What we built, what we learned, what we’re doing next. This newsletter pulls from our Now page, where we work in public.
Read the Now Page · Get Help · Donate
🧠🌈 April at Stimpunks
From legibility to architecture. From ethics to universe. From pages to positions.
April was a month of transformation. Pages became systems. Guardrails became arguments. A phrase became a microsite, and a microsite became a universe. We named what couldn’t be named before, showed funders who we are, gave our events a voice, and turned an ethics page into one of the most substantive things we’ve published.
April, in a sentence: scattered things got gathered, and growing things got shaped.
⚡ In 30 Seconds
- We built out the funder-facing layer: About, Impact, and For Funders now form a coherent path for anyone who needs to understand Stimpunks before they can support it.
- We gave the nervous system new vocabulary — Stress Incoherence, Emergent Allostasis, Intensive Interaction, Sensory Fluid — terms precise enough to design for.
- We held four Campfire Learn Together events and documented all of them.
- We turned the AI Collaboration ethics page from a list of guardrails into a document with a position — then split it in two when it outgrew one page.
- We launched a Star Stuff universe: a page, a microsite, zines, a field guide, a broadside, a manifesto, a playlist, a call for contributors.
- We gave the Anti-Ableist Learning Space series its architecture: five parts, a landing page, series intros, connective writing throughout.
- We integrated 2026 research on epistemic niche construction, neuroqueer intimate life, RSD, and AI design failure.
Stimpunks now has evidence depth to match its ethical positions. And a universe.
📊 Impact Snapshot
📈 Reach
- 5,000+ Bluesky followers
- 70+ Google Scholar results
- From Traits to Patterns — one of our highest-traffic pages, continuing strong
🧾 Publishing Output (April, Weeks 14–18)
- 5 changelog posts published
- 100+ new or significantly updated pages
- 3 Campfire Learn Together events documented
- 2 AI ethics pages (AI Collaboration + AI and Disability Justice)
- 2 new Zine Walls
- 1 full brand print asset (Esmx Bookmark) with 6 print-ready PDFs
- 1 microsite launched (star-stuff.netlify.app)
- 3 zine publications
- 1 series landing page (Building Anti-Ableist Learning Space)
🔖 Headline Publications
- For Funders — the funder-facing documentation layer
- Finland 2045 and Our Learning Space: A Crosswalk
- AI Collaboration at Stimpunks — transformed
- AI and Disability Justice — new companion page
- Love You Down To Your Star Stuff — expanded universe
- ★ stuff microsite at star-stuff.netlify.app
- Star Stuff Manifesto
- Building Anti-Ableist Learning Space — series landing page
- Esmx Bookmark
- Business Card Design Rationale
- Stress Incoherence and Emergent Allostasis
- Sensory Fluid, Designed Dignity, Engineered Exclusion
- The GRADE EtD Framework and Stimpunks
- Campfire: In Defense of Inefficiency
- Campfire: Solving the Frankenstein Problem
✨ The Month in Themes
April had five movements. Here’s how they fit together.
Week 14 — Legibility: Naming What We Already Knew
Week 14 was about naming. Naming what stress incoherence actually is. Naming why lyrics appear in a mission statement. Naming what we do and why, explicitly, in prose, where before it was implicit. When a thing is named, you can design for it.
The glossary got physiological.
Stress Incoherence names what happens when a nervous system can’t locate the source of its distress — when the body is activated but the signal is diffuse. Emergent Allostasis extends that: how the nervous system adapts and finds new equilibria over time — not by returning to a baseline, but by constructing one. Intensive Interaction rounded out the additions: a communication approach built around following, not leading.
Pattern 19 — Stim Regulation joined the pattern library. Stim regulation is what access looks like when you design for the nervous system rather than the checklist. It’s not about permitting stimming. It’s about building environments where regulation doesn’t require permission in the first place.
The funder-facing layer got built.
About, Impact, and Funder Briefs now form a coherent path for anyone trying to understand Stimpunks well enough to support it. The Impact page added a 2025 financial transparency table (65% program services / 25% administration / 10% fundraising), an “Administration is not overhead” callout, and a new Academic & Peer Recognition section consolidating our Routledge citations and peer acknowledgments.
