Stimpunks × More Realms · Collection · Print

Stimpunks Foundation × More Realms · Paper

Made for Paper

A Star Stuff collection · five broadsides, and one that isn't

Everything else here is a web page that will print. These are sheets of paper that happen to have a web page.

Why paper at all

The rest of this collection is light on dark, and the shared stylesheet inverts it for print so that a zine handed to a printer comes back readable. That is a rescue operation, and it works — but it means every other page here was designed for a screen and then made to survive paper.

The broadsides run the other way. Each one is drawn as ink on white in both media, so what you see on this site is not the artifact — it is a preview of the artifact. The sheet is the thing. The web page is how you get one.

That inversion follows from what a broadside is for. A zine is read; a broadside is carried, handed over, and pinned up. It goes into a room where nobody is going to open a laptop — a kitchen table, a clinic waiting area, a staff room, a door. It gets photocopied badly and folded into a pocket. The historical form is the same one, and we are not being clever by borrowing it: a single cheap sheet, posted where people would see it. Proclamations, ballads, manifestos.

The sheets

Five broadsides, in the order they were made — and one piece that shares the rack without being one. What each is for comes first, because on a broadside that is the load-bearing part.

Broadside

L★S Broadside

Print · Single sheet

The moment: you are giving it to someone you love.

The mark, large, with Sagan's line and the three pillars — bone, star, paradigm. The reverse carries the full text of the Bone Song prose poem and the sources for the piezoelectric claim: Fukada & Yasuda (1957), and the effect belonging to collagen rather than mineral. Compresses Bone Song, Zine No. 1.

Print ready→

Broadside

Six Ways a Fact Goes Wrong

Print · Single sheet

The moment: a claim arrives, and it is a little too neat.

A field card for checking a claim. Six failure modes with the tell that gives each one away — more quotable than anything anyone says out loud, repeated everywhere and dated nowhere, you wanted it true before you read it. The reverse carries eight habits, the refusals, and five of our own published errors, each tagged with the mode it belongs to. Compresses Too Good to Check.

The moment: you are opening a room, and this goes on the door.

The qualification at the size you can read across a room — be human, be harmless — with the one disqualifier under it: acceptance is owed to everyone, and harm, not difference, is the only thing that can cost you your place. The reverse carries the whole creed, Timothy R. Clark and Frederick Douglass with their citations, and the four doors. Compresses the Inclusion Safety creed.

The moment: someone is about to describe you — or is about to write about us.

The only sheet here that compresses no single piece, because it compresses the method. Nearly every piece we publish ends by naming the traps it won't fall into; laid side by side, the same refusals keep returning, so this one counts them. A rhyme, not a proof appears in nine pieces. The reverse says what each refusal protects, and ends on the one that points inward.

The moment: the day you can't do what you did last week.

Capacity is a state, not a trait, and the drop from managing to not managing is a cliff rather than a ramp — you were near a boundary. The reverse carries supercooling, critical slowing down and threshold anxiety, then two plain lists: what to ask for, and what not to say. Compresses The Same Water, Zine No. 20.

Print ready→

Typographic

Shorthand Evolution: LYDTYSS → L★S

Print · Typographic

Not a broadside — it fails rule four, and is in the rack anyway.

How one phrase compressed itself into a glyph. Five shorthands — LYDTYSS, LYSS, LUSS, L★S, ★stuff — with their etymologies and what each compression preserved and let go. It is a typographic specimen rather than a sheet: no fixed paper size, no A/B face, no spot inks. It sits in Print because that is where it is useful, and it is named here rather than quietly counted as a sixth broadside.

7 spreads→

What earns a sheet

Those six are the whole rack, and it stays small on purpose. Four rules decide what joins it, applied in order — they exist because “this would make a good broadside” is an easy thing to say about almost anything, and most of the time it is wrong. A proposal that fails rule three is not a weaker broadside; it is a zine, and should be built as one.

It compresses something already argued at length on the site, and links back. A broadside invents no new claim. Every line on it is a compression of text that exists in full somewhere else, with its sources attached, so the sheet inherits that piece's fact-checking rather than needing its own. If a draft starts making an argument its parent never made, it has stopped being a compression and become a new piece — which needs its own primary sources and its own ledger row.
Side A is a face you'd pin up; side B does the work. The face carries one thing, large enough to read from across a room. The reverse is where the habits, the receipts, the full text and the sources go. This division is what separates a broadside from a poster: a poster is finished when you have looked at it, and a broadside has a second half that expects to be read.
You can name the moment someone reaches for it, away from a screen. This is the rule that does the actual filtering. Six Ways is consulted when a claim arrives and something about it feels too neat. L★S is handed to someone you love. The Same Water is for the day you cannot do what you did last week. If you cannot finish the sentence “someone picks this up when…”, you do not have a broadside — you have a summary, and summaries belong on the page they summarise.
Ink on white in both media, 190 × 259 mm, two sides, no third page, two spot inks that clear AA. The physical specification. It is not negotiable per-sheet, because the point of a fixed format is that five different arguments come off the printer as the same object — a rack, not a pile.

The fourth rule is the physical one, and every number in it was arrived at by printing something and finding out it was wrong — the paper size, the margin that tipped a sheet onto a third page, the inks, and the three gates that measure it. That working lives on its own page: Designing for Paper →

Not

Not a poster. A poster is finished when you have looked at it. Every sheet here has a reverse, and the reverse is where the sources are.

Not merch. Open edition, CC BY-SA 4.0. No numbered prints, no scarcity, nothing to buy — print as many as you want and give them away. If a sheet works, we would rather it circulate without us.

Not a summary standing in for the argument. A broadside compresses a piece that exists in full, and points at it. It is not the short version for people who won't read the long one.

Not screen-first with a print stylesheet bolted on. That approach is exactly how 44 pages came to print blank. Paper is the target, not the fallback.

What is not here yet

One sheet is proposed, scoped, and deliberately unbuilt: a functioning-labels field card — the one you hand across the table when someone is about to say “mild,” “high-functioning,” or “low support needs.” It has the clearest moment of anything on the list, which by rule three should make it the strongest candidate here.

It is held because Zine No. 21 is after Helen Edgar, and constellation of intensities is her phrase. A broadside circulates harder than a zine — it goes on walls and into rooms — so that is a decision to ask about rather than assume. It waits for her word, and this note exists so that the reason it is missing is public rather than filed in a private list.