A collection of printable, shareable web artifacts — a collaboration between Stimpunks Foundation and More Realms.
Love You Down To Your Star Stuff. · Cosmic Connections.
Star Stuff is a family of self-contained HTML zines, field guides, and broadsides built around a single idea stated as an act of love: the universe doesn't pathologize its own variation.
The framing braids two threads together. From Carl Sagan's cosmology: the calcium in your bones, the nitrogen in your DNA, the iron in your blood were all forged inside dying stars — you are, literally, star stuff. From Dr. Iwao Yasuda's 1950s discovery: bone is piezoelectric, a crystalline lattice that turns pressure into electrical charge, so your skeleton is quietly generating voltage with every step. Put those together under the neurodiversity paradigm and you get the through-line of the whole collection — that difference is variation, not deficit, and that a cosmos which doesn't rank its own patterns is the right scale at which to think about human minds.
Each piece here is a single HTML file with no build step and no dependencies beyond web fonts. They're made to be read on screen, embedded, or printed and handed to someone who needs one.
Star Stuff is an official collaboration between the Stimpunks Foundation — a 501(c)(3) nonprofit built by and for neurodivergent and disabled people, and the knowledge garden this collection flowers from — and More Realms, Helen Edgar's speculative companion to her Autistic Realms. Helen's writing is one of the collection's sources and much of its weather: Why Difference Comes First, We Are Made of Relations, My Monotropic Galaxy, the shared-air and shared-signal coinages, and the constellation reading of the spiky profile all arrived here from her two sites. Three zines (Nos. 11, 28, 30) and Field Guide No. 12 are hers outright; Nos. 29 and 45 were developed after her essays, and No. 19 closes on a coda of hers; her work is named and cited across much of the rest.
Both organizations appear together wherever the collection attributes itself — Stimpunks first, equal weight — in three fixed forms:
| Form | Where |
|---|---|
Stimpunks Foundation × More Realms |
colophons, page eyebrows, og:site_name, JSON-LD publisher |
Stimpunks × More Realms |
tight monospace slots — the zine brand line, covers, index cards |
stimpunks.org · morerealms.com · starstuff.earth |
the URL trio in colophon footers |
× is the collaboration mark and nothing else; · stays the house separator. Both names link
out via the shared .ss-cobrand class in starstuff.css, which makes them inherit the
surrounding color so the pair reads as one mark. Covers and print-first sheets carry the pairing
as plain text. Per-piece credits stay exact underneath the co-branding: where a piece is Helen's,
it says so and it is hers.
The site's second tagline, Helen Edgar's phrase, with the argument at
cosmic-connections.html. Two lineages are already inside it: James
Burke's Connections (BBC, first broadcast 1978), whose method is to follow a thread across
centuries and disciplines rather than narrate breakthroughs, and Carl Sagan's The Cosmic
Connection (1973), where "we are made of star-stuff" first reached print. The page maps what
travels between the three sites in both directions, and grounds the method in Stimpunks' own
emergence,
iteration and
interdisciplinary learning, plus
Kirby Ferguson's Everything Is a Remix (2010–2012) — credited by name, which the house had not
been doing.
The project's central phrase compresses through several registers, each with its own use:
| Form | Register | Use |
|---|---|---|
| LYDTYSS | full | Love You Down To Your Star Stuff |
| LYSS | tender | the quiet, intimate form |
| LUSS | punk | the loud, defiant form |
| L★S | visual | the logotype / mark |
| ★stuff | reclamatory | the noun, taken back |
Each piece's number, title, and framing come from the page itself. index.html is the canonical
index, where these same pieces are grouped by collection rather than by kind.
The number records when a piece was made; the collection records what it is. Numbers are
chronological and load-bearing — the changelog, FACTCHECK.md, and prose references all key off
them — so they run non-contiguously inside any collection, and that gap is information rather than
a mistake. Nothing is ever renumbered.
The one exception is signed on its own face. No. 37 was held for a piece that shipped later as
No. 45, leaving a gap; out-of-order-zine.html went back and occupied it, so it is the single
number here that is not a date — it is younger than No. 46. It marks itself leap for that,
and every other gap in the sequence stays empty.
Counts here are measured, not remembered. At the time of writing that is 99 HTML pages — 84
collection members, the 13 collection pages, plus index.html and search.html, which belong to
no collection. Re-derive rather than trust it:
node tools/check-markup.mjs --checkIts last line reports the page total, and the member count and collection count it derived from the collection pages' own cards.
Thirteen landing pages, one per section of index.html plus one deliberately unlisted. A
collection is a page, not a folder — a
note that links, listing its members and arguing for why they belong together. They were observed
after thirty-five zines had accumulated with no folders at all, which keeps faith with
cosmic-connections.html: the categories are outputs, not inputs. Five sort by register (what
kind of argument a piece is making), four sort off register and say so on their own face, and three
are the site's own furniture.
