Changelog

What has changed here, newest first. This is the site's own account of itself — what was built, what was got wrong, and what is still missing.

We publish the mistakes too. A changelog that only lists wins is an advertisement.

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2026-09-26 — Mapping Monotropism in Education

Mapping Monotropism in Education is new: Helen Edgar on what the map means at school. It comes from the Yellow Ladybugs panel she gave with Dr Wenn Lawson in June 2025, and it is for teachers, support staff and families. It walks through the landmarks of the map as they show up in a school day, then executive function, the senses, communication, interests, transitions and burnout, and ends every part with what helps — which is always a change to the setting, never an instruction to the child.

• It is linked from the front page, the training, and the three areas it leans on most: the Shark Infested Waters, the Tides of the Sensory Sea and the River of Monotropic Flow States.
• Fixed before it could matter: the page renderer printed what it did not understand. It was built to stop on anything unfamiliar, so a page could never quietly lose a line. It did stop on a lost line — and turned a table into paragraphs of pipe characters instead, with no complaint. Nothing published had a table, so nobody saw it; this page would have been the first. It now renders tables and numbered lists, and stops on the rest.
• Tables read top to bottom on a phone, each row under its own heading, instead of three squeezed columns.
• The Meerkat Mounds link follows its post to NeuroHub Community, where Emergent Divergence now lives.
• Corrected: Meerkat Mounds was named by Tanya Adkin, not by Tanya Adkin and David Gray-Hammond together. The definition it quotes is still credited to both of them, because those words are theirs jointly; the name is hers.

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2026-09-20 — The changelog has a feed

A feed of this page now exists, so a reader can bring the changes to you rather than you coming back to look. It carries each entry in full, not a teaser and a link — what is on the page is what arrives in the reader.

• It is built from this file, the same one the page is rendered from, so there is no second account of the history to go stale. tools/check.mjs holds the two against each other: every entry here is an item in the feed, and every item in the feed lands on an anchor that exists on the page.
• Every page announces it in its <head>, so a reader finds it from anywhere on the site without being told the address.
• Nothing in it is the build clock. The feed's lastBuildDate is the newest entry's date, not the moment the site was built — a timestamp there would tell subscribers something had changed every time anything was published.
• Nothing is fetched from a third party to do it, and the CSP did not need editing. That is the test this repository applies to anything new.
• No tracking, and no way to add any. A feed is a file; there is no open rate, no per-subscriber URL and nothing counted. Whoever reads it is nobody's business but theirs.

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2026-09-16 — A second tool: draw your own map

Draw a map is new, and version one has not gone anywhere. They ask different questions. The marking tool asks where you are on Helen's map; the new one hands over blank ground and a tray of shapes and asks what yours looks like. Shipping only the second would have taken the easier door away.