The Mission page got section headings that reduce scroll friction, a “Music Is How We Hold This” section explaining why a mission statement contains song lyrics, and an expanded “Be Our Real Selves” section grounded in Authenticity is our purest freedom.
We also published Finland 2045 and Our Learning Space: A Crosswalk — mapping our learning space philosophy against Finland’s national vision for schools through 2045. The alignment is close. That’s worth documenting.
A moment of obligation is the instant when you can no longer look away — when your own experience of a broken system makes it impossible to leave the next person to face it alone.
— Mission, Stimpunks Foundation
Week 15 — Visibility: Making the Thinking Explicit
Week 15 made visible what was already true. The work spread across every major register: homepage copy, glossary, brand documentation, research framing, events infrastructure, community sharing, and the Learning Space page — which received its most significant expansion to date.
Events went from implicit to published.
Stimpunks has been running community events for a long time. Week 15 gave them the infrastructure to say so. We published dedicated pages for Campfire Learn Together, Infodumplings, and Solidarity Session, alongside the Events Guide and Our Events Philosophy.
The Learning Space page got its philosophical depth made explicit.
The existing content was good. This week’s work showed why. Four new paragraphs connected Dewey, Freire, sivistys, Finland 2045, and the GRADE EtD framework into a continuous argument. The philosophy and the evidence now converge on the page, not just in our heads.
We added The GRADE EtD Framework and Stimpunks to the Field Guide — applying the GRADE Evidence to Decision framework to autism intervention research and pointing toward mutual aid as an evidence-aligned alternative. The dominant intervention model for neurodivergent and disabled people fails its own evidentiary standards. GRADE EtD gives us a rigorous framework for saying so.
The Business Card Design Rationale landed under /about/brand/, giving the design system behind the cards its full account: rainbow umbrella logo, Atkinson Hyperlegible, Solarized palette, Philly Pride flag accents, light and dark modes. One card per team member.
Two new Zine Walls: Access and Stimpunks.
Week 16 — Architecture: The Epistemic Niche Argues for Itself
Week 16 moved philosophy into infrastructure. The niche doesn’t just describe itself anymore. It argues for its own reconstruction.
Epistemic niche construction landed on four pages.
The biggest theoretical work of the week arrived in four connected pieces, all drawing on Kadodia & Krueger (2026), “Epistemic injustice, niche construction, and neurodiversity.”
The argument: neurodivergent people don’t just experience epistemic injustice — they are systematically excluded from the epistemic niches that produce and validate knowledge. The response isn’t accommodation. It’s reconstruction.
We added an “Epistemic Niche Construction” section to Niche Construction with five subsections. We added “Epistemic Niche Reconstruction, Not Microgenetic Modification” to both The Stimpunks Design Method and Collaborative Niche Construction. And we expanded the Neuroqueer Learning Spaces Manifesto with Kadodia & Krueger framing. Four pages. One argument. Now visible across the whole site.
We held two Campfires.
In Defense of Inefficiency — wandering as a method, inefficiency as a value. Then Solving the Frankenstein Problem — Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang’s keynote asking the hardest question in education: what do we actually owe the people we’re supposed to be developing? The “Frankenstein Problem” is what happens when we optimize development for performance rather than integration — when we build capable people who don’t know who they are.
New research integrated throughout.
Huysamen, Hatton & Kourti (2026) on neuroqueer intimate life arrived in both the Neurodiversity and Gender page and the Autigender and Neuroqueer post. Sensory Fluid published — naming what the existing sensory vocabulary hadn’t fully captured.
The AI Collaboration testimony guardrail was revised to honor AAC-using and non-speaking community members for whom generative AI is part of their voice. The standard: “facilitate, not shape identity,” linked to Silva, Steeds & Doherty (CHI ’26).
Week 17 — Ethics as Architecture: The Page Grew Up
Week 17 was a week of turning ethics into architecture. We stopped describing our relationship to AI and started analyzing it.
