Stimpunks is a treasure trove of everything important to the neurodivergent and disabled community.

Feedback from a reader

This site is like Wikipedia because it effectively is an encyclopedia, an encyclopedia of disability and difference. It’s chock full of answers and knowledge and experience on living in this world as neurodivergent and disabled people.

Learn about yourself.

Learn about your family.

Learn about your friends, co-workers, patients, clients, and students.

We offer lots of free resources for navigating our current society and building a more inclusive society.

We offer validation for thirsty souls yearning to be seen, heard, and understood.

We offer words on your behalf, ones which call out to include you.

We offer community and belonging.

There are over 1,200 pages to explore in our encyclopedia of disability and difference. We are building a global knowledge commons, at the edges. Our glossary, library, courses, and field guide are vast. Visit our site map for lists of our most popular articles and our many collections.

On this page, we introduce our storytelling style and set the stage for a scrollytelling journey. We curate the treasures of neurodivergent and disabled cultures and weave together a community of voices and experiences.

StimPunks has a great, up-to-date glossary that reflects the breadth and richness of this global neurodivergent community. It captures a reflection of the autistic, neurodivergent and disabled culture and language used within these communities. It is a beautiful display of acceptance, belonging and connecting (NATP). An example of this is their page Five Neurodivergent Love Locutions (Stimpunks, 2022), where they expanded on Myth’s (@neurowonderful) original Twitter/ X post:

“The five neurodivergent love languages: info-dumping, parallel play, support swapping, Please Crush My Soul Back Into My Body, and “I found this cool rock/button/leaf/etc and thought you would like it” (Myth, 2021).

These examples show the different ways many autistic people create a sense of belonging by sharing stories and developing friendships online, as these spaces are often not available or accessible elsewhere. It is through these online spaces that I have grown to feel more accepted and continue to un-learn and re-learn more authentic ways of being with the support of other neurodivergent people who ‘get it’.

Autistic Community: Connections & Becoming

📜 Scrollytelling: How We Tell Our Stories

Scrollytelling is the fusion of scrolling and storytelling: a way to dynamically tell long-form stories as the user scrolls.

Scrollytelling: How to Transform Your Long-Form Content | Elementor

We use scrollytelling to tell our stories on this website. Our pages can be long, but we present the important information at the top in plain language. Scrolling down is a bonus journey.

Captured below is the how and why of our storytelling. Here are our techniques for digital composition. Here’s how we combine “talk, texts, and media” (James Paul Gee) into “multimodal ensembles” (Frank Serafini) to provide vicarious learning experiences.

🌍 A Knowledge Commons and a Space of Openness

Create open source communities instead of walled gardens of intellectual property rights – to create a global knowledge commons and to maximise collective intelligence.

Replacing Control With Ecologies of Care | Autistic Collaboration

Our Glossary, Field Guide, Library, Pillars, Gallery, and Courses steadily expand in depth and breadth. We’re building a knowledge commons and a space of openness, at the edges.

For me this space of radical openness is a margin a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a “safe” place. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance.

Living as we did on the edge we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the centre as well as on the margin. We understood both.

 Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness, bell hooks 

The writing on Stimpunks.org that isn’t quoted from elsewhere is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Rights to the images on Stimpunks belong to the individual artists/photographers unless a license is stated in the image caption. Many, but not all, use CC BY-SA.

🪴 Digital Gardening

stimpunks.org is a digital garden that we cultivate in the open. It is a living and constantly changing thing.

A digital garden is an online space at the intersection of a notebook and a blog, where digital gardeners share seeds of thoughts to be cultivated in public. Contrary to a blog, where articles and essays have a publication date and start decaying as soon as they are published, a digital garden is evergreen: digital gardeners keep on editing and refining their notes.

Another characteristic is the navigation: while a blog may usually be explored in chronological order, a digital garden uses bi-directional linking—or at least lots of internal links—to connect notes together. Such interconnection creates a trail of ideas that readers can follow.

Digital gardens are usually light-weight, with an emphasis on the text itself, but they can be designed in any way that reflects their owners’ thinking style and digital gardening preferences. They can be built with intricate systems, or simple no-code tools.

How to set up your own digital garden – Ness Labs

The Garden is an old metaphor associated with hypertext. Those familiar with the history will recognize this. The Garden of Forking Paths from the mid-20th century. The concept of the Wiki Gardener from the 1990s. Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens.

The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.

