What changed

The sheets get revised, and somebody is carrying an earlier one into a meeting on Tuesday. This says what moved and whether it changes what you hand over.

1. The Demand Avoidance broadside

   20 September 2026 Link to this release

   A twelfth broadside, in blue and violet. Demand Avoidance compresses the Why Sheet released the same day onto one sheet, printed both sides, for carrying into a meeting rather than reading on a screen. 190 × 259 mm — the intersection of A4 and US Letter, so it prints uncropped in either country. Free and CC0.

   Side A answers three sentences rather than stating one claim, and that is the shape decision. The other argument sheets put a claim on the face and the alternative on the reverse. This one gets handed across a table to somebody who has already made an argument at you, so the face is the three sentences you will actually hear — he can do it when he wants to, she managed it yesterday, you're just giving in — each answered in its own panel.

   Side B is what counts as a demand, and what to ask for. The demands are the surprising part: a clock, the turn of someone's voice, your own body asking you to eat or sleep. The asks are practice rather than statute, because the strongest legal framing in this literature is UK and a parent in a US meeting cannot use it.

   It spent the last colour pair at the minimum, and in doing so put all six spot hues back on four uses each. That evenness is arithmetic rather than design and will go again at the next sheet. The pair, not the hue, is what tells sheets apart when several are face-down in a stack.

2. Demand Avoidance

   20 September 2026 Link to this release

   An eighteenth Why Sheet, for the meeting where a child has been called defiant. Demand Avoidance is for the room where a child's inability to meet demands has been filed as a choice, and the plan on the table is more pressure. The distinction the room keeps collapsing is the whole argument: can't, not won't.

   The evidence points at the setting, not the child. Connolly, Constable and Mullally record that an unrecognised demand avoidant presentation "is viewed as defiance and deliberately challenging behavior, leading to school exclusions", and that "pressure to comply with direct demands is well-documented to lead to escalation in emotional reactivity and challenging behavior". A 2018 survey they cite found 70% of school aged demand avoidant children were either not enrolled or unable to tolerate their school environment. Seventy percent is a description of a setting.

   It does not ask the school to accept the label, and that is the design. Truman and colleagues found parents reporting teachers who did not necessarily believe PDA exists, so a sheet that only works after a school concedes a contested diagnosis fails in most rooms. Richard Woods is the way round it: the adjustments recommended for PDA are "suitable for most children, not just those diagnosed with PDA". Ask for the practice, not the diagnosis.

   The asks are practice, not statute. The strongest legal framing in this literature is UK — the Equality Act, the unlawfulness of informal exclusions — and a US parent in an IEP meeting cannot use it. So the sheet asks for the demand to be reduced first, for choices instead of instructions, for rewards and sanctions named and removed, and for anger logged as communication rather than as an incident.

   Twenty-two quotations, every one checked as a string against its source. Including the two places a machine-generated caption mis-heard a word, which are marked in square brackets rather than quietly corrected. A companion prompt for a letter to school comes with it.

   It has a broadside too, released the same day and written up in its own entry above.

   Published at stimpunks.org/why/demand-avoidance/.

3. The staleness check can fail again

   20 September 2026 Link to this release

   security.txt was rewriting itself on every build. RFC 9116 wants a future expiry date, and ours was computed as a year from Date.now() — to the second. So that one file differed from its committed copy every single run, and node tools/build-site.mjs --check reported it stale on a completely clean tree.

   The cost was not the noise. It was the gate. That check exists to answer one question — is the published site behind the sheets it is built from? — and it had been answering "yes" unconditionally since the day it was written. A gate that is always on says nothing: the next real drift would have arrived as one more line in a report that had cried wolf from the start.

   It carries the date forward now. If the committed expiry has more than 45 days left it is kept exactly as it is; only when it is running out is a new one minted, a year ahead. The file stays valid, the build stays honest, and renewal is prompted by the date running down rather than by the clock ticking.

   The renewal window is wider than the window that fails the build, on purpose. The build refuses the file below 30 days and renews it below 45. The other way round would leave a stretch of dates where the check refuses and rebuilding does not fix it — a gate nothing can clear, which is worse than no gate at all.

