Week 40 runs Sunday 2026-09-27 through Saturday 2026-10-03. The day headings below carry their dates.
The companion piece is Stimpunks.org Changelog for Week 40 2026: From the Proposal to the Vote, From the Headcount to the Handle, which records what shipped. This one records what it cost.
Best Accomplishments
The Board voted, and our governance pages now say what it decided. At our board meeting on 29 September, every decision passed unanimously. Twelve documents now read as adopted, the bylaws no longer carry a family qualification for directors, and the Transparency Log gained nine rows. Our unpaid Co-Creative Directors are indemnified, so the Volunteer Agreement went to 2.0. It had refused to promise that coverage until it was real. Mila Krambo, elected Treasurer, joined our About page on Saturday. The vote to end our private foundation status starts our conversion to a public charity and does not finish it, so the private foundation rules still apply until it does.
Stimpunks.World became a place where people meet, and on Tuesday the first room somebody built for themselves arrived. The Town Hall opened with a door for every kind of meeting, locked on the server rather than the page. Every room gained a CB channel and a call. You see who else is in a room only once you let them see you, and then by handle, with no count. Isha Snow’s NeuroHome came in through a prompt and an import tool we had written the day before. The tool refused it three times, and all three reasons were ours. Every word in the room is hers.
We started leaving Notion and HubSpot, and Friday did most of the moving. Our working documents went into a Google shared drive, Team Docs, as Docs the team can edit together. On Saturday our team garden began showing them: read here, edit there. Our contacts, grant requests, collaboration requests, email templates, and open tasks went into a trial of EspoCRM, an open source CRM. A small WordPress plugin of ours now hands a form straight to it, with no Zapier in between. Nothing is committed yet. Ryan’s goal is tools that are open source, cost less, let us add more people, and keep our data our own.
Alongside them, David Gray-Hammond’s NeuroHub Community joined our knowledge garden, credited post by post. Wiring it in stopped our concept pages filing two sites made with Helen Edgar under our name alone. Stimpunks.World also gained the Mission, the MUD Room, a page saying how the site is made and how we use AI, the street’s one opt-in strobe in the Rebellion Rave Room, a fractal window in every room that cannot flash, and a search box that began with Helen’s asks.
Theme
This week other people arrived, and each arrival tested something we had written when it was only us. Isha Snow sent the first room anybody built for themselves, and our own tool refused it three times, once for doing exactly what our prompt asked. David Gray-Hammond’s site arrived, and showed that every site without a label had been filed as ours, two of Helen Edgar’s collaborations included. Helen’s Mac draws the edges of letters a shade differently from Ryan’s, so every share card on the street rewrote itself on every run. None of those rules was careless. Each was true of the world it was written in, and that world had fewer people in it.
The code was the cheap part. Pictures on the CB, a list of who is in a call, a tree that counts its water, a photograph arriving with Isha’s room: each reversal took a line or a short function. Then the privacy page, the house norms, and every call panel had to be read again and corrected, because a sentence about what we keep goes false the moment what we keep changes. The changelog records the features. This week, the cost was in the promises.
Sunday — 2026-09-27
Accomplishments
- Sunday on Stimpunks.World ran from noon to a quarter past eleven: eight commits, three new rooms, and a fractal window in every room’s sign-off. The biggest single piece was the one that asked most carefully for permission. Rebellion Rave Room reverses the street’s no-flash rule for one room, and it took a warning above a hidden rig, two presses, a question naming the rate, and five separate ways to stop, before the reversal was allowed to count as an opt-in. By bedtime the MUD Room had gone from single-player to a place where other people can meet you, and nobody can watch without being seen.
Insights and Takeaways
- The MUD Room opened with a false sentence on a published page, and it came from our own decision record. That record said the CB was built but not yet switched on. It had gone stale, and we read it as the current state instead of checking. The false sentence went onto the page and into the feed, and it also gave the reason for going single-player first, which was never true. We corrected it within half an hour, with a correction entry at the top for readers who had already pulled the feed. The fractal window taught the same lesson from the other side. Its flash limit exists because most rooms’ pictures did flash at the fastest speed, and its test fails an unlimited strobe on purpose, to prove the test can still count. A record is a claim about the past, and a check is a claim about now. Before a record becomes a sentence a reader sees, it needs checking against what is actually running.
