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Stimpunks.org Changelog for Week 43 2026: From the Rented Hall to Our Own Street, From the Storm to the Window Seat

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Home » Blog » Changelog » Stimpunks.org Changelog for Week 43 2026: From the Rented Hall to Our Own Street, From the Storm to the Window Seat

This was the week we started moving home. Stimpunks.World opened forums, and its CB radio learned to notify, edit, reply, and carry direct messages, so our community can leave Discord and Stoat for a place of our own. Our team left rented tools too: the to-do list, the contacts, the grant requests, and the team’s documents all moved onto the street. Friends kept building with us. Helen Edgar built a cabin on the mountain for David Gray-Hammond and a cinema behind her yurt, and new rooms opened for asking for help, showing unfinished work, and coping. And when the street gets too loud, there is now a way out: a quiet screen to breathe on, and four low-stimulation modes. On stimpunks.org, we published a crosswalk between Christopher Emdin’s cogens and Cavendish Space, and Infodumplings met on the street itself.

Throughline

  • A community should hold the keys to the room it gathers in. The forums, the chat page, invites, events, and direct messages give our community everything it needs to leave Discord and Stoat, on a street we run ourselves. Rent a hall and somebody else holds the keys.
  • Say what you keep before you keep it. New features this week came with their promises written down first: who can see it, what is stored, and what is never counted. The privacy page changed before the code did. Trust is a promise you can check.
  • Everybody needs a way out when it gets too much. A bodymind break, four low-stimulation modes, a room for coping, a room for resting with pets, and a Community Center made softer at our community’s ask. Quiet is access too.
  • A street grows by the people on it. Helen Edgar built the Mountain Cabin from David Gray-Hammond’s brief. A request for an otter crossed with a raccoon became Chimera Obscura. Requests from our community shaped nearly every change to the CB. Ask, then listen, then build.

The Work

Moving Out of the Rented Hall

For years our community has gathered on Discord and Stoat, platforms we do not own and cannot shape. This week Stimpunks.World grew what it needs to be the place we gather instead.

The forums opened on Sunday, for whatever needs longer than the CB’s two days: topics in categories, from Coping and Pets to Discourse and Props & Gratitude. Each category keeps its posts for as long as it should, from a week to forever. Coping keeps a week, because forever is not what that space is for. By the end of the week the forums had a Wiki for how-to pages, polls (including sealed ballots that never say who picked what), tags, and formatting buttons above every box. Most of our community is uncomfortable with Markdown, so now nobody has to type it.

The CB radio grew up fast. It can now notify you, by your choice and off until you switch it on, when somebody mentions you or a call starts in a room you follow. You can edit and reply to messages, send direct messages that arrive as requests until you answer them, and see a quiet dot where something is new, never a number. Channels now keep their latest fifty messages for 48 hours. Links become cards, and anybody signed on can schedule an event. iPhone pictures finally send.

The chat page lays every room’s channel out on one page, the way Discord does, with channels sorted by what each room is about. And you can say how open you are to a message, in the Cavendish Space Project’s own words: come say hi, people i know, or not right now. It is a sign, never a lock. We left out "Idle" on purpose, because it would tell everybody when you stopped touching your keyboard.

You now join with an invite. Moderators make invites and share the link, and the old shared password is retired. You can add an email address if you like, for one purpose only: getting back in if you forget your password.

A hall we rent can be taken away. A street we build is ours.

Our Office, on Our Own Street

Our team’s own work moved home too. The to-do list left EspoCRM, which cost forty-five dollars a month and sat outside everything else we use. Contacts, grant requests, and connection requests followed the same evening, encrypted where they are stored, and EspoCRM was switched off. Our team’s Field Guide, notes, and meeting minutes moved out of Google Docs into the forums, and our grant rounds moved out of Notion.

