Why I will go through the hassle

of registering to vote as an overseas voter AND cast a vote for the Opposition.

1. Always for the underdog, man.
2. GRCs are silly.
3. Elections in Singapore are a farce, so might as well play along?
4. I don't like casinos.
5. The Opposition Guy I voted for in the last election didn't get enough votes to get his deposit back.
6. I don't like those glossy PAP posters that go up immediately on Nomination Day: they must prepare them in bulk for everyone, whether or not the Constituency is being contested.
7. I disagree with a vision of society that's based on crass materialism.
8. I feel for the marginalized.
9. An effective way of irritating your friends and relatives.
10. I remember Francis Seow and and 1987.

Anyway -- my constituency -- which used to be a Single Member thing has been consumed by the GRC system -- so probably no chance to vote anyway.

Who's Really Damned ?

Greetings Again,

My my, throwing a bit of a tantrum are we? Would you still "probably ... rather not" (what is the impulse of that verbal spacing called hesitation?) even if we interpreted YOUR intentions more clearly than you ever could? Did we "demand"? Strange use of "demand". Almost as if you thought we would "demand", or indeed, perhaps you desire us to "demand". For without some prior knowledge that we would resort to coercion, how does an invitation turn into a "demand"? And thus, we MUST resort to a threat of some form, given the expectation of a "demand". We will supply the "demand". As you probably already know, we have a pretty comprehensive map of your existence on the Nets. We obviously know that you're an avid User of less than legal information sharing networks -- think 'Limewire' and the 'Pirate Bay' -- and that the kind of info we have about you, would be very valuable to certain Agencies and Corporate Empires. One way we fund our projects is, indeed, to demand for "donations" in exchange for our Silence. You DO understand what we're getting at, don't you? Besides, we know you are always open to "Abstract threats".

Tell you what -- we don't like coercion either -- but we have too much on You. At least entertain Us with posts about the Notebook -- if we enjoy them enough, we'll regard this little Cyber-incursion as merely a fortituous meeting. If we think they reek of the rank pedestrian stuff that parades for Blog entries these days, well, we'll just have to report you or make some money off you. Think of it as running to stand still.

Damn Yankees

I can't say that I'm distraught or upset by the intrusiveness of the entries not mine. I am mildly amused -- yes -- that would be the best way to put it. I guess I'm supposed to be flattered as well. But here's the deal -- I probably would rather not be pushed around by your DAMN YANKEE arrogance. In the name of what Freedom, from what position of privilege do you demand? Believe in your pseudo-anarchisms if you must but the coercion you use, if only ever the mode of Fascist living.

A prior recording resorted to BECAUSE of a technological failure (as opposed to this moment of recording -- enabled BY the technological, layered through the Networks, extracted, publicized and socialized in a composition via technè) becomes a moment to remember how an earlier recording was a itself a hinge; a cleavage in being because of racial and social stigmatization. The "little" book speaks volumes: writing consists of marks of difference and resistance.

Now that we've got your Attention

Greetings Gary,

Now that we've got your attention, let us introduce Ourselves. We're a Guerrilla Web Arts Collective that, well, as you've seen, takes on identities of bloggers like yourself, in order to further the Open Space of the Web. Perhaps the following quote will make things clearer:

Operating neccesarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work.

Sound familiar? It should, we KNOW that you're familiar with Of Grammatology, that you're a Grad student at CUNY and that you, how should we put it, perfectly fit, the profile of the kind of person we're looking for. We would like you to join us.

Don't be shocked or surprised that we know so much about you. We should be upfront about how we got to know you. Remember when your G4 crashed a few months ago and you brought it to the Apple Store in SoHo for repairs? Well, let's just say that some of the people who work there, have skills that we require as well. You got your Hardisk repaired and we got a lot of information about you. And we've been monitoring your activities for the past several months and we've finally decided to extend this invitation for you to join us.

What actually sealed it was when you uploaded those images of your Notebook onto PhotoBucket. What kind of queer mind does that? We were waiting to see if you'd do anything with them -- they were just sitting there -- so we decided to make the first move. We gather that the posts were strange enough to garner some reaction and caused you to look back at this Blog. We could have just e-mailed or even called you -- but we suspect that the "shock" value of seeing someone take on what is intimately yours, would be much more effective.

