"Polygon Sea" is a rocking, Radiohead-ish new track (recently featured on the BBC!) by Alien Alarms, the one-man band fronted by Jim Purbrick. (Disclosure: A buddy from way back in our Linden days.) It's inspired, Jim tells me, by "Radiohead's 'Pyramid Song', the billionaire space race and the Second Life residents who used to ask me about uploading their consciousness into SL."
Yes: During his time as an engineer at Linden Lab, when Jim was known by his avatar Babbage Linden, he'd meet SL users who saw the early Metaverse as a platform for Kurzwelian transcendance:
"When I first started at Linden I was working from home in Sherwood and Cory [Ondrejka] would often ask me if I minded talking about SL at various European conferences that he couldn't fly to. I was more than happy to do it as it got me out of the house and meeting some of the amazing early residents of SL, but on more than one occasion I was left flat-footed by enthusiastic residents thanking Linden for building SL so that they would have a virtual world they could upload their consciousness to.
"It was pretty mind-blowing and more than a little terrifying, given that I'd seen the code."
Love it. And I also love that Jim's selling copies with all proceeds to benefit Code Club, a non-profit that teaches programming kids.
Buy "Polygon Sea" on Bandcamp here or if you're a Second Life user, you can even get it for Linden Dollars — just send L$500 to Doc Boffin (his "civilian" avatar) and mention your e-mail address in the payment, so he can send you the redemption code!
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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