through the gate in the wall · midday · one bed per site we publish
The Garden
Stimpunks is not one website. It is a knowledge garden, and this is the part of it you can walk out into: one bed for every site we publish, the path going wherever you like, and a gate at the bottom back onto the street.
What a knowledge garden is
- Ideas spread sideways rather than down. A filing system runs subjects, then categories, then articles, which is exactly right for an encyclopedia and wrong for us. Our own page about the garden grows the other way instead: experiences first, then concepts, a glossary, patterns, recipes, environments, systems — each layer out of the one underneath it. Autistic Rhizome is the shape that describes, and it is a term in the glossary it describes.
- Nothing needs to be read in order. Skimming, skipping and stopping partway are all fine here. That sentence is on the garden’s own page and it is not a courtesy; a knowledge base that only works if you start at the top is a knowledge base for people who are not tired.
- It grows unevenly, and some of it lies fallow. The glossary and the pattern language have years in them; other regions are sparse, and a few are left alone for a season while the work moves elsewhere. A garden with no fallow ground is a catalogue — our words, on that page, and worth repeating in a room that could easily pretend every bed is thriving.
- When an idea outgrows a page it gets a site of its own. Which is what this room is a list of. Every bed below links straight out, because each of those is already somewhere, and a shopfront on this street promising a room you never arrive in would be a lie about the architecture.
- The working library behind it is not public, and the garden is. That shelf holds our own copies of other people’s work — things we can cite and cannot redistribute — next to private notes. What gets published is the writing that grows out of the shelf rather than the shelf. Everything linked from this page is open to anybody, with no account and no paywall.
- Nothing in here is ranked, counted or scored. No bed is the biggest, the best or the busiest, and no bed says how much its site holds. A number like that is wrong within the week and looks authoritative in the meantime, and a garden measured by volume is an inventory.
tools/make-garden.pyrefuses both, so this stays true after we have forgotten we meant it.
How the whole thing is actually tended is written up in three places, each answering a different question: the field guide to the system opens with what happens to everything we know when the person holding it is unavailable; the garden as curriculum reads it as a course of study rather than a filing cabinet; and start your own knowledge garden is the version written for you instead of for us. That last one is down the path.
The beds
One per site, in the order our own feeds page puts them in, which is not a decision this room gets to make. Beside each bed is the habit of growth it keeps, and every habit is different: that is what tells the drawings apart, rather than a colour of their own. Some of these were made with other people, and every bed says so on its face.
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Stimpunks Foundation
stimpunks.orgThe garden itself, and the one the others were built to take weight off: a glossary kept in public, a pattern language grown out of lived experience, recipes for the environments those patterns ask for, and the frameworks that came out of all three. Its own page about the garden says nothing there needs to be read in order, and means it.
What is growing here: A rhizome, running sideways under the bed and coming up in several places at once. That is the shape our own page gives this knowledge, and Autistic Rhizome is a term in the glossary it comes up in.
Grown with Stimpunks Foundation, and everybody whose writing the glossary credits by name.
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Star Stuff
starstuff.earthZines, field guides and broadsides that start from something settled in physics, cosmology, chemistry or biology and let it carry an argument about belonging — not as loose metaphor, but as the same pattern showing up at more than one scale. Its about page calls itself the public flowering of this garden, which is its phrase and not ours.
What is growing here: An umbel coming into flower: one stem, and every ray of it opening at the same height. It is the bed in flower because that site said it was.
Grown with A collaboration between Stimpunks and More Realms, where a great deal of it was grown from seed.
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Queering.Earth
queering.earthA cabinet of mounted sheets on queerness, illness and the natural world, with an accession register that publishes its own corrections rather than quietly fixing them. One of the sheets in it is about Monotropa uniflora, the ghost pipe, which makes no chlorophyll of its own and lives by what it is connected to underground.
What is growing here: That plant, which is why this is the one bed in the garden with no green in it at all. It is carried by its outline and by the threads running out of it, the way the things in it are.
