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on the street · the community center · the window seat

Open to everybody · no sign-up at the door

Community Center

CB sign-on at the front desk

HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?

Starts wherever your device says. Nothing moves, flashes, or plays until you say so.

The street’s community center, a quiet room in sage lime plaster. One big window faces north onto a hillside, so the light is soft and the same all day and no sun lands anywhere, and a deep seat is built into the bay under it, with a cushion, a folded throw and a plant on the sill; there is a radio on the front desk. This is where you get started in our community: how to join the CB with an invite and a username of your own, just below. The radio is the CB, a chat channel patterned after citizens band radio, and this is the only place it is switched on. Sign on with your username and your password and it rides along in the corner of your screen, on every page of the street, until you sign off. Our community talks on the CB and in the forums, which are the CB’s too, for whatever needs longer than a day. Every room on the street, and who is in each, is on the World room’s web, past the Garden’s spider. On the wall by the desk is the community service board: every way there is to give something to a room on this street, and how.

Getting started in the community

  1. Ask to join. Go to the Stimpunks Community page and request to join, with the join form. It takes a few minutes, and you share only what you are comfortable sharing. As part of that, you are given an invite to Stimpunks.World: a link, or a code. A moderator can give you one too.
  2. Open the invite’s link. It opens the joining page with the code filled in. If you were given a code on its own, type it in there.
  3. Choose your username and a password of your own, eight characters or more, and an email address for password recovery if you want one. Then press Join.
  4. Keep the recovery code the joining page shows you then. It is shown once, and it is the way back in if you forget your password: write it down, or keep it where you keep your passwords.

Your username is yours

From the moment you join, your username signs on with your own password and nothing else, so nobody else can be you. Next time, sign on at the front desk, below, or with Get on the CB on the bar in the bottom right corner of any page. Account, on the radio in the part called You, is where you change your password, add, change or take off your email address, or delete your username.

On the CB with the old starter password? It was retired on 21 October 2026, when every username on the CB came to be claimed, and since 28 October a browser still on it opens nothing: the radio says so in its place. Ask for an invite as above, open its link, and choose the same username if nobody has claimed it; your pets, avatars and everything else kept under it stay with it.

What you can do now

Now that you are on, you can chat on the CB, post to our forums, fill in your profile, and much more. Here are some quests you can go on:

The front desk

Sign on with your username and your own password. New here? You join with an invite, on the joining page: Getting started, above, says how to get one. Moderators join the same way, and an administrator gives them their roles afterwards.

Once you are on, Account on the radio is where your username is kept: its password, its email address for recovery, and the way to delete it. Signing on keeps your username, a pass and where you put the radio in your own browser. What the channel keeps, for how long, and what it never keeps are all on the privacy page.

How the radio works

Every button and switch on the radio, named the way the radio names it, is in the CB guide. These are the things worth knowing first.