| File | Collection | Sorted by |
|---|---|---|
collection-star-stuff.html |
Star Stuff | Register — one settled, checkable fact, followed honestly, already contains the belonging claim. |
collection-star-gazing.html |
Star Gazing | Register — experimental, neuroqueer, wonder-forward; possibility rather than proof. Named by Helen Edgar. |
collection-more-than-human.html |
More Than Human | Register — Umwelt, multispecies, ethodiversity; neurodiversity de-anthropocentrized. |
collection-kin.html |
Kin | Register — citation-dense natural history with a neurodivergence moral. |
collection-stars-we-grew-up-on.html |
Stars We Grew Up On | Register — culture and icon; owns the star-as-celebrity sense, and the place the fun is loudest. |
collection-field-guides.html |
Field Guides | Form — a catalogue of same-shaped entries, none of them ranked. Cuts across register on purpose. |
collection-how-we-got-here.html |
How We Got Here | Form — a Burke chain, one link per spread, every joint marked documented, contested or leap. |
collection-print.html |
Medium — paper. Sheets that happen to have a web page, not web pages that will print. | |
collection-sound.html |
Sound | Medium — audio. The one collection that points at other people's work. |
collection-start-here.html |
Start Here | Unsorted — the ways in. Three doors in and one door out. |
collection-foundations.html |
Foundations | Unsorted — what the rest of the site presupposes rather than argues. |
collection-notes.html |
Notes & Rationale | Unsorted — the working papers. Outside the reading chain, because all four of its members are. |
collection-easter-eggs.html |
Easter Eggs | Unsorted — real pieces kept off the front page, reachable by two small footer doors or by search. The only collection with no section on the index, and the only one created below the two-member floor; it explains both on its own face. |
| File | Piece | What it is |
|---|---|---|
about.html |
What Star Stuff Is | The shortest version of the whole idea: what these pieces are, how they read settled science as an argument about belonging, and why they're written in the first person plural. |
love-you-down-to-your-star-stuff.html |
Love You Down To Your Star Stuff (the page) | The whole thing in long form — Sagan and the settled science, the five shorthands, the video inspirations, the Resonance and Belonging cards, related traditions across cultures, the Crystal Under Pressure prose poem, and what LYDTYSS is and is not. |
cosmic-connections.html |
How It All Connects | The house method, and the argument behind the site's second tagline: what travels between Stimpunks, More Realms and Star Stuff — essays becoming zines, glossary becoming argument, corrections going back out — after James Burke's Connections (1978) and Sagan's The Cosmic Connection (1973). Why a web of linked notes produces concepts nobody wrote. Deliberately outside the reading chain. |
| File | Piece | What it is |
|---|---|---|
manifesto.html |
Star Stuff Manifesto (founding document) | On our cosmic origins, the science of how we carry the universe in our bones, and why neurodivergent and disabled people belong — not despite difference, but as difference. Six sections and eight declarations. |
inclusion-safety-creed.html |
Inclusion Safety: Owed, Not Earned (a creed) | The first stage of psychological safety as a creed: inclusion is owed, not earned — worth before worthiness, harm the only disqualifier. Where Timothy Clark grounds it in common humanity, this goes a floor deeper — you were ★stuff all along, so belonging is constitutive, not conferred. |
too-good-to-check.html |
Too Good to Check (the checking ethic) | How a story gets smoother than the science, and what reading the primary source puts back. Six ways a fact goes wrong — the quote nobody said, the number that went stale, the story told backwards, the credit that drifted, the press release instead of the paper, and the finding that flatters you — with seventeen worked corrections, most of them errors we published and had to fix. Why "go to the primary" is the opposite move from "do your own research," and why the primary source for an Autistic life is an Autistic person. |
In number order, which is the order they were made. Three of them are filed elsewhere on the site and keep their numbers regardless — Nos. 3 and 18 in Foundations, No. 4 in Start Here — which is the sharpest case of the number and the collection disagreeing. Both collection pages explain it on their face rather than leaving it to look like an oversight.
| File | Piece | What it is |
|---|---|---|
bone-song-zine.html |
Bone Song (Zine No. 1) | Piezoelectric bone, star-forged calcium, and a universe that doesn't pathologize its own variation. Six spreads with the full prose poem, diagrams, and the neurodiversity reframe. |
lydtyss-zine.html |
Love You Down To Your Star Stuff (Zine No. 2) | The full phrase as a zine — the cosmology of care. What Sagan said, what the elements are, what "down to" means as a direction, and six affirmations across every register. |
neurodiversity-field-guide-zine.html |
Neurodiversity Field Guide (Zine No. 3) | The paradigm, plainly stated. Two frameworks compared, three key definitions, five myth/fact pairs, five principles, and what it all means in practice — from assessment to self-understanding. |
we-are-all-star-stuff.html |
We Are All Star Stuff (Zine No. 4) | An open call for contributors — neurodivergent people and those who love us, writing toward what it means to be loved down to your star stuff. |
underground-zine.html |
Underground (Zine No. 5) | The below to Bone Song's above — the mycelial worldview as an act of love. Networks with no center, decomposition as renewal, and the quiet dark where the realest work gets done. |
eternal-sunshine-zine.html |
Eternal Sunshine (Zine No. 6) | The Sun is the nearest star, so every warm morning is starlight — and the light was always in you. A golden-hour zine on warmth, authenticity, and the counter-deficit turn: the light was always yours, the sky was in the way. |
you-were-never-one-thing-zine.html |
You Were Never One Thing (Zine No. 7) | You are a collective. Mitochondria were once free-living bacteria that never left, so every cell is a truce between former strangers — interdependence over independence, grounded in verified cell biology (Margulis 1967; Sender, Fuchs & Milo 2016). |
the-universe-runs-on-difference-zine.html |