Things in the Garden don’t collapse to a single set of relations or canonical sequence, and that’s part of what we mean when we say “the web as topology” or the “web as space”. Every walk through the garden creates new paths, new meanings, and when we add things to the garden we add them in a way that allows many future, unpredicted relationships

The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral – Hapgood

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.

The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral – Hapgood

Gardens present information in a richly linked landscape that grows slowly over time. Everything is arranged and connected in ways that allow you to explore. Think about the way Wikipedia works when you’re hopping from Bolshevism  to Celestial Mechanics  to Dunbar’s Number  . It’s hyperlinking at it’s best. You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream. The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces.

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

Digital gardening is part of the pushback against the limited range of vanilla web formats and layouts we now for granted.

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

💨 Default to Open, Created Serendipity, and Learning Exhaust

The quality of our code and our product depend on the amount of feedback we get and on the amount of people who use them. If we’re developing behind closed doors, we are putting artificial limits to both.

We have done our best work in the open, let’s continue working this way.

Default to Open · Issue #1 · Automattic/wp-calypso · GitHub

Our writing on stimpunks.org connects humane tech, tech ethics, tech regrets, indie ed-tech, open source, open web, open data, distributed work, backchannels, indieweb, neurodiversity, #ActuallyAutistic, the social model of disability, design for real life, behaviorism, structural ideology, mindset marketing, psychological safety, progressive education, and much more. That jumble of tags is full of connections and overlap. It’s full of lessons on building for humans and the commons. We try to bring these communities together with our public writing and sharing, because in connection there is created serendipity, and we urgently need a lot of that going on between tech, education, and neurodiversity and disability communities.

created serendipity: the more connected you are, the more ideas seem to find you, not the other way around.

3 Obvious Ways Twitter Promotes Literacy – The Principal of Change

We feel good and reenergized when educators, tech workers, and autistic and disabled people interact in discussions we start. These moments are necessary and make a difference. Cheers for being in the space. Cheers for helping make the commons.

Generally speaking, open by default is just the right thing to do. As the GOV.UK team mantras says, “Make things open: it makes things better.”

Openness is an ethos that organizations — public and private — adopt so they can be more adaptive and responsive to the people they serve.

Default to open – Proudly Serving

Open education, open government, open data, open web, and open source. These are the foundations of the commons. They should be public, well-supported, and open by default.

Software and the internet are at their best when making human systems more inclusive, accessible, and transparent. The web and the open source stack that powers it were built so that public infrastructure, particularly education, could “default to open”.

We default to open at Stimpunks. We iterate out loud, in public. We share our “learning exhaust” on this website so we can learn from each other.

You already know that you will never be done learning. But most people “learn in private”, and lurk. They consume content without creating any themselves. Again, that’s fine, but we’re here to talk about being in the top quintile. What you do here is to have a habit of creating learning exhaust:

• Write blogs and tutorials and cheatsheets.
• Speak at meetups and conferences.
• Ask and answer things on Stackoverflow or Reddit. Avoid the walled gardens like Slack and Discord, they’re not public.
• Make Youtube videos or Twitch streams.
• Start a newsletter.
• Draw cartoons (people loooove cartoons!).

Whatever your thing is, make the thing you wish you had found when you were learning.

Learn In Public

🗄️ Building a Storytelling Database

Instead of seeing ourselves as gathering textual quotes to support a persuasive narrative argument, we saw ourselves first and foremost as building a database (in our case, a Google spreadsheet) that we could then query in order to explore a range of possible stories we might tell.

Thin Description and Data Visualization – Methodological Play – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy

We build storytelling databases using thin description and multiple scales of analysis across many disciplines and silos. While doing so, we recognize that “our own embodied positionalities influence our work”.

📼 Bricolage, Remixing, Constructionism, and Pastiche: Behind Our Punk Rock Research-Storytelling

You don’t want to make communication an elite thing. And I think that’s really a lot of what punk was about — a hands on, do what you want, of the people type of a thing.

Anita Smith, Fifth Column, Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution

bricolage = the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available.

pastiche = a work that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists. Pastiche celebrates the work it imitates.

constructionism = a theory that people build knowledge most effectively when they are actively engaged in constructing things in the world.

monotropism = a neurodiversity affirming theory of autism.

What do you get when monotropic bricolage thinkers write about monotropism and neurodiversity using the bricolage-friendly tools of the open web? This website. This website is an artifact of our iteration and constructionism.

In the tradition of punk and disabled communities, we use bricolage and pastiche to roll our own.

Constructionism

Constructionism is being practiced anywhere where people are making artifacts to represent their knowledge constructions.

