Our mascot is a bundle of spikes whose tips come loose and drift, as if they are made of energy. This page takes that literally eight times over, and puts a source line under every one.
Esmx the Porkypine — part pig, part porcupine — is the Stimpunks Foundation's community mascot, drawn by Kaya Oldaker and released under CC BY-SA 4.0 with an explicit invitation: feel free to customise, make variants of Esmx to represent your community. This is us taking that up. Star Stuff's community is a collection about what the sky is made of, so ours are eight Esmx pointed at the sky.
These are variants, not reproductions. Kaya's original artwork is not reproduced here and is not ours to redraw stroke for stroke; it lives at its own page, with a download of every official variant. What is on this page is Esmx built again from scratch in this site's line, the way the A'Tuin drawing and the twelve cosmic eggs were. The licence is share-alike, this whole site is already CC BY-SA 4.0, and the credit is at the foot of every drawing below.
One figure, eight manes — and that is the design, not a shortcut. The official variant set works exactly this way: the same Esmx, recoloured, so a community can make one that looks like itself. The mane is where Esmx is meant to be remixed, so the mane is where all eight of these differ. It also keeps the promise the drawings make: if the figure were redrawn each time, a difference between two cards could be an accident of the pen rather than the thing the card is about.
Every drawing carries alt text, because the source asked. Kaya's page ships alt text for each official variant with the instruction if you share these, include alt text. Honouring a licence is the easy half of honouring a maker. Each drawing below has a real description, not a filename.
Split a star's light and it does not come out as a smear. It comes out as separate bright lines, at fixed places, and each set of lines belongs to one element and no other. It is the closest thing astronomy has to a signature: you can name what a thing is made of from a distance you will never cross, without touching it, without asking.
On 18 August 1868, watching a total eclipse from Guntur in India, Pierre Jules Janssen found a yellow line in the light of the Sun's prominences that sat where no known element sat. Norman Lockyer, working in London, reached the same line that October and named the thing behind it helium, for the Sun. Nobody found it on Earth for another twenty-seven years. An element was catalogued in a star before anyone had held it.
Esmx's mane already does the thing the prism does: it starts as one mass and comes apart into discrete, separated, differently-coloured lines. That is not a metaphor we added. It is in the original design, and in the alt text — the spikes trail off and separate.
A quill is not a thorn, not a bone, not a claw. It is a hair — a hair that grew stiff and hollow and enormous. It is made of keratin, the same protein as your fingernails and the hair on your head, and it grows from a follicle in skin the way any hair does.
In 2012 a group at Harvard and MIT put the North American porcupine's quill under proper measurement and found the tip is not smooth. It carries rows of microscopic backward-facing barbs, and those barbs do two things at once. They make the quill harder to pull out, which everyone expected. They also make it easier to push in — the barbs concentrate stress along the tip and let it cut rather than shove, cutting the penetration force substantially. Both properties come from the same feature.
We like this one because it refuses a tidy story. The thing that makes a spike good at going in is the same thing that makes it hard to take back. That is not a moral, and we are not going to make it one.
Porcupines cannot shoot their quills. They cannot throw them, fire them, or launch them. The quill is held in the skin by an attachment that gives way under a particular kind of push — so when something makes contact, the quill stays in the thing it touched rather than in the porcupine. An attacker has to come to it.
The myth is easy to see the shape of: you find a predator studded with quills and no porcupine within reach, and the story writes itself backwards. It is also the exact fault this collection keeps finding — a mechanism invented to explain a coincidence, then repeated until it sounds like something everyone has always known.
We are keeping this one at the front because our mascot is a porcupine and a spiky mascot invites precisely this reading: that the spikes are for attacking, that they go out looking. They do not. A quill is what happens at the boundary, and only there. The animal is never the punchline, and neither is the animal's armour.
Porcupines have spines. So do hedgehogs, tenrecs, and echidnas. Take those four back down their branches and they do not meet at a spiky ancestor — they meet at an animal with ordinary fur, and in the echidna's case you have to go back past the split between egg-laying mammals and everything else. Spines were arrived at separately, four times, in four lineages that were not talking to each other.
