The Cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the Universe to know itself — in every color, key, and frequency of neurodiversity.
Love You Down To Your Star Stuff, after Carl Sagan
The link density is the argument.
Cosmic Connections, ★ stuff
There is a website we have been building all year that is mostly made of wonder and citations. It is called ★ stuff, it lives at starstuff.earth, and it is forty+ zines, eleven field guides, five broadsides, and four playlists that all do the same thing: take one fact that is actually settled — piezoelectric bone, stellar nucleosynthesis, phase transitions, tidal force falling off with the cube of distance — and follow it honestly until it turns out to already contain a claim about who belongs here.
Tonight we give you the tour. Ryan walks through the site and its collections — what’s in them, how they got named, and the one decision that shaped everything else. Then the floor is open for Star Stuff related talk.
That second half is the real point. Star Stuff started as a phrase somebody said out loud and it has never stopped being a group project — Helen Edgar named one of the collections and wrote three of the zines outright, community members are credited through the corrections ledger, and the open call for contributors has been sitting there since Zine No. 4. So bring the thing you have been thinking about. A zine you loved or argued with. A fact you want checked. An element you feel personally about. A rabbit hole that is cosmic-adjacent if you squint. It counts.
No astronomy required. This is an infodump night, not a lecture, and the site itself is what happens when you let a special interest run for a year with good sourcing.
Date and Time: Thursday, August 13 at 7PM Central
What We’re Showing
A guided walk through starstuff.earth, roughly twenty minutes, then out of the way.
What the site is. In its own words: “A growing collection of zines and field guides that read settled science as an argument about belonging.” Each piece begins with something well-established in physics, cosmology, chemistry, or biology, and lets it carry a claim about neurodivergent and Disabled life. Everything is held in common under Creative Commons, made to be printed free and shared freely. The About page states the limit in one line: “We are noticing a rhyme, not collecting a proof.”
The collections. Five of them sort the essay run by register — how the piece makes its argument. Star Stuff is the founding move: “Take one fact that is settled and checkable, follow it honestly, and find that the fact itself already contains the claim about belonging.” Star Gazing is Helen Edgar’s, name and description both — “Awe-inspiring and not definite. Possibilities of thought, possibilities of connecting things and ideas.” More Than Human is umwelt, symbiosis, and ethodiversity. Kin is natural history read against the primary literature — “our relatives, read against the primary literature, and the reflexes that make us disown them.” Stars We Grew Up On is Bowie and AURORA. Then every other section of the front page got its own landing page too, sorted by medium or by job rather than register: Start Here, Foundations, Field Guides, Sound, Print, and Notes & Rationale.
A few places to start. Bone Song if you want the founding one. A Field Guide to the Ways of Being a Star if you want to see astronomy’s own vocabulary caught grading things — the “failed” brown dwarf is right there in the literature. Not a Line if you have ever had the word spectrum used on you as a severity scale. The Same Water if someone has asked you why you could do it yesterday.
The parts that aren’t zines. A public changelog of our own corrections. A design system with the ink ratios measured. And Too Good to Check, an essay on popular-science misconceptions written from inside the problem rather than above it, because we had published several.
The Stimpunks Frame
The categories came last, and that is the whole argument
Thirty-five zines accumulated with no folders. Not as an oversight — as a commitment. Cosmic Connections argues the site should work by dense linking rather than top-down structure, because “connecting notes makes higher-level concepts appear that nobody wrote down.” That’s emergence: “the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.” The theoretical backbone is Philip Anderson’s more is different — “a large enough collection of parts obeys laws you cannot read off the parts themselves.”
Then two people, working separately, noticed the same clusters had already formed. Naming them at that point wasn’t a betrayal of links-over-folders. Naming them was the emergence step. The categories were outputs, not inputs — a description of what had grown, not a scheme imposed on it beforehand.
Sit with how rarely that happens to people. Nearly every category any of us has been sorted into arrived first and got applied second: the bell curve drawn before anyone was measured against it, the diagnostic tier assigned before anyone asked what the day is actually like, the reading group, the tracked class, the label that shapes the file before the child arrives. Zine No. 9 is about exactly this — the constellation is a line we impose from one vantage point, and so is the border between disorder and difference. A human-made line is ours to redraw.
A category that describes is not the same object as a category that decides. The collections page is a small, honest demonstration of the first kind.
The number says when; the collection says what
Sorting thirty-five pieces into five collections looked like it required renumbering them. We didn’t, and the reasoning is the useful part.
A number records when a piece was made. A collection records what it is. Keep those orthogonal and you get the collections for free. Renumber and you falsify a dated public changelog, break every number-keyed cross-reference in the fact-check ledger, and invalidate every reference in someone else’s prose — and prose has no redirect. Helen quotes “Zine No. 21” in an essay on More Realms; nothing we do to our own files can update that sentence.
So the numbers inside a collection run non-contiguously. Star Stuff holds 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, and 25. The gaps are information — the collection page says outright that five of its members “were made much later and still belong here,” because “membership here is decided by mechanism, not chronology.”
We keep meeting the same shape elsewhere. A person’s history is not a ranking. The order things happened to you is real data and it is not a verdict on you, and a system that collapses when into what is the same system that reads a late diagnosis as a lesser one, or a skill you had at nine and not at nineteen as a moral failure rather than fluctuating capacity.
The physics has to do the work
The site’s own warning against itself: “Not interdisciplinary as tourism — borrowing a physics word for its glamour and leaving the physics behind.” That is a real risk for a project like this, and the guard is boring and load-bearing. Every claim gets checked against a primary source, and when it fails, the correction gets published under our name.