• The shapes are ours, drawn from scratch. Islands with beaches and without, rivers that turn whichever way you turn them, a rabbit, a penguin, a meerkat, an octopus, a tent, a campfire, a shark, a storm, a canyon, a whirlpool. Nothing is traced from Helen's map or from anybody's stock library, which is what makes them yours to keep, copy and change under the same licence as everything else here.
• Land and islands come first in the tray again. They had been moved down so the tray would open with what joins a map rather than with separate islands — and then the first person to use it did not find the land at all. Third in a tray of ninety-five is the same as not being there. The point about joining is now in the words instead of the order: the land does not have to sit on its own, and the water, bridges and boats are named right there.
• Fixed: the map stayed put only on tall windows. Keeping it on screen while you scroll was switched off below a 704-pixel-tall window — which is an ordinary laptop with a bookmarks bar, or Chrome at 110% zoom. It was reported as not working at all, and it was not working, silently, for most of the windows it was built for. It now stays put on any window with room for two columns, and the board shrinks to fit rather than being cut off.
• Drag a shape out of the tray and drop it where you want it. It appears under the pointer as soon as it crosses onto the board, so you are placing something you can see. Clicking still puts a piece on the middle of the board — dragging is unavailable from the keyboard and awkward with a tremor, so it is an alternative and not a replacement.
• Download your map, as an SVG: it scales to a wall, opens in anything, and can be taken apart and changed, which is the same permission the licence gives you in words. The file is made in your browser and handed straight to you. Nothing is uploaded to produce it.
• The tray opens with joining, not with islands. The board is fresh water, and the first things offered are what crosses it: rivers, bridges, boats. A map does not have to be marooned to be yours. There is also a Span — a bridge seen from above, which is the one that still reads as a crossing when you turn it, because a side view has an implied up in it and a plan view does not.
• Places of your own. The twenty do not name everything, so you can put a ? where something of yours belongs and write what it is. Writing in it is what turns a question into a place: the ring goes from dashed to solid. Your words are kept in your browser, on your device, and there is nowhere for them to go — no account, no upload, and headers that forbid the page from trying.
• Undo and redo. Every change to a map can be taken back, including clearing it, with the buttons or with Ctrl or ⌘ and Z. A run of arrow-key nudges counts as one step rather than twelve, and undo says what it undid by name — never how many moves are left, because that would be a number.
• Every area page carries its own illustration, set beside the opening of the page, made of the same shapes the builder offers and linking to it — so a drawing you like is a drawing you can pick up and use.
• The map stays on screen while you scroll the shapes, on screens wide enough for two columns. Scrolling back up to see what you just put down is the difference between placing a piece and guessing at one — and it gives the empty column beside the tray something to do.
• Each of the twenty areas has an illustration of our own, offered in the builder as The twenty, drawn. They are arrangements of the shapes already in the tray rather than twenty separate drawings, so they cannot drift away from the palette they are made of.
• Nothing the site draws for itself comes from a stock library. Helen's map is composed of Canva elements and stays exactly as she made it, reproduced unaltered; every shape and illustration the site draws is Stimpunks' own work, which is what makes it yours to take under the same licence as everything else here.
• Rivers, paths and bridges run four ways each — level, rising, falling and straight down the map — and Turn moves any piece an eighth of a circle at a time, with Flip mirroring it. A tray of horizontal squiggles quietly says a river only goes one way.
• No score, no type, no result, and no counts — the same rule version one is held to. The tool says where a piece is in words, and says nothing about what your map means.
• Nothing you draw leaves the device. No account, no upload, nowhere for a map to go. It is kept in your browser and gone when you clear the site's data.
• Two colours were added to the palette, a leaf green and a storm navy, because a tree painted in one of the four area colours would be claiming the tree is a state. Both are checked for contrast in both themes like the rest.
• The board needs JavaScript and says so. Drawing does in a way that marking does not, so the page shows the sentence rather than a board that will never respond, and points at the marking tool and the paper workbook instead.

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2026-09-16 — Helen's review came back

The map's author read the forty passages Stimpunks wrote onto her map, and sent notes on eighteen of them. Those notes are now the pages. This is the part of the process the site was built around: our words sit on her map, so she gets to say whether they are right.

What changed across the whole site

• "Monotropic mind" is now "monotropic person" everywhere it was ours to change. It stays as written inside quotations, because correcting someone else's words is not ours to do.
• The senses are eight, not five. Tides of the Sensory Sea counted sound, light, touch and smell. It now counts taste as well, and interoception, proprioception and the vestibular sense — the three the familiar five leave out.
• The Autistic Self Advocacy Network is spelled out and linked where the abbreviation stood alone.

What changed on the areas

• Attention Tunnels — a tunnel can go the other way, and the page no longer presents it as purely good. The word cheap is gone.
• Penguin Pebbling Cove of Friendship — says why it is called that. Penguins give each other pebbles to show they care.
• Mountains of Ruminating Thoughts — tired, cross, or anxious.
• Cyclones of Unmet Needs — advocacy moves the side that holds the resources, and community support holds a person up while it shifts.
• Infodump Canyon — an infodump shows trust. It can be a sign of friendship.
• Rhizomatic Communities — says what a rhizome actually is, in plain words, and names both online and in-person communities.
• River of Monotropic Flow States — time may feel like it has melted away.
• Meerkat Mounds — on high alert, and unable to find a way into flow.
• Riverbanks of Monotropic Time — "clocks that bend" is now timetables that flex and people who adapt to needs that fluctuate.
• Beach of Body Doubling — a body double is a shared presence, and there is no pressure to perform. The page had described only what the other person does not do.
• Burnout Whirlpools — run on empty for too long, not for years, and without enough left to manage or refill. Not cured by neuronormative resilience training, and carrying Nick Walker's line: "Cultivating resilience becomes an act of defiance."
• Panic Hills of Low Object Permanence — things you cannot see fall outside the attention tunnel. Phone reminders and apps sit alongside open shelving and visible lists.
• Forest of Joy, Awe and Wonder — stimming is named.
• Shark Infested Waters — the water is drunk, not just swum in. See below.

