Stimpunks.org Changelog for Week 30 2026: From the Weather to the Compass, From the Light to the Dark

This week we read the weather out loud. We published a PESTEL and SWOT of the whole organization — strengths to be useful, weaknesses to be trusted — and set it beside our finances and governance, where anyone can check it. We gathered the nine documents we steer by into one place, so you can see the compass and not just the course. And we gave the site itself a second skin: dark mode, a Solarized palette that holds in light and dark alike, and a home page that finally moves. Read the weather; name what you steer by; choose your own light.

Throughline

Read the weather in the open. Reading the Weather publishes a PESTEL and SWOT most organizations keep private — beside our finances and governance, not behind them. It names the storm bearing down on Disabled and neurodivergent people, then reads us honestly inside it. We publish our strengths to be useful and our weaknesses to be trusted. Broken systems, not broken people.
Name what you steer by. Framing Documents gathers the nine papers we navigate by into one index, each with a pulled description. A compass you can read is a compass you can be held to. Alongside it, Why? says the plain thing first — default to open, all the way down to the reason.
Choose your own light. Dark mode arrived, carried by a Solarized palette that holds in light and dark alike, on a home page rebuilt to load fast. Access isn’t one right setting — it’s the room to pick your own. The environment bends to the person, not the person to the environment.

The Work

Reading the Weather

We published a public PESTEL and SWOT of the organization — Reading the Weather: Our Strategic Environment — under Accountability. Most organizations keep their strategic analysis private; we put ours in the open, beside our finances and governance. It names the weather bearing down on Disabled and neurodivergent people — special-education enforcement hollowed out even where the law still stands, Medicaid cuts reaching the assistive tech people rely on, a DEI rollback that turns the plain language of disability justice into a funding liability — and then reads ourselves honestly inside it. We publish our strengths to be useful and our weaknesses to be trusted. Broken systems, not broken people.

The Papers We Steer By

We gathered the nine documents we steer by into a single index — Framing Documents — Mission, Creed, Manifesto, Tenets, Covenant, Philosophy, Our Lens, Interdependence, and Choosing the Margin/Edges, each with a pulled description. It joins the Series index between Facts, Fire, and Feels and Learning Space. A compass belongs in public: if these are the papers we navigate by, you should be able to read them and hold us to them. In the same spirit we published Why? — the plain answer to the first question anyone should ask.

Light and Dark

The site got a second skin. Dark mode is live, documented in Stimpunks.org — Light/Dark Mode: Design & Technical Notes, and carried by the Solarized system we now describe in full in Color & Palette: Our Solarized System — one palette tuned to hold in light and dark alike. On the way, we refactored the home page to cut page weight, DOM complexity, and load time; stimpunks.org is now much, much faster. The site is an environment too, and we try to practice the environmental design we preach: let the reader choose their own light.

The Deck, Woven In

Cavendish Cards moved from launch into the body of the site. We added the deck to four pages — a project section on Projects (credited as a collaboration with Autistic Realms), a top-of-page callout on Cavendish Space, a note under Interaction Without Pressure on Communication & Interaction Access, and a “Name What’s Not Working” entry in the Livable Worlds Checklist — all with “artwork in progress” framing. We also added a Cavendish Cards: A Design Brief, Not a Behavior Report section to Create a Neurodiversity Inclusive Environment, and gave that page a front-page doorway under Explore Stimpunks → Design better environments. A spread is a design brief for the environment, not a behavior report. The guardrails travel with it: the person controls sharing, there’s no scoring, it isn’t a screening tool, and it never replaces AAC.

Named, Not Free

The Supporters page had shrunk to a single line after our old Donor Wall couldn’t follow us to Givebutter. Rather than mourn the wall, we rebuilt the page as real appreciation of donors, volunteers, and supporters — mutual aid and reciprocity, not top-down charity, in the same “dignity, not pity” register as our Give page. Donors see where gifts become mutual aid, creator grants, open resources, and living wages. Volunteers get their labor named and honored, not treated as free. And the widest ring — everyone who cites the glossary, shares a field guide, or forwards a newsletter — is recognized as support, because everything we publish is openly licensed. The missing wall became a feature: appreciation is collective by design, honoring the Donor Bill of Rights and donor privacy, with an invitation to contact us for anyone who wants to be named.