Here is what that costs. In fact-check batch seven, we found we had gotten Orion’s Belt wrong — on the page arguing that a confident line gets mistaken for a fact of the sky. Zine No. 9 opened by claiming the three belt stars sit at wildly different depths, at 740, 690, and 2,000 light-years. They don’t. Those were Hipparcos-era parallaxes, and current values put all three within a hair of each other, near 1,250 light-years — members of the same association, born from one cloud. The zine’s own colophon cited a source that never supported the numbers. Worse, Field Guide No. 1 had said it correctly all along: “They are not a coincidence. They are a cohort.” The collection had been contradicting itself in public, and the guide was the one telling the truth.
So the spread now argues something truer. There is no hunter — the depth is real, it’s in the figure rather than the belt, a shape stitched from stars strung across roughly a thousand light-years with nothing in common but the direction we happen to see them from. The better fact made the better argument. It usually does.
This matters more than tidiness, because the deficit stories told about us are almost never checked. Deficit ideology travels on repetition, not evidence, and the pathology paradigm is full of numbers nobody has traced to a source. If we’re going to say the science of belonging is on our side, we do not get to be sloppy about the science.
There is no “For Fun” collection, on purpose
One of the reasons this project exists is that it is fun. Helen and Ryan are having a genuinely good time, and that shows in the work.
We considered a “For Fun” collection for the looser pieces and rejected it, for two reasons. A bin labelled for fun implicitly labels everything else homework. And it would create the one place where verify-everything could quietly relax — the corner where a nice-sounding fact gets in because nobody was going to check the fun ones. So the fun is distributed instead. Stars We Grew Up On is right there on the front page saying so.
That’s the same reason nothing on the site is behind a login, a price, or a download form. Print it free. Photocopy it badly. Cut it up. A zine you can’t get is not a zine.
Join Us
Infodumplings happens every Thursday at 7PM Central in the Stimpunks Learning Space.
Bring Star Stuff talk. A zine you have read, or one you want to argue with. An element you feel strangely loyal to. A fact you suspect we got wrong. A cosmology from your own tradition that says something similar. A thing you would like to see made. Or bring nothing at all and come to listen — lurking is a real and honored way to show up.
- Cameras optional. Chat-only participation fully valid.
- Stims, movement, and fidget tools encouraged.
- No one will be called on. Silence is participation.
- Screen sharing available if you want to show rather than describe.
Want to curate a future session? Get in touch →
How the Hour Goes
| Time | What’s happening |
|---|---|
| 7:00 PM | 👋 Welcome & housekeeping — set the theme: we are made of star stuff, and here is the site that argues it |
| 7:05 PM | 🌱 Guided tour of ★ stuff — the collections, and how they got named |
| ~7:25 PM | 💬 Questions — about the site, the science, or the sorting |
| ~7:35 PM | 🧠 Bodymind break — 5 minutes, do whatever you need |
| ~7:40 PM | 🎤 Open floor: Star Stuff related talk |
| 8:00 PM | ✨ Cozy overflow + next week’s reveal |
Sessions run approximately one hour with cozy overflow after. Camera optional, chat always open, safe foods and stimming always welcome.
Related Glossary Entries
- Neurodiversity
- Emergence
- Ethodiversity
- Monotropism
- Spiky Profile
- Crip Time
- Niche Construction
- Double Empathy Problem
- Deficit Ideology
- Pathology Paradigm
- Hierarchy
- Normal
- Weird
- Neuroqueer
- Bodymind
- Interdependence
- Belonging
- Radical Inclusivity
- Infodump
- Digital Gardening
Reflection Questions
On being made of it
- The iron in your blood was forged in a dying star. Does that land as a fact, as comfort, as neither? What does it change, if anything?
- Which element, creature, or physical process do you feel oddly loyal to — and how long have you been carrying that around without a reason to mention it?
- “We are noticing a rhyme, not collecting a proof.” Where in your life is a rhyme enough, and where do you need the proof?
On categories and who does the sorting
- What category were you sorted into before anyone looked closely? Who benefited from the sorting?
- Is there a line you were told was a fact of nature that you now recognize as a line someone drew — a threshold, a cutoff, a tier, a diagnosis boundary?
- A number says when, a collection says what. Where has your own chronology been read as a verdict on you?
On the room
- What piece of Star Stuff do you want to argue with? Bring the objection, not the compliment — the Orion correction came from someone saying something out loud.
- What would you make if it cost nothing and nobody had to approve it?
- What’s the fact you have been waiting for an excuse to explain to somebody?
Resources
- ★ stuff — the site itself, and the collections
- About ★ stuff — what it is, who makes it, the method and its limits
- Cosmic Connections — links over folders, emergence, and why categories are outputs
- Too Good to Check — popular-science misconceptions, written from inside the problem
- Changelog — every correction we have published on ourselves
- Star Stuff Manifesto — the cosmological grounding, in eight declarations
- Love You Down To Your Star Stuff — the long-form home of LYDTYSS, LYSS, LUSS, L★S, and ★stuff
- The Fold and the Crystal — piezoelectric bone, Deleuze’s fold, and the body as transducer
- L★S Playlist — songs in conversation with the phrase
- Helen Edgar, We Are Star Stuff: Being Autistic, Ethodiversity and Cosmic Connection — More Realms
- Helen Edgar, Why Difference Comes First — More Realms, and the basis of Zine No. 11
- Helen Edgar, My Monotropic Galaxy: A Constellation of My Autistic Self — More Realms
- Carl Sagan: We are star stuff — the source, in his own voice
- Bodymind Break
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Part of Stimpunks Recurring Events. See also: Solidarity Sesh and Watering Hole Hangs.