Gratitude
- Helen Edgar, whose yes turned the fractal window on in the Faery Yurt twenty minutes after it shipped off to wait for her, and whose phrase "monotropic time" is spoken by one of the Slake’s residents. And Majuular, whose Ultima Online retrospective is where the MUD Room started.
Monday — 2026-09-28
Accomplishments
- Monday on Stimpunks.World ran from noon to a quarter to midnight: thirty-three commits, six new rooms, and not one Cavendish door still pointing at somebody else’s service. The day moved in three stretches. The morning wrote down how the street is made and handed its tools to other people’s AI. The afternoon gave the Picture House its campfires and taught the CB to talk about a place in a film. The evening built a call into every room and a room behind every door. By bedtime the Cave had closed the last one, and Proton was gone from the page, the data, the credits and the generator.
- Both posts that went up on stimpunks.org were repaired on the live page by match-once edits that keep a revision, and the harder work was writing down what we still don’t know. Week 39 broke from a clean source, which made it tempting to write a rule about which asterisk shapes the converter mishandles. We did not write one. The same post had both shapes elsewhere, and both rendered correctly. The note added to our publishing hazards that night says what the post settles and what it leaves open.
Insights and Takeaways
- Two of the day’s commits were admissions, and neither was a bug in the usual sense. The licence had said for weeks that every typeface on the street was OFL, and some are Apache. Nothing broke; the sentence was just false, and we only noticed because we wrote the design page that had to describe it. Then Share video in a call was hidden behind a Jitsi switch that also turned off analytics, avatar lookups and Giphy. Turning it on was one line. Keeping everything else it had covered switched off took naming each one, and the honest part was the privacy page: a shared video loads youtube.com for everybody in the call. A switch that covers several things makes a promise about all of them, so when you flip it, you have to re-make each promise by hand. The same day showed the smaller costs no gate can see ahead of time. A Chrome update changed every share card by a few bytes. A pasted key lost its line breaks in Netlify’s settings box. The radio’s answer line shrank to zero pixels because it was the one row allowed to shrink.
- Two posts published on the same day broke the same way for two different reasons, and that is exactly why one explanation was so tempting. The Week 38 reflection broke because Ulysses re-saved it. The Week 39 changelog broke even though its source measured clean. Given only one of them, we would have blamed a single cause, as the Week 37 note did when it named the wrong culprit. What held up was refusing to write a rule from one post: the cause of the converter’s damage is still open, and we have written it down as open. A rule that is confident and wrong steers every later session away from the real fault. A note that admits it is incomplete keeps the question alive until the next post answers it.
Gratitude
- Everyone who has sat round a Campfire Learn Together. Screen Three at the Lightbulb Picture House opened on Monday with every session’s films on it, newest first, so its rack is a record of what we have watched together.
Tuesday — 2026-09-29
Accomplishments
- Tuesday on Stimpunks.World ran from a quarter past midnight to half past nine at night: thirty commits, seven new rooms, and the first room on the street that somebody else made. The small hours built the Town Hall and its five doors. Every lock behind them was tested by breaking it on purpose first, and the board meeting’s outline went up in the Board room the same morning the meeting was held. The afternoon gave the CB pictures, longer messages and links that say they are leaving. The evening brought Isha Snow’s NeuroHome in, and let people see who else is in a room and in its call.
Insights and Takeaways
- The first real room anybody sent us was refused three times by our own tool, and every refusal was a rule we had written for a room we had only imagined. Isha Snow did exactly what our prompt asked: she left a marked space and sent her photographs separately. The import tool refused any room still waiting for a photo, because its written rule said to bring the room in without the space. Our prompt and our tool disagreed, and the person caught between them was the first one to follow the instructions. The rest of the day had the same shape. Three standing rules were reversed by Ryan’s call: pictures on a channel we had recommended keep to words, links to other sites from a street that only linked to itself, and a list of who is in a call from panels whose small print said we keep nothing about a call. Each reversal cost more in rewritten promises than in code. The privacy page, the house norms and every call panel had to be re-read and corrected, because a feature that changes what we keep makes every sentence about keeping false at once. A rule written before anybody uses a thing is a guess, and the first real user is the one who tests it. When they hit it, the fault is ours to fix, not theirs to work around.
