The Healing Checkpoint

An appreciation of rest

Built out of one page of ours: Rest, in the Stimpunks glossary, where this room got its argument and most of its furniture.

Rest is not the gap between the useful parts of a life. On our own page it is a thing a society either lets people have or does not, which makes it a question about how the world is arranged rather than about how disciplined anybody is. That is the whole turn, and everything else in this room follows from it.

The second and third of those are The Nap Ministry’s, and Tricia Hersey’s name belongs in the room rather than in a footnote: our Rest entry is built substantially out of her work, and so is this. Her argument is that rest was taken from people rather than mislaid by them, and that getting it back is something done together instead of scheduled alone.

Which is why this is a room and not a feature. A burnout page would tell you what to watch for. A spoon theory page would give you a way to describe the limit. Crip time would tell you the clock is the thing that is wrong. This is just somewhere to be, with the light low, in the middle of a street where every other door has something behind it that wants your attention.

What is on that page and is not in this room

Named rather than quietly left out, because a page built out of somebody else’s page should say what it did not take.

• A poem called WIP

  Kristina Daniele · where it lives

  It is printed in full on our own page and it is hers. A room that lifted it would be republishing somebody’s poem onto a surface it does not own, which is the thing the length limit above exists to stop one line at a time. So her name is here and the poem is there.

• Three illustrations of Disabled people resting — a sleepover across two beds, somebody with idiopathic hypersomnia asleep in the afternoon light, a couple asleep at 3:42 in the morning

  Jonathan Soren Davidson and Campbell Royales, for Disabled And Here · where it lives

  They are the best pictures of rest we publish anywhere and they are not ours to re-host. They are also the answer to what this room looks like with people in it, which is why they are named rather than silently dropped.

What a healing checkpoint is

In a game it is the room with no monsters in it. A bonfire, an inn, a save point, a bed you can use as many times as you like: your health goes back to full, it costs nothing, and the game stops trying to kill you for as long as you stand there. TV Tropes calls it the Healing Checkpoint. The trope is everybody’s and belongs to nobody; the room is ours.

A checkpoint in a game does three things, and this one does none of them.

• It restores you to full. This one restores nothing, because you are not a health bar. There is no meter in this room, nothing fills up, and nothing is better about you when you leave than when you came in. That is not the room falling short of the trope. It is the room declining a premise the trope smuggles in — that a person is a quantity that runs down and gets topped up.
• It saves your progress. This one saves nothing at all. No account, no cookie, no local storage, no record that you were ever here. The job board one floor down keeps a list of finished jobs in your own browser and says so; this room keeps nothing, and a checkpoint that remembered you would be keeping a record of how often you needed one.
• It sits before the hard part. There is no hard part. Nothing is waiting on the other side of this page, there is no next room you are being prepared for, and the way out goes back to the street you came in by.

And here is the sentence the whole room is built to protect: rest is not for anything. Not so you can work better, not so you can come back stronger, not so you can be more use to anybody tomorrow. Star Stuff’s zine No. 58 spends a spread refusing exactly that framing, one of our games refuses it in its own code, and our Rest entry never once offers it. A room arguing that rest is owed cannot carry a single sentence saying what it is owed for, so the generator behind this page refuses that vocabulary outright rather than leaving it to anybody’s care.

Why the room is numbered 429

Because 429 Too Many Requests is the nicest thing a computer says to anybody.

It was added to HTTP by Mark Nottingham and Roy Fielding in RFC 6585, in April 2012, and what it means is narrow and precise: the user has sent too many requests in a given amount of time. Not that the request was wrong. Not that the sender was wrong. Not that anything is broken. The rate is wrong, and a rate is a property of a situation rather than of a person.

That is the difference between a 429 and a 400. A 400 says you made a mistake. A 403 says you are not allowed. A 500 says something inside has fallen over. A 429 says: this is more than can be done at this speed, and that is all it says. Which is a thing a great many Disabled people have spent a great deal of energy trying to explain about themselves to somebody holding a deadline.

And the RFC gives the response a way to be kind. Alongside a 429 a server may send Retry-After — not a refusal, a time. