A collection of artifacts exploring piezoelectric bones, stellar nucleosynthesis, and the neurodiversity paradigm. We love you down to your star stuff.
L★S · Love You Down To Your Star StuffFeatured Artwork
Every atom heavier than hydrogen was forged inside a star. The calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood — all of it came from stars that lived and died before the Earth existed. “Star stuff” takes that settled science and reads it as an argument about belonging: if we’re all made of the same stellar matter, then neurodivergent and disabled people belong here fully — not despite our differences, but as part of the universe knowing itself in every possible way.
New here? Start with the shortest version of the whole idea: zines and field guides that read settled science as an argument about belonging, from the cosmic to the lived. How the pieces blend science and neurodivergent and disabled community across scales — difference as the default state of matter, written in the first person plural, held in common, printed free and shared freely.
The whole page, in long form. Sagan and the settled science, the five shorthands, video inspirations, the Resonance and Belonging cards, related traditions across cultures, the Crystal Under Pressure prose poem, and what LYDTYSS is and is not.
On the cosmic origins of who we are, the science of how we carry the universe in our bones, and why neurodivergent and disabled people belong — not despite difference, but as difference. Six sections and eight declarations.
The first stage of psychological safety, made into a creed. Inclusion is owed, not earned — worth before worthiness, with harm the only disqualifier. Where Timothy Clark grounds it in common humanity, Star Stuff goes one floor deeper: you were ★stuff all along, so belonging is constitutive, not conferred.
On piezoelectric matter, star-forged calcium, and the universe that doesn't pathologize its own variation. Six spreads including the full prose poem, diagrams, and the neurodiversity reframe.
The full phrase as a zine — the cosmology of care. What Sagan said, what the elements are, what "down to" means as a direction, and six affirmations across every register.
The paradigm, plainly stated. Two frameworks compared, three key definitions, five myth/fact pairs, five principles, and what it all means in practice — from assessment to self-understanding.
Voices from the community. Open call for contributors — neurodivergent people and those who love them, writing toward what it means to be loved down to your star stuff.
The below to Bone Song's above — the mycelial worldview as an act of love. Networks with no center, decomposition as renewal, and the quiet dark where the realest work gets done. Six spreads with a prose poem, diagrams, a "Not:" refusals set, and reflection questions.
The Sun is the nearest star, so every warm morning is starlight — and the light was always in you. A golden-hour zine on warmth, authenticity, and the counter-deficit turn: the light was always yours, the sky was in the way. Six spreads with diagrams, affirmations, and a "Not:" refusals set.
You are a collective. Mitochondria were once free-living bacteria that never left — every cell you have is a truce between former strangers. A companion to Bone Song, grounding interdependence over independence in verified cell biology, with diagrams, a prose poem, and a "Not:" refusals set.
Variety is resilience; monoculture is the fragile, engineered thing — one blight from collapse. The Cavendish argument across scales: the near-uniform early universe that needed tiny differences to make any structure at all, the Cavendish banana, neurodiversity via the spiky profile and the competency network, and ethodiversity — the more-than-human variety of ways of being. Sameness is a single point of failure; difference is the default state of matter. Seven spreads, five diagrams, a "Not:" refusals set.
Constellations are lines we impose from one vantage point — Orion's stars sit light-years apart at wildly different depths, and the belt only lines up from here. So is the bell curve; so is the border between "disorder" and "difference." The companion argument to the Constellation Field Guide: the error curve borrowed from astronomy and turned into "the average man," the DSM's moving border, epistemic injustice and the words to name ourselves, and why a human-made line is ours to redraw. Eight spreads, five diagrams, a "Not:" refusals set.
The time-delay of starlight as inheritance and accountability. We see stars as they were; some still shining have already gone dark — and their scattered elements become us. A memorial register read as ancestry: Highlander and our own elders, the ones the Cult of Compliance took, and why memory is labor owed forward. Carries Ira Socol and Page & Woodland in full, closing on “forgetting is a tool of white supremacy — memory is the work.” Eight spreads, five diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.