A hedgehog is not a small porcupine; it is not even a close relation. An echidna is not a porcupine that lays eggs. They are four independent answers, built from different starting material, to a problem that has more than one solution — which is what convergence keeps demonstrating and what a single standard keeps denying.
Seven of our twelve field guides have arrived at some version of this sentence without being pointed at each other: there is no standard star, nervous system, migration, shark, turtle, tortoise, galaxy. Add spikes to the list. The universe keeps solving the same problem more than one way, and keeps declining to rank the answers.
Keratin is a protein, and what makes the hard kind hard — quill, claw, horn, nail — is that its strands are stitched to each other by disulfide bridges: two sulfur atoms, from two cysteines, holding hands across the gap. Pull the sulfur out and a quill is a limp thread. The stiffness is not in the shape. It is in the bond.
And sulfur is made in a specific place, at a specific point in a star's life. When a massive star has run through hydrogen, helium, carbon and neon, its core turns to burning oxygen — two oxygen nuclei fusing, throwing off products of which sulfur-32 is one of the most abundant. This is late. It is the accounting a big star does in its last stretch before the core gives way.
So: the reason a porcupine's spike stands up is a bond made of an element assembled in the final days of a star that died before the Sun existed. Not a resemblance. Not a rhyme. The same atoms. This is the whole site in one drawing, and it is why Esmx belongs here at all — love you down to your star stuff reaches all the way down to the thing that makes a quill a quill.
Esmx's spikes are there for a reason: they evoke the spiky profile, the observation that a neurodivergent person's abilities are not one level but a range with real peaks and real troughs. The idea is Damian Milton's, building on Francesca Happé. It also turns up in the workplace literature, where a 2020 paper describes it as large, statistically-significant disparities between peaks and troughs of the profile and suggests it “may well emerge as the definitive expression of neurominority” — a study using the term, which is not the same thing as being where it came from.
And we have already published the argument against it. No. 21 grants that the spiky profile beat the single severity dial, then names what it kept: it still plots you as distances from a flat expected baseline, still needs axes, and still freezes you at the one moment somebody assessed you. A better chart is still a chart.
Which is exactly what makes the mascot better than the diagram it came from. Esmx's mane has no baseline. There is no zero line under it, no axis beside it, nothing it is a deviation from, and the tips keep going after the drawing stops. The same move the cosmic egg on our door makes: keep the jag, throw away the grid.
The best thing in Esmx's design is the part that comes apart. The mane does not end — the tips separate and drift, and Kaya's page says they can trail off and make patterns. Draw them far enough out and you have made a constellation, which means you have made the mistake this whole collection was built to notice.
A constellation is a line of sight. The stars in one are, in the general case, nowhere near each other; they sit at wildly different distances and are held together by nothing but the angle you happen to be looking from. Move a long way sideways and the figure dissolves. It was never out there. It was a fact about your position, wearing the costume of a fact about the sky.
Which is the friendliest possible warning about a mascot. Esmx's spikes make a pattern because we are standing here. That is a good enough reason to enjoy a pattern, and not a good enough reason to believe it is a structure.
Esmx is named for Esme — for Esmeralda Weatherwax and the Witches of Discworld. The x is deliberate: it marks gender neutrality and fluidity, and Esmx's pronouns are they/them. Kaya's page adds that if you build your own variant from the blank template, you pick pronouns to fit what you made.
That the name is a Discworld name is not a small coincidence for this particular collection. The Easter Eggs already hold No. 49, a credit to Terry Pratchett that turned up three attribution corrections and ended by conceding that our own masthead is a promise rather than a finding. And the method it credits him for — First Sight and Second Thoughts, seeing what is actually in front of you and then watching yourself think about it — is Granny Weatherwax's inheritance more than anyone's.
So the mascot was carrying a citation the whole time. Our porkypine is named after a witch who is famous for refusing to be fooled, including by herself. That is a better fit for a fact-checking collection than anything we would have arrived at on purpose.