Two front doors opened this week, and neither one asks you to say it out loud. Cavendish Cards lets a child point instead of explain. ★ stuff says you were made of stars long before anyone asked you to earn your place. We also gave a common dread a working name, and found an Autistic researcher reaching our refusal from the top of a ladder we usually climb from the bottom.
Throughline
- Show, don’t explain. Cavendish Cards hands someone a picture instead of a performance. Point at a card, or lay a few — no reading, no scoring, no winners. That is legibility on your own terms, which is the whole point and not a side effect.
- You belong as difference, not despite it. ★ stuff takes settled science — every atom heavier than hydrogen was forged inside a star — and reads it as an argument about belonging. Belonging is constitutive, not conferred. You were star stuff all along.
- Name the edge, and find who else names it. Threshold Anxiety gives a working name to the dread that lands at the edge of a change: broken thresholds, not broken people. And the SLODF crosswalk finds an Autistic researcher reaching that same refusal from the top of the ladder while we reach it from the bottom.
The Work
Cards Without Scores
Cavendish Cards is a new open deck for naming sensory and interaction needs, grown out of the Cavendish Space Project. The argument is in what it refuses. A child points at a card, or lays a few — no reading required, no scoring, no winners. Lay cave, buzzy, headphones and you’ve been handed a design brief, not a behavior report. The deck lives at cavendish.app as a calm, no-scoring web deck: point at a card or lay a spread, show someone how you feel and what helps instead of having to explain it, and hand off to the guidebook, implementation guidebook, and facilitator sheet built in alongside. The 55-card starter deck runs across seven families — Places, Weather, What helps, Lily pads, Growers, Love Locutions, and a new Interaction family drawn from the Autistic community’s color communication badges. It’s CC0 and community-authored: one card per file, a contributor template for adding your own, and a two-page facilitator sheet for support staff. We also published Infodumplings: Show Your Work, One Card at a Time — the deck in practice. Cavendish Cards augments a child’s legibility to the people around them, on their own terms. It is not a screening tool, and it refuses the pathology paradigm, deficit ideology, and behaviorism.
★ stuff
★ stuff is our new microsite — zines, field guides, a manifesto, a long-form page, and a playlist — built on one line we keep coming back to: Love You Down To Your Star Stuff. Every atom heavier than hydrogen was forged inside a star; the calcium in your bones and the iron in your blood came from stars that lived and died before the Earth existed. The site takes that settled science and reads it as an argument about belonging: if we are all made of the same stellar matter, then neurodivergent and Disabled people belong here fully — not despite our differences, but as them. It gathers ten zines so far, from Bone Song to The Dead Stars Still Reach Us, alongside the Star Stuff Manifesto, the Neurodiversity and Constellation field guides, and the whole thing in long form. Belonging is constitutive, not conferred. 💫
A Name for the Edge
We published a new glossary entry, Threshold Anxiety (a.k.a. transition anxiety): the dread that lands at the edge of a change — a doorway, a first day, graduating — before you’ve even begun it. It’s a working term for a common experience that existing language only names in pieces, so the entry pulls the pieces together: the cost of transitions for monotropic minds, anticipatory anxiety, Elaine Heumann Gurian’s “threshold fear,” and the anthropology of liminality (limen is Latin for “threshold”). The framing stays counter-deficit throughout — broken thresholds, not broken people. It’s also carded in Cavendish Cards as the big step weather card, whose lineage now links back to this entry.
The Grid Over the Ladder
We crosswalked the System-Level Organisational Design Framework (Jessica Dark, Frontiers in Psychology, 2026) against ARLES — The System-Level Organisational Design Framework: An ARLES Crosswalk. Dark is an Autistic researcher in Organisational Psychology; her SLODF reads workplace inclusion as emerging from the interaction between neuro-cognitive traits and four organisational domains — Environment, Systems, People, Policy — rather than as a deficit to be adjusted in the worker. This one starts closer to home than most: the mechanism at its heart, neuro-cognitive trait interaction, is the same one our From Traits to Patterns bridge already credits to Dark (2025). So it is lineage at the traits layer, not a cold external read. The crosswalk lays the grid over the ladder: Dark’s four domains fill ARLES’s top three rungs, fold Attention into Systems, and leave no cell for Lived Experience. It converges on the refusal — broken systems, not broken people — on the ecological model of experience, and on the warning that policy alone collapses, which Dark reaches from the top of the ladder as we reach it from the bottom. It stops short at the two things that make ARLES load-bearing: the ordering and the regulation floor. Shared mechanism, mutual supply, and “stops short of” precisely at the spine.