The AI Collaboration page transformed.
Over seven days we added more than a dozen sections to AI Collaboration at Stimpunks: harm reduction as an individual AI framework (Dr. Fatima’s “How to (Anti) AI Better”), disability and accessibility as the primary ethical frame, engineered exclusion as a pipeline problem, the double empathy problem in code (Srinivasan 2026, AI & Society), art as community representation and soul preservation, a hybrid and assistive use framework for GenAI in art, MADTech and constructionism (Trevor Aleo), the Freirean frame from Human Restoration Project, POSIWID, “The Tensions We Sit With,” “The Biggest Guardrails: Anthropomorphization and Sycophancy,” “Co-design Is Not a Strategy. It’s a Political Demand.”
The page is no longer a set of guardrails. It’s a position on power, design, and what it means to use contested tools ethically when your community is the one those tools were not built for.
Star stuff and the footer.
We published Love You Down To Your Star Stuff and added a star stuff section to the site footer. It’s there now at the bottom of every page. Some things belong everywhere.
The Esmx Bookmark published. Print-ready, Manifesto-backed, available in six PDFs for A4 and A3 printing. 55mm × 190mm. Dark palette. Atkinson Hyperlegible. Philly Pride accent bars. Esmx on the front, Manifesto lines on the back.
The Covenant received an “Everything is politics, but…” section clarifying what “civil” and “professional” mean in our context — drawing on the Contributor Covenant FAQ to prevent those terms from becoming tools of respectability politics.
The Cult of Compliance page was updated with quotes on Alex LaMorie’s death. Training is not enough. The page now says so more clearly.
Week 18 — Universe: Scattered Things Into Structure
Week 18 moved scattered things into structure. Things that had been growing got shaped.
Star stuff became a project.
The page became a microsite, a microsite became zines, a zine became a field guide, a field guide became a broadside, a broadside became a call for contributors. ★ stuff launched at star-stuff.netlify.app with six publications:
- A Field Guide to Neurodivergent Constellations
- L★S Broadside
- Love You Down To Your Star Stuff — Stimpunks Zine No. 2
- Neurodiversity Field Guide — Stimpunks Zine No. 3
- We Are All Star Stuff — Call for Contributors
- Shorthand Evolution: LYDTYSS → L★S
The Star Stuff Manifesto published on the main site. The shorthand is settling. LYDTYSS becomes L★S.
AI Collaboration split in two.
The main AI Collaboration page kept receiving content. Then it became too much for one page to hold. AI and Disability Justice launched as a companion page with its own room to grow. The main guide added evidence depth to match its ethical positions: Ruha Benjamin, Joy Buolamwini, CDT’s Hand in Hand report, Penn State research on trained disability bias in AI tools, Sins Invalid’s Disability Justice framework, Rose & Lupton (2026) on what autistic adults actually use. Eleven annotated resources. The John Oliver Last Week Tonight alignment section.
Anti-Ableist Learning Space became a series.
Five pages had been living on the site without a clear relationship. This week they got a landing page, series intros, connective writing throughout, and a shared “Shape of This Series” navigation block. The five parts — The Need, The Answer, The Feeling, The Learning, The Gift — can now be traversed as a single argument.
Education Access got an argument. Restructured for logical arc (harm → cause → what becomes possible), with eleven bridge paragraphs at each seam. A page that was a collection became a case.
The Library was rebuilt with a Start Here pathway, TOC near the top, framing for each section, connective writing throughout. A commons that knows what it is.
Glossary kept growing. Designed Dignity and Engineered Exclusion published, both drawing on Srinivasan (2026). Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria updated with six pull quotes from Van Asselt, Reekers & Roke (2026) — the first scoping review of RSD in autistic adults. Intensive Interaction broken into eight sections, woven through with Helen Edgar’s “Neuro-Affirming Practice Is Not a Framework. It’s a Way of Being.”
🗺️ New to Stimpunks? Where to Start in April’s Work
April produced a lot. Here’s a guided path through it.