Gratitude
- Isha Snow, who built her NeuroHome for herself and sent it to us, and whose room showed us three places our own tool was wrong. And Norah, whose tray at the Samefood Cafe is written exactly as Norah gave it.
Wednesday — 2026-09-30
Accomplishments
- Wednesday on Stimpunks.World ran from just after midnight to eight in the evening: twenty-three commits, seven new rooms, and the Mission the street now answers to. Most of the day turned games from our Discord’s Collaborative Nonsense channels into places that keep less than the games do. A grove, a fridge door and a stairwell came first, then three shelters, then the accounts and reactions those rooms turned out to need. Every new room was broken on purpose before it shipped, six or seven ways each, and every tool caught every break. Fifteen people race each one at once in the tests. The privacy page changed before the code did, every time.
- The governance pages took a second pass that no Status line could show. The bylaws still said "not yet in force" in bold above the new Status. A sibling site of ours had copied the old words too: the Town Hall’s Board room on Stimpunks.World still said the bylaws were proposed. Its tool refused that text once the mirror re-synced, and the section was re-copied word for word. What the day left open is small and real. Mila Krambo is Treasurer on the Board & Governance page and not yet on our About page, so the Board room cannot link her. Ending our private foundation status starts the conversion to a public charity and does not finish it, so §4941 still holds until it does. And the Volunteer Agreement still refuses to promise insurance we have not confirmed.
Insights and Takeaways
- The Mission was published at a quarter past midnight saying nothing on the street is counted, and by lunchtime it had been rewritten twice. The tree made it false at 9:25 and the stair made the rewrite false at noon. The fridge had already made the privacy page’s "the one thing the CB keeps for good" false in between. None of this was a mistake. Ryan chose each count knowing what it reversed. What made it safe was that the old sentence could not survive: the tree’s tool refuses the old wording on the Mission and the broadside, and every page that repeated it was changed in the same commit, so the promise could not quietly outlive its truth. A published aim is a claim about every room built after it, and today it was tested three times in twelve hours. Narrowing it from nothing is counted to nobody is counted kept what the promise was for, and dropping it would not have. The same day showed that a rule we write is a guess until Ryan reads it: the shelter’s week-then-a-home rule lasted two hours.
- A vote on stimpunks.org made words false on a site that is not stimpunks.org. The Board room’s copy of our governance text was accurate on Tuesday and wrong on Wednesday morning, and nothing in this repository would have noticed. It was caught because the Town Hall’s tool refused the old words, as it was written to, once the mirror held the new ones. Every page that quotes our governance needs that check, because the source keeps changing. The mirror sync that carried the adoptions also brought three unrelated pages along, two Campfire posts with a new tag and a date bump. That is the cost of an incremental sync, and the commit said so rather than letting it pass as part of the governance change.
Gratitude
- Helen Edgar, who said yes to the guest bar in the Faery Yurt and then said she need not approve future additions, which turned one permission into a convention for every room. And Dave Kapell, whose word magnets are the Fridge of Sighs, credited with their source.
Thursday — 2026-10-01
Accomplishments
- Stimpunks.World can be searched, and its share cards stopped fighting between two machines. Both started with Helen. Her asks shaped the room finder, and her Claude measured why every check run rewrote every card. Neither gets fixed from one machine alone. That is what a second contributor costs, and what they are worth.
- Thursday afternoon we started a trial of EspoCRM, and by midnight our HubSpot grant pipelines were in it. Ryan opened the trial at twenty to five. By midnight it held more than two thousand contacts, all 750 grant requests with every stage count matching HubSpot, and 426 collaboration requests as cases. Each grant request kept the date it was submitted, from June 2022 to June 2026, and all but nine are linked to the person who sent them. We did not carry over the old grant descriptions. Ryan pointed out that the few still holding anything were due for deletion, for privacy, and a migration is no reason to keep what we meant to delete.
