You get all sorts of people in the library, and the librarian gets it all.
Terry Pratchett

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Knowledge equals power…
The string was important. After a while the Librarian stopped. He concentrated all his powers of librarianship.
Power equals energy…
People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.
Energy equals matter…
He swung into an avenue of shelving that was apparently a few feet long and walked along it briskly for half an hour.
Matter equals mass.
And mass distorts space. It distorts it into polyfractal L-space.
So, while the Dewey system has its fine points, when you’re setting out to look something up in the multidimensional folds of L-space what you really need is a ball of string.
Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

Oook.
The Librarian
At Stimpunks, 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
We’re contributing to a library economy.
A library economy would require a vast reorientation of our priorities from the centrality of capital and competition to the centrality of humanity and cooperation, which brings us to the final core concept for a library economy: complementarity.
We Need A Library Economy – YouTube
Revolutionaries can engage in building full-fledged library economies based on the commons.
This can take the form of tool libraries, vehicle libraries, clothing libraries, furniture libraries, and more in an effort curb overproduction, end planned obsolescence, and provide access to an irreducible minimum to all.
How We Can Change The World – YouTube
Here are some books of the edges we recommend. We provide WorldCat links and embed Amazon previews. The Librarian, visiting us from Discworld via L-space, will guide your journey with the alacrity offered by prehensile hands and feet.

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We’d like to grow our library into something like The Bi Pan Library with synopses, selected quotes, contextualization, and more. Interested in helping?
I’m a writer at least partly because I had access to public libraries.
Octavia Butler
I am also a product of librarians who read stories to groups of avid little kids.
Sitting in the hushed cocoon of the library gave shape and structure to her days. It gave her a role. It gave her purpose.
Whenever Butler felt dispirited — about not having a mentor or a steady income or a clear path forward — she’d remind herself that she always had two things: her desire and access to aisle upon aisle of books.
Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction Predicted the World We Live In – The New York Times

- NeuroTribes
- New Releases in Our Own Voices
- Autistic Collaboration Trust
- Fundamental Texts of Progressive Pedagogy
- Books Every Progressive Educator Should Read
- Autism Books For Parents and Clinicians
- For Autistic People, by Autistic People
- By Our Community
- Have you really read all these?
- We Need a Library Economy: Usufruct, the Irreducible Minimum, and Complementarity
- Libraries are Punk AF
- Librarians Rock
Books bend space and time.
Guards! Guards!: A Novel of Discworld
NeuroTribes
Our community recommends NeuroTribes to everyone. NeuroTribes changed the conversation about what it is to be human. It is a history of the 20th Century through the lens of the dispossessed and misunderstood. It is a trip through anguish and horror and a celebration of the minds that survived to make modernity.
The idea of neurodiversity has inspired the creation of a rapidly growing civil rights movement based on the simple idea that the most astute interpreters of autistic behavior are autistic people themselves rather than their parents or doctors.
The notion that the cure for the most disabling aspects of autism will never be found in a pill, but in supportive communities, is one that parents have been coming to on their own for generations.
NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity
Take a trip through the pages of NeuroTribes with this talk from author Steve Silberman.
Build a structure that will enable autistic people and their families to live happier, healthier, more engaged, more productive, more creative, successful lives.
NeuroTribes and the Real History of Autism
2016 Neurodiversity High Tech Conference

