What’s this all about?

Stimpunks.World is a website built as a street. Every shopfront is a door, and behind every door is a room that is its own world, with its own light, its own lettering and its own colours.

It is made by Stimpunks Foundation, which builds accessible infrastructure and public tools for Disabled and neurodivergent people. This is the one of our sites that gets to be loud, and it was built to show that loud and accessible are not opposites.

The short version

A film, thirty seconds long and silent. It plays only when you press play, and everything it shows is written out underneath.

What the film says and shows

1. 0:00 “As neurodivergent and Disabled people, we’re often told we live in our own worlds.” Then, in yellow capitals: “We said why not.” Small lights come on along the bottom of the screen, one at a time.
2. 0:05 “So we built a street of them.” The stimpunks.world sign lands, and a row of dark shopfronts rises out of the lights onto a pavement.
3. 0:09 “No two rooms alike. Each brings its own light, its own type and its own colours.” Walking past the shopfronts, each door lights up in its own colours with its own name in its own lettering: Pink Pony Club, Club Chronic, The Arcade, The Mopery, The Jungle Room, The Adventurer’s Guild, Laughingstock and Samefood Cafe.
4. 0:16 “How loud it gets is yours to hold.” The street’s dial, asking how loud you want it, turns from Gentle to Regular to MAX GLITTER. At Gentle the doors stand still, at Regular they lift a little, and at MAX GLITTER they sway and sparkles rise slowly past them. “Gentle takes away the wobble, never the words.”
5. 0:22 “Difference is the layout, not the exception. The street rearranges itself for whoever walks down it.” The doors lift and swap places.
6. 0:26 The stimpunks.world sign again, over the lit doors, and: “Nobody has to earn the right to walk in.”

What do I do here?

• Walk in anywhere. There is no right order, nothing to finish and nothing keeping score. The Map shows the whole street, and the foot of every page has a Where am I? that opens it at the page you are on.
• Turn the dial. Every page carries it, and the one at the foot of this page works too. Gentle takes away the wobble, never the words, and MAX GLITTER turns everything up.
• Press play only if you want to. Nothing from anybody else plays or loads until you press it, and every play button says first how long it runs, or that it runs until you stop it.
• Rest. Some rooms are for nothing else, like the Healing Checkpoint and Stay Frosty. Rest is owed here, not earned.
• Find people. The Community Center is where to start if you want company.

Why a street?

Because a street can hold rooms that have nothing in common. Every other site we make is careful and consistent; this one has no house style on purpose, because here difference is the layout rather than the exception. The rooms share a dial and a set of promises, and the Mission writes each promise down beside the page that keeps it.

The idea of a street that rearranges itself for whoever turns up is not ours. It is Danny the Street’s, a character in DC Comics’ Doom Patrol, created in 1990 by Grant Morrison and Richard Case.

The street is not mutual aid. It pays no rent and gives no grant. The foundation does those things, at stimpunks.org.

Questions people ask

What is Stimpunks, and where does Stimpunks.World fit in?

Stimpunks offers Disabled- and neurodivergent-led mutual aid and access infrastructure: free tools, language and guides for surviving bad systems, building dignity and living authentically. Stimpunks.World is part of that work. Why we built it, and what it is for, is in the Mission.

How did it start, and how has it changed?

Stimpunks.World started as a way for Helen Edgar and Ryan Boren, our Co-Creative Directors, to have fun. So much of what we do is very serious, hyper-diligent, and carefully curated and designed. We wanted a way to tell our stories in a more relaxed and fun way that also invited community. We took inspiration from Danny the Street, created our first few rooms, and ran with it from there. It rapidly grew and morphed into a third space for our community to gather in. Helen and Ryan and others hang out in the world often, chatting in text and video, watching videos together, and building more rooms around our interests and advocacy.

Why does it look like the old web, and what does AI make possible?

This answer is Ryan Boren’s.

The throwback to Web 1.0, “the web we lost”, and GeoCities is intentional — a sort of love letter to the early days of the web. Unlike GeoCities, Stimpunks.World has some rules regulating its mayhem: everything must still be accessible, particularly contrast.

AI makes Stimpunks.World possible. Without AI, it’d all be a dream still in the can. AI opens all of this to folks who aren’t web developers. Even for experienced web developers like myself, it frees me to focus on being a creative director instead of a programmer. I’m retired from software development and have no desire to go back to slinging code. Generative AI agents are better at it and more up-to-date on the latest conventions, techniques, and tools than I ever was anyway. Leveraging AI, we can use things like HTML5 animations and modern CSS and JS techniques, all while keeping it accessible.

One of our primary motivations with Stimpunks.World is to use open source software, publish everything we build for the site in the open under CC BY-SA 4.0, and own as much of the resulting software stack as possible. We want to be less reliant on third party platforms. We are getting tired of platforms succumbing to enshittification and executives at those companies revealing that they are fascist, bigoted assholes. We seek to escape rentier technofeudalism with deliberately boring technology and generative AI.

We keep third parties few, and we name them. The site is hosted on Netlify. Hosting our own video serving infrastructure is beyond us, so our calls run on Jitsi, an open source video and audio stack, on a platform hosted by 8x8, a company we currently trust. Most films on the street are YouTube embeds, the music players are Spotify, Apple Music and TIDAL, and nothing from any of them loads until you press play. How the site runs lists every outside service it contacts. Everything is designed so that we can swap out third party parts if necessary.

Has the technology helped bring lived experience online?

The tech has greatly enabled expression of our humanity and lived experiences. Coding and full-stack web development knowledge are no longer necessary to tell your story in interesting, interactive, and accessible ways on the open web. Samefood Cafe, about samefoods, safe foods and food aversions, is one of those stories.

What are you hopeful about with AI, and what worries you?

We list our many reservations about AI in our AI Hub. We acknowledge and confront the many downsides of generative AI, while at the same time exploring how AI can assist constructionism and access. AI is at its most helpful when enabling constructionism and helping us build and leverage knowledge gardens.

Many of the problems with AI are not intrinsic to it, but rather are very human political problems resulting from our extractive and exploitative systems that are currently failing us all, including the planet. The biggest danger of AI is our lack of political will to harness it safely in service to the commons.

Where’s a good place to start?

Start on the front pages at stimpunks.org and stimpunks.world and take it from there. They both reward freestyle exploration.

Who made the film, and this page

Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, wrote the film as code in Claude Motion, to Ryan Boren’s brief of 2026-10-15, and the film was exported to video from there. Like every drawing on the street, it is shapes and type rather than a generated picture, and How we use AI says more. The doors in it are the front page’s own, each lettered in the typeface its room uses, from this site’s own font files; every typeface and who drew it is in the liner notes.

Claude also drafted this page, except the answers under Questions people ask, which are Ryan’s. Claude asked those questions plainly, trimmed the first answer, corrected the paragraph on outside services in the third and added the line about Samefood Cafe, at Ryan’s ask.