The Universe Runs on Difference (Zine No. 8) | Variety is resilience; monoculture is the fragile engineered thing. The Cavendish argument across scales — the near-uniform early universe, the Cavendish banana, the spiky profile and the competency network, and ethodiversity. |
the-lines-we-drew-zine.html |
The Lines We Drew (Zine No. 9) | Constellations are lines we impose from one vantage point; so is the bell curve, and so is the border between "disorder" and "difference." The error curve borrowed from astronomy, the DSM's moving border, and why a human-made line is ours to redraw. |
the-dead-stars-still-reach-us-zine.html |
The Dead Stars Still Reach Us (Zine No. 10) | The time-delay of starlight as inheritance and accountability. A memorial register read as ancestry — our own elders, the ones the Cult of Compliance took — and memory as labor owed forward. |
why-difference-comes-first-zine.html |
Why Difference Comes First (Zine No. 11 · guest) | A guest zine by Helen Edgar (Autistic Realms), in her own voice: one thread followed down three scales — relational quantum mechanics, the cosmic microwave background, and Deleuze — to the same shape. Ends where the flat line, and even the spiky profile, give way to a constellation of intensities. |
bowie-zine.html |
Turn and Face the Strange (Zine No. 12) | David Bowie as a way of being star stuff — unmasking as authorship rather than exposure, the freedom of many selves, difference read as direction. Eight spreads, each with an embedded performance. |
aurora-zine.html |
Warriors and Weirdos (Zine No. 13) | AURORA as a way of being star stuff — the alien who came home by gathering a tribe of Weirdos, not by being cured into fitting. Eight spreads, each with an embedded performance. |
the-council-of-all-beings-zine.html |
The Council of All Beings (Zine No. 14) | Multispecies justice and more-than-human governance. Every being at the table is forged from the same stellar matter, so the Council is the universe convening with itself — carrying the ethodiversity thread from No. 8 outward, with a hydrofeminist coda. |
every-creatures-own-sky-zine.html |
Every Creature's Own Sky (Zine No. 15) | Umwelt as star stuff. Every creature is sealed in its own complete perceptual world, and each is whole rather than a partial view of one real world underneath — so Autistic perception is a different and complete sky, and the empathy gap is mutual. |
minor-worlds-zine.html |
Minor Worlds (Zine No. 16) | Niche construction as star stuff. Organisms remake their environments and pass the built world on, so the turn is plain: don't fix the mind, change the environment. Stimming is worldmaking; no niche is neutral. |
the-nearest-body-zine.html |
The Nearest Body (Zine No. 17) | Tides and co-regulation. The Moon runs the tide because nearness beats mass — so a safe-enough nervous system nearby pulls yours into rhythm, at a distance, without touching. |
the-garden-and-the-stars-zine.html |
The Garden and the Stars (Zine No. 18) | Knowledge gardening as star stuff, and a self-portrait of the project: if stimpunks.org is the knowledge garden, starstuff.earth is where it flowers. A garden, not a stream — held in common, not enclosed. |
no-universal-now-zine.html |
No Universal Now (Zine No. 19) | Crip time read through relativity. Physics says there is no universal "now," so the one true clock is a human invention we mistook for a law — with a closing coda by Helen Edgar on spiral time. |
the-same-water-zine.html |
The Same Water (Zine No. 20) | Fluctuating capacity read through phase transitions. Water holds, then flips to ice all at once: capacity is a state, not a trait, and the conditions decide. Broken thresholds, not broken people. |
not-a-line-zine.html |
Not a Line (Zine No. 21) | The spectrum was never a severity scale — after Helen Edgar and Patrick Dwyer. Split a star's light and every element signs its own pattern; the sky's figure was never a line but a constellation. Held with care: refusing the line doesn't erase that some of us need far more support. |
no-one-is-the-leader-zine.html |
No One Is the Leader (Zine No. 22) | Emergence and the murmuration — a flock has no captain, and neither does a self. Anderson's "More Is Different" as the spine: you are not a list of deficits, and our best collectives are leaderless murmurations, not org charts. |
bodies-of-water-zine.html |
Bodies of Water (Zine No. 23) | Hydrofeminism as belonging, after Astrida Neimanis. You are water, briefly gathered into a shape, and none of it is only yours — but watery belonging is not dissolution into sameness: where two rivers meet, the confluence runs braided for miles. |
shared-air-zine.html |
Shared Air (Zine No. 24) | The one air we share, read through star stuff and solarpunk. Every room is a shared-air space (a term coined by Helen Edgar and Ryan Boren), many of us are the canaries of that room, and breathable air is a commons — don't blame the bird, change the air. |
shared-signal-zine.html |
Shared Signal (Zine No. 25) | Connection carried across distance — a companion to Shared Air. Shared-signal space (a term coined by Helen Edgar) is the counterpart to shared-air space: text and AAC aren't a fallback from speech but often the clearer channel, and no channel is the master channel. |
mycelium-and-rhizome-zine.html |
A Mycelium and a Rhizome (Zine No. 26) | How neurodivergent knowledge and community grow — no trunk, no center, many doors. The rhizome has no root to ask permission of; Gray-Hammond and Munday name the practice neuro-anarchy. Decentralization isn't disorder. |
every-nervous-system-zine.html |
Every Nervous System (Zine No. 27) | More-than-human neurodiversity, following Ombre Tarragnat's ethodiversity. There is no standard nervous system — and since we are pathologized by being animalized, the liberation is to reclaim animality as kin. |
wyrd-and-weird-zine.html |
Wyrd & Weird (Zine No. 28 · guest) | A guest zine by Helen Edgar (Autistic Realms) on the old word for fate and the newer word we made of it. Wyrd meant becoming; Autistic and disabled communities have run the drift from insult back to name — etymologically honest, not just cheek. |
only-in-relation-zine.html |
Only in Relation (Zine No. 29 · guest) | Relational quantum physics and what it means to be Autistic, developed after Helen Edgar's essay "We Are Made of Relations." Barad's intra-action and intradependence, the double empathy problem living in the relation rather than one mind, and ARLES. A rhyme, not a proof. |
always-migrating-zine.html |