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New Releases in Our Own Voices
The tendency to force a meltdown upon an autistic person, and then to castigate them for acting in such a childish and ungrateful way, is a rhythm that most autistic adults will recognize and despise.
What I Want to Talk About How Autistic Special Interests Shape a Life
What has prevented me from feeling that I can claim disability is the way my disabilities do not fit into the typical legal and medical models of disability and accommodations, the ways white disabled people especially have been dismissive of my understanding of how racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and fatphobia have materially created, sustained, and exacerbated my disabilities.
Black Disability Politics
I cannot get on board with approaches to disability that do not understand it as inherently, inextricably tied to racism and other oppressions. I cannot and will not promote a disability-first or disability-pride-only analysis—and the research that undergirds this book has only solidified and clarified for me these beliefs that I once held more quietly and tentatively. In claiming this Black disability identity, I often use we, ours, and us when referring to disabled people, Black people, and Black disabled people. I refuse to use they as if I am separate from the communities I write about, live within, and learn from every day.
Black Disability Politics
I have spent over a decade unravelling myself, carefully turning over each piece shattered on the floor since my first breakdown, desperate to find one that I could recognise. I realised I had been camouflaging my whole life, that is, I’d been trying to mask my autistic traits and fit in with all the non-autistic people around me, desperate to always be liked and to never draw attention to myself. Underneath was an abyss of emptiness, a stream of tainted thoughts that didn’t belong to me. I was utterly lost, but little did I know that such a painful journey would lead to such an extraordinary rediscovery of myself and others.
Taking off the Mask: Practical Exercises to Help Understand and Minimise the Effects of Autistic Camouflaging
My first day of school was full of tears and utter terror as I desperately tried to cry out for my mum to return and take me home. But I had no words. While the teachers would say I refused to talk, even at the age of four I knew this wasn’t true. My words were stuck and I couldn’t talk.
Taking off the Mask: Practical Exercises to Help Understand and Minimise the Effects of Autistic Camouflaging
The Future Is Disabled : Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs
I wish I didn’t find it so hard to speak up.
But at school, when there’s so much going on at once, and so many sounds and tight clothes and new things?
I get overwhelmed.
So when I try to speak, I can never find the words.
Speak Up!
Before Mommy and I leave, I’m busy resting with my favorite super seat: Misty!
I have cerebral palsy, so I know that when my legs get tired I have to stop and sit.
Yesterday at the park, I overdid it on the swings, and my right leg still hurts a little.
Misty is the living room couch named after my favorite dancer, Misty Copeland. When we aren’t doing pirouettes before dance class, we play “I spy” and laugh at our silly answers. Misty loves to dance, and I know she loves me. She’s comfortable and graceful. That’s what makes her a super seat.
Sam’s Super Seats
Autistic people have built many niche communities from the ground up—both out of necessity and because our interests and modes of being are, well, weird.
Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity (p. 218)

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Autistic Collaboration Trust
All books featured by the Autistic Collaboration Trust are written by members of the Autistic community and contribute to the co-creation of Autistic culture.

- The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale (2021)
- Neuroqueer Heresies (2021)
- Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement (2019)
- Being Autistic (2019)
- A Field Guide to Earthlings (2010)
- Through the Eyes of Aliens (1998)
- NeuroDiversity: The Birth of an Idea (1998)
- Don’t Mourn for Us (1993)
Source: Books | Autistic Collaboration

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Fundamental Texts of Progressive Pedagogy
Our friends at Human Restoration Project suggest that their community read these four “fundamental texts of progressive pedagogy” to understand their philosophy. These are great recommendations that also help understand our philosophy at Stimpunks.
- Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks
- Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools by Ira Socol, Pam Moran, and Chad Ratliff
- The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards” by Alfie Kohn
- On Critical Pedagogy by Henry Giroux
When learning is allowed to be project, problem, and passion driven, then children learn because of their terroir, not disengage in spite of it. When we recognize biodiversity in our schools as healthy, then we increase the likelihood that our ecosystems will thrive.
To be contributors to educating children to live in a world that is increasingly challenging to negotiate, schools must be conceptualized as ecological communities, spaces for learning with the potential to embody all of the concepts of the ecosystem – interactivity, biodiversity, connections, adaptability, succession, and balance.
Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools
IF WE WANT to talk about schools in a way that matters, we have to talk about the people in schools. In fact, we have to make a habit of seeing things from the perspective of that student sitting right over there. You see her? She’s playing with her hair and wondering why the clock stops moving during math class. Meaningful educational reform requires us to understand her point of view: Can she connect at any level with what she just read?
As any number of studies have found, a child’s “thoughts and emotions while performing an action are more important in determining subsequent engagement than the actual outcome of that action.”
The Schools Our Children Deserve : Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards”
Critical pedagogy takes as one of its central projects an attempt to be discerning and attentive to those places and practices in which social agency has been denied and produced.
On Critical Pedagogy

