Libraries are the closest thing we have to a place that is simply for you. No purchase required. No performance of need. You are a patron, not a customer. You walk in and the shelves are there, the quiet is there, the librarian is there, and the only rule is that you brought yourself. For neurodivergent people who have spent their lives performing acceptable personhood in order to access spaces, the library is different. The library says: you can just be here.
This week on Infodumplings, we’re celebrating that. We’re celebrating libraries — what they are, what they mean, what they’ve been for us — and we’re doing it alongside Lilypad Library, a neurodivergent-created children’s show that Stimpunks is proud to fiscally sponsor. We’ll watch a Lilypad Library episode together. Then we’ll infodump: your library stories, your formative reads, your favorite books, the one that changed how you understood yourself or the world.
Come ready to talk about libraries. Come ready to talk about books. Come with the weird niche thing you checked out twelve times as a kid. This is exactly the kind of session Infodumplings exists for.
Videos
We’ll watch this together at the start of the session — a joyful introduction to Lilypad Library, built on the principle that neurodivergent kids deserve to see themselves in stories made by people who actually know what that’s like.
The Stimpunks Frame
Stimpunks is a neurodivergent- and disabled-led community. Libraries are where we live. Many of us grew up in our local public library. Here’s how we think about what we’re celebrating tonight.
Libraries Are Third Places — and Cavendish Spaces
The concept of third places — spaces that are neither home nor work, that belong to everyone, that ask nothing of you except your presence — was invented to describe what libraries already were. You are not there to buy anything. You are not there to perform. You are there, and that is sufficient.
Our Stimpunks Library page puts it directly: libraries are the closest thing we have to ideal third places, especially for neurodivergent people who are so often pushed out of spaces.
Libraries also function as what we call Cavendish Spaces: they offer caves for solitude and deep focus, campfires for small-group connection, and watering holes for open community. Quiet corners for stimming and reading. Tables for gathering. Open floors for wandering. You can be deeply alone in a library, or you can be in the gentle company of others who are also simply existing. No one checks whether you’re being social correctly.
This is why so many neurodivergent people have a library origin story. A place that held you before you had language for what you needed. A place that was just yours.
Libraries Are Punk AF
Our library page names it plainly: Libraries are punk AF. And they are. The public library is an act of collective defiance against the premise that knowledge and access belong to those who can pay for them.
At Stimpunks, we believe in the library economy: the idea that what we share freely, we all have more of. Usufruct — the right to use and benefit from something held in common — is the library principle made explicit. You don’t own the book. You borrow it. You return it so someone else can read it. The book becomes infrastructure. Knowledge becomes infrastructure. Access to it is mutual aid.
Our collections span books, reading lists, zine walls, music, infographics, eBooks, and bookmarks. We collect what we’ve learned, what shaped us, and what we think you need. Not a curriculum. Not a canon. A commons.
We think about this through the lens of L-Space — Terry Pratchett’s concept that all libraries, everywhere, are connected through the sheer weight of accumulated knowledge. Mass distorts space. Enough books distort it into something traversable. What you need to navigate it isn’t a map. It’s a ball of string.
That’s what tonight is. We’re following threads together.
Lilypad Library: Nothing About Us Without Us
Lilypad Library is a children’s show built on a simple premise: neurodivergent kids deserve to see themselves in stories written by people who actually know what that’s like.
Creator Kiersten Case draws from lived experience. The show’s characters are written by and with neurodivergent people. That’s not a feature — it’s the standard. Nothing About Us Without Us (NAUWU).
We at Stimpunks are proud to serve as their fiscal sponsor. Lilypad Library is integrating our ARLES design method — Attention → Relational → Lived Experience → Environment → Systems — into the format and arc of the show. We’re excited to build alongside Ms. Kiersten and the team.
The show exists because neurodivergent kids learning to love books deserve to see Dots — a character who moves and feels and thinks like they do — sitting in that library, belonging there, being exactly right.
Library joy. That’s what we’re here for.
Special Interests as Love Languages
Monotropism means our interests run deep. We don’t read a book — we become absorbed in it. We don’t have a favorite author — we own everything they wrote. We don’t recommend a book — we hand it to you with both hands and tell you it changed something.
Sharing books and library stories in a session like this is an act of special interests as love languages. The book you loved most is a kind of self-disclosure. The library that held you is a kind of autobiography.
