---
title: "The Quillery"
url: "https://starstuff.earth/quillery.html"
updated: "2026-08-15"
description: "Eight drawings of Esmx the Porkypine — the Stimpunks mascot, by Kaya Oldaker, CC BY-SA 4.0 — redrawn for the sky. One figure, eight manes, because the mane is where Esmx is designed to be remixed. Each carries one checkable thing: helium found in the Sun 27 years before Earth, the barbed quill of PNAS 2012, the quills a porcupine cannot throw, spines evolved separately in four mammal lineages, the sulfur in a quill's disulfide bonds made by oxygen burning, the spiky profile the mane outruns, a constellation that is a line of sight, and the Discworld witch Esmx is named for."
collection: "Easter Eggs"
licence: "CC-BY-SA-4.0"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
fact_check: "https://github.com/Stimpunks/Star-Stuff/blob/main/FACTCHECK.md"
generated_by: "tools/build-markdown.mjs, from the page's own <main> landmark"
omitted_diagrams: 9  # inline <svg>, decoration on this page — the HTML is the artifact
---

[Stimpunks Foundation](https://stimpunks.org/) × [More Realms](https://morerealms.com/) · Star Stuff

# The *Quillery*

Eight Esmx · drawn for the sky

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](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/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.

What this is, and what it is not

**These are variants, not reproductions — and that is a choice rather than a restriction.** **Esmx belongs to the Stimpunks Foundation**, who commissioned the character from Kaya Oldaker; the originals, every official variant and a blank template are a download away at [its own page](https://stimpunks.org/2025/04/12/our-mascot-esmx-the-porkypine/), and half of this collaboration could simply have pasted one in. What is on this page is Esmx built again from scratch in this site's line, the way the [A'Tuin drawing](https://starstuff.earth/collection-easter-eggs.html#the-turtle-moves) and the twelve [cosmic eggs](https://starstuff.earth/hatchery.html) were — because a pasted copy would be the only drawing in the collection not in its own hand, and because a variant is the thing the licence goes out of its way to ask for rather than merely allow. The licence is **share-alike**, this whole site is already CC BY-SA 4.0, and **Kaya is credited under every drawing below**: holding the rights to a commission is not a reason to stop naming the hand that drew it.

**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.

## The eight

### Esmx in Emission

No. 1 · the mane as a spectrum

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](https://stimpunks.org/2025/04/12/our-mascot-esmx-the-porkypine/), and in the alt text — the spikes trail off and separate.

**Sources:** Janssen's eclipse observation, 18 Aug 1868, and Lockyer's of 20 Oct 1868 — American Physical Society, *This Month in Physics History*. Terrestrial isolation: William Ramsay, 1895, from cleveite, with Per Teodor Cleve and Abraham Langlet independently. Related here: [A Field Guide to the Elements](https://starstuff.earth/elements-field-guide.html), [Not a Line](https://starstuff.earth/not-a-line-zine.html) (No. 21), which uses the same fingerprint fact.

### The Quill Is a Hair

No. 2 · what a spike is made of

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.

**Source:** W. K. Cho, J. A. Ankrum, D. Guo, S. A. Chester, S. Y. Yang, A. Kashyap, G. A. Campbell, R. J. Wood, R. K. Rijal, R. Karnik, R. Langer & J. M. Karp, “Microstructured barbs on the North American porcupine quill enable easy tissue penetration and difficult removal,” *PNAS* **109**(52), 21289–21294 (2012), [doi:10.1073/pnas.1216441109](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1216441109). Quills as modified hairs: standard mammalogy.

### Esmx Does Not Shoot

No. 3 · the popular verdict, corrected

**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.

**Source:** Uldis Roze, *Porcupines: The Animal Answer Guide* (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) — Roze's own field work on the quill's release mechanism is the standard account. Related here: [True Facts About True Facts](https://starstuff.earth/true-facts-zine.html) (No. 47), [A Field Guide to Watching Animals](https://starstuff.earth/watching-animals-field-guide.html), whose reframe tables correct the popular verdict on the animal and nothing else.

### Spikes, Independently

No. 4 · there is no standard way to make a spike

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.**

**Related here:** [Five Times a Crab](https://starstuff.earth/five-times-a-crab-zine.html) (No. 36), on carcinisation — where the real finding is that the crab shape was *lost* more often than it was gained; [the Field Guides](https://starstuff.earth/collection-field-guides.html), where the no-standard sentence keeps recurring. The four lineages sit in four different mammal groups (Rodentia, Eulipotyphla, Afrosoricida, Monotremata), which is what makes the independence uncontroversial rather than a close call.

### Sulfur, and the Last Days

No. 5 · the whole argument, in one spike

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](https://starstuff.earth/love-you-down-to-your-star-stuff.html) reaches all the way down to the thing that makes a quill a quill.

**Sources:** disulfide cross-linking in hard α-keratins — standard protein biochemistry. Sulfur's origin: all sulfur isotopes are synthesised in hydrostatic or explosive oxygen burning, which happens only in massive stars and Type Ia supernovae — Chin, Henkel *et al.*, “Interstellar sulfur isotopes and stellar oxygen burning,” *A&A* (1996), [arXiv:astro-ph/9505067](https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9505067). Related here: [A Field Guide to the Elements](https://starstuff.earth/elements-field-guide.html), [Bone Song](https://starstuff.earth/bone-song-zine.html) (No. 1).

