More Than Human

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. Six spreads with a prose poem, diagrams, a "Not:" refusals set, and reflection questions.

Multispecies justice and more-than-human governance, read as star stuff. Every being at the table — soil, river, beaver, cuckoo, meadow — is forged from the same stellar matter, so the Council of All Beings is the universe convening with itself, and you cannot rank what you are made of. Carries the ethodiversity thread from No. 8 outward: the cosmos varies not only in what it makes but in how its creatures live. Six spreads of argument, then a hydrofeminist coda — the “service provider” critique and the four dimensions of justice, ethodiversity and ethonormativity after Tarragnat, the role-play method (speaking as the soil and the river), the proxy problem and the Umwelt, and Rights of Nature meeting hydrofeminism at Te Awa Tupua, closing on a coda where the council dissolves into flow. Nine spreads, six diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.

Umwelt as star stuff. Every creature is sealed in its own complete perceptual world — the tick's three signals, the bat's echo, the mantis shrimp's light, the dog's scent-time — and each world is whole, not a partial view of one real world underneath. There is no neutral, default way to sense. The animals do the arguing, so that when minds enter, the point lands as recognition: monotropism is an attention-world, Autistic perception a different and complete sky, not a broken copy of a standard one. And when two worlds meet — human and bat, one mind and another — the gap is mutual: the double empathy problem, arrived at without lecturing. Not one correct channel, but mutual translation. Carries the Umwelt thread from No. 14 inward, from von Uexküll through Tarragnat, Manning, Milton, and Despret. Eight spreads, six diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.

Niche construction as star stuff, and the third of a loose trilogy — how we treat other worlds (No. 14), how we sense them (No. 15), and here, how we build them. Organisms don't just adapt to a fixed environment; they remake it — the beaver's dam, the spider's web — and pass the built world on as ecological inheritance. So the neurodiversity turn is plain: don't fix the mind, change the environment (positive niche construction — there is no “normal” brain in a vat). Stimming is worldmaking; minor worlds and niche communities are real, not lesser; and no niche is neutral — the “default” room was built for one kind of mind, so the fix is reconstruction, not accommodation. Grounded in Odling-Smee & Laland, Armstrong, Tarragnat, Manning, Kadodia & Krueger, and Haraway, and rooted in Stimpunks' own glossary. Eight spreads, six diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.

More-than-human neurodiversity, read through star stuff. There is no standard nervous system — not across species, and not within one: the octopus's mind distributed down its arms, the jellyfish's centreless nerve net, the worm's fully mapped 302 neurons. Read neurodiversity literally and it never stopped at the human. Following Ombre Tarragnat's antispeciesist–posthumanist philosophy: there's “no valid reason to be anthropocentric when you talk about neurodiversity,” and ethodiversity — behaviour reclaimed as “a subjective response to a bodymind's situation” — is a fundamentally animal phenomenon. Ethonormativity punishes the ethodivergent (the horse who refuses the rider, the cat who resists petting — abandoned or euthanised). And the core move: neurodivergent people are pathologised by being animalised, so the liberation is to reclaim animality — not bestialisation (the speciesist, neuronormative “less-than-human” split, after Butler 2020) but (hum)animality, kin. Distance is not disconnection: shutting down can be how we keep relation. Every nervous system is the universe wired up to feel itself, no two ever the same. “I would rather be a divergent animal than a typical human.” Eight spreads, six diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.