A rest week. We let the weekly events carry it and took the recovery in the gaps. Our friends at the Lilypad Library launched their Kickstarter. Helen wrote about otters. Fungi work in the quiet and the dark, and this week, so did we.
Throughline
- Rest is the work. The weekly events carried the week — two Campfires and an Infodumplings — and we took the recovery in between. No new architecture, no marathon builds. We gathered, we watched, we counted our spoons, and we let the rhythm hold us instead of the other way around.
- The Lilypad Library went to Kickstarter. Our friends, allies, and partners at the Lilypad Library — which Stimpunks fiscally sponsors — launched a campaign for a brand-new preschool television pilot by Kiersten Case. Mutual aid is a verb. This is what it looks like when a partner builds something and invites the world in.
- Helen wrote about otters and solidarity. Stimpunks Solidarity and Otters reads the otter cam our Solidarity Session watches together as an embodied model of something the community already lives — parallel play, co-regulation, showing up for each other without having to perform. Rest, held in common.
The Work
The Week the Events Carried
We published three event posts and let the weekly rhythm do the rest.
Campfire Learn Together: The Mycelial Worldview Is Punk, for the July 12 Campfire, gathered two short films — a six-minute overture, The Mycelial Worldview, and a thirty-five-minute documentary, Allpa Ukundi, Ñukanchi Pura, forty-one minutes in all — and framed them through a Stimpunks and punk lens. Fungi as master decomposers. Distributed intelligence with no commanding center. Punk science and punk law. The power of working in the quiet and the dark. A fitting text for a rest week: the most important work is often the slow, unseen kind.
Infodumplings: Spoon Theory — An Invitation To Count Your Spoons With Us did exactly what a rest week needs — it made the ration of energy a thing we name out loud and share.
Campfire Munch Together: Why Don’t Fascists Eat Vegetables? set up a marathon screening: a samefood mukbang watch-along of The Leftist Cooks’ nearly-six-hour video essay on the politics of food. The post names the tension at the heart of the room — people eating their safe foods while watching an essay about how restrictive eating gets weaponized into supremacy — and resolves it by drawing the line clean. Samefoods are self-knowledge, access, and bodymind autonomy. The grift the essay dissects is control and domination. They are not the same thing, and the post refuses to let them be confused.
Lilypad Goes to Kickstarter
The Lilypad Library, which Stimpunks fiscally sponsors, launched its Kickstarter this week — a campaign to fund a brand-new preschool television pilot by Kiersten Case. Fiscal sponsorship is one of the quiet mechanics of mutual aid: it lets a project stand up, take payments, and reach the public without first having to build an entire organization underneath it. This week that scaffolding did its job. A partner had something to build and a room to build it in. Go look.
Solidarity, With Otters
Over at Autistic Realms, Helen published Stimpunks Solidarity and Otters. Every Saturday, our Solidarity Session meets in Discord — cameras on or off, some speaking, some in text, some passing memes — and for the past few months the group has watched an otter cam together in the background. Helen reads the otters as an embodied version of what the session already is. The otter keeps a favorite stone tucked in a pouch of skin and returns to it again and again, the way a stim tool or a special interest works. The otters play alone, drift together for a moment of shared delight, then drift back into their own absorption — a cave and a watering hole in one animal. The point is not that otters are soothing to watch, though they are. The point is that they get to just be otters, and in a space held away from the dominance of neuronormativity, so do we. Showing up for each other, in whatever way we can that day, is its own radical act.
A Little Quiet Building
Even a rest week leaves a few tracks. We expanded Space Bunny — added “Space Bunnies” art from Treebeard, a page introduction framing the white rabbit as the mascot of our learning space (playfulness, curiosity, wonder, hope, and interest-led, attention-following learning down the rabbit hole), and an intro for a new “Get your head in the clouds” section that reclaims a common rebuke as an invitation and hands off to Helen’s reflection on monotropic noticing and flow. The rabbit sends you down. The clouds send you up.
And we published AI and Competency Networks under the AI hub — a page on generative AI as both asset and compromise to competency networks. It draws the line between augmentation and extraction: AI that makes a person’s thinking more legible to the group versus AI that screens it behind fluent output. Vulnerability is the currency the network runs on, and the same tool can pay in or cash out. It closes with a legibility test and concrete practices for using AI to increase legibility across a team — grounded in show your work, default to open, and iteration.
Week 28 Changelog
- Published “Stimpunks.org Changelog for Week 27 2026: From the Tangle to the Map, From the Machine to the Root.”
- Our friends, allies, and partners at the Lilypad Library — which Stimpunks fiscally sponsors — launched their Kickstarter: Lilypad Library: A Brand New Preschool Television Pilot by Kiersten Case. A campaign to fund a brand-new preschool television pilot. Mutual aid is a verb — go look.
- Published Campfire Learn Together: The Mycelial Worldview Is Punk for the July 12 Campfire. Two short films — a six-minute overture (The Mycelial Worldview) and a thirty-five-minute documentary (Allpa Ukundi, Ñukanchi Pura), forty-one minutes in all — framed through a Stimpunks and punk lens: fungi as master decomposers, distributed intelligence with no commanding center, punk science and punk law, and the power of working in the quiet and the dark.
- Published “Infodumplings: Spoon Theory — An Invitation To Count Your Spoons With Us.”
- Expanded Space Bunny — added “Space Bunnies” art from Treebeard, a page introduction framing the white rabbit as the mascot of our learning space (playfulness, curiosity, wonder, hope, expanding potential; interest-led, attention-following learning down the rabbit hole), and an intro for the new “Get your head in the clouds” section that reclaims a common rebuke as an invitation and hands off to Helen’s reflection on monotropic noticing and flow. The rabbit sends you down; the clouds send you up.
- Published AI and Competency Networks — a page under our AI hub on generative AI as both asset and compromise to competency networks. It draws the line between augmentation and extraction: AI that makes a person’s thinking more legible to the group versus AI that screens it behind fluent output. Vulnerability is the currency the network runs on, and the same tool can pay in or cash out. Closes with a legibility test and concrete practices for using AI to increase legibility across the team — grounded in show your work, default to open, and iteration.
- Published Campfire Munch Together: Why Don’t Fascists Eat Vegetables? — a marathon-screening Campfire post for a samefood mukbang watch-along of The Leftist Cooks’ nearly-six-hour video essay on the politics of food. The post frames the screening around the tension at its heart — hosting a room of people eating their safe foods while watching an essay about how restrictive eating gets weaponized into supremacy — and resolves it by distinguishing samefoods (self-knowledge, access, bodymind autonomy) from the control-and-domination grift the essay dissects.
- Helen published “Stimpunks Solidarity and Otters” over at Autistic Realms.
Week 28. A rest week, and we let it be one. The events carried it — a Campfire in the quiet and the dark, spoons counted out loud, a marathon of safe foods and sharp politics — and the recovery filled the gaps between. A partner went to Kickstarter. Helen watched the otters drift together and apart and named it what it is: solidarity, the radical act of showing up for each other, in whatever way we can that day. Broken systems, not broken people. The work continues, and so does the rest.