### Not a Chart

No. 6 · the mascot outruns its own diagram

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](https://starstuff.earth/not-a-line-zine.html). 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](https://starstuff.earth/hatchery.html) makes: keep the jag, throw away the grid.

**Sources:** the spiky profile is **Damian Milton**'s, building on **Francesca Happé** — the attribution this collection carries throughout. The two quoted phrases are from Nancy Doyle, “Neurodiversity at work: a biopsychosocial model and the impact on working adults,” *British Medical Bulletin* **135**(1), 108–125 (2020), [doi:10.1093/bmb/ldaa021](https://doi.org/10.1093/bmb/ldaa021), which is the wording [Esmx's own page](https://stimpunks.org/2025/04/12/our-mascot-esmx-the-porkypine/) quotes; it is cited here as a *use* of the term in the workplace literature, **not as its provenance**. Related here: [Not a Line](https://starstuff.earth/not-a-line-zine.html) (No. 21) and [its broadside](https://starstuff.earth/not-a-line-broadside.html).

### The Trailing Spikes

No. 7 · a pattern is a place you are standing

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.

**Related here:** [A Field Guide to Constellations](https://starstuff.earth/constellation-field-guide.html); [The Lines We Drew](https://starstuff.earth/the-lines-we-drew-zine.html) (No. 9), which had to correct its own version of this — its depth argument originally ran on Orion's Belt, whose three stars turn out to be at essentially one distance and genuinely related. The general claim survives; the example did not.

### Esme

No. 8 · where the name came from

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](https://starstuff.earth/collection-easter-eggs.html) already hold [No. 49](https://starstuff.earth/one-atom-of-justice-zine.html), 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.

**Source:** the naming, the *x*, and the they/them are stated on [Esmx's own page](https://stimpunks.org/2025/04/12/our-mascot-esmx-the-porkypine/) — primary, being the mascot's own account of itself. Related here: [One Atom of Justice](https://starstuff.earth/one-atom-of-justice-zine.html) (No. 49); [the Turtle](https://starstuff.earth/collection-easter-eggs.html#the-turtle-moves) at the foot of the collection.

## What we left out, and one we nearly got wrong

Notes

**The goblin stays in.** Kaya's design notes name a bit of goblin in the mix, after *goblin mode* — refusing a social norm in order to be comfortable, and being frank about being weird. We have not drawn that as a feature because it is not a feature; it is the posture the whole character is standing in. It is also the closest thing Esmx has to a thesis, and it is the same one as [Wyrd and Weird](https://starstuff.earth/wyrd-and-weird-zine.html).

**We did not draw the pig.** A porkypine is pig plus porcupine, and the temptation was to make something of the fact that porcupines are rodents and are not pigs at all — that the Latin behind the name calls it a spiny *pig* and the animal politely declines. We left it out because it is a joke about a word rather than a fact about an animal, and this page had eight better things to carry. It is written down here so the next person does not think we missed it.

**And one this page got wrong and shipped, about its own family.** From publication on 2026-08-15 until 2026-09-20 the note above read that Kaya's artwork was *“not ours to redraw stroke for stroke.”* That is false. **Stimpunks commissioned Esmx and holds the rights**; there was never a permission to lack. The mistake is worth more than its correction, because it shows which way this collection's caution leans: told that a drawing came from a named artist, the sentence reached for *somebody else's, handle carefully* without ever asking who had paid for it, and being extra careful reads as rigour rather than as an error, so nothing flagged it for five weeks. Caught by **Ryan Boren** on 2026-09-20, while [a sibling site](https://stimpunks.love/arcade.html) was copying the framing out of this page. What survives the correction is the half that was doing the real work: the credit line, which stays under every drawing. **Honouring a licence is the easy half of honouring a maker, and owning the commission changes neither half.**

**One distinction this page nearly got wrong, in the direction it warns about.** A draft of card No. 6 cited the 2020 *British Medical Bulletin* paper as the source of the *spiky profile*, on the reasoning that it is the wording most often quoted and that its author's name appeared nowhere in this project. That is the error, not the fix. **Using a term in a study is not being part of its provenance** — a paper that defines a phrase in order to work with it is a *use*, and the citation belongs to whoever the idea came from, which here is Damian Milton building on Francesca Happé. Caught by **Ryan Boren** before it shipped. It is recorded because it is precisely the substitution [Too Good to Check](https://starstuff.earth/too-good-to-check.html) catalogues: the most quotable source standing in for the actual one, which is how a citation ends up pointing at the wrong person while looking more rigorous than the alternative.

“Esmx” by **Kaya Oldaker** is licensed under [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) · these eight variants likewise
 [Stimpunks Foundation](https://stimpunks.org/) × [More Realms](https://morerealms.com/)
 stimpunks.org · morerealms.com · starstuff.earth
 open edition · print freely