On Constructionism, Makerspaces, and Music Education

We practice constructionism and actively engage in constructing things in the world. Constructionism, collaborative niche construction, bricolage, and toolbelt theory go great together.

DIY Bricolage

Neurodivergent and disabled people have to do it ourselves, or we go without. We bricolage from “a diverse range of things that happen to be available“.

People with disabilities are the original life hackers because our motivation is so high. If we don’t hack we often go without.

Liz Jackson: Designing for Inclusivity – 99U

In the arts, bricolage (French for “DIY” or “do-it-yourself projects”) is the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work constructed using mixed media.

The term bricolage has also been used in many other fields, including anthropology, philosophy, critical theory, education, computer software, and business.

Bricolage is a French loanword that means the process of improvisation in a human endeavor. The word is derived from the French verb bricoler (“to tinker”), with the English term DIY (“Do-it-yourself”) being the closest equivalent of the contemporary French usage. In both languages, bricolage also denotes any works or products of DIY endeavors.

Bricolage – Wikipedia

Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s described the early Masque scene: “Everyone was kind of into the whole homemade thing, ‘cause … you couldn’t buy real punk clothes like they could in London.”

“We Accept You, One of Us?”: Punk Rock, Community, and Individualism

Pastiche

A pastiche is a work of visual art, literature, theatre, music, or architecture that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists. Unlike parody, pastiche celebrates the work it imitates, rather than mocking it.

The word pastiche is a French cognate of the Italian noun pasticcio, which is a pâté or pie-filling mixed from diverse ingredients. Metaphorically, pastiche and pasticcio describe works that are either composed by several authors, or that incorporate stylistic elements of other artists’ work. Pastiche is an example of eclecticism in art.

Pastiche – Wikipedia

Stimpunks.org is pastiche. We celebrate the work of the many authors and artists we incorporate into our storytelling. In our learning space, we encourage our learners to build and iterate via bricolage, pastiche, and celebration of their influences.

Next in a punk sensibility was its love affair with pastiche. As the true postmoderns they were, punks drew freely from highbrow culture, lowbrow culture, and places in between, picking and choosing as they went, bound by no formal ideology.

In practice, however, punks consciously or unconsciously drew on previous youth cultures, with methodologies and ideologies marked by pastiche and bricolage. In other words, punks borrowed freely from previous youth cultures and dominant society, melding these elements into a new form of expression.

“We Accept You, One of Us?”: Punk Rock, Community, and Individualism in an Uncertain Era, 1974-1985

Remix

We encourage our learners to remix.

Remixing is key to progress.

Twenty Things to Do with a Computer Forward 50: Future Visions of Education Inspired by Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon’s Seminal Work

Creation requires influence. Everything we make is a remix of existing creations, our lives, and the lives of others.

Everything is a Remix Remastered (2015 HD) – YouTube

Together, all of this is a living storytelling and community building process that turns our differences into strengths and our problems into assets.

📋 Our Conventions

Content on our website is structured in a multimedia, multi-modality, scrollytelling style.

Our vertical storytelling style is inspired by webtoons. Read the bolded text as you scroll for a scrolling pace similar to webtoons.

To get more detail on things that interest you, read the surrounding text, explore the accordions, and follow links to other parts of our website.

Here are our conventions for webtoon style scrollytelling with progressive information disclosure.

👉 Front-Load Key Points

On our website, main concepts are presented at the top of the page in plainer language, with more academic language and further detail provided as you scroll down. Read to the depth you’re comfortable with. If you don’t have time to rabbit hole an entire page or section, read what you can knowing that you got the main ideas up front.

Especially in a world when some of the people attending your event, or participating in your meeting, will not have had time to review the whole thing in advance, assume that you have to front-load your key points at the beginning of the document. And within a particular page or slide, assume that you have to put the most pertinent info at the top, with supporting points below. If you’re not ordering things by importance (because you want to set up a chronological flow, or because you’re organizing by some historical categorization you’ve inherited) make that explicit in the text that your audience sees. Otherwise half your audience will be lost right at the top, wondering in their minds why these items are in an inexplicable order.

Make better documents. – Anil Dash

🎬 Transmediality

We tell our stories vertically using multiple media forms: quotations, videos, music, lyrics, poetry, art, and color blocks.