Two things here are worth a reader’s notice. When you fill in a form on stimpunks.org, to join our community or ask for a grant, it now comes straight to us, and nothing about you is logged along the way. And our member map moved off Google Maps onto the Community Center’s own wall: a pull-down wall map in the room’s own paint, where each pin says how many of us live in a place, and never a name.

Your data should live with the people you gave it to, and nowhere else.

A Way Out When It Gets Too Much

Helen Edgar pointed out that the street is busy even at its gentlest setting, and asked for a blank, cool screen to regulate on, one that says breathe, it will be okay. So now there is one. I need a bodymind break opens from the Glitter dial or from the CB, in its own quiet colours. It offers crisis lines, the help page, three quiet rooms, and two calm things to watch if you like: a forest in 4K and the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s live jelly cam. Nothing on it moves, and it keeps nothing about you.

Beside it are four low-stimulation modes, Warm Light, Cool Dark, Plant Green, and Red Light, which lay a few quiet colours over every room and the radio at once. One room went blank in every mode when they first shipped, and we fixed it the same evening.

Two new rooms help with the same need. Coping brings together our writing on Seeds of Cope as the eye of a storm: clear sky overhead, with the storm kept in view at the window’s edges, because coping is not denial. It says up front that it is not clinical advice and not a crisis line. Pets is co-regulation made into a room: the floor at the end of the day, a dog and a cat asleep on the rug, and nobody switching the lamp on because getting up would mean moving somebody. It explains why being with an animal matters so much to so many Autistic people, in our words and the words of Trauma Geek, Helen Edgar, and others.

And at our community’s request, the Community Center became a window seat: sage plaster, one window onto a hillside, after Terrapin Bright Green’s 14 Patterns of Biophilic Design.

Quiet is not a reward for getting through the day. It is a door that should always be open.

Friends Building Homes

Helen Edgar kept building her corner of the street, and this week she built for a friend. The Mountain Cabin is David Gray-Hammond’s log cabin at the summit, from his own brief. It has a stove with the coffee pot on top, bean bags, a bowl of rainbow sweets, and LED strips in a colour you pick. Its screen plays David’s own playlist, a wolf sleeps on the rug, and the window holds six of his own photographs of Lake Geneva. A cable car runs up from the pond, level at both ends, for visitors.

Behind her Faery Yurt, Helen opened the Cinema, a picture palace where every film sits on an old-fashioned reel: 93 of them on its first evening, on shelves for Philosophy, Nature, Cosmos, Poetry, Relaxation, and Things That Make Me Smile. The doors to her Music Room, Reading Room, and Cinema became portals onto deep-space skies. Her playlists moved to the Music Room’s phonograph, and a third, Symphrenia Chill, arrived with a piece by Helen and David to read alongside it. She also hosted a Coltrane and Hartman album at the Solarpunk Hermitage, and when it stopped at the end of every song, we fixed it so Watching together now plays a whole album through.

The best rooms on the street are the ones built by somebody for somebody.

New Rooms to Wander

Chimera Obscura is a camera obscura where two animals make one creature: the body of one, and the head, ears, tail, wings, and markings of any other. It opens on an otteraccoon, the request it began with, and its shelf grew from eight animals to more than forty, from an axolotl and a narwhal to a Highland cow. Becky Hicks’s own chimeras hang on the wall, with her yes. A chimera can then become a familiar that follows you from room to room, rests where there are no words, and can keep other people’s familiars company.

Community Care is our room for asking, under a street roofed with umbrellas tied to one another. Its channel is for four things, asking, offering, receiving, and declining, after a talk by Vivian Ly at Autscape 2020. It will not sort the people who ask, keep a tally, or offer pity.

Show Your Work is a garage with the door rolled up, where people in our community show work before it is finished. It credits Austin Kleon’s idea and Brian Eno’s word scenius, and refuses to call anybody a genius, gifted, or a savant. Anything on its bench comes down the moment its maker asks.

