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!
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.
Something about writing in the pastagang blog which I think is a bit of a shame is the whole github 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….)