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Books Every Progressive Educator Should Read
Nick and Chris of Human Restoration Project list some of their favorite books for progressive educators.
I think a cornerstone of progressive education is understanding the connections between happiness and contentment and learning.
Schooling should be about creating a better world not preparing people for the world that exists.
Chris McNutt of Human Restoration Project
Hope is a platform for action.
What about our education is an inoculation against white supremacy and against white nationalism?
Good digital pedagogy is accessible to everyone.
Nick Covington of Human Restoration Project
Nick
- Troublemakers : Lessons in Freedom From Young Children at School
- Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto
- The Book of Learning and Forgetting
- The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America
- 17,000 Classroom Visits Can’t Be Wrong: Strategies That Engage Students, Promote Active Learning, and Boost Achievement
- What’s the Big Idea?: Question-Driven Units to Motivate Reading, Writing, and Thinking
- The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards”
- Teaching as a Subversive Activity
- Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
- Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School
- We Got This : Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be
- The Fire Next Time
- Democracy and Education
Chris
- Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
- Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed
- The End of the Rainbow: How Educating for Happiness-Not Money-Would Transform Our Schools
- Culture and Power in the Classroom: Educational Foundations for the Schooling of Bicultural Students
- Schooling as a Ritual Performance: Toward a Political Economy of Educational Symbols and Gestures
- On Critical Pedagogy
- The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards”
- Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education
- Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools
- The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools
- Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control Our Lives
- Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences
- Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
- The Path to Purpose: Helping Our Children Find Their Calling in Life
- Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania
- We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice
- We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom
- Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
Source: MINDFOOD I: Top 10 Books Every Progressive Educator Should Read – YouTube

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Autism Books For Parents and Clinicians
Steve Silberman offers a great list of autism books for parents and clinicians.
- Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism
by Barry Prizant and Tom Fields-Meyer - Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism
edited by Shannon Des Roches Rosa, Jennifer Byde Myers, Liz Ditz, Emily Willingham, and Carol Greenburg - Raising Cubby: A Father and Son’s Adventures with Asperger’s, Trains, Tractors, and High Explosives
by John Elder Robison - Parenting Without Panic: A Pocket Support Group for Parents of Children and Teens on the Autism Spectrum
by Brenda Dater - Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate: A User Guide to an Asperger Life
by Cynthia Kim - My Baby Rides the Short Bus: The Unabashedly Human Experience of Raising Kids with Disabilities
edited by Yanta Bertelli, Jennifer Silverman, and Sarah Talbot - Asperkids: An Insider’s Guide to Loving, Understanding, and Teaching Children with Asperger’s Syndrome
by Jennifer Cook O’Toole - The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism
by Naoki Hidashida - Neurodiversity.com: Honoring the Varieties of Human Wiring by Kathleen Seidel
- The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy
by Priscilla Gilman
Source for this list: Resources – Steve Silberman

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For Autistic People, by Autistic People
- Pretending to Be Normal
by Liane Holliday Willey - I Think I Might Be Autistic: A Guide to Autism Spectrum Disorder Diagnosis and Self-Discovery for Adults
by Cynthia Kim - Living Independently on the Autism Spectrum: What You Need to Know to Move into a Place of Your Own, Succeed at Work, Start a Relationship, Stay Safe, and Enjoy Life as an Adult on the Autism Spectrum
by Lynne Soraya - Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s
by John Elder Robison - Ask and Tell: Self Advocacy for People on the Autism Spectrum
edited by Stephen Shore, Liane Holliday Willey, Phil Schwarz, Roger Meyer, Kassiane Sibley, and Ruth Elaine Joyner Hane - Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking
edited by Julia Bascom - Typed Words, Loud Voices
edited by Amy Sequenzia, Elizabeth Grace, and Melanie Yergeau - Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate: A User Guide to an Asperger Life
by Cynthia Kim - No You Don’t: Essays from an Unstrange Mind
by Sparrow Rose Jones - Blazing My Trail: Living and Thriving with Autism
by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg - The Independent Woman’s Handbook for Super Safe Living on the Autism Spectrum
by Robyn Steward - Navigating College: A Handbook on Self Advocacy Written for Autistic Students from Autistic Adults
edited by the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network - Developing Talents: Careers For Individuals With Asperger Syndrome and High-functioning Autism
by Temple Grandin and Kate Duffy - And Straight on Till Morning: Essays on Autism Acceptance
edited by Julia Bascom - A Field Guide to Earthlings: An Autistic/Asperger View of Neurotypical Behavior
by Ian Ford - A Helpful Compilation of Blogs and Online Resources by Autistic People
by Kit Mead - A Comprehensive List of Blogs by Autistic People
Source for this list: Resources – Steve Silberman

