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Stimpunks.org Changelog for Week 45 2026: From the Cave to the Ballroom, From the Street to the Headset

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Home » Blog » Changelog » Stimpunks.org Changelog for Week 45 2026: From the Cave to the Ballroom, From the Street to the Headset

This week opened with a cave and closed in a headset. On stimpunks.org, A Third Place Needs a Cave asked what a gathering place owes the people who need to step out of the conversation. On Stimpunks.World, every door on Cel Street now opens onto a room, many of those rooms have rooms behind them, and by Saturday you could visit Helen Edgar’s Faery Yurt in a VR headset. New rooms opened for a Discworld city, a ballroom with somewhere to hide under every canopy, four public restrooms, and Ryan’s own table in the shade. Norah Hobbs, Rowena, Luis, New Partington Power, and Em all have places on the street that are theirs. Stimpunks Social moved home. Our code went MIT across five of our sites, while the art stays with the people who made it. And on stimpunks.org, our AI alignments grew into pages of their own, with a new one reading MIT’s report on AI and education.

Throughline

  • Every grand room needs somewhere to hide. A Third Place Needs a Cave argues for parallel presence over required conversation. The Scalable Feast Ballroom puts a refuge under six canopies, the Quiet Stall is lined so nothing echoes, and the CB’s new Comfort section puts the break button where an overwhelmed person finds it first. A third place with no cave is a watering hole with no shade.
  • A place belongs to the people who build it. Norah Hobbs’s Retail Therapy and Spaceholder Saloon are in her words and colours. The Aerial Arbour carries Rowena’s photographs with her yes. New Partington Power’s House came from their own brief, and its name is theirs to change. Their page, their words, their call.
  • Give away the tools. Keep the art with the people who made it. Stimpunks.World, Star Stuff, Queering.Earth, Penguin Pebbling, and the Monotropic Map now release their code under the MIT License. The words, pictures, and Helen Edgar’s designs stay under their Creative Commons licences. Share the hammer. Credit the house.
  • Every rule we bend, we write down. Song lyrics are welcome on the street now. Guests no longer join calls. The Faery Yurt’s candles move. Each reversal was written into the street’s own record, in plain words, rather than slipped in as a quiet edit. A changed rule said out loud is still a promise.

The Work

A Third Place Needs a Cave

We have said before that the library is both a third place and a Cavendish Space. A Third Place Needs a Cave asks where those two ideas part.

It reads Ray Oldenburg’s eight characteristics of a third place one at a time, and one of them breaks. Oldenburg calls conversation the main activity of a third place. For Henry Cavendish, who stood at the edge of his club while others talked, conversation was the price of entry. Parallel presence is the answer: being together without having to talk. Chris McNutt of the Human Restoration Project named it too, when he missed third places in lockdown for the people, not the talk.

The post closes on the third places of Stimpunks.World and a checklist anyone running a room can use.

A third place with no cave is a watering hole with no shade.

A Room Behind Every Door

By Sunday morning, every door on Cel Street opened onto a room. Then came the rooms behind the rooms, each entered through a door in its parent’s scene: the Arcade’s games playing on their own cabinets, L-Space through the Community Library’s stacks, and the caverns down the lift by the stoop. What belongs to somebody, or could overwhelm, stays on the room’s own page, so no photograph is lifted into a scene and nothing in the street flashes.

Paper Street caught up. It now walks into every room Cel Street does, and into the rooms behind rooms, each drawn in card in the room’s own colours. Rooms built by Helen Edgar, by David Gray-Hammond, and by others who brought rooms in each say plainly that the drawing is ours and theirs, to keep or send back.

Getting around got easier on both streets. Every room’s page now has a Walk this room link. Teleport to a room takes you anywhere on the street, and a small plate tells you where you have arrived. You can turn and look, zoom, fill the screen, and walk with a game controller. The glitter dial is now in every room, and where it left a tall empty gap, it moved into a floating dock.

The rooms also got deeper. The Chappell was rebuilt around its stained glass, with each window’s light lying coloured on the floor. And on Ryan’s call, the Faery Yurt’s candles and fairy lights now move. That reverses the street’s rule that nothing moves by itself, within limits: a room moves only as much as its own page does, nothing moves in the low-stimulation modes, and the flash limit still holds.

Build the street you can wander, and keep a shortcut to every door.

Into the Headset

On Saturday, the Faery Yurt on Cel Street became something you can visit in a VR headset, as a trial. An Enter VR button shows only in the yurt, and only where a browser can open a headset, so on every ordinary screen the room is unchanged.

A stick walks you the way your head faces, and because gliding makes some people sick, a switch puts it back to steps and snap turns. You can walk into all six of the yurt’s rooms and back out without taking the headset off. At Helen’s ask, people in the 3D yurt can also see each other as figures built from their avatars — off until you turn it on, and sharing where in the room you are, never when. The privacy page said so before it shipped. So far it has been tried with a pretend headset, not a real one.

