watched this video.
2) Keep an eye on the crowd in this video. They are the real story here. They stand around in a semi-circle a respectful distance from the action pointing their camera phones. As the situation escalates, the number of cameras recording the action increases. Is this citizen journalism, an activist public intent on monitoring the scene? Or is this prurient Peep recording – chronicling another person’s confusion and misery because they know other people will find it entertaining?
Two questions:
*If the police had pulled out their night-sticks and started savagely beating this man, would anyone in this crowd of mesmerized photographers have intervened?
*Why will millions of people watch this six minute clip? (Here’s a clue: a very enthusiastic Huffington Post introduced the video this way: Herewith, the best Tasering video since ‘Don’t Tase me bro!’)
Naked Wizard Tased By Reality from Tracy Anderson on Vimeo.
2009,
18:57 GMT
E’s Ear Infection: The Case for Peep
Posted by: Hal
Okay since I’ve been raging pretty hard lately against Peep Culture, I thought I’d share something Peep positive.
This morning, I sent the following twitter, which also automatically flowed to my Facebook as a Status Update:
the kid throwing up yesterday, seems fine now. diagnosis by medvisit doc at 10pm: ear infection>
Next thing you know, I had no fewer than 9 comments from 7 different people offering sympathy and advice:
1. Glad she’s okay. How is MedVisit anyway? Do you have to pay? Is it through TeleHealth or OHIP?
2. (from me) medvisit is great as long as it’s a minor issue and you can wait at home 3-5 hours. it’s free! covered by ohip!
3. ear infections— [my kid] gets them a lot and they used to lead to some serious horror movie style vomiting where I really did expect her head t spin around. Poor little thing—hope she gets better quickly. They are pretty tough.
[Hal says: hey E. puked too!]
4. my doberman pinscher gets ear infections quite frequently. i just blow on his ear lightly until he starts wagging his tail.
[note: Hal says: what a hilarious and strange comment!]
5. MedVisit is totally free. You call them and the doc comes to your house. I have always found it to be a good service. My son had constant ear infections until he was 3 and a half. After that, he was never sick again!
[Hal says: yeah it rules to have doc come to your house!]6. Poor kiddo. I hear the hug+antibiotic combo does wonders 
7. When mine was little she got them a lot too. My doctor told me unofficially (for some strange reason)... to try giving her dimetab at night whenever she was really stuffy and to steam her up in the bathroom with a towel under the door to keep everything thinly running. She hasn’t had one since.
[Hal: Makes sense, doc says they usually get them at the end of a cold from being all congested…]
8. Those are the worst. Horrible for the kid and horrifying for the parents. Ibuprofen dents the pain a little. Forget Tylenol.
9. Don’t laugh but I strongly recommend a chiropractor. Yes, for an ear infection! Before replying with ‘it’s Hare Krishna medicine’... look into it. I’m sorta against antibiotics.
[Hal says: I would like to see the look on W’s face when I tell her I’m taking the kid to a chiropractor for her ear infection…]
10. I agree… dimetab is better than antibiotics but if the ear canal could be adjusted a tad to open up and prevent infection even better!
11. (from me) wow! ear infection advice aplenty! thanks for the sympathy and ideas…kid is feeling much better, sleeping it off right now.
So I’m posing this little exchange to help remind me that it’s not all bad. That, in fact, Peep features many sweet exchanges like this one.
2009,
14:46 GMT
Peep is Recession Proof and Other Confessions from the Ranks of the Unemployed
Posted by: Hal
Peep is not only recession proof, like the movies and beer, it actually benefits from the recession. Here are the reasons why.
1) More time on social networks. We believe, rightly and wrongly and the jury is still out on this, that our social network can help us get a job. So, increasingly, the first thing we do when we get laid off is let everyone on FB, LinkedIn, etc. know ASAP, not to mention sending an array of Tweets and Text Messages to make sure everyone knows we are out there hunting for new employment. A recent article in the Orlando Sentinel starts: “Just minutes after she was laid off from her job earlier this month, Brittany Ward pulled out her cell phone and typed a short message. ‘Needs a job.’ Ward, a 23-year-old account manager at an Altamonte Springs marketing firm, hadn’t even told her family.” There’s a reason we’re sending tweets like there’s no tomorrow – because for a lot of us, there’s no tomorrow.
Here’s the aforementioned Brittany searching for a job via laptop.
2) Recession blogs! We have the time because we’re unemployed, we think getting our name out there is a good idea that might lead to a job offer (again, jury is out on that one) so we blog. Here are just some of the recession blogs I found. Pink Slips are the New Black, Laid off in NYC, Recently Laid Off, and Fired For Now etc. There’s even a recession cooking blog that has gone viral featuring the recipes of a 90 year old who survived the great depression. (Which, as far as I can tell, looks nothing like our current situation: Recession 09: I’m going to have to cut down on my Starbucks Skinny Mocha Latte until I get a new job. Great Depression: Can anyone spare a cup of coffee and a slice of stale bread? I haven’t eaten in a week.)
Much of this blog material is classic Peep. Here’s a little snippet from a post on Fired For Now about Mom telling her kids she’s been let go: “So when I lost my job, I felt a deep sense of shame in telling them the news. I felt like I had failed them. I wasn’t the parent they could be proud of. No child boasts about a parent who spends their days at home in sweat pants, on the phone and net in between reruns of Law and Order.”
3) Corporate Peep Predators. Yep, when the times are tough, the Peep predators are ready and waiting to take advantage of our misery. Ergo, Newsweek’s My Turn column is running a contest on Twitter: send them your “recession story” on Twitter and you’ll maybe win the right to actually publish an entire column in Newsweek about your misery. In the meantime, “All of the tweets will be streamed on Newsweek.com” for the general amusement of those with two much time on their hands, both in the office and lying around on the couch.
Still on the subject of weird and predatory and Peep-inspired, how about this news story about a coffee shop trying to entice people to keep spending their money on mocha lattes (see mini-rant above) by hiring only comely young ladies to serve the coffee in bikinis?
Meanwhile, the Dallas News reports gangbuster business at a stripper job fair in that hard hit city. Wow. The dead-pan article trumpeting the “jobless to topless” job fair makes it sound like stripping is basically the perfect solution for unemployed women with the appropriate skill set.
Finally, Fox has a new Reality TV show in the works (no word on air date yet) called Someone’s Gotta Go. The show pits employees against each other as small companies seek to down-size and the employees themselves have to decide who should get laid off. Thanks for making people losing their jobs fun Fox…and for proving once and for all that Peep is recession proof.
2009,
20:30 GMT
Failed Facebook Party on Radio Netherlands
Posted by: Hal
A radio essay based on my failed Facebook party is now online and circulating radio stations around the globe courtesy of the very cool Radio Netherlands show The State We’re In. Check out my essay here, and the whole show here.
The Bloggist
Hey, I’m Hal Niedzviecki. I’m a writer/thinker who lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with my wife and daughter. Up till now I’ve always considered myself a private person. But at the same time I’m fascinated by people who effortlessly open themselves up to the whole world. So I’ve… more...
Indie comics in 80s LA, a homage featuring Groening, Panter, Hernandez bros…. http://bit.ly/b1FcGM
Issue 47 (spring) is now completely ‘unlocked’ on the NEW Broken Pencil website. Web TV, Liz Worth on punk TO & more http://bit.ly/bXvQuP
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