In addition to the emphasis on how web composing helped expand audiences for student writing, Huntington Lyman (1999) gave voice to a particularly crucial reason for encouraging student participation in composing for the web: working with multiple media forms allowed even those students who aren’t the strongest writers a greater potential range of rhetorical expression. As he writes, “hypertext’s easy incorporation of images and sounds has the potential to involve students who are strong in the non-verbal intelligences. . . . Hypertext helps integrate word, image, and sound, allowing students to draw on their strengths and discover new possibilities in their writing” (58). Although the notion of multiple “intelligences” can at times be used in overly reductive ways, Lyman’s emphasis on the value of using web media to engage students with diverse learning needs in composing with a wider range of modalities remains an important argument for digital pedagogies today.

Weaving the Web (Act 4, Page 3) – Conversing With Computers – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy

The value of using web media to engage students with diverse learning needs in composing with a wider range of modalities remains an important argument for digital pedagogies today.

Weaving the Web (Act 4, Page 3) – Conversing With Computers – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy

The webtoon platform is very dynamic and can be used to differentiate from traditional comics and manga, explains the professor. “They can add music, short clips or animation, interactive contents, and most of all the story flow is fitted with the ‘scrolling down’ [nature of phones]. The story, including the text and visuals are well placed, matching the speed on the reader’s scroll speed,” he says. The vibrant colours, sometimes even incorporating music or simple animations, tend to provide an innovative and immersive reading experience that differs from traditional Western comics or graphic novels, adds Kang.

Korean webtoons, the history and culture: Why they inspire K-dramas like The Uncanny Counter, Sweet Home | Friday-art-people – Gulf News

Because of its web platform, webtoon becomes a site where old and new media collaborate and multiple media functions are combined to create distinctive effects, stories, and genres. The general definition of “transmediality” that Elizabeth Evans provides is useful in explaining the broad range of the practices of cultural production involved in webtoon in Korea. Based on discussions that include Henry Jenkins’s theories, Evans explains, “In essence, the term ‘transmediality’ describes the increasingly popular industrial practice of using multiple media technologies to present information concerning a single fictional world through a range of textual forms”.

The Webtoon: A New Form for Graphic Narrative – The Comics Journal

🌊 Vertical Space, Gutters, and Wavelike Visual Flow

We use vertical space and “gutters” in ways similar to the conventions in manhwa and webtoons.

🔗 Hyperlinks

We love hyperlinks and use them extensively. We consider them a kindness to the reader and a potent weapon in the fight against disinformation. Many of our links lead to our expansive glossary.

Semantic links rather than commercial advertisements are the life blood of the internet – the Autistic online habitat.

Jorn Bettin, author of “The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations“

We love Stimpunks, their Glossary is a rich source of information presented through an affirming lens.

Be more Punk! 🤘🏻✊🏾

https://stimpunks.org/glossary-list/#h-all-glossary-entries

Pebble Autism on X

🧱 Block Quotes

We use block quotations (blockquote) heavily. We quote our favorite passages and sources with hyperlinks signposting back to the original work.

A block quotation (also known as a long quotation or extract) is a quotation in a written document that is set off from the main text as a paragraph, or block of text, and typically distinguished visually using indentation and a different typeface or smaller size font. This is in contrast to setting it off with quotation marks in a run-in quote. Block quotations are used for long quotations.

Block quotation – Wikipedia

🪗 Accordions

We also heavily use “accordions”. Accordions contain more in depth information on a topic that you can reveal at your own pace. As a thanks for scrolling down this far, we put some fun artwork from our community in an accordion below. Click or tap the accordion to expand it.

⁍ Bulleted Lists

Where possible, break down paragraphs into lists. Lists make scanning easier!

Show, Don’t Tell | CSS-Tricks – CSS-Tricks

A related technique is to spray them with bullets. Bullet points are a super powerful way to make content more skimmable for an audience, and perform a useful forcing function in making you edit your points down to be concise and roughly consistent.

Make better documents. – Anil Dash

We often break paragraphs of text down into bulleted lists that present one idea per line in plain language.

📑 Sections, Hierarchy, Semantics, and Tables of Contents

We provide content hierarchy, visual hierarchy, and tables of contents to improve skimmability and wayfinding.

Readers on the web scan for information, rather than reading everything line-by-line. Chunking your content into smaller sections, called out by larger headings, helps them find the information they’re searching for.

When I’m trying to find something quickly, there’s nothing more intimidating than jumping onto a site with a giant wall of unbroken content. 

Show, Don’t Tell | CSS-Tricks – CSS-Tricks

People want to know where they’re at in the story. This doesn’t have to be fancy, you don’t need a full timeline bar like a YouTube video. But a quick outline of progress (and, if you’ve got a particularly long document, recapping your position in that outline as you go) can help ensure people that they understand their place in the overall conversation.