A guest zine by Helen Edgar (Autistic Realms), in her own voice. One thread followed down three scales — relational quantum mechanics, the cosmic microwave background, and Deleuze — to the same shape: difference comes first, and the baseline is the thing that got built. It ends where the flat line, and even the spiky profile, give way to a constellation of intensities: a self that is dynamic, relational, and never finished. Ten spreads.
David Bowie as a way of being star stuff — defiantly, joyfully weird. Unmasking as authorship rather than exposure, the freedom of many selves, bringing the hidden to the front, and authenticity as our purest freedom. From “Changes” and Space Oddity to Blackstar, difference read as direction, not deficit. Eight spreads, each with an embedded Bowie performance, plus a “Not:” refusals set.
AURORA as a way of being star stuff — the alien who came home by gathering a tribe of Weirdos, not by being cured into fitting. Feeling alien, the mothership's invitation, naming your people, refusing the cure, stimming in the open, and the way back to Earth. Eight spreads, each with an embedded AURORA performance, plus a “Not:” refusals set.
Multispecies justice and more-than-human governance, read as star stuff. Every being at the table — soil, river, beaver, cuckoo, meadow — is forged from the same stellar matter, so the Council of All Beings is the universe convening with itself, and you cannot rank what you are made of. Carries the ethodiversity thread from No. 8 outward: the cosmos varies not only in what it makes but in how its creatures live. Six spreads of argument, then a hydrofeminist coda — the “service provider” critique and the four dimensions of justice, ethodiversity and ethonormativity after Tarragnat, the role-play method (speaking as the soil and the river), the proxy problem and the Umwelt, and Rights of Nature meeting hydrofeminism at Te Awa Tupua, closing on a coda where the council dissolves into flow. Nine spreads, six diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.
Umwelt as star stuff. Every creature is sealed in its own complete perceptual world — the tick's three signals, the bat's echo, the mantis shrimp's light, the dog's scent-time — and each world is whole, not a partial view of one real world underneath. There is no neutral, default way to sense. The animals do the arguing, so that when minds enter, the point lands as recognition: monotropism is an attention-world, Autistic perception a different and complete sky, not a broken copy of a standard one. And when two worlds meet — human and bat, one mind and another — the gap is mutual: the double empathy problem, arrived at without lecturing. Not one correct channel, but mutual translation. Carries the Umwelt thread from No. 14 inward, from von Uexküll through Tarragnat, Manning, Milton, and Despret. Eight spreads, six diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.
Niche construction as star stuff, and the third of a loose trilogy — how we treat other worlds (No. 14), how we sense them (No. 15), and here, how we build them. Organisms don't just adapt to a fixed environment; they remake it — the beaver's dam, the spider's web — and pass the built world on as ecological inheritance. So the neurodiversity turn is plain: don't fix the mind, change the environment (positive niche construction — there is no “normal” brain in a vat). Stimming is worldmaking; minor worlds and niche communities are real, not lesser; and no niche is neutral — the “default” room was built for one kind of mind, so the fix is reconstruction, not accommodation. Grounded in Odling-Smee & Laland, Armstrong, Tarragnat, Manning, Kadodia & Krueger, and Haraway, and rooted in Stimpunks' own glossary. Eight spreads, six diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.
Tides and co-regulation as star stuff. The Sun out-masses the Moon 27 million times, yet the Moon runs the tide — because tidal force falls off with the cube of distance, and nearness beats mass. So co-regulation is gravity: a safe-enough nervous system nearby pulls yours into rhythm, at a distance, without touching. Spring and neap tides as aligned or crossed pulls, parallel presence as tidal locking, meerkat mode as a sea that lost its moon, and the ecosystemic turn — the storm is in the weather, not the water. Grounded in the Stimpunks glossary (co-regulation, polyvagal theory, meerkat mode, ARLES, regulation-first), with a hydrofeminist thread carried inward from No. 14. Eight spreads, six diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.