Grown with Built with Helen Edgar of Autistic Realms, who is named on the sheets she wrote rather than folded into our “we”, and with contributions credited on the cabinet's own pages.
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Cavendish Space
cavendish.spaceCaves, campfires, watering holes, the library of what we have worked out, and the habitat that holds all four — plus the Cavendish Cards deck, which lets somebody point at a picture instead of explaining, and the room sheets for working out which zones a real room can already hold. Everything there is free and CC0.
What is growing here: The one bed with something built over it, because that site is about the structure: a frame changes what a bed can grow, which is the whole argument for zoning a room rather than telling somebody to cope in it.
Grown with Stimpunks Foundation. The three primordial spaces are David Thornburg's, from From the Campfire to the Holodeck; the name comes from Henry Cavendish by way of Steve Silberman's NeuroTribes; and Ira Socol's home of opportunity is on that site's origin page beside them.
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Penguin Pebbling
penguinpebbling.appA card game about bringing somebody a small thing for no reason, and about what that does. No winners, no pressure to perform, and you can leave whenever you need to. There is a cabinet in our arcade built on the same practice that deliberately takes nothing from that deck — the deck is the better thing and it is here.
What is growing here: Runners: the plant reaches sideways and puts a new plant down beside itself, roots and all, without being asked for anything back. That is pebbling rather than trading.
Grown with Helen Edgar of Autistic Realms and Ryan Boren of Stimpunks, together. The locution the practice is described in is Amythest Schaber's.
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The Why Sheet Press
whysheet.pressOne-page arguments, openly licensed and editable, made to be printed and carried into a room where somebody is about to be talked over. You tick the sheets you need and the press hands back a single correctly paginated PDF with the citations intact. Nothing is uploaded and no account is kept.
What is growing here: A seed head gone dry, which is the only bed here whose point is that you take it away. What it grows into somewhere we will never see is the intended outcome rather than a side effect.
Grown with Stimpunks Foundation, and the researchers, lawyers and self-advocates each sheet cites on its own face.
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Stimpunks.Love
stimpunks.loveThe street you are standing on, and the loud half of the same lung. No single design system, no two rooms alike, credits scrawled in the margins, and a dial that lets you decide how much of it happens. The street is that way and the liner notes say where everything in it came from.
What is growing here: A scramble: nasturtiums over the edges of the bed, out onto the path and up whatever is standing near them. Nothing in this bed has been kept in its row.
Grown with Stimpunks Foundation, with a pitch in the campgrounds that is Helen Edgar's own room and a community board kept by Norah Hobbs.
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Map of Monotropic Experiences
monotropicmap.orgTwenty places a monotropic person goes, drawn as an island you can walk — attention tunnels, rabbit holes of research, infodump canyon, burnout whirlpools, the forest of joy, awe and wonder — with a second tool for drawing your own. Some of those places are where the good work happens and some are weather that other people make.
What is growing here: A tendril: the stem puts out a feeler, finds something, and holds on. Tendril Theory is one of the places on that island, which is why this bed grows the thing the theory is named after.
Grown with Helen Edgar's map of her own Autistic and ADHD experience, published with Stimpunks. Monotropism is Dinah Murray, Wenn Lawson and Mike Lesser's.
The Garden Spider
There is a spider in this garden that will answer questions about it. It is grounded in the garden itself — the glossary, the patterns, the frameworks — so the words it reaches for are the ones we planted: monotropism, the double empathy problem, spiky profiles. That matters most for somebody who does not have the word yet, because you cannot search for monotropism if nobody has ever told you it exists.
It can also be wrong. Generative AI can misstate, confuse, and confidently produce things we did not say, and scoping it to our own garden reduces the source of the distortion rather than the possibility of it. So every trail it puts you on ends at a page a person wrote: follow the link, read laterally, and treat what it says as a starting point rather than as us. A spider is a guide to the garden and never a replacement for it, and its best answer is an entrance. Those are our own sentences, from the page it lives on, and how we hold that line is written up at AI Collaboration and AI, Disability Justice, and the Ethics of Making.