Week 29 Changelog
- Published “Stimpunks.org Changelog for Week 28 2026: From Working to Resting, From the Quiet and the Dark to the Otters.”
- Cavendish Cards. A new open deck for naming sensory and interaction needs, built out of the Cavendish Space Project, now live as a calm, no-scoring web deck at cavendish.app. A child points at a card, or lays a few — no reading required, no scoring, no winners. Lay cave, buzzy, headphones and you’ve been handed a design brief, not a behavior report. The 55-card starter deck runs across seven families — Places, Weather, What helps, Lily pads, Growers, Love Locutions, and a new Interaction family drawn from the Autistic community’s color communication badges. It’s CC0 and community-authored: one card per file, a contributor template for adding your own, and a two-page facilitator sheet for support staff. The deck augments a child’s legibility to the people around them, on their own terms — it is not a screening tool, and it refuses the pathology paradigm, deficit ideology, and behaviorism.
- Published “Infodumplings: Show Your Work, One Card at a Time.”
- ★ stuff. Our new microsite — zines, field guides, a manifesto, a long-form page, and a playlist — built on one line we keep coming back to: Love You Down To Your Star Stuff. 💫 Every atom heavier than hydrogen was forged inside a star, and ★ stuff reads that settled science as an argument about belonging: neurodivergent and Disabled people belong here fully, not despite our differences but as them. Ten zines so far, from Bone Song to The Dead Stars Still Reach Us, with the Star Stuff Manifesto and the Neurodiversity and Constellation field guides alongside. starstuff.earth
- Threshold Anxiety. Published a new glossary entry, Threshold Anxiety (a.k.a. transition anxiety): the dread that lands at the edge of a change — a doorway, a first day, graduating — before you’ve even begun it. It’s a working term for a common experience that existing language only names in pieces, so the entry pulls the pieces together: the cost of transitions for monotropic minds, anticipatory anxiety, Elaine Heumann Gurian’s “threshold fear,” and the anthropology of liminality (limen is Latin for “threshold”). The framing stays counter-deficit throughout — broken thresholds, not broken people. It’s also carded in Cavendish Cards as the big step weather card, whose lineage now links back to this entry.
- Crosswalked the System-Level Organisational Design Framework (Jessica Dark, Frontiers in Psychology, 2026) against ARLES — The System-Level Organisational Design Framework: An ARLES Crosswalk. Dark is an Autistic researcher in Organisational Psychology; her SLODF reads workplace inclusion as emerging from the interaction between neuro-cognitive traits and four organisational domains — Environment, Systems, People, Policy — rather than as a deficit to be adjusted in the worker. This one starts closer to home than most: the mechanism at its heart, neuro-cognitive trait interaction, is the same one our From Traits to Patterns bridge already credits to Dark (2025). So it is lineage at the traits layer, not a cold external read. The crosswalk lays the grid over the ladder: Dark’s four domains fill ARLES’s top three rungs, fold Attention into Systems, and leave no cell for Lived Experience. It converges on the refusal — broken systems, not broken people — on the ecological model of experience, and on the warning that policy alone collapses, which Dark reaches from the top of the ladder as we reach it from the bottom. It stops short at the two things that make ARLES load-bearing: the ordering and the regulation floor. Shared mechanism, mutual supply, and “stops short of” precisely at the spine.
Week 29. We built two front doors and left them open. One lets a child show a need without a word; the other says the need was never a deficit — you were star stuff before anyone asked you to prove it. We named the dread that lands at the edge of a change, and we found a researcher climbing to our refusal from the far end of the ladder. Broken systems, not broken people. Broken thresholds, not broken people. Show your work; default to open; love you down to your star stuff.
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