Make better documents. – Anil Dash

Headings are semantic and hierarchical and should be used semantically, not just for styling.

Semantic HTML is the use of HTML markup to reinforce the semantics, or meaning, of the information in web pages and web applications rather than merely to define its presentation or look.

Semantic HTML – Wikipedia

We encounter documents all the time with incoherent heading hierarchy because folks used them according to their displayed size instead of their meaning.

Hierarchical headings are important to accessibility.

A common navigation technique for users of screen reading software is to quickly jump from heading to heading in order to determine the content of the page. Because of this, it is important to not skip one or more heading levels. Doing so may create confusion, as the person navigating this way may be left wondering where the missing heading is.

The HTML Section Heading elements – HTML: HyperText Markup Language | MDN

Most screen readers can also generate an ordered list of all the headings on a page, which can help a person quickly determine the hierarchy of the content:

The HTML Section Heading elements – HTML: HyperText Markup Language | MDN

One of the best things we can do for accessibility is use headings, actual <h1> … <h6> headings, not just text that’s been bolded and made bigger. It needs to be marked as a heading.

⌨️ Accessible Typography

We like this advice on accessible typography.

Font

This article surveyed dyslexic people for their preferences and they found a list of things to look for in an accessible typeface:

• Is there a difference between capital I, lowercase l, and the number 1?
• Compare letters b and d, p and q — are they mirror images or distinguished?
• Compare letters g, a, and o — are they distinguished?
• Do the letters rn look like the letter m?

The controversy of accessible type | by Alex Chen | Queer Design Club | Medium

Font Size

Use large font sizes instead of tiny text. It’s best practice for body text to be at least 16px for web. I personally prefer 18–20px.

People should also be able to zoom in up to 200% without losing information or structure.

The controversy of accessible type | by Alex Chen | Queer Design Club | Medium

Weights and Styles

Use different weights and styles sparingly to make text simple and clean.

• Use sentence case, not all caps
• Don’t combine bold and italics
• Don’t create blocks of text with italics

The controversy of accessible type | by Alex Chen | Queer Design Club | Medium

Spacing

Use accessible spacing to differentiate lines of text and make reading easier. Best practices are:

• 1.5x font size for line spacing
• 2x font size for paragraph spacing

The controversy of accessible type | by Alex Chen | Queer Design Club | Medium

Contrast

Use high contrast to make text stand out. The text on the left is easy to read because:

• It uses regular instead of light weight
• It’s at 100% instead of 30% opacity
• It’s at 21:1 contrast (aim for at least 7:1)

The controversy of accessible type | by Alex Chen | Queer Design Club | Medium

🌸 Lily Pads

We group related elements together in color blocks with rounded corners. We call these “lily pads” as they are pads from which spectacular things bloom. Further, lily pads develop from a rhizome, evoking the autistic rhizome.

Grouping not only improves readability but also enhances comprehension, reader retention, and engagement.

Getting Started Guide

Lily pads improve skimmability and aid cognitive accessibility.

◼️ Bolding

bold the most important part of a sentence to make sure that readers scanning through your content catch their eyes on what’s most important.

Show, Don’t Tell | CSS-Tricks – CSS-Tricks

🎬 Show, then Tell

Show, then tell. Start with concrete examples & pictures, then lay down the abstract definitions.

Nutshell: make expandable, embeddable explanations

Smart Brevity

Smart Brevity’s Core 4

Smart Brevity, in written form, has four main parts, all easy to learn and put into practice—and then teach. They don’t apply in every circumstance but will help you begin to get your mind around the shifts you need to make.

1. A muscular “tease”: Whether in a tweet, headline or email subject line, you need six or fewer strong words to yank someone’s attention away from Tinder or TikTok.
2. One strong first sentence, or “lede”: Your opening sentence should be the most memorable—tell me something I don’t know, would want to know, should know. Make this sentence as direct, short and sharp as possible.
3. Context, or “Why it matters”: We’re all faking it. Mike and I learned this speaking to Fortune 500 CEOs. We all know a lot about a little. We’re too ashamed or afraid to ask, but we almost always need you to explain why your new fact, idea or thought matters.
4. The choice to learn more, or “Go deeper”: Don’t force someone to read or hear more than they want. Make it their decision. If they decide “yes,” what follows should be truly worth their time.

VandeHei, Jim; Allen, Mike; Schwartz, Roy. Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less (pp. 24-25). Workman Publishing Company.