House norms

  1. Our covenant is the floor. Everything in the Stimpunks Covenant applies on the channel, as it does in every Stimpunks space.
  2. A reaction names who pressed it. React on a message puts a heart, an otter, a penguin or any other emoji under it with your handle beside it, and pressing it again takes yours back. Nobody is shown a count, only names, so a reaction is a person saying something small, not a score.
  3. A username is somebody’s, and only theirs. Every username on the CB is claimed, and signs on only with its owner’s own password, so a message under a name came from whoever holds that name’s password. It says nothing more about who they are. BASE is the one mark, and it means a moderator: only our moderators can send it, each under their own username off the moderators’ list. Nobody can type it or tick it; only the server puts it there.
  4. World, or this room. The radio hears one channel at a time. World is the one the whole street shares. This room is the room you are standing in, heard by whoever else is tuned to it there, and walking into another room tuned that way hears that room’s channel instead. Every channel keeps a hundred messages, each for two weeks, unless our administrators set it otherwise, and the radio says which.
  5. Every room has a call. Join this room’s call opens voice and video for the room you are in, for people signed on to the CB. The rooms off the Town Hall for our directors, board and moderators are the base’s: anybody can walk in, and their channel and call are for the base alone. Camera and microphone start off, and camera off and microphone off is a fine way to be in a call. The base station moderates, and is the only one who can record a call or turn on transcription; before doing either, say so in the call, and a recording or transcript is shared only if everybody in it has said yes, the same as a screenshot of the channel. Anybody can share a YouTube video in the call for everybody to watch together; whoever shares it plays and pauses it for everybody, and while it plays with its sound on, Jitsi mutes your microphone, so unmute to talk over it. For watching at your own pace instead, use the room’s own players and the CB’s spots. Anybody in a call can share a screenshot or a photo there with Share file; it goes to 8x8, not to us, so share nothing with somebody else in it unless they have said yes, the same as a screenshot of the channel.
  6. It is a room, not a private line. Everybody on the CB can read the channel. Say what you would say in a room with people in it.
  7. What is said here stays here. That goes for pictures too. The channel forgets after two weeks; do not carry it off in a screenshot, a repost or a forum topic unless everybody in it has said you can. That is the covenant’s own privacy norm, on the one channel of ours built to forget. If somebody takes what you said to the forums anyway, Take my message out there takes it back.
  8. Nobody has to answer. A notification is the reader’s own choice, never a summons, and an @mention is not a deadline: nobody is waiting on you. A message into a quiet channel is fine, a quiet channel is fine, and you can leave without saying goodbye.
  9. Plain words are fine. Say ten-four and breaker-breaker if you like them. Nobody needs to know the codes.
  10. A room on the street is a link. Type # and the start of its name, like #den, pick it from the list, and everybody on the channel sees it as #The Den, linked. Arrow keys move through the list, Enter or Tab picks, and Escape leaves your # alone. A room’s full address works too, like stimpunks.world/the-den.html.
  11. An address on another site is a link that says it is leaving. Write it out with https:// and it opens in a new tab, with the site it goes to after it, like ↗ example.com. Check that name before you follow it: a handle proves nothing about who sent it. A link can have words of its own, [words](an address), and one to another site still has its site after the words, so check that name too.
  12. A place in a film is a button. Watching something together, type @ and the time, like @34:12 or @1:02:03, or press Add my spot to put in where your film has got to, which film it is and which room you are in. Everybody sees it as a button that moves the film on their own page to that place, and the room as a link to go there. Following that link takes you to the film’s play button, ready to start at that place when you press it. If a spot names a room or a film, it only moves that film in that room, and anywhere else it tells you where that spot is instead. It does not press play, so anybody taking a break can catch up when they come back. A time without the @, like 7:30, stays words.
  13. Hosting is a beacon, not a remote. Press Host this film while you watch something, and everybody on the channel sees where you are in it and in which room, with a Catch up button if they are in the same room, and a Follow switch that keeps their film in step with yours, at their own volume. Nobody’s film moves unless they press one of those themselves, and pausing your own film stops following, so taking a break and coming back is always fine. One person hosts a room at a time.
  14. Keep the password inside the community. It only changes if there is a problem, and everybody is signed off when it does.
  15. If something is wrong, tell the base. Say so on the channel, or reach us privately. The base station can take any message off the air, as you can take off your own. If it keeps happening, the password changes, which signs everybody off at once, and that is the only other lever there is.

The covenant

The Stimpunks Covenant is where our community norms live, and it is longer and better than anything this room could say about them. It starts from the Contributor Covenant, version 2.1, which every Stimpunk agrees to abide by, and adds what we have learned since: no proselytising, prosocial ways of settling conflict, and how to repair harm when it happens. Read it on stimpunks.org, where it is kept up to date, rather than here, where it would not be.

The community service board

The ash pigeonholes on the wall by the desk have a slot for every room on the street that takes something in from our community. Each slot says what the room takes, what it asks of you and how to send it, and points at the room’s own words, where the full terms are.

Nothing on this board sends anything, and neither does the CB: the radio forgets after two weeks and everybody signed on can read it, which is the wrong place for somebody’s photograph. Everything here goes the way its own room says, and you do not need to be signed on to the radio for any of it.

Where we are

A pull-down map of where our community lives, as each of us chose to say on the Join form: a city, a region or a country, and never a name. The number on a pin is how many of us are there. We draw it here ourselves, from Natural Earth’s world, so looking at it asks no other site for anything.

Every place on the map is listed in words below.
Every place on the map, in words

The world is Natural Earth’s, public domain. Places are found with OpenStreetMap: © OpenStreetMap contributors. What the map keeps. To be on it, give your city when you join, or ask us.

Whose this is

The CB was Ryan’s idea: a simple chat patterned after citizens band radio, one password shared with the community, no alerts until the community asked for notifications, a short history cleared daily until people in other timezones needed two days of it, and a radio that floats on the screen once you are on. It is the one thing on this street that talks to a server, and the only thing that sends anything anywhere, and the privacy page says in plain words what that server keeps.

The room’s look answers a request from our community for something softer and quieter, and leans on 14 Patterns of Biophilic Design, by William Browning, Catherine Ryan and Joseph Clancy for Terrapin Bright Green (2014). The type is Varela Round, by Joe Prince, for the room’s name and headings, and Radio Canada, by Charles Daoud, Coppers and Brasses, Alexandre Saumier Demers and Jacques Le Bailly, for everything that is read, both under the SIL Open Font License and read off their own records rather than typed. The window, the seat and the radio on the desk are ours. Everything is credited in the liner notes.

Job marker — a leaf, fallen from the plant on the sill

You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.

The job: The door the radio waits outside

Before the code: Which room does the CB's radio stay out of?

Hint 1

It is the last thing in the list headed How the radio works.

Hint 2

It is a guest room with a bed nobody is charging you for.

Last hint

Its room number is 429.

Give me the answer

The answer is The Healing Checkpoint. Room 429 promises that it writes nothing down about you and has no fetch in it. The radio listens to a server and remembers where you put it, so it would make that promise untrue, and it waits outside the door instead.

Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.

Quest code: TENFOUR

Hand it in at the Adventurer’s Guild →