Two credits were completed

The Forest of Joy, Awe and Wonder credit is finished. The last changelog asked for a byline the live article does not carry; Helen had it. It is Amelia Blackwater. The surname stood alone rather than getting a guessed first name, which is the rule working.

Two areas stopped saying they had no originator. Rabbit Holes of Research and Infodump Canyon are Helen Edgar's own. The definitions quoted on those pages are still general ones rather than her words, so each page credits her with the area and says the definition is not a quotation from her.

One quotation on this site has no public recording

Nick Walker's line is from a talk at the 2026 Autistic Mental Health Conference, and there is no video, transcript or published text of it to link. Recordings went to ticket holders. The page links the conference page, which names Walker and the talk.

The wording rests on Helen, who was in the room and helped organise the event. That is a weaker basis than every other quotation here, all of which link to the words themselves — which is why it is written down in ATTRIBUTIONS.md instead of passing quietly. If a published version turns up, we will cite that instead.

The water is absorbed, and the answer to it is other water

Shark Infested Waters said the water was around everything else. That made neuronormativity ambient — weather you might get out of. Helen's note: we absorb it, and it becomes part of us. The page now says so. You do not just swim in it. You drink it, and it becomes part of you.

The frame is Astrida Neimanis's hydrofeminism, borrowed and credited: bodies are permeable, and there is no clean edge where the outside stops. Neimanis is not writing about neuronormativity — applying it here is Helen's move, and ATTRIBUTIONS says so.

What changes it is other water. Not getting out — you cannot, you are made of it — but nourishing water being within reach: Autistic community, spaces built for the bodies in them, people who do not read you as a deficit. Most of the rest of this map is that water.

An attribution error on that same area, now fixed

The definition on Shark Infested Waters was this site's own summary, printed as a quotation under Damian Milton's name, with a link to his handout. Only one of its three ideas is his, and none of its sentences are. It has been marked up as a quotation since launch.

It is no longer a blockquote, and the credit says what it is: a summary written here, with the double empathy problem attributed to Milton and linked. This is the failure the credit fields exist to prevent, committed against the definition instead of the credit.

What did not change, and why

The capital A on Autistic was already house style and stays lowercase inside quotations that were written that way.

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2026-09-15 — the site went live

monotropicmap.org exists. The Map of Monotropic Experiences has its own home, built on Helen Edgar's go-ahead with joint Stimpunks and Autistic Realms attribution settled first.

What is here

• Both maps, and you can click them. The map's twenty areas, and the nine zones of Autism & The Map of Neuronormative Domination. The markers sit over Helen's original artwork — nothing about the pictures was redrawn, recoloured or cropped.
• Twenty area pages, one for each place on the map, each crediting the person who named it and linking to their own words. This is a map of other people's coinages and the credit is the content, not a footnote.
• A plain-language definition on every area page, before the quoted one. The glossary entries these come from are collections of academic quotations — useful, and not what somebody meeting an idea for the first time should have to read first. They average seven words a sentence. No sentence runs over fifteen.
• A numbered key under the map, so the picture can orient you on its own: the marker on the artwork, the name in the key, the same number on both.
• The frame is structural, not an appendix. The second map has a page of its own, and every area page follows the rule it implies: what changes a stuck state is a change to the conditions, never an instruction to the person. You will not find "rest more" here.
• The whole free training, about 4,000 words with presenter notes, all sixteen slides, and all eight Consider reflection prompts. The training pack and workbook stay at Autistic Realms — buying them there is what funds this work.
• The community story project, and the questions for marking your own map.
• No accounts, no analytics, no tracking, no third parties. See privacy.

The front page needs no JavaScript at all

The map, its key, and every name on it are in the page before any script runs. Not as a degraded fallback — as the only mode there is. The page loads nothing but a light/dark toggle.

It took two goes. The first version was a picture/list switcher, built so the list would be a real front door rather than a fallback. The principle was right and the mechanism undermined it: making the two mutually exclusive put the twenty names in the view you were not looking at, so with the picture showing, an area was a numbered circle and nothing else.

The key fixed that, and the switcher then had nothing left to do. It is gone, and so is the script behind it.

Four credits were wrong, and are fixed

The first draft of the area pages carried four invented names — attributions where our own published page gave only a surname and the gap got filled in rather than looked up. Every one was wrong.