❤️📕 Emotion Rich Alt Text

Good alt text means that screen reader users get the same ‘meaning’ from the page as a fully sighted user.

The relevant parts of an image aren’t limited to the cold hard facts. Images can make you feel a particular way, and that’s something that should be made available to a screen reader user.

“Emotion matters” really changed how I think about writing alt text. Léonie wrote a longer article on the idea, which I recommend reading.

Writing great alt text: Emotion matters – JakeArchibald.com

So just what is a decorative image? It seems to me that one person’s eye candy is another person’s emotional link to a website.

A good alt text can conjure up wonderfully stimulating mental images. A friendly smile is the same in print, photo or wax crayon. Whether you listen to an image or see it, the emotional response is the key factor, so why should we recommend that these emotion rich images should be given a null alt text and hidden from screen reader users?

Perhaps it’s time we introduced another group of images: Emotion rich images and encouraged the practice of providing descriptive alt texts for them. If people don’t want to listen to the alt text, they won’t. If people don’t want to pause and look at the image, they won’t. In either case, it’s good to have the choice.

Text descriptions and emotion rich images – Tink – Léonie Watson

🥡 Main Takeaways

We provide “Main Takeaways” on many pages. Main takeaways are presented with one idea per line in a bulleted list format. If you don’t have time or energy to read an entire page, reading just the main takeaways will give you what you most need to know.

Here are the main takeaways for our front pages.

🤖 Search

🐿️🐅 How We Try to Make This Website More ADHD-Friendly

In this video, Jessica discusses how she made her book more ADHD friendly.

We attempt all of these things on our website at stimpunks.org.

• Lots of whitespace.
• Every page/screen has something breaking up the text. Break up text with pull quotes, blocks, bullets, bolding, backgrounds, images.
• Add attention getters like selective bolding and pull quotes.
• Write in conversational style.
• Organize so you don’t have to read it.
• Flip open right to your struggle. Allow people to pick up and go right to what they need.
• Format is the same for every chapter.
• Make it so people can just read the headers.
• Make it engaging and visual.
• Add in jokes and feelings.
• Put everything in one book so folks have one place to go.

How I Made My Book ADHD-Friendly 🧠📘 – YouTube

What would you do to make our scrollytelling style on stimpunks.org more ADHD-friendly?

📜 Our Rules and Patterns for Scrollytelling

We are iterating toward “digital stories” and “Web-Based Conceptual Portmanteau”.

Consume this content to the depth and breadth of your preference in whatever way and order works for you.

🫀 It’s Alive!

This website is a living document that you can contribute to under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA license. Send us your suggestions and favorite quotes and resources.

📚🎥🎧 Story: Maintaining the Continuity of Creation

You wrote that “the key to keeping track of stable innovation processes across multiple generations is story.” You said—I love this quote—“that it can be more creative than a Cambrian explosion, or more destructive than a nuclear explosion. Story that maintains the continuity of creation requires a lot more work, however, and it develops over time from thousands of data sets held in relationships.”

Deep Time Diligence – with Tyson Yunkaporta

Stimpunks.org attempts to be “story that maintains the continuity of creation” with our research-storytelling and digital composition. We curate the treasures of neurodivergent and disabled cultures and weave together a community of voices and experiences.

We build on each other’s work – as good revolutionaries always do.

@ira.socol • We build on each other’s work – as good revolutionaries always do. I love what you’re building. I… • Threads

Stimpunks.org is a celebration of bricolage and pastiche assembled into story, building on other’s work and preserving it as story that maintains the continuity of creation.

Forgetting is a tool of white supremacy. It keeps us from building upon prior strategies led by our ancestors and elders. White supremacy also teaches us that we must be the first—the first to confront a particular issue or problem and therefore need to create something new instead of drawing from our rich history of revolutionary work available to us.

Memory.

Page, Cara; Woodland, Erica. Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety (p. 32). North Atlantic Books.

We use bricolage and pastiche to tell our stories and preserve our histories.

In practice, however, punks consciously or unconsciously drew on previous youth cultures, with methodologies and ideologies marked by pastiche and bricolage. In other words, punks borrowed freely from previous youth cultures and dominant society, melding these elements into a new form of expression.

“We Accept You, One of Us?”: Punk Rock, Community, and Individualism in an Uncertain Era, 1974-1985

We create lily pads from the rhizome.

⏳ Deep Time Diligence

Tyson Yunkaporta’s conception of “Deep Time Diligence” resonates with our efforts to serve the edges and connect the rhizome.