We’re gathering tonight to infodump in the most elemental sense: here is a thing I love. Here is why. Here is what it opened in me.
Omnidirectional learning flows both ways. We are here to give and to receive. The knowledge is in the room, distributed across everyone present. The books on the floor of your childhood bedroom are data. The library card you still have is data. The book you’ve been meaning to recommend to everyone for years — bring it.
Join Us
Infodumplings happens every Thursday at 7PM Central, online via Discord. No preparation needed. No expertise required. Come as you are.
Our libraries and Lilypad Library session is on Thursday, May 28. You can participate by video, voice, text chat, or just by being in the room. All modes are welcome. Cameras optional. Chat-only participation fully valid. Stims, movement, and fidget tools encouraged.
No one will be called on. Silence is participation.
If you want to share a book, hold it up. If you’d rather type your recommendations in chat, do that. If you’d rather just listen to what everyone else has loved, that is equally valid.
Join our community to get access, then find us in our online space. Our Infodumplings page describes what to expect.
How the Hour Goes
| Timestamp | Session |
|---|---|
| 0:00 | Welcome & Grounding — Brief framing: what we’re celebrating, why libraries, what Lilypad Library is. No wrong way to be in this space. |
| 0:05 | Watch Together — “Welcome to Lilypad Library” episode. Screen-shared, no talking over it. |
| 0:20 | Opening Infodump Round — Anyone who wants to share what they already knew, felt, or loved — no filter, no order. Library stories. Childhood reads. The book that got you. Pure neurodivergent passion mode. |
| 0:35 | Bodymind Break — A few minutes to move, stim, stretch, breathe. Intentional and encouraged. |
| 0:40 | Book Recommendations Round — Share your favorites: the book you hand to everyone, the one you’ve read six times, the one that made you feel seen. |
| 0:52 | Reflection Round — Optional soft prompt: What’s the library story you still carry? Sharing welcome, silence equally welcome. |
| 0:57 | Close & Resources — Links, gratitude, gentle goodbye. |
Related Glossary Entries
- Monotropism
- Special Interests
- Third Places
- Cavendish Space
- Omnidirectional Learning
- Mutual Aid
- NAUWU
- Belonging
Reflection Questions
On the library that held you
Most neurodivergent people have a library origin story — a specific place, a specific section, a specific librarian. The library that let you stay too long. The one where you discovered the particular genre that reorganized your understanding of what stories could do. The one where no one asked you to be different than you were.
What was your library? What did it give you? Who were you in it that you couldn’t quite be anywhere else?
On the book that made you feel seen
There’s a specific experience of reading a character and recognizing yourself so completely that the recognition feels almost violent. Here I am. Here is someone who moves like me, thinks like me, has the kind of mind I have. The relief is enormous and sometimes strange — why did it take this long to find this?
What book held that recognition for you? What character or narrator or voice made you feel less alone in how you experience the world? What would you have given to have found it earlier?
On special interests as love languages
To recommend a book to someone is to say: here is something I loved. I think you might love it too. I am trusting you with my enthusiasm.
For monotropic minds, book recommendations can carry a weight that’s hard to explain. The book that absorbed you completely. The author you couldn’t stop reading. The genre that became a years-long passion. When you recommend these, you’re offering a piece of yourself.
What book do you recommend most often? What does it say about you that you love it as much as you do? What are you hoping the person you give it to will understand about you when they read it?
On libraries as infrastructure
Libraries are not amenities. They are infrastructure — the same category as roads and water and power. The idea that they might be optional, that communities might choose not to have them, is as strange as the idea that communities might choose not to have streets.
The library economy is the idea that what we share freely, we all have more of. The book you borrowed and returned made it available to the next person. The library system extends that principle to an entire community. You contribute by using it. You benefit by using it. Everyone does.
What has the library economy given you that you couldn’t have accessed any other way? What would you not know, not have read, not have become, without it?
On Lilypad Library and seeing yourself in stories
Neurodivergent kids are growing up now with Dots. With a character who feels and moves and processes the way they do. Who is held gently by the show, who belongs in the library, who is never the problem to be fixed.
Many of us didn’t have that. We had characters we had to translate ourselves into, stories we had to work to see ourselves in, representations that were about us but not for us.
What would it have meant to you to have had a Lilypad Library when you were small? What do you most want for the neurodivergent kids finding the show right now?
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