Insights and Takeaways
- The first fix for the share cards was the obvious one, and the measurements showed it could never work. A pixel tolerance seems like the natural answer to "two Macs draw the same card a little differently". But anti-aliasing moves a stroke about ten levels and a real contrast fix moves it about twenty. Those are close enough that any threshold either lets a real change through or keeps flagging noise. So we stopped comparing outputs and started recording inputs: if nothing that decides the card has changed, the card has not changed. When two machines can’t agree on the picture, compare what the picture was made from instead. We also chose to leave Pagefind out of the site search. The reason was not that it fails. It would loosen the script policy and churn every morning, and we decided neither of those was worth it.
- Two of Thursday’s failures were somewhere other than where we looked. Connecting EspoCRM to the team’s Gmail failed three times in a row, and twice we suspected the client secret after Ryan said it was right. It was. Our browser pane was blocking part of Google’s sign-in popup, and the connection worked first time from another browser. Later, the first contact import came in short, and Ryan spotted why: hundreds of our HubSpot contacts are an email address and nothing else, and EspoCRM’s importer leaves out a row with no name. When a tool fails without saying why, the first suspect is usually the wrong one. Both times the answer came from the person who knew what should have happened.
Gratitude
- Helen Edgar, whose asks ("fire" should find The Campfire) set the shape of the street’s search, and whose Claude found and measured the share-card churn between our two machines.
Friday — 2026-10-02
Accomplishments
- Friday was the day most of the move out of Notion and HubSpot happened, and it left no commits anywhere. Just after midnight, a small WordPress plugin of ours sent a real form submission to EspoCRM as a request linked to its contact, with no Zapier in between. It had passed 52 tests offline before it touched the live CRM. By evening EspoCRM had our five pipeline mail folders, our 13 HubSpot email templates, grant and collaboration reports, a dashboard for Chelsea Adams, Norah Hobbs, and Ryan, and all 46 open Notion tasks, with saved views that reproduce Notion’s Today? formula and a shared team calendar. Then, between seven and eleven at night, every page in four Notion collections became a Google Doc in Team Docs: the internal Field Guide, notes, meeting minutes, and weekly reviews, with expenses and grants as spreadsheets. None failed, and none was copied twice. EspoCRM has no recurring tasks, so a scheduled workflow now creates them, and the team’s onboarding guide grew a section for each piece.
Insights and Takeaways
- Moving everything at once showed us what we had stopped seeing. Our Mutual Aid pipeline had a stage called Granted (Overflow). It was never a stage. It was a way round a HubSpot limit, and it merged into Granted the moment somebody named it. Copying our email templates found two sentences we had been sending people. One said we cannot provide requests to minors without a guardian’s approval, when we meant fund. The other said in one place that grantees are chosen monthly and in another that awards go out every other month. The Field Guide went over as it was, badly out of date, to be revised as people use it. Not everything odd in old data is a fault, though. Our grant chart peaks in January and June, and we read the peaks as something to look into. Ryan pointed out that those are the two months we open for submissions. A move finds what the old tool hid, and it still takes somebody who knows the work to say which part of it is wrong.
- Two of Friday’s stops were the right outcome. HubSpot signed out every browser session we drove, so we stopped rather than work round a block it sets on purpose, and a few minutes later Ryan exported the templates as a file instead. Later, Claude Code’s own permission check stopped us creating a new record type in EspoCRM until Ryan said yes directly, because a new record type changes the CRM for everyone on it. Each stop cost a few minutes, and each kept a decision with the person who owns it.
Gratitude
- The people who build EspoCRM in the open. Twice this week we needed to know what it does: how its Connect button picks up Google’s reply, and what its importer does with an email labelled after it arrives. Both times we could read the code instead of guessing.