Deep time diligence is sort of looking at all the systems and the trajectories of these things and doing catastrophic risk analysis, doing all these kinds of things, doing these things collectively. So as a group, everybody’s out there observing what’s happening in nature and what’s happening in your economic systems and communities, and we keep coming together and everybody’s bringing a different data set, and some of these overlap, some of them are contradictory. But in the aggregate, we get a sense, together, with that one big brain—the computational power of a group of people together, you know, big community together doing all this work—that, that works. That’s deep time diligence, because you start building the stories that you need and the Lore that you need and the knowledge that you need for the system as it’s shifting.

Deep Time Diligence – with Tyson Yunkaporta

That’s why myth works so well. That’s why myth is so evocative and so enduring; it’s because all these diverse ignorances come together and truth emerges from that, from all those different data sets. Because the ignorance is just that: you’ve only analyzed it from one point of view. But collectively, collective analysis—ah, that’s amazing. That’s the only way it can be done.

Deep Time Diligence – with Tyson Yunkaporta

☁️ Data is Vulnerable

Data is vulnerable. Data just disappears. All your photos in Photobucket—how long are they gonna be there for? Is someone just gonna maintain that server forever, and maintain the costs for that, and keep losing money? Nah. So the only way to store data long term, like proper long term, is in intergenerational relationships, where data is stored in narratives, intergenerational narratives. That can last for forty, fifty, sixty thousand years. That can last as long as relations are continued—that data will last

Deep Time Diligence – with Tyson Yunkaporta

Doing curation work on Stimpunks emphasizes how real this trend of information loss is. We’re continuously updating broken links, hoping they were captured in the Internet Archive so we can link to a public copy. We use the Internet Archive browser extension to tell it to save copies of pages critical to our storytelling. The amount of link rot created by the collapse of Twitter as people locked and closed their accounts was great.

The trend is accelerating with companies taking decades of archives offline.

• MTV News Website Goes Dark, Archives Pulled Offline
• Comedy Central Website Removes Archive of Video Clips, Content

🗄️ Become a Citizen Archivist

We need to maintain the continuity of creation through story. We attempt that on stimpunks.org for the neurodiversity and disability communities.

Join us. Become a citizen archivist and help tell our stories across generations.

I’ve loved so much of the art, culture, criticism and reporting that I’ve seen from marginalized people in the past several years, and I’m terrified that a lot of it could be buried in this tidal wave of hate. We’re really going to need all of those stories and creations to hold onto, during the dark times to come. We’ll keep producing great art and culture no matter what, but we’ll still want to hold on to the proof of what we can accomplish when the “mainstream” culture industry gives us access to resources. And there are so many obscure, little-noticed, indie projects from the past several years that we’re going to want to revisit. This has been a fertile time, and we need to save as much of these riches as we can.

The good news? There’s something you can do to help. You can become a citizen archivist.

We Should All Be Archivists • Buttondown

As we move toward creating a society within which we can each flourish, ageism is another distortion of relationship which interferes without vision. By ignoring the past, we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes. The “generation gap” is an important social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memories of the community, nor ask the all important question, “Why?” This gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread. We find ourselves having to repeat and relearn the same old lessons over and over that our mothers did because we do not pass on what we have learned, or because we are unable to listen.

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

🗣️ Talk, Texts, and Media

We use talk, texts, and media in a highly connected way to provide vicarious learning experiences.

Stories, texts, and media (e.g., videos, films, music, and video games) can be important means for extending children’s real-world experiences. Each of these can cause a child to fill up his or her imagination with images and match them to words, just as children do in real-world experiences. Talk, texts, and media are types of virtual or vicarious experiences.

The human mind is built in such a way that people (that is, all of us) often cannot remember whether an experience of theirs was in the world, in talk (in a story for example), in a text, or in a movie (Reeves & Nass, 1999). All these can become fodder for pattern recognition, the superpower of the human mind.

Gee, James Paul. Teaching, Learning, Literacy in Our High-Risk High-Tech World: A Framework for Becoming Human (p. 38). Teachers College Press.

📊 Language Has Always and Ever Been a Multimodal Performance

Language has always and ever been a multimodal performance.

Serafini, Frank. Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy (Language and Literacy Series) (p. xi). Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition.

Multimodal Literacy

This new world is a multimodal world. Language is one mode; images, actions, sounds, and physical manipulation are other modes. Today, students need to know how to make and get meaning from all these modes alone and integrated together. In the 21st century anyone who cannot handle multimodality is illiterate. They must be able to handle it critically, since without critical and analytic skills a multimodal world of games, ads, news, and other media is a world where it is easier than ever to lie, scam, dupe, and manipulate people.