Breaker Breaker tells where the street’s CB came from: night on the interstate in a convoy, lit only by marker lamps, with Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes on amateur radio. The Source went up the hill behind The Feed, white travertine terraces where every code repository on our feeds page is a pool. And the World room puts every room on the street on our garden spider’s web, saying which have people in them and which have calls going.

Every room is somebody’s answer to "what if there were a place for this?"

Showing Up as Yourself

Profiles on the CB opened up into whole cards, after Discord’s: banners, frames, effects, a tagline, and tabs for your avatars, pets, badges, and battle jacket patches. New themes and effects came with credit where it is due: Fairy Lights and a Flying Fairy after Helen Edgar’s Faery Yurt, Otters in the kelp after her otters, a Halloween effect after The Cramps, and scenes of howling wolves, leaping dolphins, and children bursting out of autumn leaf piles, one of them throwing leaves from their wheelchair. Motion plays only when you have asked for it, and nothing flickers.

Anybody can now leave you Props, thanks that wait until you confirm them, and none of it is counted. And there is a community directory, opt-in only: tick the box and your card appears, alphabetically, with no count and no dates.

You choose how much of yourself to show, and it is never a score.

Keeping Each Other Safe

Our moderators asked for tools to keep people safe, and they now have them. The moderators’ desk can see every username on the CB, and can time somebody out or ban them. This reverses a rule the street had held since it opened, that nobody, moderators included, keeps a list of everybody. We changed it for safeguarding, said so on the Mission page, and kept it narrow. The desk holds nothing else about anybody: no join date, no email, no reason recorded for a ban. Anybody can now call @moderator in a message, and every moderator is told.

Safety tools should know as little as they need to.

Quote the Source

On stimpunks.org we published Cogens and Cavendish Space: A Crosswalk, and added it to our Learning Space page. Christopher Emdin’s cogens are simple conversations between a teacher and their students that end in a plan for the classroom. A cogen is a conversation about the room, and Cavendish Space is how we build the room that conversation is about. The crosswalk meets Emdin there, then pushes back in three places: a cogen that runs on talk alone, visibility that is expected rather than offered, and a plan that serves the teacher’s goals instead of the room’s. Its practical companion, Hold a cogen, went up on cavendish.space the same evening.

Both quote Emdin in his own words, with page numbers. A rule against quoting anybody had grown up around our Cavendish work, and we relaxed it: a paraphrase asks you to trust our reading, and a quotation lets you check it. Cavendish.space is dedicated to the public domain, so every page now says plainly that quoted words still belong to whoever wrote them.

Quote the source, so nobody has to take our word for it.

On stimpunks.org

We published the Stimpunks Monthly Newsletter for September 2026: the month other people arrived, from our bylaws to the Why Sheets press to Helen Edgar becoming a peer. The home page gained a Partner sites list: Helen Edgar’s Autistic Realms and More Realms, David Gray-Hammond’s NeuroHub Community, the Human Restoration Project, and GROVE, by Autistic adults for Autistic young people. When GROVE joined the list, the sentence above it still counted the old number of partners; we corrected it on Tuesday.

This Week’s Gathering

Thursday’s Infodumplings, Every Chimera Is Whole, was the first to meet on the street, in the Events Room. We opened with help signing up for anybody new, watched Monstrum on how the Chimaera of myth became real science, then built chimeras together in Chimera Obscura and took them along as familiars. The post’s frame is the room’s own house rule. Bodies made of unexpected parts were exhibited as freaks, and the people exhibited were mostly Disabled, so the room never calls a chimera a monster. Every chimera is whole.

Week 43 Changelog

This was the week we started moving home. Our community got forums, a fuller radio, and a door you open with an invite, so we can gather somewhere that belongs to us. Our team’s work came home too, and the forms you fill in now come straight to us. Helen Edgar built a cabin for a friend and a cinema of her own, and new rooms opened for asking, showing, coping, and resting with animals. When it all gets too loud, there is now a quiet screen and a softer street. And every new thing came with its promise written first: what it keeps, who can see it, and what it will never count. Broken systems, not broken people.

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