   And the general rule is written down now: nothing this repository generates may take a value from the clock. This was found while building the feed, which was one decision away from the same bug.

4. A changelog you can subscribe to

   20 September 2026 Link to this release

   This page. The sheets get revised — a section added, a quotation re-sourced, a claim corrected — and somebody is carrying an earlier version into a meeting on Tuesday. A commit history does not answer them. "What changed, and does it change what I hand over" is a question in prose, and this file has been answering it in prose since the first release. Now it is published at whysheet.press/changelog rather than sitting in a repository, generated from the same Markdown like everything else here.

   And a feed, at /feed.xml. A reader who finds the press before the sheet they need exists has no way back except remembering to look. There are no accounts here and there is no mailing list, because both mean holding somebody's address in order to tell them a page changed. A feed is the version of that which collects nothing: your reader asks for a file, we never learn that it did, and you unsubscribe without telling us.

   Same-day releases are a minute apart, and that is not a claim about the clock. Four of the first five releases here landed on one day. A changelog records a day; RSS wants a timestamp, and a reader handed four identical ones sorts them however it likes — usually backwards, which would have presented the oldest entry as the newest thing on the press. The minutes exist to preserve the order this file states, and nothing else reads them.

   The feed is gated like everything else. Every item's link is a permalink into an anchor on the changelog page, and the build fails if that anchor is not there — the same dangling-anchor check the printed packets already get, in a medium where nobody would ever report it. A feed breaks silently and permanently: a reader sees an error once, or just stops getting updates, and concludes the press went quiet.

5. AAC Is Not a Last Resort

   19 September 2026 Link to this release

   A seventeenth Why Sheet, logged here late. AAC Is Not a Last Resort argues that a robust communication system is a right rather than a reward for proving you deserve one, and that AAC does not delay speech — it supports it. For the moment a school or clinic says a child needs to develop speech before they can have a communication system.

   It answers the prerequisite myth with the profession that refutes it, sets out where the right is written down, and makes the case for presuming competence as the least dangerous assumption. A device on its own is not enough: somebody has to model it.

   It has a broadside and a companion prompt, and it is published at stimpunks.org/why/aac/.

   This entry is a backfill. The sheet shipped on 2026-09-19 and no release note was written, which is how a changelog with seven entries about prompts, cards and feeds had nothing to say about the seventeenth sheet. The policy is written down now.

6. Prompts for work and clinic

   19 September 2026 Link to this release

   Every sheet that has somewhere to write now has a companion prompt — twelve of sixteen, up from ten. The four without one argue a position with no decision-maker at the other end.

   Sensory Access at Work builds an accommodation request from the sheet's own menu of forty-five adjustments across eight senses. It asks what you want to disclose before it writes anything, and defaults to naming nothing: an adjustment can be asked for without naming a diagnosis, and naming one puts it in a file you do not control.

   Neuromodulation & Autism prepares the appointment rather than writing a letter. Six questions to ask out loud, shaped to your situation, each with a line on what a good answer and a non-answer sound like. Its first rule is that it must not give medical advice — the questions are what make a decision informed, and the decision stays yours.

7. Asks sections, published

   19 September 2026 Link to this release

   All ten school sheets now say what to ask for. Five gained a "What to Ask For in the Room" section — Behaviorism, Alternatives to ABA, ABA Tactics, Positive Greetings at the Door, and Hoodie — and all five are live on stimpunks.org as well as here. A sheet that makes the argument and then leaves you to work out what to say in the room is doing half its job.

   Monotropism was never missing one. It has had "Questions To Ask In The Room" all along, written as a bold label above each question rather than as a list. The tooling read only lists, found none, and reported the sheet as having no asks — which would have led to writing a new section over better prose that was already there.

   All ten sheets now generate a companion prompt, up from four.

   And the drift checker can see content now. It used to count sheets, which is how five sections could exist here and not on the site while it reported no drift. It compares the text of every published section against the page — 167 of them — and fails the build when one is behind.