Serafini, Frank. Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy (Language and Literacy Series). Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition.

Multimodal literacy isn’t about pretty pictures and popsicle sticks. It’s not about Pinterest Pedagogy. It’s about honing a sense-making skillset our students can use to navigate the complex times in which we live.

Reading the World: The Case for Multimodal Literacy – National Council of Teachers of English

Multimodal Ensembles

Frank Serafini, author of the fantastic “Reading the Visual,” refers to these print, visual, and video combinations as “multimodal ensembles” to capture the fact we rarely encounter information in a single mode anymore.

Whether we’re viewing a snapchat or reading an online article, most of the texts we engage with convey meaning across several modes that shape the meanings within.

Reading the World: The Case for Multimodal Literacy – National Council of Teachers of English

Crip Linguistics

Crip linguistics frames language as a form of care work where we work collectively to provide access and co-construct meaning.

PsyArXiv Preprints | Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: Imaging a Crip Linguistics

🔑 The 7 Keys to Multimodal Pedagogy… According to Your Grandmothers

1. Learn with the students!
2. Embrace play and failure
3. Hack the tech!
4. Compose for real audiences
5. Keep the focus on reflective learning
6. Use new media to rethink pedagogy
7. Fight for access and justice for all

The Seven Keys to Multimodal Pedagogy . . . According to Your Grandmothers – Coda: Back to the Future – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy

🖍️ Let’s Revel in Disruptive Frivolity

The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production. [. . .] Indeed, terms like serious and rigorous [. . .] signal a form of training and learning that confirms what is already known according to approved methods of knowing, but they do not allow for visionary insights or flights of fancy.

(Jack Halberstam 2011, 6)

But Halberstam’s queer rejection of seriousness emboldens us to revel in the disruptive frivolity of multimodal play—to recognize that our conscious refusal of a serious tone in digital multimodal scholarship can potentially open new ways of knowing and being in the field.

Multimodal Performance – Methodological Play – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy

🌿 Biophilic Design

We attempt biophilic design with our color choices and art selection.

Biophilic design is an approach to creating spaces that connect people to the natural world. It prioritises elements like natural light, organic textures, and calming colours inspired by nature. The goal is to create environments that reduce stress, promote well-being, and foster a sense of calm and focus.

For schools and nurseries, this means designing spaces that help children feel grounded and secure, particularly for those who may find traditional learning environments overwhelming.

The Power of Biophilic Design in Schools and… – The Autistic SENCO | Facebook

Biophilic design is the designing for people as a biological organism, respecting the mind-body systems as indicators of health and well-being in the context of what is locally appropriate and responsive. Good biophilic design draws from influential perspectives – health conditions, socio-cultural norms and expectations, past experiences, frequency and duration of the user experience, the many speeds at which it may be encountered, and user perception and processing of the experience – to create spaces that are inspirational, restorative, and healthy, as well as integrative with the functionality of the place and the (urban) ecosystem to which it is applied. Above all, biophilic design must nurture a love of place.

14 Patterns of Biophilic Design

Biophilic design, on the other hand, creates a sensory-friendly environment where children can focus, feel safe, and engage more meaningfully with their surroundings. Here’s why it works:

1. Calming the Senses: Neutral tones and natural textures are less overwhelming for the senses, helping children who may struggle with sensory overload.
2. Improved Focus: Studies have found that exposure to natural elements can boost concentration and cognitive function.
3. Lower Stress Levels: Biophilic spaces have been linked to reduced stress and anxiety, which can have a huge impact on children’s ability to learn and regulate their emotions.
4. Increased Creativity: Natural environments inspire curiosity and creativity, encouraging children to explore and engage with the world around them.

What Does Biophilic Design Look Like in Schools?

In practice, biophilic design might include:

• Natural Materials: Wooden furniture, woven baskets, and cotton fabrics replacing plastic-heavy materials.
• Neutral Tones: Soft whites, beiges, greens, and blues inspired by nature replacing bold, primary colours.
• Plants: Adding greenery to classrooms to improve air quality and bring a touch of the outdoors inside.
• Natural Light: Maximizing daylight with large windows and open spaces.
• Decluttered Walls: Streamlined displays with minimal, purposeful content rather than overly busy and overstimulating decorations.

The Power of Biophilic Design in Schools and… – The Autistic SENCO | Facebook

🎸 When the movement is strong, the music is strong.

We use music to tell our stories. We embed music and lyrics all over our website.