They were caught by opening the sources, and corrected: the training video is Kieran Rose's, and the sensory-sea graphics are Janae Elisabeth's. A surname you can source beats a full name you cannot.

One was still incomplete on the day: the Forest of Joy, Awe and Wonder credited Blackwater, and the byline is not on the live article. Helen supplied it the next day — see the entry above.

A bug that only existed once it was public

The site sends a strict security policy that forbids inline styles. The map markers were positioned with exactly that — so on the first live deploy every marker on both maps stacked in the top-left corner, while looking perfect on the machine it was built on, because a local server sends no such policy.

Fixed, and the build now refuses to ship an inline style at all. Recorded here because verify in production, not on your own machine is the kind of lesson that is cheap to write down and expensive to relearn.

Said "map", stopped saying "island"

The site's tagline was An island you can find yourself on. It is now A map you can find yourself on, and the word is gone from the rest of the site's voice: the association the word now carries is not one a page about Autistic flow states should be putting in anybody's head.

It survives in one place only — the alt text describing the artwork, because the artwork is an island and a blind reader should get the same picture everyone else does. Describing a picture accurately is a different job from choosing our own words.

My Monotropic Map: you can mark the map now

The tool the Your map page has been describing since launch is built. Go through the twenty areas and say what each is for you right now — living here, passing through, taken over the map, never been — and the map above fills in as you go. You get a legend you can print or copy.

Those four are not new words. They are the sentence that page has used from the start, which is where they came from.

There is no score, no type and no result, and that includes counts. The tool will never tell you that you marked eight of twenty, because eight of twenty is a number and a number would make this a quiz. What you have not got to yet is listed under Not said yet, by name. Nothing on the page interprets your marks or offers you advice about them — each area links to its own page, where what the environment can change is already written down.

Nothing you mark leaves your device, and the tool has no way to send it anywhere. There is no account, no upload, and no request to anywhere — the page is not permitted to make one, and there is no button that would want to. Copying the legend puts it on your clipboard, and what happens to it after that is entirely yours. Clearing your browser data clears your marks; there is nothing on our side to delete.

It works with JavaScript switched off, because the twenty controls are ordinary radio buttons. What a script adds is remembering your marks between visits, assembling the legend, and the print and copy buttons. Without one you can still fill the page in and print it, and the page says so rather than silently doing less.

The workbook still does this on paper and in far more depth. This is the five-minute version.

The typeface the design asked for is now actually shipped

For the whole of the site's first day, Atkinson Hyperlegible was named in the stylesheet and no font file was ever served, so every reader quietly got the system stack instead. Naming a face costs nothing and proves nothing. The page looked fine to everybody testing it, which is exactly why it lasted.

It is now served from this origin: four faces, about 97 KB all told, cached for a year. Atkinson Hyperlegible is drawn for low vision — the letterforms are pulled apart so that b and d, i and l, and 0 and O cannot be mistaken for one another — and it is the reason the face was asked for in the first place.

Nothing is fetched from a third party to do it. The files are ours to serve, font-src 'self' is unchanged, and the CSP did not need editing — which is the test this repository applies to anything new.

The font is Braille Institute of America's, under the SIL Open Font License, and the licence ships in fonts/OFL.txt beside it because the licence requires that. It was converted from the published TrueType to WOFF2 and changed in no other way — no subsetting, all 342 glyphs — so no character quietly loses its shape.

tools/check.mjs now fails if the face is named and not served, if any font file referenced is missing, or if the licence stops travelling with it. The bug that lasted a day cannot last a second one.

One thing it does not cover: the font has no ← or → glyph, and the previous/next links at the foot of each area page use both. Those two characters fall back to the system stack. They are arrows; they look like arrows.

Open, and said out loud

• The marking tool marks our map, not yours yet. Version one is on your map. Version two would let you drag and resize your own island, and it needs each area as a separate drawing — which may not exist. That is Helen's to answer.
• The twenty What changes this paragraphs are ours, and Helen has not reviewed them.
• No offline copy yet. Once a service worker ships it lives on people's devices until something unregisters it, so it is worth being sure of the page shapes first.

This page exists

All of our sites publish a changelog. This was the one that did not.

The full record, including what was decided and why, is in DECISIONS.md. Credits are in ATTRIBUTIONS.md. The whole site is open source, CC BY-SA 4.0.