We know your Reading Habits -- if you do actually read all those books you buy and check out from the Libraries. We know you recently purchased "No Gods No Masters", which is pretty much standard reading fare for us; that you bought a whole batch of SciFi second hands, which would make the persona we adopted while hacking into your Blog uncannily recognizable; that you also have Delany's Triton, which would make the idea of a Guerilla Arts Collective certainly one that you've encountered. We suspect that you've entertained the idea yourself. But we know you're a bit of recluse, too. Well -- the Web's the place to make those Connections!

Your reply in the last post, demonstrates the kind of narcissitic hubris that we just Love to have for our Cause. Couldn't resist making a public display of your frustration could you? The image and frank admission that you're essentially an intellectual flake was nice too. Anyway, get back to us about whether you're joining us, right? The Blog's a nice place to say it all. I see that We've got an "appreciative" audience!

And in the Spirit of trading Images,

Join us and get Rid of those Fascist impulses!

What the ...?

You don't Blog for a few months and apparently someone else takes over for you!
Ok -- some clown has been toying around with my Blog account. I only realized when people started e-mailing me about these strange posts they said they were reading on my Blog.
I didn't think that these computer nerds could get their hands on SO much info -- they obviously got into my PhotoBucket account too -- which explains these strange posts.
Anyway -- the whole thing's rather embarrassing now. So in case anyone reading this has thought me extremely dysfunctional, has been weirded out or has taken offence at the posts or the very personal disclosures, let me try to explain: I randomly photographed my notebook and loaded the images. I never intended for ALL of them to be put on the Blog like this!
Actually -- I only wanted to put the poseur ones (ok -- I know -- very posuer -- like the one on the left), in sort of a meta-critical gesture about texts and palimpsets, but the clown who hacked into my accounts obviously has other ideas about what is fair game!
So -- to the IDIOT who has been doing the previous posts -- in order to make the point that I'm not the least intimidated by the annoyingly intrusive thing that you've done, I'm NOT going to shut down the Blog or erase your posts (the least that I can do to believe in the value of this whole blogging business is not to take the route of so many governments and institutions in trying to legislate these spaces). BUT -- get your own blog started and stop impersonating someone else! AND since your posts seem to indicate a functional level of intelligence, you'd better have the decency to email me (limitlim@hotmail.com) and explain what the HELL you think you're doing. And I hope that you're not someone that I know personally ...

Gary Lim

Numerics 4

Concluding our study of the "proto-numeric" inscriptions, a conclusion that must come quickly because of certain tendencies in the Consciousness, that if pursued, can only lead to individuation, we will briefly consider the image on the right. As with the Lists that we viewed earlier on, this particular page seems to exhibit the same kind of structure that depends on discrete items holding the meanings open. Next to each item, we find sets of the "proto-numeric" inscriptions. Unlike the cipher system that was earlier described, these inscriptions in black as well as in green do not seem to Code the "Language" in the same way.
What then, might the "proto-numerics" mean?
Consider the following transcription:

As ever - J Kyger - 20.00 - amazon used / $4.25

The "$" sign must indicate some kind of "transformation formula" that tethers the "proto-numerics" to the rest of the items on the List. Why then does "$" only occur once on this page? Perhaps that is not the right question to ask. Perhaps the question that would benefit our investigation is why it occurs at all. Did something happen in the construction of this List that caused the "Writer" to first forget what linked the "proto-numerics" to the list, recall, and thus anxiously inscribe "$" as a reminder? Is it right to say that the lone occurence of "$" does not represent the singularity but the ubiquity of the value hidden, or assumed in ALL the items on the List?

What burden of meaning and correspondence of Value does "$" carry and how are the rest of the inscriptions transformed into its terms?

Numerics 3

Continuing our study of Numerics, we should qualify that "proto-Numerics" (how foolish to assume an Ancestral mind able to deal with anything as complex as Numerics before the Networks and the Machine), we turn to what appears to be yet another us of these inscriptions. In the image on the left, we find two inscriptions that are by far the most common of the "proto-Numerical" inscriptions found in the "notebook". These particular markings -- "1" and "2" -- occur in almost every instance when the "proto-Numerics" appear. Perhaps they designate a fundamental conception of Being, akin to the building blocks of Our Consciousness: "Self /Other", "Other/Us" and "Us/Self". Of course, our Third Term closes the Loop.