Always Migrating (Zine No. 30 · guest) | A guest zine by Helen Edgar (Autistic Realms), written after Brigit Anna McNeill's migration workshop. Every migrating body is made of matter that already migrated once, so migration was never a metaphor borrowed from animals; a bird reads the Earth's faint field through a pair of electron spins that stay linked; and the restlessness that builds before anything is decided is monotropism's gravity. Closes past the spiky profile — not a chart, a constellation of intensities. |
five-times-a-crab-zine.html |
Five Times a Crab, Seven Times Not (Zine No. 31) | Convergent evolution read against the primary literature. The crab body plan evolved at least five times and was lost at least seven, and the reasons for the recurrence remain a mystery — so a basin is not a destiny. Nature's attractor permits the millions who never roll in; engineered systems write the attractor into the rules. |
skeleton-that-skipped-bone-zine.html |
The Skeleton That Skipped Bone (Zine No. 32) | A counter-song to Bone Song, written for a young person in our community whose special interest is sharks. A vertebrate skeleton with no true bone at all — and a 2020 finding that makes the shark's bonelessness a loss rather than a failure to arrive, which exposes the verdict buried in the word primitive. Then what happened when a body was read as a cure. |
the-ick-is-a-border-zine.html |
The Ick Is a Border (Zine No. 33) | Disgust feels like a fact about the animal and is a fact about the frame. Bone-eating worms, anglerfish males who gave up telling self from not-self in order to stay joined, and a whale fall richer than any other hard surface down there — then the same reflex firing at feeding tubes, stimming and AAC. Nobody is guilty of a flinch; everyone is answerable for the two seconds after. |
two-hundred-years-zine.html |
Two Hundred Years Before You're Grown (Zine No. 34) | The Greenland shark is not mature until about 156 and lives at least 272 years, so late turns out to be a comparison rather than a measurement — the ruler was always the variable. Not a slow-is-beautiful zine: an animal needing a century and a half to reproduce cannot recover from pressure arriving in decades. The social model of disability, stated in fish. |
everywhere-that-turtles-go-zine.html |
Everywhere That Turtles Go (Zine No. 35) | A Star Dreaming that "goes everywhere that turtles go" reads like a figure of speech and is actually a range map, so we checked it — roughly 357 species on every continent but Antarctica, including a dry Pilbara riverbed. The shell began as a digging adaptation rather than armour, and the price was the ordinary way of breathing. |
the-layer-we-call-essential-zine.html |
The Layer We Call Essential (Zine No. 36) | The long-finned pilot whale's neocortex holds roughly 37.2 billion neurons — the first animal ever counted above us — and the same paper concludes that absolute neuron number doesn't explain human cognition. The yardstick came back against us and the ranking survived, because it was never resting on the count. Difference read as deficit, conducted by neuroscientists, about whales. |
out-of-order-zine.html |
Out of Order (Zine No. 37 · easter egg) | The one gap in the numbering, annotated by a page that admits it doesn't belong there. No. 37 was held so a question could go to Helen Edgar rather than be assumed, and arrived two days later as No. 45 — so the gap was a receipt, not a slip, and the zine corrects its own commissioning premise on spread two. Then three famous 37s: Wunderlich's 37 °C, averaged in 1868 and now about 0.4 °C out of date; the 37% of any search you should spend looking and refusing everything; and the number people reach for when told to be random, marked contested. It refuses to connect them, because a coincidence dressed as a mechanism is the fault this site was built to name. Not in the index grid — the doors are a bare 37 and an egg in the footer link row, both labelled. |
eight-tenths-of-a-second-zine.html |
Eight Tenths of a Second (Zine No. 38) | The first Burke-style chain here: an assistant dismissed in 1796 for marking star transits eight tenths of a second late, and astronomy's answer — the personal equation, publishing a constant per observer and keeping the observer. Follows the measuring apparatus out of the observatory to a table with a child at it. Every joint marked documented, contested or leap; accommodation is the older answer. |
five-microns-zine.html |
Five Microns (Zine No. 39) | How a number nobody wrote became doctrine. Wells put the boundary between droplets that fall and droplets that linger at 100 micrometres and never wrote 5; the 5 µm figure came from a different question — which particles reach the deepest lung — and the two were fused in 1951. Meanwhile Flügge's team had grown colonies nine metres from a sneeze in the 1890s and recommended ventilation. |
five-sigma-zine.html |
Five Sigma (Zine No. 40) | How much evidence is enough before you do something to a child? Particle physics won't say discovery below five sigma; p = 0.05 was chosen in 1925 with the word convenient. The gap is roughly 170,000×, and the asymmetry runs backwards — then the systematics column turns out empty, because 150 intervention studies produced 11 that mentioned adverse events at all. Not an argument against science; an argument against scientism. |
conquering-gaze-zine.html |
A Conquering Gaze from Nowhere (Zine No. 41) | Bessel measured 61 Cygni in 1838 using the observer's own displacement as the baseline — so a view from nowhere has no baseline, no angle and no depth, which makes it the blindest available position rather than the most authoritative. Haraway named it the god trick; the correction is neither removing the observer nor declaring all views equal, but publishing your coordinates. Stops to name the three women who did the work and lost the byline. |
look-for-the-air-zine.html |
Look for the Air (Zine No. 42) | Aristotle explained falling by what a thing is, and every prediction checks out — because everyday observation happens in air. In 1971 a hammer and a feather landed together in the lunar vacuum, on film: the difference was never in the feather. This chain argues that mindset marketing runs that two-thousand-year move backwards on children, and that the dashboard completes it — fields for effort, focus and behaviour points, and no field for the room. |
elimination-of-waste-zine.html |