Try new ways in, and keep every old way open.

New Rooms on the Street

Widdershins opened as a Discworld appreciation, against the way of normativity. It reads Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork as a city where nobody matches, and the City Watch as a competency network, and it recognises us in its people without diagnosing any of them. It stands on Star Stuff’s One Atom of Justice and opens with a line from Raising Steam, read from Ryan’s own copy.

Over the bridge, three more rooms opened, each after a place in the Discworld and none quoting the books. The Golem Trust is kept by golems who own themselves, and their writing on slates is named as what it is to our community: AAC, a voice, never a lesser one. The Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons is a home and not a shelter: nobody adopted out, nobody cured, nobody counted, and nobody anybody’s good deed. The Clacks Tower is a shutter cabin lit by the noon sun, for GNU John Dearheart and the message this street sends in his name.

Champuru is Ryan’s restaurant, a table in the shade of a lane. Mediterranean and Okinawan dishes, and the two mixed on one plate — chanpurū is Okinawan for "something mixed." It cooks for Ryan and gives nobody advice. Its kitchen says plainly that Okinawan home cooking uses pork and SPAM, and that this kitchen cooks with tofu, egg, and fish because it is Ryan’s.

The Scalable Feast Ballroom is big, bright, and comfortable at once. You come in at the painted ceiling and scroll down the height of the room to the parquet floor, with a link to skip the scroll. The hall stays bright. The only shade is under six canopies, no two alike, each a living room for refuge at human scale, around a long table as long as the people at it. It refuses a guest list, a dress code, a ticket, and any word for who sits out, and it quotes our Biophilic Design page on prospect and refuge.

Public restrooms opened, four of them, each its own world. Loo With a View looks out over a fjord in the midnight sun. The Comfort Station sits under the park in white tile and brass. The Seaside Convenience is Victorian cast iron on the promenade. The Quiet Stall is lined with felt and cork, with no air dryers and nothing that hums. Every one carries everything on the list every restroom on the street must carry, in its own words. Cel Street gained benches, bins, and drinking fountains too.

The basics, done with care, are the luxury.

Rooms That Belong to Our People

Excursions opened past Cavendish Coworking, a visitor centre after closing with a rack of brochures. Every brochure is an outing we take together, and its page belongs to whoever made it. First on the rack is Norah Hobbs’s Retail Therapy, her page for Thursday’s Infodumplings, brought in with her yes: her words, colours, faces, and drawing. Ryan made a call for it that holds from now on: community members may link to their own businesses in what they make here, signed as such, so her shop stays as she wrote it. That evening Norah’s second room arrived, the Spaceholder Saloon, a saloon by the fire for spaceholding, venting, and solidarity, which keeps no ledger.

The Aerial Arbour is Rowena’s circus tent on the campgrounds, from a brief Helen passed on. A silver birch is the king pole, with silks, a hoop, and a hammock hanging from its branches. Nobody is drawn and there is no ring, because nothing in it is a show. Four photographs from Rowena’s piece prayer hang on its walls, with yeses from Rowena and from the photographer, Oz, and each comes down whenever either of them asks. The room first went up under the wrong name, and Helen corrected it the same morning.

Luis’s Burrow is a surprise for Luis from Helen, a cosy cave under the roots of an old tree, lit only by the green wood through its round mouth. Every card is a cushion. A fox, two rabbits, an owl, and a dormouse sleep in it, and the coffee is free. Every book on its shelf is checked against a real library record. The name is Helen’s pick and Luis’s to change.

Looking-Glass House, Helen’s room from Halloween, now opens through a tall gilt glass in the Faery Yurt, and a second glass at the foot of the Rabbit Hole leads there too. It is her yurt given back dark on silver, with quotations from both Alice books and four of John Tenniel’s engravings, each credited.

New Partington Power’s House is the first home on Nature’s Contribution, from their own brief: a brick house at the edge of town with a covered porch and a small, makeshift maker space. Helen chose where it stands, where the last street stops at a gate and the farm’s fields come up to the back fence. At Helen’s ask, the porch is glazed in clear glass, with nothing between you and the farm. A home owes the land nothing, so it carries no offering.

And Em’s hand-painted press-on nails now stand in rows between the parts of the Stimpunks.World front page, lifted from her own photographs for Ems Nails 4 You with her permission. Her photographs stay hers, outside the site’s licence, with a credit linking her shop.

Build with people, credit them by name, and let them change their minds.

Moving Home

Stimpunks Social moved home to Stimpunks.World and caught up. Its posts came over from the old WordPress.com site, which had stopped keeping up with Bluesky in May, so the missing months were read back from our own Bluesky posts. Every image lost its camera data, and every alt text says who wrote it, us or Claude.