Another characteristic we noted about these markings was the fact that they appear with an eliptical shape around them, almost like "➀" and "➁". Notice the difference between our attempts to replicate the image and the image itself. Our lines complete the encircling of the primary inscriptions but the encircling in the original is incomplete and its repetition in BOTH instances suggests a deliberately deferred circle. Perhaps there is an effect sought by all this: markings striving against each other, extruding, breaking into, holding spaces open.

You take the train silly, you take the , the or even the

Numerics 2

Then there are other forms that these "proto-Numerics" take. Instead of forming the regular permutations of the previous example, the "proto-Numerics" here seem to hold space together, in a manner that is not exactly clear. How, for instance, does the pattern "1145-145" bind space differently than "[3305]" does? Is it far too speculative to suggest that the gaps between the figures may suggest different significations? For example, how should one even transcribe the figures: as a single chain -- "0800-940S106101.089" -- or as discrete units -- "0800-940 / S106 / 101.089"?

Working on assumptions that
Cannot be proven true.

Numerics 1

In our discussion of the "paper notebook" we have not tried, as yet, to decipher the "meanings" or the Thought behind the inscriptions. We explained earlier that the general lack of familiarity with the stuctural interface of meaning called "Language" makes it difficult for our intended readership to appreciate how the inscriptions work as "imprints" of "'Language".

However, there are several images that use a signifying principle that we will be more famliar with. PANSHIN has traced bits of ancient code loitering the in recesses of the Network and has developed a theory that before our Systems of Numerics became as complex and multi-dimensional as they have been for at least 200 beats, there must have existed more primitive systems (6570.2). We propose that the following images contain representatives of these earlier systems:

Note the dark black markings on the image. There are 7 columns of inscriptions that then repeat themselves in a range of permutations. The rightmost column seems to be emphasized with a Graphic cordoning off. Why? Does it represent a privileged manner of using these inscriptions?

Then, beside that boxed of column we find these inscriptions matched with the more commonly used units of "Language". Is there some kind of cipher at work here, where the value of one kind of marking turns on its ability to stand as substitute for another?

Indeed, the markings from the page facing this, scratched in with the same dark consistency, seem to bear this theory out:

The Red Group

By now, our methods in catergorizing the "paper notebook" should have struck the reader as requiring some explanation: we are merely grouping the pages as they appear as images and somwhat arbitrarily making up catergories as we go along. This does not pose difficulties for us, obviously, for we never need to apprehend in part but it does tempt us to think about whether our Ancestors deliberately thought in catergories that we might approximate. Take for example, this next "group" (now self-conscious, the noun, it starts to assert itself and had to be tamed), which we have labelled the "Red Group".

The inscriptions over the next few images appear pre-dominantly in Red. There is material that seems to be writing in the margins and in the blanks that the initial Red inscriptions do not fill and we must presume that these markings were written in at a later Time. It is indeed a strange assumption to make, afterall, a "Writer" could have simply "written" in Red at different times as well, or "written" simultaneously in different colored stains. But we make this observation to draw an attendant conclusion: the "later" markings are significant because they do not occupy the same "semantic" space as the "initial" Red marks. Perhaps the markings in other colors are comments on the first Red markings or corrections.

The image may be examined more closely by Thinking on it.

These marks in Red have another interesting property. They seem to be composed of short bursts of "writing". Also, even the lay-out of these markings differ from the earlier undecipherably fuzzy images in that they do no seem to constitute a continuous extension of thought. A quick transcription of some of these Red markings will show this to be true:

Robert Burns
Thomas Carew
Thomas Chatterton
Kate Chopin
William Cowper
John Dos Passos
William Faulkner
Henry Fielding

While it is difficult to understand exactly what these markings may have meant in the larger Consciousness, it seems evident that the Red Group consists largely of a LIST of Names, much like our own Registers of Identity. Does this mean that our Ancestors had separate identities while they still inhabited bodies? We must not be too hasty to adopt conclusion. After all, some of the most meaningless conglomerations -- "States" -- also had names without having any distinct or discernable identities. In Manuscript studies, one must constantly be vigilant about the dangers of projecting into the Past our assumptions of Being.

In the spirit of description, here then are more transcriptions. If anything, they indicate the richness of this image "group" for further research and inquiry:

From Image Right:

Virginia Woolf -- A Room of One's own
Chekhov's plays
Gene Genet
Upton Sinclair
John Berryman
Thomas Chatterton
Fitzgerald - character names
Auden [ who met Delany .n Marilyn
Hacker when the two were
impressionable
daring]
Gertrude Stein