Start Here, or Don't

Three sections. An official collaboration: Star Stuff is a collaboration between the Stimpunks Foundation and More Realms — Helen Edgar's site — and the pairing is on every page rather than tucked into a credit at the bottom. The through-line: settled science read as an argument about belonging, from the cosmic to the lived, braiding stellar nucleosynthesis with Yasuda's piezoelectric bone and reading both through the neurodiversity paradigm. How it's made, and held: written in the first person plural because it comes from inside the community rather than about it, printed free and shared freely, with the working and the errors left visible. The shortest way in, and the page to hand someone who has not seen any of this before.

The long-form home of the phrase, with a table of contents of its own: the five shorthands and their registers; the video inspirations; the Resonance card, and the Belonging, Authenticity and Radical Inclusivity cards; related concepts and traditions across cultures; Sagan's the cosmos is within us; the Crystal Under Pressure prose poem; a reflection section and community voices. The pair that does the most work is What LYDTYSS Is Not set directly against What LYDTYSS Is — because the phrase is a promise made by people rather than a finding about the universe, and the distance between those two is the whole argument of A Promise, Not a Finding. It ends at the L★S Playlist.

Three sections, and the page names the method the whole site runs on. Three sites, one web: what travels between Stimpunks, More Realms and Star Stuff — essays becoming zines, glossary becoming argument, corrections going back out. Why links, and not folders: a web of linked notes produces concepts nobody sat down and wrote, which is why the collections here were observed after the fact rather than opened in advance. Accumulated, not authored — nothing here comes from nowhere. Cosmic Connections is Helen Edgar's phrase and it is the site's tagline; two lineages sit inside it and both stay credited wherever it is explained — James Burke's Connections (BBC, 1978) and Carl Sagan's The Cosmic Connection (1973). Two diagrams, a table of receipts, and a “Not:” refusals set.

The first three zines in this series made arguments. This one holds space for something different: the actual voices of the people the series is for. Nos. 1, 2 and 3 built the framework — the piezoelectric bones, the cosmology of care, the neurodiversity paradigm — and explained why you are made of star stuff and why that matters. We Are All Star Stuff asks what that means to you. We're collecting short pieces, a few sentences to a few paragraphs, from Autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, disabled and otherwise neurodivergent people, and from the family members, educators and community members who love them. In progress, and open.