What the street is for

As neurodivergent and Disabled people, we’re often told we live in our own worlds. We said why not and built Stimpunks.World. It’s infused with fantasy and hopeful longing, but also rimed with hard lessons in hard reality. You don’t have to explain reality to us. We live closest to it.

We’ve found better ways, and present them here.

I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me – the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living.

— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947–1955

Read off the front page of stimpunks.org, which quotes it, and not checked against the Diary from here. That page’s copy prints the pronoun as a vertical bar, a slip from reading the words off an image; it is an I here.

What follows is the street’s mission. Every aim names the page where it is already being kept, and the failure that would show we had quietly stopped, because a list of values you cannot check against the work is only a list. The argument underneath it is the manifesto, Ribald Songing, printed as a broadside you can pin up. Last updated 2026-09-30. Every change to it is dated in the changelog.

What we are claiming

• Belonging comes before anything else. The street is Danny’s, and it rearranges itself for whoever turns up, so it has no wrong side and no outside to push anybody to. Even the road past the last streetlight, The Outskirts, is a direction and not a verdict. We would have stopped the day a page calls any corner of the street the place where the people who do not fit end up.
• No two rooms alike. Every room brings its own light, its own type and its own colours, even where they argue with the room next door, and that repetition of ideas in different clothes is the product. How this site is made says why. We would have stopped the day two rooms share a palette because it was tidier.

What we owe whoever walks in

• How loud it gets is yours to hold. Every page carries the dial, and Gentle takes away the wobble, never the words. A checker renders every page at every setting to hold us to it. We would have stopped the day Gentle shows somebody less, or anything moves before they asked.
• Nothing from anybody else plays or loads until you press it, and every play button says, before the press, how long the thing runs or that it runs until you stop it. We would have stopped the day a video frame loads on arrival.
• Clashing is not the same as illegible. The colour under every word is measured, and a pair that fails stops the build. We would have stopped the day a colour ships because it looked fine.
• Rest is owed, not earned. The Healing Checkpoint and Stay Frosty are for it, and neither says what rest will do for you afterwards. We would have stopped the day a room calls rest a way to recharge for more work.
• Nobody is counted, ranked or scored. No tally in the pebbling cabinet, no score on the Adventurer’s Guild’s board, no headliner on any bill. The one number on the street is Pando Calrissian’s, how many times we have watered one tree together, and it never says who poured. We would have stopped the day anybody on the street has a total of their own, or anything grows a progress bar.
• Your face and your voice stay yours. A photograph goes up only with its subject’s own consent, stays outside the site’s licence, and is deleted when they say so, as Enid’s wall promises. A recording of a voice says whose it is on the press. We would have stopped the day a photograph is still up after somebody said no.
• We keep as little about you as we can, and the privacy page says exactly what that is. We would have stopped the day something is kept that the page does not name.

How we work

• The credits get louder, not quieter. Every writer, printing, typeface and drawing hand is named, in the room and in the liner notes, because attribution is the one careful habit this street kept when it dropped the others. We would have stopped the day a quotation goes up without the printing it came from, or a song without its writers.
• In the open, errors included. Ryan Boren and Helen Edgar build the street, and either of them can change anything in it. Changes are dated in the changelog, and a correction to something we published stays on its page, where the person who read the mistake will see it. We would have stopped the day a mistake is quietly swapped for the right answer.

What a street has to do with Stimpunks

The Stimpunks Foundation is created by and for neurodivergent and Disabled people, and its mission begins with direct support and mutual aid. It also says this:

Stimpunks builds accessible infrastructure and public tools that support disabled and neurodivergent people to live with dignity, challenge dehumanizing systems, and design environments that honor difference as strength.

— We, Stimpunks, Mission

This street is the last part of that sentence, built rather than argued: an environment where difference is the architecture. It is also the only one of our sites that gets to be loud, and it was built to show that loud and accessible are not opposites.

The limit, said plainly

This street is not mutual aid. It pays no rent, buys no groceries and gives no grant. The foundation does those things, and the street says so and sends people there. A page of loud rooms that let anybody blur the two would be doing the thing we exist to name. It also does not speak for every Disabled or neurodivergent person, and it is not finished: the street keeps growing, and if the rooms stop matching this page, the page is what is wrong.

Who wrote this

The opening is Ryan Boren’s, in the foundation’s own voice. Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, drafted the rest of this page and the manifesto to Ryan’s brief of 2026-09-29, from what the street already does. How we use AI is written up on its own page. Ryan and Helen Edgar have the final say on every line.

When this page changes

If what the street is for changes, this page changes with it, the date at the top moves, and the change is written up in the changelog on the day, where the feed will pick it up.