I wanted to write some of my experiences of pastagang writing a paper. It would be really nice if other pastagang folks also shared their experiences!

Incredulity

I am used to musical coherence emerging from a mishmash of individual ideas and parts. I am not used to a paper emerging in this way!!!

When I first became aware of pastagang (or maybe shortly afterwards) I think the beginnings of the paper already existed, with some very nice but mostly unordered personal experiences of individual pastagangers. These accounts were very sweet and wholesome, and made me feel really excited about pastagang. Here were a lot of anonymous people on the internet who had really similar thoughts and feelings to me! And they were sharing them openly and honestly and vulnerably and non-competitively on the internet!

However, I did not feel that these unordered personal accounts were very close to being a “paper”. I also thought the idea of a group of strangers writing a paper without coordination or discussion to be a very intriguing goal but also thought that this would be a very difficult or even impossible thing to achieve.

Anonymity

Something about writing in the pastagang blog which I think is a bit of a shame is the whole git attributions things. While this isn’t always concrete (see by-pastagang) - it is often possible to go back and see who contibuted which words. I think one of the things that is really good about nudel and pastagang is the protection in anonymity that it affords members of pastagang (see the paper itself and also various pastagang blog posts about this), but the blog doesn’t quite have that freedom.

When the writing of the paper moved to Hedgedoc it felt like that anonymity had been returned!! I really enjoyed that - being back in cursorland! At so many points it felt like we were writing about the experience we were having as we were writing, so fun!

For me it meant that when discussions and disagreements were happening in the doc it never felt personal - what a great way to trade ideas! Energy: YES! The paper really did feel like a jam, it felt okay to remove things, change things, update things, comment on things, share things. I saw several paragraphs being brought in and out of the comments, just like we do in nudel. I saw cursors asking for help, and that help being given.

Someone did try to guess who I was at some point - but who could I have been other than pastagang??? Don’t look at the git commits for this blog post!!! I don’t want you to know!!!!! I love anonymity!!!!!!!! (ok actually I am gonna make an anonymous git account for contributing to pastagang stuff… I’m doing it right now! hope this works….)

Name guessing

Yes, name guessing has become a pretty common practice within nudel. I think it started when people started using pseudonyms— I mean, I know people have always used pseudonyms in nudel, for example, “eddyflux”, which is Eddy Flux’s pseudonym. But there were some increasing concerns about impersonation. If someone went into nudel and set their name to “eddyflux” and started typing hateful comments, there’s a chance you might get fooled into thinking that those hateful comments were from eddyflux himself, when actually they were from an imposter trying to sabotage Eddy Flux. (who would do such a thing!?)

So … Some notable figures, like eddyflux, began using pseudonyms to avoid such a risk. If you saw someone named eddyflux, you should know “oh eddyflux never calls himself eddyflux in nudel, that can’t be him” and in fact “that could be ANYONE”, thus protecting us all from impersonation. Great!

Oh but the important thing is that you don’t stick to just one name. You have to keep rotating your name, maybe to something new each time you join. The key point is that you can’t have a persistent identity. Otherwise there’s a risk of impersonation!!!! because nudel has no auth or login and probably never will.

Yes, picking a new name for each session is now something that many jammers now do. Some might do it to avoid impersonation, others might do it for fun, but either way it happens.

And I know what you’re thinking! “Why don’t you just make everyone anonymous?” Right? that would be so much easier. Well, Ha! We did make everyone anonymous. Everyone got known as “pastagang” for about a day, but the change didn’t survive and people reverted it, and it got turned into a weather instead, in the form of “everyone is mantra”. Sometimes you don’t get to choose what sticks around in the jam.

Something unexpected emerged from the name changing practice, and that was: Name guessing.

You see, even when someone’s using a pseudonym, you might still be able to see who they really are: from the things they make, from the way they move their cursor, from the tools they use, from the style they bring, from their HANDWRITING that they can’t help but carry. So it has become a bit of a game to guess who people are even when they’re anonymous.

If and when you guess a name right, it’s a fun moment / a reaffirmation that two people know each other well enough to recognise one other. I see it as a moment where you get to celebrate that. Isn’t it weird? to be able to feel someone’s presence from such limited clues / from something as simple as a text editor? I guess we know each other quite well then!

Sometimes it takes a long time to guess. Sometimes it’s very fast. You usually state your guess with a simple “hello lu” or “hello eddy” and maybe a winking face to suggest the feeling of “Ha! I got you!”

When someone guesses you, it’s a chance to guess back… have you gathered enough info to return the shot? Will you go out on a limb and take the chance? or do you concede?

Or maybe you throw your hands up and say “What made it so obvious????” and maybe it’s something like “striate gave it away” or “obvious froos special” or “always with the steps”. (Pastagang talked about the idea of “signature moves” a bit in the podcast.)

Advanced name guessing meta

If you’re a keen name guessing player like me, you’ve learned to disguise your movements by imitating someone else. For me it can mean whipping out a %16 on a drum beat to try to convince someone I’m boggo. That has never worked so far because I’m not hard enough on drums yet. But in the past I did manage to convince someone I was todepond once by doing juxBy("<1 -1>", x=>x.speed(1.01))

Anyway, guessing people in the pastagang paper was super hard because it was a completely different context. You couldn’t tell who people were from their paper-writing habits because we’ve never written a paper before.

Emergence

I first created an empty file entitled “Currently Untitled Pastagang Paper” because I knew there was a lot of energy going into pastagang at that moment in time and I’ve learned to off-shoot energy during those peaks. When the summit is full I think it’s good to make space for overflow!

The eventual paper that got written was really not the kind of thing I first had in mind, but that’s the wonder of EMERGENCE and CHAOS. It’s hard to predict what will happen from your early small steps.

The same thing happened when we adopted pseudonyms. I don’t think anyone predicted that it would cause the name guessing game to emerge, but it did.

Embracing emergence means embracing the unexpected! It means opening ourselves up to new things by letting go of control.

Throughout the past eight-ish months of pastagang, emergence has created some very strange phenomena that I don’t think anyone could have planned or created intentionally, because a lot of it doesn’t seem to make sense.

It feels like a paradox? or a contradiction: In pastagang, we’re all anonymous and hidden from each other, yet we also somehow feel closely connected.

It’s hard to control or predict or steer what will happen, but still it happens. This blog post started on the topic of the paper. Now it has grown into something else.