If you want to understand our ethical stance on AI:
→ AI Collaboration at Stimpunks
→ AI and Disability Justice
If you’re a funder or potential partner:
→ For Funders
→ Impact
→ About Us
If you work in learning and care environments:
→ Building Anti-Ableist Learning Space
→ Education Access
→ The Stimpunks Design Method
If you want the philosophical grounding:
→ Niche Construction + Epistemic Niche Construction
→ Neuroqueer Learning Spaces Manifesto
→ Love You Down To Your Star Stuff
If you’re looking for community:
→ Campfire Learn Together
→ Infodumplings
→ Community
🧭 From Guardrails to Positions
One of the most significant things that happened in April wasn’t a single publication — it was a structural shift in what the AI Collaboration work is.
The page started as guardrails: rules about what we will and won’t use AI for. It ended April as an argument about power, design, disability justice, and what it means to use contested tools ethically when your community is both the one those tools were built to exclude and the one with the most to gain from their assistive applications.
That tension doesn’t resolve. But it can be named. And naming it with precision — with Srinivasan and Benjamin and Buolamwini and Trevor Aleo and Dr. Fatima and Sins Invalid all in the room — is the work.
The same logic runs through the rest of April’s work. Epistemic niche construction isn’t accommodation. The Frankenstein Problem isn’t a curriculum problem. Functioning labels aren’t neutral. Training alone isn’t enough to prevent police killings of autistic people. These aren’t new positions for Stimpunks. April gave them the infrastructure to say so clearly.
Receipts: Working in Public
We default to open whenever we can.
🔭 What We’re Doing Next
🤝 Mutual Aid and Grants
- DIF Collaborative Grant application in progress (deadline May 20, 2026) with Human Restoration Project as collaborating partner, centered on Neurodivergent Design and the ARLES method
- Select one Mutual Aid grantee every other month until we raise money for more grants
- Build toward the 2026 Fundraising Goal Stack
🌟 Star Stuff
- Gather community voices for We Are All Star Stuff — Call for Contributors
- Expand the L★S playlist and ancillary pages
🤖 AI Ethics Depth
- Continue developing AI and Disability Justice
- Keep building evidence depth into the AI Collaboration guide
📚 Learning Space and Glossary
- Continue the Anti-Ableist Learning Space series connective writing
- Expand glossary with 2026 research as it arrives
- Internal linking toward the /space/ section from high-traffic pages
💸 Funding & Sustainability
- Expand employer matching through Give
- Strengthen funder documentation through For Funders
We are building the infrastructure we wish existed. If this work matters to you, help fund it, partner with us, or share the tools with someone who needs them.
One Good Line
The page is no longer a set of guardrails. It’s a position on power, design, and what it means to use contested tools ethically when your community is the one those tools were not built for.
— Week 17 Changelog, Stimpunks Foundation
📚 Three Things Worth Revisiting
In case you missed them — or they’re newly relevant:
- The GRADE EtD Framework and Stimpunks — the dominant intervention model for neurodivergent and disabled people fails its own evidentiary standards. This page says so rigorously. Share it with anyone who still thinks ABA is evidence-based in the relevant sense.
- AI and Disability Justice — the new companion page to the AI Collaboration guide. Starts with People’s Guide to AI alignment. Holds disability justice analysis that the main guide can’t fully contain.
- Building Anti-Ableist Learning Space — five-part series now navigable as a single argument. Start here if you’re a teacher, administrator, or anyone building learning environments. Then go to Education Access for the evidence.
How You Can Help This Month
Need help?
- Get Help
- Coping resources
- Regulation & Coping — including the Neuro-Affirming Wheel of Life
- Burnout & sensory safety
Support the work
Share
- Forward this post to one person who needs to reckon with the Frankenstein Problem — anyone building humans for performance rather than integration.
- Share one link: AI Collaboration at Stimpunks — this is the most substantive thing we’ve published on AI, disability, and ethics. It deserves readers.
- Contribute to We Are All Star Stuff — the call for community voices is open.
Stimpunks Foundation · stimpunks.org · Mutual Aid and Human-Centered Learning for Neurodivergent and Disabled People
Leave a Reply