If you need a human read on something — anything that touches your situation, your community, or a decision that matters — say so to us directly. We are here.
Ask the garden →Start a garden of your own
None of this needs our budget, our tools or our people. The steps below are the short version of Start Your Own Knowledge Garden, and they degrade gracefully: most of the value is in the first one, which needs no software at all, and each later one only adds convenience on top of something that already worked. Stop wherever it stops being useful. A half-built garden is a garden, not a failure — and the opposite framing is how these things die, because a tool that only pays off once you have finished configuring it gets abandoned during configuration, on a bad day, by exactly the person who needed it.
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Make a garden. No tools required.
One folder. Everything you read, save or write goes in it, untouched. One index file, listing what is in the folder with a line about why each thing is there. A habit of adding to both. That is a garden — no app, no subscription, no AI — and the line about why this is here is a small act of synthesis repeated hundreds of times, which is where the learning actually shows.
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Never edit your own sources.
Not to tidy a filename, not to fix a typo. Every derived thing — summaries, categories, indexes — lives somewhere else and points back at the original. That single rule is the difference between provenance you can cite and a pile you have been quietly rewriting.
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Put it in git, for mercy.
Not for collaboration and not really for backup. Once every version of your thinking is recoverable you stop being careful with your own work in the way that stops you working. Version control is mercy, made structural. The template arrives as a repository already, so check with
git statusbefore runninggit initanywhere — and check which folder you are standing in first, which is the one mistake on that page with real consequences. -
Let something else write the index.
Past a few dozen files, keeping an index by hand stops being fun. The template ships a script that walks your originals and writes it for you. The index is disposable and the sources are not: if it comes out wrong, change the configuration and run it again, and never hand-edit a generated page, because your edits get silently overwritten — which is worse than being refused.
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Make it searchable, when filenames stop being enough.
A library you cannot search is half a library, and a filename is a terrible index of meaning. The payoff is finding things by what they mean: somebody in distress does not arrive knowing your vocabulary, they arrive saying it hurts. Filling the Garden is the one-click version of the whole thing, including clipping an article into your library with its source and date intact, and it needs no terminal either.
Why the garden is off the street
None of it was planned as a system. It accumulated, the way a garden does, and then we went back and named what had grown — which is also the honest account of this street. The difference is that every bed out here belongs to a site that had to leave: an idea gets big enough that a page cannot hold it, somebody builds it somewhere of its own, and what stays behind is a label saying where it went.
The gate at the bottom of the hedge is the one you came in by. The street is back through there, and it is a great deal louder than this.
HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?
Starts wherever your device says. Nothing moves, flashes or plays until you say so — and out here the only thing that moves at all is the leaf shadow.
Job marker — a blank wooden plant label
You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.
The job: What a spider's best answer is
Before the code: The garden says what a spider's best answer is, in our own words. One word.
Hint 1
It is in the room's own writing about the spider, not on the button.
Hint 2
The sentence is about what a spider is FOR: a guide to the garden and never a replacement for it.
Last hint
The room says a spider's best answer is an entrance.
Give me the answer
The answer is An entrance. Grounding the spider in our own garden changes where its answers come from and not whether they can be wrong, so every trail it puts somebody on ends at a page a person wrote. What it is genuinely good at is the step before the word: taking "why does switching tasks hurt" and getting somebody to the glossary entry, the pattern or the recipe. It is the way in rather than the thing itself.
Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.
Quest code: PLANTLABEL
That is the one.
Grounding the spider in our own garden changes where its answers come from and not whether they can be wrong, so every trail it puts somebody on ends at a page a person wrote. What it is genuinely good at is the step before the word: taking "why does switching tasks hurt" and getting somebody to the glossary entry, the pattern or the recipe. It is the way in rather than the thing itself.
Quest code: PLANTLABEL