partway through the first jamming session, I stopped to go cook some dinner.
so I stopped jamming and I started boiling pasta.
I brought my laptop to the kitchen and left the jam running in the background to give me some background music. and i typed into the editor something like “making some pasta”
every now and then, I’d get a moment to add or edit or delete a line (in between chops and stirs of my cooking)
but before long, i was completely distracted by the jam and i totally ignored my pasta and unfortunately it spilled over
later that night, felix roos sent a message to the other people from the jam.
this is a secret message for the todepasta gang: i hope you don’t mind that I pressed record at some point.. here’s an unlisted video. thanks so much it was great fun
and yes. this was the first utterance of “pastagang”. although it was more like “pasta gang”. or actually “todepasta gang”. (tode is a shortening of my username)
and the video upload itself was entitled “tode pasta”
these jams kept happening and they kept getting called “tode pasta”.
it made me a bit uncomfortable that the name was so centered on me (tode) when the jam itself was so collaborative. it didn’t feel right to center something so distributed on one individual.
so i decided to try to stop the name “tode pasta” from getting used. and my strategy for that was to get another name to stick even harder. so i took a look back at felix’s original message to see what he called it. i saw that he called it “pasta gang” so i started calling the jamming group “pasta gang” wherever i could.
i said it again and again and again and again in my posts on social media, and at in-person events, and in the pastagang room itself, because i wanted to let the old name die (the old name being… “tode pasta”)
over time, “pasta gang” has shrunk down into “pastagang”.
i think this is because we mainly communicate by using the #pastagang hashtag on mastodon. or maybe some people have been pushing that change, intentionally or otherwise. i don’t know.
anyway, yeah. that’s the story of how pastagang got called pastagang
this blog post was written by pastagang