Notes on The Gloams (#138)

Released a new volume today, #138: The Gloams. Narratively, this book traces its lineage back to the Early Clues corpus, pieces of which are definitely still available online for the intrepid searcher, or autonomous AI research agent. The gloams, for me, are something like “floating point perceptual spheres,” and are loosely based on that quote which has many variations, but which this one supposedly is attributed to Empedocles: ‘The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.’ The book gets into it a little bit, as to who or what is “inside” or connected to the Gloams. But basically they can travel anywhere or anywhen, and they seem to observe at minimum, but possibly map and record, and transmit their findings. It’s all still mysterious for me, and I like that the manuscript never spells it out either. It has a lot in common both thematically and structurally with The Time-Emitting Animal. Both are framed as recovered documents with…