Our office now posts to our networks from home instead of through a third-party scheduler: one set of words to Bluesky, Mastodon, and Stimpunks Social, and never twice to the same place.

Song lyrics are welcome on Stimpunks.World now. Our use of lyrics is fair use, and the responsibility for what we publish is ours. Every room that said it refused a song’s words was rewritten to say otherwise, rather than quietly edited. Eighty-six Stimpunks Social posts quoting songs went up as they were first posted.

Moving home means unsaying some things. Say so when you do.

Calls, Chat, and Comfort

Calls on Stimpunks.World now stand beside what they are about. On a wide window, a call docks beside its channel. When a room watches a film together, the call lines up under the screen so both are seen at once, with a strip saying who is hosting. Popping a call out now warns you first and keeps the chat beside it.

Calls are for members only now. Nobody had needed guest access, so the three public calls are gone. Whatever is typed during a call is kept the way the room’s channel keeps it, and the privacy page says so.

The CB learned GIFs, our own emoji, spoilers, and who is in a call. GIFs come through our own server, so nobody’s browser talks to the GIF service, and every GIF shows as a still until pressed, at every setting, because a GIF can flash. Anybody can add our own emoji, and there is no top or popular list. ||Spoilers|| stay hidden from sight and from screen readers until pressed. And by popular request, a channel with somebody in its call now lists who is in it.

The CB’s side panel now keeps the parts about you apart from the parts about the room. I need a bodymind break and the glitter dial moved into a section of their own, Comfort, which comes right after the room and starts open, so somebody overwhelmed finds it at a glance. The name is Ryan’s.

Every book on the Solarpunk Hermitage’s shelf now has a discussion of its own in the forums, at Helen’s ask, and each book on the shelf links to it.

Put the way out where an overwhelmed person looks first.

Sharing the Code, Keeping the Art

From 3 November, the code behind five of our sites is under the MIT License: Stimpunks.World, Star Stuff, Queering.Earth, Penguin Pebbling, and the Monotropic Map. It was Ryan’s call across every Stimpunks repository, with Helen Edgar’s agreement for the code she wrote. Creative Commons advises against its own licences for software, and Netlify’s Open Source plan asks for a software licence.

The line is drawn carefully, inside the files. The tools and scripts are MIT. The words and pictures a script carries are not. The collection, the map, Helen’s art, and the prose all stay under their Creative Commons licences, and Penguin Pebbling’s deck and Helen’s artwork stay non-commercial. Calling everything MIT to keep it simple would have released her art commercially under a licence nobody chose. Each site’s licence now says which is which. Stimpunks.World’s code also gained a code of conduct that adopts the Stimpunks Covenant rather than restating it.

Share the hammer. Credit the house.

On stimpunks.org

Our AI alignments grew too big for one page, so each one now has a page of its own. AI Ethics — Alignments and External Frameworks had reached twenty crosswalks on a single page. It is now an index, with a short summary of each alignment, grouped into schools and learning, disability and access, and power and political economy. Every old link still lands on the right summary.

Splitting them risked losing what reading them side by side shows, so the index opens with what keeps recurring. The sharpest critics of AI’s political economy stop before disability. The disability documents stop at remediation. Agreement is widest where it costs least, and behaviorism is almost never named.

The twenty-first alignment is new: the MIT Report on AI and Education. We credit MIT’s committee for arguing against AI detectors, and for asking instructors to disclose their own AI use. We also note that its call for project-based learning is constructionism without the name, at the university where Papert taught. Across the whole report, the word "disability" never appears, and its menu of AI-proof assessments — oral exams, handwriting, timed rooms — is a list of access barriers. Remove the friction of access. Keep the friction of thought.

We published the Week 43 reflection, the week we started moving home. Its lesson is that a narrow exception stays narrow only while somebody is counting, so we are keeping a single list of every rule we have bent, for what, and for whom. And we published the Week 44 changelog, Halloween week on the street.

This Week’s Gatherings

Thursday’s Infodumplings gathered in Norah Hobbs’s Retail Therapy, the page she made for the evening and the first brochure on the Excursions rack.

And the Events Room’s screen now opens on the Campfire Learn Together playlist, newest first, so it starts on that week’s video.

Week 45 Changelog

This week opened with a cave and closed in a headset. We asked what a third place owes the people who need to step out of the talk, and answered in rooms: a ballroom with a refuge under every canopy, a restroom where nothing hums, and a Comfort section where an overwhelmed person looks first. Every door on the street opened onto a room, and the rooms belong to the people who built them — Norah’s saloon, Rowena’s arbour, Luis’s burrow, and a brick house at the edge of town. We gave away our code and kept the art with its makers. And every rule we bent, we wrote down. Broken systems, not broken people.

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