The Elimination of Waste (Zine No. 43) | Carnot proved in 1824 that waste heat is not sloppiness but the fee — an engine with nowhere to dump it does not run at all. Then the phrase left the engine room and shed the ceiling, arriving by 1916 in a textbook about schoolchildren as a specification. Ends at spoon theory, then spends a whole spread arguing that this argument should not need physics at all. |
cannot-flatten-a-sphere-zine.html |
You Cannot Flatten a Sphere (Zine No. 44) | Gauss's Theorema Egregium (1827): curvature is intrinsic, so no flat map of a curved thing can preserve everything and every projection must sacrifice something — and never says what it chose. An IQ score or a support level is literally a projection, and worse than a Mercator, which keeps every place badly, because a single number deletes the other dimensions instead. If you must summarise, publish the indicatrix. |
the-cloud-phase-zine.html |
The Cloud Phase (Zine No. 45) | The story of a dead star usually ends one step past the explosion, but the physics runs further — to a cloud phase, the remnant falling back into itself and settling as an enriched cloud (held as proposed, flagged in place). The firmer claim is the measurement: star formation efficiency averages 0.08 in the Galaxy's brightest complexes, so the in-between is the majority state, not the wait between the real ones. Written after Helen Edgar. |
companion-stars-zine.html |
Companion Stars (Zine No. 46) | Astronomy's own working word for the people who orbit close — with a correction first, because most stars are in binaries is not so: most stars are single (Lada, 2006). So this one won't tell you everybody has their people; it says that where the binding is real, here is exactly what it is — a barycentre lying in neither star, wide pairs where both keep their shape, and mutual gravity as the only requirement, which means no companion star has to earn it. |
| true-facts-zine.html | True Facts About True Facts (Zine No. 47 · easter egg) | A credit the animal zines never paid. Nos. 32 and 34, Field Guide No. 9 and the wider Kin collection came out of watching Ze Frank's True Facts with a young person in our community whose special interest is sharks — and his name appeared nowhere in this repository until now, because the citation habit points at claims rather than causes. What we took is narrower than "it makes science fun": the comedy lands on the narrator, on human expectation, on language, never on the organism for being defective. Ridiculous is not deficient. Plus the series' unusual arc toward better sourcing, and the origin story nobody checked — three incompatible published versions, resolved as far as upload dates allow and marked contested where it isn't. He has no involvement and we did not ask. |
| File | Piece | What it is |
|---|---|---|
constellation-field-guide.html |
A Field Guide to Neurodivergent Constellations (Field Guide No. 1) | Eight patterns in the sky renamed for what they actually are — the Stimmer, the Deep Diver, the Pattern Seeker, the Flood, the Navigator, the Bridge, the Signal, the Forge — each with SVG diagrams, real star data, and full field notes. |
elements-field-guide.html |
A Field Guide to the Star Stuff You're Made Of (Field Guide No. 2) | Eight elements essential to your body traced to where the universe forged them, from Big Bang hydrogen to iodine from colliding neutron stars. The periodic table read as autobiography. |
impossible-places-field-guide.html |
A Field Guide to Life in Impossible Places (Field Guide No. 3) | Eight kinds of life thriving where we assume nothing could. The condition is named extreme, never the organism: it's about fit, not grit. |
worlds-field-guide.html |
A Field Guide to Worlds That Work by Other Rules (Field Guide No. 4) | Eight worlds in our own solar system running on rules Earth would call impossible. Not failed Earths — different rules, not broken rules. |
ways-of-being-a-star-field-guide.html |
A Field Guide to the Ways of Being a Star (Field Guide No. 5) | Eight ways to be a star, each mapped on the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram. Astronomy's own names hide verdicts ("failed" brown dwarf); the sky doesn't grade. |
symbioses-field-guide.html |
A Field Guide to Symbioses (Field Guide No. 6) | Twelve partnerships across the tree of life, read as mutual aid — including the honest one-way case, the ghost pipe. What biology has always done, disability-justice communities name and practice: care webs and spoon shares. Solidarity, not charity. |
nervous-systems-field-guide.html |
A Field Guide to Nervous Systems (Field Guide No. 7) | Eleven ways to have a nervous system — the companion catalogue to Every Nervous System (Zine No. 27). Neuroscience hides verdicts in its words; the animal kingdom keeps no standard nervous system. |
migrating-field-guide.html |
A Field Guide to the Ways of Migrating (Field Guide No. 8) | Fifteen ways of migrating — the companion catalogue to Always Migrating (Zine No. 30). Almost nothing does the long straight line, and the largest migration on Earth is a few hundred metres straight up, every night, in the dark. At the centre is partial migration, where one population holds both migrants and residents: variation within a population isn't the anomaly, it's the mechanism. |
shark-field-guide.html |
A Field Guide to Being a Shark (Field Guide No. 9) | Twelve ways to be a shark, written for a young person in our community whose special interest is sharks — one clade, one body plan, four hundred million years, and almost nothing holding still inside it. Two entries are here because of a phrase rather than an animal: the great hammerhead's head does not sharpen its electrosense, and nothing alive is a living fossil. There is no standard shark. |
turtle-field-guide.html |
A Field Guide to Being a Turtle (Field Guide No. 10) | Twelve ways to be a turtle, and five turtles people made — the companion catalogue to Everywhere That Turtles Go (No. 35). Nearly every entry is something a turtle is supposed to have and doesn't. The Arrau was filed as a silent animal until somebody brought a hydrophone: 2,122 recorded sounds, hatchlings calling from inside the egg — the silence was ours. The five turtles people made get a deliberately different card and no reframe table. |
tortoise-field-guide.html |
A Field Guide to Being a Tortoise (Field Guide No. 11) | Twelve land tortoises, opening where it has to: on 15 September 1968, when Zond 5 carried two Soviet steppe tortoises around the far side of the Moon and brought them back alive, two months before Apollo 8 carried any human. Four entries are marked unfinished, because their endings are decisions rather than facts. |