Saturday — 2026-10-03
Accomplishments
- Saturday on Stimpunks.World ran from one in the afternoon to quarter to eight: five commits, two new shopfronts, and a comedy bill reworked. The Open Notebook and Learning Large each added a script to the morning task, which now runs five. Each new script also needed a skip rule here, so the logs would not read a timer’s refill as a day of work. That makes three rules in three days. Every room that refills itself costs the garden one more line of upkeep.
- Saturday’s work on stimpunks.garden came down to who is allowed to read what. Mirroring NeuroHub meant a site’s name could no longer stand in for its author, and that turned up an older mistake. Every site without a label of its own had been filed as ours, so queering.earth and the Map of Monotropic Experiences, both made with Helen Edgar, had been credited to Stimpunks alone on every concept page. Nobody noticed until a third person’s site arrived. The Team Docs section raised the same question in a new form. Leaving the Team group removes someone from Drive straight away, but nothing removes them from Netlify. That step is still a manual one, and the only thing watching it is a line in each deploy report.
Insights and Takeaways
- Two of the day’s guards exist because one of our own sentences went false while nobody was looking. On Laughingstock, a set billed as "the longest on the bill" stopped being true the moment a longer one went on, and nothing said so until we read it again. So the generator now refuses any superlative in a note. The concept layer’s quiet default of "ours" was the same kind of fault on a larger scale. It was true when only our own sites were mirrored, and it became false as soon as anyone else’s arrived. A claim that depends on what else is around it goes stale without any edit, and the fix both times was to stop making that claim.
Gratitude
- David Gray-Hammond let us mirror NeuroHub Community into the garden, and is adding stimpunks.org to his own in return.
Looking Back
Meaningful Moments
A unanimous Board. On 29 September every decision passed with the whole Board and our staff behind it. Our unpaid Co-Creative Directors are indemnified now, and the Volunteer Agreement, which refused to promise that until it was true, says so in plain words.
Isha Snow’s NeuroHome. A tiny home by the Columbia River, with her bookshelf, her instruments, her collages on the walls, and a bee yard out the front door. She built it for herself and sent it to us, and the street is better for having been tested by it.
Helen said she need not approve future additions. One yes to a guest bar in her Faery Yurt became a convention for every personal room on the street. Rooms take the street’s conventions as they develop, a convention nobody likes goes to the Town Hall, and nothing touches a room’s own look or words.
Life is Teaching Me
Moving house is when you find out what you have been keeping.
The move out of Notion and HubSpot was meant to change where things live. It also made us look at every one of them. A pipeline stage that was only a workaround. Two sentences we did not mean. Old grant descriptions holding sensitive details, already due for deletion, so they stayed behind. A Field Guide that went over as it was, to be revised as we use it. On the street the same thing happened to promises: every time a room started keeping something new, every page that said what we keep had to be read again.
Keeping our data our own is the goal Ryan set for the move. It starts with knowing what the data is, and this week was the first full inventory.
Habit Insights
Friday was the only empty day in this log, and it was the busiest day of the move. All of it happened in a separate workspace, in a CRM and in Google Drive, and none of it made a commit. So the next morning’s catch-up read every repository, found nothing, and reported that nothing new had happened. The running changelog got one line, written by hand. The Thursday and Friday entries above about the move were written more than a week later, from the session’s own record. That recovers what was done and loses what it was like, which is exactly the trade the Week 32 reflection warned about. A thin day looked thin, and that is the only reason anybody went looking.
Last week’s one change got made, this week. The licence edit on /together/ went in on Saturday, after five reflections had named it, as a single edit that keeps a revision. Searching for the caption rather than the page found two more copies. The Week 39 reflection tells it in full.
Looking Forward
One Change I Can Make Next Week
Write the reflection on the day for work that leaves no commit. The EspoCRM move is still going, it happens in a CRM and a browser, and the morning catch-up cannot see any of it. A day that only shows up in a session record gets reconstructed, and a reconstructed day keeps the facts and loses the experience.
I’m Looking Forward To
The second room somebody builds for themselves. Isha’s NeuroHome came through a prompt and a tool that were a day old, and fixed three of our mistakes on its way in. The next one will come through a tool that has already met a real person.