Knowledge gardening as star stuff — a self-portrait of the whole project. If stimpunks.org is the knowledge garden, starstuff.earth is where it flowers, and these zines are the blooms. A garden, not a stream: evergreen, cross-linked, walkable, grown from lived experience rather than handed down as hierarchy (a rhizome and a mycelial network, after Deleuze & Guattari). The cosmic turn: a knowledge garden is how star stuff comes to know itself — a supernova scatters its forged elements like a seed-head (SN 1006, liberating iron), and the universe knows itself not as a vault but as a garden, by growing and seeding. Held in common, not enclosed: CC BY-SA, print free, share freely — the licence line is the seed dispersal. Grounded in Caulfield, Appleton, Bush, Deleuze & Guattari, Ostrom, and Sagan, and rooted in Stimpunks' own garden and commons. Eight spreads, six diagrams, a cover bed of blooms keyed to the prior zines' colours, a “Not:” refusals set.
Crip time, read through relativity — with a guest coda by Helen Edgar. Physics says there is no universal “now”: simultaneity is relative and clocks run at different rates by speed and gravity (your phone's GPS corrects for it). So the one true clock is a human invention — railway-and-factory standard time, a convention we mistook for a law and then began grading bodies and minds against. Crip time (Zola & Gill, Kafer, Samuels, Price) bends the clock back to fit us instead of bending us to it — the same move as Minor Worlds, now applied to time. Monotropic spiral time and felt time (Helen Edgar, Bergson, Deleuze) are their own real clock, measured in intensity, not minutes; Samuels' time travel, grief time, and broken time hold the hard edges too. The reading: no clock is master, and being “off the clock” is closer to the truth than fitting it. Nine spreads, seven diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set, and a closing coda by Helen Edgar on spiral time.
Fluctuating capacity, read through the physics of phase transitions. Water doesn't get gradually stiffer as it cools — it holds, then flips to ice all at once at a threshold. Same H₂O, different state, and the conditions (not the substance) decide which. So the exhausting question — why could you do it yesterday and not today? — has a clean answer: capacity is a state, not a trait, and you were near a boundary. The hardest part is the crossing itself (threshold anxiety is sensitivity to a real edge — broken thresholds, not broken people); you can be supercooled, held past your limit until one small thing tips everything at once; and recovery slows near the edge, because that's how systems behave. Nothing is fixed or broken — fluid adaptation and weather-bodies, re-adapting to a changed climate. Extends Minor Worlds: change the conditions, not the substance. Grounded in phase-transition physics, Cynthia Kim, Helen Edgar, and Stimpunks' own threshold anxiety. Eight spreads, six diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.
The spectrum was never a severity scale — after Helen Edgar & Patrick Dwyer. “Spectrum” is the most misread word in our vocabulary: people hear a line from mild to severe. But a real spectrum isn't a ladder — split a star's light and every element signs its own pattern of lines, a fingerprint, which is the only way we know what stars are made of. And the sky's figure was never a line: it's a constellation. The zine follows the escalation from Helen Edgar's brand-new essay — the line of neuronormativity, to the spiky profile (better, but still a grid measured from a baseline), to a constellation of intensities: no rank, no norm, no line. Patrick Dwyer's autism constellation anchors it; the functioning-labels critique shows how the line gatekeeps support (“not disabled enough” vs “too disabled”). Held with care: refusing the line doesn't erase that some of us need far more support — need is not a rank; name it instead. Cashes in the rainbow motif on every page and hands off to the Constellation Field Guide. Eight spreads, spectrum-forward diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.
Emergence and the murmuration — a flock has no captain, and neither does a self. Hundreds of thousands of starlings make vast rolling shapes with no leader and no plan: each bird tracks only its six or seven nearest neighbours (Ballerini & the STARFLAG project), and the whole emerges from that one local rule. Philip Anderson's “More Is Different” (1972) is the spine — the founding statement of anti-reductionism: at each level of scale new laws appear that the parts don't contain, so knowing the parts never rebuilds the whole. The early universe did the same, self-organising faint density ripples into the cosmic web with no architect. Two payoffs land it home: the whole person is realer than any diagnostic checklist of parts (you are not a list of deficits — you are the murmuration), and our best neurodivergent collectives — NeurodiVentures — are leaderless murmurations, not org charts (competency networks and catalysts rather than leaders; decisions where the knowledge lives). A “the whole exceeds the parts” zine. Held with care: leaderless is not structureless. Eight spreads, flock-and-web diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.