monotropic-galaxy-field-guide.html |
My Monotropic Galaxy (Field Guide No. 12 · guest) | A guest guide by Helen Edgar (Autistic Realms), and the first whose subject is a person: twenty named features of her own Autistic life over a deep-field image, in her words and at her numbers. It carries no "sounds like / actually" table, and that is the argument rather than an omission — that table corrects a verdict somebody handed down, and there is no verdict in these twenty to correct. Ends where she ends: draw your own. |
watching-animals-field-guide.html |
A Field Guide to Watching Animals (Field Guide No. 13 · easter egg) | The companion catalogue to No. 47, and the watching list the animal writing came out of. Sixteen animals, each with a True Facts video and field notes from the primary literature; twelve pair with a piece already here and link back. The reframe table corrects the popular verdict on the animal, never anything in the videos — because No. 47 argues the series issues no verdicts — and the aye-aye entry deliberately has no row aimed at a belief. Nothing loads until you press play. Filed in Easter Eggs, not Field Guides. |
| File | Piece | What it is |
|---|---|---|
ls-playlist.html |
L★S Playlist | Twenty-six songs in conversation with "Love You Down To Your Star Stuff" — cosmic, reclamatory, tender, and true — with YouTube embeds and Spotify links. |
joyful-sound-playlist.html |
It Take a Joyful Sound | The loud companion to the L★S Playlist, and the one that argues first: Punky Reggae Party and Rock Against Racism as a guest list for an alliance that didn't exist until it was read out — which is what neurodiversity did too. Then the physics, because sound needs matter and distortion is difference deliberately added. Thirty-six songs, and the honest part: a loud room is itself an access barrier. |
aurora-playlist.html |
Stimming and Belonging with AURORA | The companion rack to Warriors and Weirdos (No. 13), weighted toward live performance because the argument is the body. The aurora's famous green is oxygen's own forbidden line — a slow release that only completes where nothing crowds it. Twenty-eight performances, and it says plainly that she calls it emotion and we are the ones calling it stimming. |
bowie-playlist.html |
Nobody Got His Eyes Right | Thirty-one songs from Space Oddity to I Can't Give Everything Away, and the one fact everybody repeats about that face, which is wrong: both irises were the same colour, and a 1962 injury left one pupil unable to close — anisocoria, not heterochromia. The 2016 "constellation" isn't one either. Both errors round up into something more elegant, which is Too Good to Check with a soundtrack. |
Sheets made for paper rather than for a screen — one physical sheet, two sides, printing uncropped
on A4 or US Letter. See print-design.html for how the numbers were arrived
at, and tools/check-sheets.mjs for the gate that keeps them honest.
| File | Piece | What it is |
|---|---|---|
ls-broadside.html |
L★S Broadside | Two-sided single sheet, risograph-inspired and print-ready: L★S large on the face with Sagan's line and the three pillars, the full Bone Song poem on the reverse. Toggle sides and print from the browser. |
six-ways-broadside.html |
Six Ways a Fact Goes Wrong | A field card for checking a claim, and the hand-out companion to Too Good to Check: the six failure modes and the tell that gives each one away on the face; the habits, five of our own published errors, and the refusals on the reverse. |
owed-not-earned-broadside.html |
Owed, Not Earned | A sheet for the door, and the hand-out companion to the Inclusion Safety creed. Be human, be harmless; no litmus test, and one disqualifier, which is harm rather than difference. The full creed, Clark and Douglass, and the four doors on the reverse. |
what-we-refuse-broadside.html |
What We Refuse | Nearly every piece here ends by naming the traps it won't fall into, so this sheet collects the six recurring refusals and counts them — with the measured number of pieces each appears in, what each one protects, and the one we aim at ourselves. |
the-same-water-broadside.html |
The Same Water | For the day you can't do what you did last week — the hand-out companion to Zine No. 20. Capacity is a state, not a trait, and the flip is a cliff rather than a ramp: supercooling, critical slowing down, threshold anxiety, and plain lists of what to ask for and what not to say. |
shared-air-broadside.html |
Shared Air | For the room where someone can't breathe easy — the hand-out companion to Zine No. 24. Don't blame the canary; change the air. The most actionable reverse in the rack: open a window, add a plant, wear the mask, run a Corsi–Rosenthal box, then what to say and what not to say. |
better-get-used-to-it-broadside.html |
Better Get Used To It | For the meeting where someone says the real world won't wait — the hand-out companion to Zine No. 34. BGUTI, named by Alfie Kohn in 2005, and why hardship now is not preparation. Keeps the zine's own safeguard: the Greenland shark's 156-year childhood, and the bill attached to it, come before any application to people. |
star-stuff-elements-broadside.html |
The Star Stuff You're Made Of | The periodic table read as autobiography, and the sheet most likely to end up on a wall — the hand-out companion to Field Guide No. 2. Eight elements with their house names and their forges, and a correction on the reverse: iron has two parents. |
constellation-sheet.html |
The Constellation Sheet | Eighty stars, nothing joined, and a title with a gap in it: My ______ Galaxy. Field Guide No. 12 ends by asking you to draw your own constellations and the site gave you nothing to draw on — this is that gap, closed. The only sheet in the rack that compresses nothing, because it is a surface; the stars are SVG circles rather than the CSS starfield, because browsers omit background graphics and a blank sheet with no stars on it is a mistake rather than a blank sheet. |
shorthand-evolution.html |
Shorthand Evolution: LYDTYSS → L★S | How one phrase compressed itself into a glyph. Five shorthands with their etymologies, and what each compression preserved and let go. |
All four sit outside the reading chain by decision — threading a changelog or a design system into a reading sequence would put a maintenance document between two zines.
