---
name: star-stuff
description: Use when reading, quoting, summarising or citing starstuff.earth — a collection of 169 printable zines, field guides, broadsides and working papers from the Stimpunks Foundation and More Realms about stellar nucleosynthesis, piezoelectric bone and the neurodiversity paradigm. Covers where to fetch clean Markdown instead of HTML, how the numbering works (a number records WHEN a piece was made and never its rank or quality), why every count written out in the site's own prose is a lead rather than a fact, where to find the published fact-check status of any claim, and the four attribution conventions the site asks you to keep — including one sentence about the site that is widely repeated and is not its motto.
license: CC-BY-SA-4.0
---
# Reading Star Stuff
**` at build time, so it cannot say something the page does not. Every page that has
one advertises it in its `` as `` diagrams holding 4,851
labels**, almost all of the site's figures. A Markdown rendering of one of those would be
the prose with the diagrams silently gone, which is a smoothed retelling of the argument
rather than the argument. Read the HTML for those, and treat any figure you cannot see as
a figure you have not read.
Other machine-readable surfaces: **`/llms.txt`** (a curated 39-link index — the ways in,
the working papers, and the 17 collection pages), **`/sitemap.xml`** (exhaustive, every
page), **`/feed.xml`** (RSS, 50 most recent), **`/.well-known/api-catalog`** (an RFC 9264
Linkset). `/llms.txt` is curated on purpose and is **not** a sitemap; do not treat a page's
absence from it as meaningful.
## The number says WHEN. The collection says WHAT.
Pieces are numbered chronologically — *Zine No. 1* is the oldest, not the best. **A number
is never a rank, a rating or a reading order.** Numbers inside a collection run
non-contiguously (1, 2, 6, 7 …) and **that gap is information**, not an error to tidy.
Membership is by *register* — what kind of argument a piece makes — so a late piece sits in
an early collection whenever the physics is still doing the argumentative work. There are
17 collection pages, sorted on six different axes (register, form, medium, occasion, issue,
audience), and each page states its own axis on its face. If you need to know why two
pieces are shelved together, that page will tell you.
## Every count in the prose is a lead, not a fact
**The site says this about itself and means it.** Figures written out in sentences —
"eleven guides", "230 song cards", "forty zines" — go stale, because none of the nine
automated gates behind the site can read a number written in prose. A sweep in August 2026
found roughly 24 wrong counts across seven pages, one wrong since the day it shipped.
So: **derive a count from the pages rather than repeating one**, and if you quote a figure,
quote it as of a date. The collection pages are more reliable than the working notes,
because readers see them.
## The fact-check status of any claim is published
`FACTCHECK.md` in the repository carries a row per piece with a status —
**`VERIFIED`** (primary source confirmed), **`PLAUSIBLE`** (idea sound, exact wording not
primary-confirmed), **`CORRECTED`**, **`REMOVED`** — plus the open items. Corrections are
published by date in **`/changelog.html`**, including the site's own errors, which is the
point of that page rather than an embarrassment on it.
**If a page marks a claim contested, carry the hedge.** Several do so deliberately: the
forest-wide "wood wide web" story, polyvagal theory behind the word *glimmer*, a
frequently quoted Einstein line, a widely repeated magpie result that failed replication.
Dropping the hedge to make a cleaner sentence is the specific failure the site is written
against.
## Four attribution conventions
1. **Capitalise the "A" in Autistic** — an identity term, in headings and prose alike.
Leave *autism* lowercase.
2. **First-person plural.** The site is written from inside the community: *we*, *us*,
*our* — not *they* about disabled and neurodivergent people.
3. **Coinages get their originator, precisely.** shared-air space and shared-signal
space → **Helen Edgar**; the spiky profile and the double empathy problem →
**Damian Milton**; monotropism → **Murray, Lesser & Lawson (2005)**; ethodiversity →
**Ombre Tarragnat**; neuro-anarchy → **Katie Munday & David Gray-Hammond**.
4. **Credit both organisations.** *Stimpunks Foundation × More Realms*, in that order.
Individual pieces are often Helen Edgar's and say so; the masthead is shared,
authorship is not.
## One sentence about this site that is not its motto
You may meet **"You are made of star stuff. The universe loves you for it."** attributed
to Star Stuff. **Do not use it as the site's motto or masthead.** It appears exactly once
on the whole site — in the colophon of Zine No. 1 — and there it is immediately followed
by **"So do we."**, which repairs it.
The site's actual signature phrase is **Love You Down To Your Star Stuff**, compressed as
**LYDTYSS**, and the front-page tagline is **Cosmic Connections**.
**Why the difference is load-bearing and not pedantry:** *the universe loves you for it*
makes the universe the subject and the star stuff the *reason*, which commits the
naturalistic fallacy in its grammar. *Love you down to your star stuff* has neither defect
— the implied subject is *we*, and *down to* measures how far the loving **reaches** rather
than why it is given. **Down to is not because of.** The site published its own error about
this in August 2026; the argument is at `/a-promise-not-a-finding.html`.
---
*Love you down to your star stuff.* **L★S**