Hydrofeminism as belonging, read through star stuff — after Astrida Neimanis. You are not a container of water; you are water, roughly 60% of you, briefly gathered into a shape. And none of it is only yours: it was rain, river, cloud, and the inside of other creatures first. Neimanis's gestationality (we each began inside another body's water) and Stacy Alaimo's transcorporeality dissolve the clean edge — we are all downstream of one another, permeable and borrowed. The crucial move, held with care: watery belonging is not dissolution into sameness. Where two rivers meet, the confluence runs braided for miles — one channel, two waters, still distinct. That's the neurodiversity paradigm in an image: the spiky profile survives the merge. A dedicated spread carries shared/collective flow — monotropism's deep channels can align into shared flow (Autistic Realms, Helen Edgar); a watering hole is where currents pool. So belonging is a current, not a border — build watering holes, keep the water moving. Much of Earth's water is older than the Sun. Eight spreads, six diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.
The air we share, read through star stuff and solarpunk — a companion to Bodies of Water. There is only one air: a single, well-mixed body with no walls in it, so thoroughly circulated that your next breath very likely holds atoms once breathed by strangers and by trees across the world. It's a reciprocal breath — we exhale what plants inhale, and our oxygen is the exhaust of ancient cyanobacteria (the Great Oxidation Event, ~2.4 billion years ago), forged first in stars. Every room we share is a shared-air space (a term coined by Helen Edgar & Ryan Boren): in it we trade breath and co-regulate, nervous systems settling into a shared rhythm. The neurodiversity turn: many of us are the canaries of that room. Miners carried canaries because the birds felt the bad air first — not because they were weak, but because they were sensitive, and their alarm was information. Our sensitivity to fragrance, stale air, and fluorescent hum is an early-warning system, not a flaw: don't blame the bird, change the air — build it breathable for the canaries and it's breathable for all. Which raises the harder question: habitable, and for whom? The burden of shared air falls unevenly, so breathable air is a commons, not a private accommodation one person quietly manages. The response is solarpunk: clean air as infrastructure as resistance — open windows, plants, masks, DIY Corsi–Rosenthal boxes — mutual aid you can build in an afternoon. Move quietly and plant things. Nine spreads, seven diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.
Connection carried across distance, read through star stuff — a companion to Shared Air. The electromagnetic spectrum is one continuous field: radio waves and starlight are the same phenomenon at different wavelengths, and the same physics that carries a voice call carries a star's light. Shared-signal space — a term coined by Helen Edgar — is the counterpart to shared-air space: a call, a message, a voice note, a synthesised voice, carrying the rhythm on a signal instead of the air of a room. A voice note is breath, timestamped and sent; co-regulation crosses a screen too — thinner, but real (Porges; Streuber et al.). For many of us, text and AAC aren't a fallback from speech but the clearer channel — thinking time, structure, fewer sensory demands, a record to return to (Howard & Sedgewick) — and AAC is the real communication, not a workaround. Aversion to the phone is information, not fragility. Reachable, and for whom? Communication access is a commons; we build our own watering holes — the Autistic Rhizome (Edgar), Discords, AAC — sideways and underground, where lurking counts. The oldest signal of all is a dead star's light still reaching your eye: signal lets connection cross a gap touch can't, so no channel is the master channel (Milton). Nine spreads, seven diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.