| File | Piece | What it is |
|---|---|---|
changelog.html |
What Changed, and When (public changelog) | Every piece as it arrived, every substantial revision, and every fact-check and attribution audit — including the errors we found in our own work and how we fixed them. Live at starstuff.earth/changelog. |
design.html |
The Design System (reference) | The visual language with its numbers and its receipts: the typeface and why it was chosen, the --sp-* palette with every token's CIELAB lightness and contrast ratio, the palette's honest lineage (began as Solarized, kept the method, none of the colors), and the principles and the refusals. Live at starstuff.earth/design. |
print-design.html |
Designing for Paper (rationale) | The working behind the print rack, where every number was arrived at by printing something and finding out it was wrong: 190 × 259 mm as the intersection of A4 and US Letter, 9 mm margins rather than 10 because 0.4 mm of slack tipped a sheet onto a third page, ink on white in both media because browsers omit background graphics, borders instead of backgrounds, and five house hues darkened until they clear AA on white. Plus the gates that measure it — and a standing list of the faults none of them can see. |
difference-first-frame.html |
The Difference-First Frame (backing material) | A summary of Helen Edgar's essay "Why Difference Comes First," held for anyone who asks why difference gets to be the starting point. A resonant frame, not a proof. |
Neither belongs to a collection, and neither is in the reading chain.
| File | Piece | What it is |
|---|---|---|
index.html |
Star Stuff | Landing page and entry point — every artifact, grouped and described. Also the only page with no .ss-nav; it carries its own masthead jump strip and search link instead. |
search.html |
Search (tool) | Client-side search across the whole collection, down to the individual zine spread and field-guide entry. No dependencies and no server — the index is a committed JSON file and the query never leaves your browser. Live at starstuff.earth/search. |
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
starstuff.css |
Shared stylesheet: the .ss-nav component, the injected footer-nav styles, the canonical --sp-* palette tokens, and the shared twinkle keyframes. |
starstuff.js |
Shared behavior for paged zines — per-spread prev/next controls and #spread-N deep linking. A safe no-op on pages that aren't paged zines. |
where-we-come-from-rainbow-mosho.jpg |
"Where We Come From" by Rainbow Mosho, as seen in the MoonMars Museum. Used on index.html and the LYDTYSS page. |
35407642044_c29b4f2bd7_3k.jpg |
SN 1006: Liberating Star Stuff — Chandra X-ray Observatory photo album, 1 July 2008. Used on love-you-down-to-your-star-stuff.html. |
og-card.jpg, favicon.svg |
Social card (1200×630) and site icon. |
robots.txt, sitemap.xml |
Crawl and index files. Add every new page to the sitemap. |
search-index.json |
The committed search index — roughly a thousand records, one per zine spread and per field-guide entry, covering every page but search.html itself. Regenerate with node tools/build-search-index.mjs whenever page text changes, and commit it; --check exits non-zero if it's stale and prints the exact totals. |
tools/build-search-index.mjs |
Builds the above. A local dev tool, not a build step — Netlify never runs it. Needs headless Chrome, because the field guides render their entries from JS and much zine text is hidden until paged to, so the index has to come from rendered DOM rather than HTML source. |
tools/check-contrast.mjs |
Measures every text element against its real composited ancestor background, on screen and against bare white paper, plus SVG fill labels the CSS pass can't see. Baseline 0 since 2026-08-13, so --check is a ship gate. What it can't measure — gradient-clipped text — it lists rather than skips. |
tools/check-markup.mjs |
Reads source, not the DOM, because the faults it catches are ones the parser silently repairs: nested anchors, blocks inside paragraphs, duplicate ids, a .ss-nav outside its content shell, and a collection badge that disagrees with the collection actually carding the page. No Chrome, no dependencies, ~0.3s. |
tools/check-sheets.mjs |
Prints each paper-first sheet to PDF at both US Letter and A4 and counts pages, and measures content height against the box — because a fixed-height sheet that overruns doesn't paginate, it clips. |
tools/check-sitemap.mjs |
Audits sitemap.xml against the filesystem — missing, stale and duplicate entries, off-site or non-https loc, malformed structure, the bare root entry, and lastmod sanity. Nothing else here opens the sitemap, so a page could be absent and every other gate still pass. |
FACTCHECK.md |
The per-piece fact-check ledger and the verification guidelines behind it — the working companion to the public changelog.html. |
DECISIONS.md |
Open and settled decisions about the collection. |
CLAUDE.md |
Working guidance for Claude Code in this repository. |
reference/ |
Three academic PDFs grounding the more-than-human strands — Tarragnat on ethodiversity, Harms/Joshi/Knauß on multispecies role-playing games, and Neimanis on hydrofeminism. |
Everything shares one visual language, tuned for accessibility first:
- Typeface: Atkinson Hyperlegible Next — released free by the Braille Institute, named for its founder J. Robert Atkinson, and drawn for letterform distinction so readers with low vision can tell confusable characters apart. Every page has been on Next since 2026-08-08 except the Fraunces-set trio — Bone Song, Underground, and You Were Never One Thing — which don't request Atkinson at all (