Week 30 Changelog

Published “Stimpunks.org Changelog for Week 29 2026: From the Word to the Card, From the Bone to the Star.”
Reading the Weather: Our Strategic Environment. Published a public PESTEL and SWOT of the organization under Accountability. Most organizations keep their strategic analysis private; we put ours in the open, beside our finances and governance. It names the weather bearing down on Disabled and neurodivergent people — special-education enforcement hollowed out even where the law still stands, Medicaid cuts reaching the assistive tech people rely on, a DEI rollback that turns the plain language of disability justice into a funding liability — then reads ourselves honestly inside it. We publish our strengths to be useful and our weaknesses to be trusted. Broken systems, not broken people.
Framing Documents. A new index page gathering the nine documents we steer by — Mission, Creed, Manifesto, Tenets, Covenant, Philosophy, Our Lens, Interdependence, and Choosing the Margin/Edges — each with a pulled description.
Added Framing Documents: The Papers We Steer By as a new entry in the Series index, placed between Facts, Fire, and Feels and Learning Space.
Published “Why?” — the plain answer to the first question, in public.
Dark mode. Added dark mode to stimpunks.org, with the design and engineering written up in Stimpunks.org — Light/Dark Mode: Design & Technical Notes.
Published “Color & Palette: Our Solarized System” — the Solarized palette behind the site, tuned to hold in light and dark alike.
Faster home page. Refactored the home page to reduce page weight, DOM complexity, and load time. stimpunks.org is now much, much faster.
Cavendish Cards, across four pages. Added the deck to a new project section on Projects (credited as a collaboration with Autistic Realms), a top-of-page callout on Cavendish Space tying it to caves, campfires, and watering holes and the interaction badges, a note under “Interaction Without Pressure” plus an “alongside, never instead of” AAC note on Communication & Interaction Access, and a “Name What’s Not Working” entry in the toolset of the Livable Worlds Checklist. All four use “artwork in progress” framing.
Added a Cavendish Cards: A Design Brief, Not a Behavior Report section to Create a Neurodiversity Inclusive Environment, introducing the free, CC0 pictorial prompt-card deck as a concrete tool for the environmental design the page describes. A spread is a design brief for the environment, not a behavior report — with the deck’s guardrails intact: the person controls sharing, no scoring, not a screening tool, not an AAC replacement.
Linked Create a Neurodiversity Inclusive Environment from the front page, adding it to the Explore Stimpunks → Design better environments group. It’s the piece we hand people who ask how to build neuroaffirming spaces, so it earns a front-page doorway beside the more abstract design pages.
Expanded the Supporters page. The Supporters page had shrunk to a single line after our old Donor Wall couldn’t come along to Givebutter. Rather than mourn the wall, we rebuilt the page as a real appreciation of donors, volunteers, and supporters — framed as mutual aid and reciprocity rather than top-down charity, in the same “dignity, not pity” register as our Give page. Volunteers get their labor named and honored, and the widest ring — everyone who cites the glossary, shares a field guide, or forwards a newsletter — is recognized as support, because everything we publish is openly licensed. The missing wall became a feature: appreciation is collective by design, honoring the Donor Bill of Rights and donor privacy, with an invitation to contact us for anyone who wants to be named.
Polaris Education “AI & Ethics” alignment. Added a Polaris Education alignment to AI Ethics — Alignments and External Frameworks, mapping our AI Collaboration guidelines against Polaris, the voice-first student-listening product from Human Restoration Project. Lineage, not external critique — the same house as the Critical AI Handbook already on the page, but the engineering half: HRP encoding into a pipeline the augmentation-not-replacement principle we argue for in prose. Convergence runs strong on human-in-the-loop review as load-bearing rather than theater, on provenance held as a hard requirement — every student quote one click from its recording, the way every Ask answer is one click from a human-authored page — and on cost named without being resolved.
Published “Campfire Learn Together: The Existential Movement — Bringing Wisdom to a Turbulent World.”
Published “Live Captions” — a new field guide entry.
Published “Screens — Zine Wall.” Props palepixel.
Published “Infodumplings: Otters Already Know How to Rest.”
Shared-Signal Space. A new glossary entry: the mode of connection carried by signal rather than proximity — a voice note, a thread, a call left open in the background, a message typed and read across distance. For many Autistic, ADHD, and otherwise neurodivergent people, this is where regulation, access, and honest connection come easiest, away from masking and sensory overload. Not a substitute for shared-air space — a mode in its own right, connection spreading sideways rather than up a ladder.

Week 30. We read the weather in the open and steered by papers anyone can check. We gave the site a second skin — light and dark, so you choose your own — and made it faster on the way. The deck kept spreading, the door to designing better environments moved to the front, and we named the hands that hold us up as reciprocity, not charity. Broken systems, not broken people. We publish our strengths to be useful and our weaknesses to be trusted. Read the weather; name what you steer by; choose your own light; default to open.