8. Social cards

   19 September 2026 Link to this release

   Every page now has a card. Share a Why Sheet into Discord, Bluesky or Slack and the link arrives with the sheet's title and the moment you reach for it, set in the site's own type on white — a document, not an advertisement. Thirty cards: the library, each of the sixteen sheets, each of the ten broadsides, the packet builder and the about page. Before this, every one of those links arrived as a line of grey text.

   Rendered from the pages, so they cannot drift. A new sheet gets a card with no further work. The build fails if a card no longer matches its page, if a page has no card, or if a card overflows at the minimum type size.

   og:image:alt carries what each card says. A card is the only part of a shared link that a blind reader would otherwise get nothing from.

9. Companion prompts

   19 September 2026 Link to this release

   A prompt to go with the sheet. Four Why Sheets now carry a companion prompt: plain text you copy into whatever AI assistant you already use, which asks you what happened — your child's name, their year, what was said, how the evening went — and then drafts the letter. Eye Contact, Masking and Burnout, Developmental Pace, and Recess and Play. Nothing you type reaches us.

   Each one carries its sheet's quotations inside it, word for word, and forbids the assistant from adding any source it was not given. That is the whole design. An assistant writing about school policy will reach for a study, and an invented or misattributed citation hands a school a free reason to dismiss you — in a room where you are already outnumbered. The generator refuses to put a quotation into a prompt without its attribution attached.

   Generated from the sheets, so they cannot drift. tools/build-prompts.mjs reads the argument, the quotations and the asks out of the Markdown. --check fails the build if any prompt no longer matches its sheet.

   And it only builds the ones it can build honestly. A sheet with no "What to Ask For in the Room" section is skipped rather than shipped without asks, because the alternative is an assistant inventing what to demand of a school. Six school sheets are in that state and are named on every build.

10. The Why Sheet Press

    19 September 2026 Link to this release

    The first release. Fourteen Why Sheets and nine broadsides, published as a print-first library at whysheet.press, generated from the Markdown in this repository.

    The press. Every sheet gets a page and a PDF. Tick the ones you need and the packet builder returns a single correctly paginated PDF — cover page with a name and a date, contents list with real page numbers, everything numbered straight through. Assembled in your own browser; nothing is uploaded and nothing is recorded.

    One source of truth. The site, the PDFs and the packet are all generated from the Markdown, and tools/check-drift.mjs prints every count side by side whether they agree or not.

    And the first thing it caught was itself. It reported three sheets as published but missing from the list on /why/. All three were already there. That list is generated from the page's child pages at request time, so it cannot drift — and the local site mirror had not re-fetched the page in six weeks, because a page whose rendered output depends on other content never reports itself as modified. The scrape is gone; the staleness signal that would have caught it is in its place.

    126 non-breaking spaces repaired. Nine of the fourteen sheets had been quietly damaged by Ulysses, twenty-four of the spaces sitting inside an emphasis delimiter where they stop the emphasis opening at all. The published pages were not the damaged copy; these files were. tools/check-ulysses.mjs now finds them and repairs exactly that, never the prose.

    Seven quotations that had become one. The Hoodie sheet's seven separately sourced quotations were rendering as a single blockquote carrying a single citation — six sources folded into a seventh's attribution. A blank line ends a quotation now.

    Two paper sizes, both measured. Why Sheets print at 190 × 259 mm, the intersection of A4 and US Letter. Broadsides print at 208 × 277 mm, the largest page that fits both, giving the 194 mm column that is the narrowest width at which all nine clear. Measured, not chosen — and the measuring turned up that Developmental Pace is already 0.6 mm over on A4 as published.

    Gates. Broadside page counts are asserted rather than assumed. Contrast is measured in a real browser in both themes. Every internal link and anchor is resolved. The Content-Security-Policy is checked against the markup, because the local preview sends no CSP and an inline script breaks the page in production only.

This page is generated from CHANGELOG.md in the repository, which is where it is written. Every revision to every sheet is in the commit history at the level of the line; this is the same story at the level of the meeting.