grep -L "Atkinson+Hyperlegible+Next" *.htmlshould return exactly those three). The Google Fonts request must bewght@0,200..800;1,200..800— Next publishes 200–800, and asking for200..900returns HTTP 400 with no@font-face, silently falling every visitor back tosystem-ui. That shipped unnoticed for weeks; if you touch a font URL,curlit and confirm you get@font-faceblocks back. - Palette: the canonical tokens live in
starstuff.cssas:root { --sp-* }— the single source of truth for every recurring color (cosmic dark ground, card, and the purple / pink / gold / cyan / green accent set). Pages alias them inline (--purple: var(--sp-purple)), so a palette change happens in one place. Introduce a new shared color by adding a--sp-token there, not by hardcoding a hex across pages. Page-specific one-off colors stay inline, as does the themed starfield gradient art — its per-page tinting is intentional. - Principles: full-opacity body text (no faded grays), generous line height,
8pxcard radius, a3pxcolored left border as a recurring motif, and a starfield rendered in pure CSS. - Accessibility:
starstuff.csshonorsprefers-reduced-motionand hides navigation in@media print. Every artifact stays keyboard-navigable and print-friendly — they're meant to be printed and handed to people. - Print: the whole collection inverts to ink on paper. Browsers leave Background graphics off by default, so a light-on-dark page that keeps its screen colors prints blank — which is exactly what 44 of 46 pages did until 2026-08-08. The shared stylesheet now redefines the
--sp-*tokens inside@media print, so one change inverts every page that aliases them; SVGfill/strokeare inverted separately becausecolordoesn't reach them, and the few pages that hardcode colors carry small print overrides of their own. If you add a page, print it before you ship it —node tools/check-contrast.mjs --checkmeasures both media for you and has held at zero failures since 2026-08-13, so a failure is yours. Seedesign.htmlfor the full account andprint-design.htmlfor the paper-first sheets.
The whole system is documented, with its numbers, at starstuff.earth/design (design.html).
The palette began as a Solarized dark variant — before this
repo existed, so git holds no record of it — and none of Solarized's values survive. The accents
are Tailwind CSS v3's 400-weight ramp (--sp-purple is violet-400, --sp-pink pink-400,
--sp-gold amber-400, --sp-cyan cyan-400, --sp-green green-400, --sp-white gray-50) sitting on
a violet-cast near-black of our own (#0a0a14, not a Tailwind color).
What we kept is Ethan Schoonover's method:
- a small, fixed, named accent set used as semantic tokens rather than ad-hoc color — which is
exactly what
--sp-*is for; - those accents held at near-uniform lightness, so swapping one doesn't change the weight of a page (ours cluster at CIELAB L* 64.6–80.7; Solarized's at L* 49.1–60.1);
- a ground that refuses pure black and carries a hue cast (Solarized's
#002b36leans cyan, our#0a0a14leans violet); - warm cream rather than white for paper —
--paper: #f5f0e8in the broadside,--bone: #e8dfc8in Bone Song, both a close cousin of Solarized's base3#fdf6e3.
What we threw out is his central move. Solarized deliberately reduces brightness contrast; we push it up hard. Body text here runs 18.84:1 where Solarized dark runs 4.75:1. "Full-opacity body text (no faded grays)" is a direct repudiation of the scheme it started from — accessibility-first won the argument. Credit for the discipline, not the colors.
Two senses appear in the collection and must never be conflated:
- Cavendish banana — the genetic-clone monoculture, used as a cautionary tale: uniformity is efficient but brittle, one blight from collapse. The Universe Runs on Difference (Zine No. 8) leans on this.
- Cavendish Space — Stimpunks' concept for environments built for diversity (caves, campfires, and watering holes for dandelions, tulips, and orchids). It is the answer to monoculture, not an example of it.
When writing or editing, keep the banana as the problem and Cavendish Space as the response. Saying "we refuse to build Cavendish Space" is inverted and wrong.
The collection is live at starstuff.earth, deployed from this repository via Netlify. Everything is static with no build step, so Netlify serves the files as-is — pushing to main publishes the update.
index.html is the landing page, and every artifact is reachable at its own path (e.g. https://starstuff.earth/bone-song-zine.html).
To embed a piece elsewhere — such as the WordPress site — point an <iframe> at its URL:
<iframe src="https://starstuff.earth/bone-song-zine.html"
width="100%" height="900" style="border:none;"
title="Bone Song — Stimpunks Zine No. 1"></iframe>Open edition. Print free. Share freely. These artifacts are made to be reproduced, folded, and passed along. Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 — see LICENSE.
The neurodiversity paradigm language draws on the foundational work of Nick Walker and on the Autistic community of InLv — Martijn Dekker, Jim Sinclair, and Autism Network International — who developed these ideas collectively in the 1990s, before the concept entered academia. The piezoelectric research traces to Dr. Iwao Yasuda (1950s), later extended by Dr. Andrew Bassett and colleagues. The cosmological framing draws on Carl Sagan's Cosmos and the broader popular tradition of stellar nucleosynthesis.
Love you down to your star stuff.
L★S