How neurodivergent knowledge and community grow, read through star stuff — no trunk, no center, many doors. A tree has one trunk and a chain of command; you climb it or you're lost. A rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari) has no root to ask permission of, so you can enter anywhere — Spiky Profiles → Monotropism → Deep Attention, or in from burnout, or a word that finally fit. No prerequisite, no gatekeeper. And a mycelium is the life in that shape: fungal threads carry nutrients and signals between trees that never touch (the “wood wide web,” Simard), thickening the paths that help and letting the rest fade; a brainless slime mold rebuilds the Tokyo rail network (Tero et al.). Zoom all the way out and the shape returns — the cosmic web of dark-matter filaments, the universe's largest structure, looks like a mycelium, like a neuron: not a pyramid, a web. We're already building it. Gray-Hammond and Munday name it neuro-anarchy; the Autistic Rhizome is “a network with no single point of origin,” members as equals held by a do-no-harm ethic, resilient because nothing depends on a center (with Helen Edgar's watering holes). Where the map meets soil is Cavendish Space. Decentralization isn't disorder — it's the oldest structure there is. Eight spreads, six diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.
More-than-human neurodiversity, read through star stuff. There is no standard nervous system — not across species, and not within one: the octopus's mind distributed down its arms, the jellyfish's centreless nerve net, the worm's fully mapped 302 neurons. Read neurodiversity literally and it never stopped at the human. Following Ombre Tarragnat's antispeciesist–posthumanist philosophy: there's “no valid reason to be anthropocentric when you talk about neurodiversity,” and ethodiversity — behaviour reclaimed as “a subjective response to a bodymind's situation” — is a fundamentally animal phenomenon. Ethonormativity punishes the ethodivergent (the horse who refuses the rider, the cat who resists petting — abandoned or euthanised). And the core move: neurodivergent people are pathologised by being animalised, so the liberation is to reclaim animality — not bestialisation (the speciesist, neuronormative “less-than-human” split, after Butler 2020) but (hum)animality, kin. Distance is not disconnection: shutting down can be how we keep relation. Every nervous system is the universe wired up to feel itself, no two ever the same. “I would rather be a divergent animal than a typical human.” Eight spreads, six diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.
On the old word for fate, and the newer word we made of it — a guest zine by Helen Edgar (Autistic Realms), rehoused in the Star Stuff style. Long before “weird” meant strange, wyrd meant becoming: Old English wyrd comes from weorþan, “to become,” and is twined with the root of “worth.” Fate was never drawn as a straight line from birth to death but as cloth — the Norns' weaving at the well beneath Yggdrasill, the “web of man” — many threads crossing, none load-bearing alone. The Weird Sisters carried the word down through Holinshed to Shakespeare's Macbeth; over centuries “weird” drifted into an insult, and Autistic and disabled communities have run that drift backward, taking it up again as a name, not a verdict — which is etymologically honest, not just cheek. Held with care: wyrd is not a script, not doom, not a synonym for wrong, not something done to you alone. Under the root, weorþan meant “to become,” never “to be”: nobody is finished, and becoming was never the flaw — it was the design. You were never written; you are still being woven. Nine spreads, six diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set, a “threads already running” map of its kin in the collection, and Helen's own sources & notes.
Relational quantum physics, and what it means to be Autistic — a guest zine developed after Helen Edgar (Autistic Realms) from her essay “We Are Made of Relations.” In Carlo Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics a particle has no standalone properties; what it is becomes definite only in relation to another system (Rovelli, 1996). The count gives it away: two distinct coins make four outcomes, but two identical bosons make only three — what's fundamental isn't the standalone particle but the symmetry, the relation (Webster, 2026). Karen Barad calls the relation-before-parts intra-action; the human version, intradependence — made of each other, deeper than interdependence — Helen draws from Barad too. Read through Deleuze, “objects emerge out of more fundamental processes of differentiation”: difference first, then relation, and the tidy standalone object is the thing that got built. The payoff lands on our own work — the double empathy problem (Milton, 2012) lives in the relation, not one mind, and Helen widens it into DEEP; and in the ARLES ladder Relational sits near the base with Regulation inside it, because regulation is relational, so you change the field, not the person. Held with care: not quantum mysticism, not “everything is connected” as a vibe, not dissolution into sameness — the spiky profile survives the merge. A rhyme, not a proof. Nine spreads, seven diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.