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By Our Community
Kristina Daniele
Kristina Brooke Daniele is a Black, queer, neurodivergent homeschooling mom, educator, wife, and author of two books, (Civil Rights Then and Now and i wandered, lost: poems). Kristina has worked as an educator in some capacity for over 15 years- first as a classroom teacher, then as a homeschooling teacher, and currently, as an education consultant. She is passionate about collaborative projects centering on creating and maintaining safe-spaces for those who have for too long been pushed aside. During her time at Automattic, Kristina spearheaded the creation of the Employee Resource Group, Cocoamattic for Black employees at the company.

WIP by Kristina Daniele I’m in pain. Mental. Physical. The result’s the same. Retreating into silence. Resting my brain. Taking deep breaths. Trying to reframe. Writing in my journal. Listening to myself. Trying to get centered But drifting to the left. I’m in pain. Mental. Physical. Emotionally, it’s the same. Stimming to reset Moving to get rest. Blocking out the world, And listening to myself. Trying to get centered But drifting to the left. I'm a work in progress. I'm not finished yet.

Rainbow Punk orangutan shelving book with prehensile feet, Geometric, Manga, Colored Pencil
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Have you really read all these?
A good library is comprised in large part by books you haven’t read, making it something you can turn to when you don’t know something. He calls it: the Anti-Library.
The 5-Step Research Method I Used For Tim Ferriss, Robert Greene, and Tucker Max

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Someone walks into your house and sees your many books on your many bookshelves. Have you really read all these? they ask. This person does not understand knowledge. A good library is comprised in large part by books you haven’t read, making it something you can turn to when you don’t know something. He calls it: the Anti-Library.
I remember once in college, the pride I felt about being able to write an entire research paper with stuff from my own anti-library. We all have books and papers that we haven’t read yet. Instead of feeling guilty, you should see them as an opportunity: know they’re available to you if you ever need them.
This is the mark you must aim for as a researcher, to not only have enough material - and to know where the rest of what you haven’t read will be located - on hand to do your work. You must build a library and an anti-library now… before you have an emergency presentation or a shot at a popular guest post.
The 5-Step Research Method I Used For Tim Ferriss, Robert Greene, and Tucker Max
We Need a Library Economy: Usufruct, the Irreducible Minimum, and Complementarity
These concepts are foundational to any cooperative, caring, and egalitarian society, but particularly to what Bookchin called ‘organic society,’ which consist of the egalitarian tribal societies that can be found in much of human history.
Beginning with the first essential concept for a library economy, usufruct refers to the freedom of individuals or groups in a community to access and use, but not destroy, common resources to supply their needs.
The second essential concept for a library economy is the irreducible minimum, which is the guaranteed provision of the means necessary to sustain life, the level of living that no one should ever fall below, regardless of the size of their individual contribution to the community.
Complementarity is a way of looking at non-hierarchical differences within a society as something generative, where each person contributes a small part to an outcome greater than the sum of its parts.
We Need A Library Economy – YouTube
We are participating in the library economy with our “Things Library“.
A library economy would require a vast reorientation of our priorities from the centrality of capital and competition to the centrality of humanity and cooperation, which brings us to the final core concept for a library economy: complementarity.
We Need A Library Economy – YouTube
…engage in building full-fledged library economies based on the commons.
How We Can Change The World – YouTube
This can take the form of tool libraries, vehicle libraries, clothing libraries, furniture libraries, and more in an effort curb overproduction, end planned obsolescence, and provide access to an irreducible minimum to all.
Libraries are Punk AF

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Five laws of library science – Wikipedia
- Books are for use.
- Every person his or her book.
- Every book its reader.
- Save the time of the reader.
- A library is a growing organism.

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Librarians Rock

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Libraries are the last place in America where you are valued for your personhood, rather than the contents of your wallet. At the library, you are a patron, not a customer.
Librarians are kind of upside-down cops: public employees who are stepping in wherever the rest of our services have failed.
They Want to Kill Libraries. The Last Place in America Where You Are… | by Cory Doctorow | Nov, 2022 | Medium
While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, their powerful political connections or great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
Further explorations in L-space,
I leaned closer and whispered, “A librarian’s gotta do what a librarian’s gotta do.”
Libriomancer

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