Eight patterns in the sky, renamed for what they actually are. The Stimmer, The Deep Diver, The Pattern Seeker, The Flood, The Navigator, The Bridge, The Signal, The Forge — each with SVG diagrams, star data, and full field notes.
Eight elements essential to your body, traced to where the universe forged them — hydrogen from the Big Bang, carbon and oxygen from dying giants, calcium and iron from supernovae, iodine from colliding neutron stars. The periodic table read as autobiography, each entry with an atom diagram, key data, and full field notes.
Eight kinds of life thriving where we assume nothing could — tardigrades that survive by pausing, lichens that never go it alone, vent worms on an economy without sun, fungi that eat radiation, life at home in brine, boiling springs, freezing seas, and solid rock. The condition is named extreme, never the organism: it's about fit, not grit. Each entry with a tolerance diagram, a “to us / to them” table, and full field notes.
Eight worlds in our own solar system that run on rules Earth would call impossible — Europa’s hidden ocean, Titan’s methane rain, Enceladus venting to space, Uranus on its side, Venus with no exit, Pluto reclassified by a vote, Mercury on its own clock, Neptune making its own weather. Not failed Earths: different rules, not broken rules. Each with a world diagram, an “Earth’s rule / its own rule / result” table, and full field notes.
Eight ways to be a star — the long slow burn of a red dwarf, the so-called “failed” brown dwarf, energy pulsing on its own rhythm, a pulsar’s millisecond precision, stars bound in pairs, the red giant’s later phase, the white dwarf’s long afterward, and the brief brilliance of a blue giant. Astronomy’s own names hide verdicts; the sky doesn’t grade. Each entry maps its place on the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, with a “sounds like / actually” table and full field notes.
Mutual aid, written into biology — twelve partnerships across the tree of life, read as mutual aid. Fungi feeding trees through the wood wide web, bacteria making soil, a cleaner fish trusted by predators who could swallow it, algae building reefs that shelter a quarter of ocean life, the fig and its wasp that cannot live without each other. Interdependence is the rule, not the exception: Kropotkin showed mutual aid is a factor of evolution; Margulis, that life “took over the globe not by combat, but by networking.” This isn't “nature is nice” — parasites are real too, and the ghost pipe (Monotropa uniflora) is the honest one-way case, a myco-heterotroph that only takes, modelling receiving without reciprocating — and a bridge to monotropism (with Helen Edgar's tribute to Dinah Murray). It's that nothing living stands alone. What biology has always done, disability-justice communities name and practice: the human specimen is our own care webs and spoon shares (Spade, Mingus, Piepzna-Samarasinha, Kafai, Lewis), and a closing coda swaps the language of management for the language of living systems — symbiosis over competition, competency networks over leadership, coordination over management. Each entry maps who gives what and gets what, with full field notes. Solidarity, not charity; interdependence, not independence.
Eleven ways to have a nervous system — the companion catalogue to Every Nervous System (Zine No. 27). The jellyfish's centreless net, older than brains; the octopus's mind spread through its arms (two-thirds of its neurons outside the brain); the worm's fully mapped 302 neurons; the honeybee's million-neuron cognition and swarm mind; a jumping spider planning routes with a brain smaller than a pinhead; an electric fish reading a sense we lack; the star-nosed mole's 22-ray touch-world; the corvid's forebrain packed denser than a primate's (Olkowicz 2016); the elephant's 257 billion neurons, almost all cerebellar; a slime mold solving mazes with no neurons at all; and us — about 86 billion neurons, one arrangement among many, not the top of any ladder. Neuroscience hides verdicts in its words — “primitive,” “simple,” “lower” — but the animal kingdom keeps no standard nervous system. Each entry maps its architecture, reframes the deficit reading (“sounds like / actually”), and carries full field notes. There is no standard nervous system.
Two-sided single sheet. L★S large on the face, full Bone Song poem on the reverse. Risograph-inspired, print-ready. Toggle between sides and print from your browser.
How one phrase compressed itself into a glyph. Five shorthands — LYDTYSS, LYSS, LUSS, L★S, ★stuff — with their etymologies and what each compression preserved and let go.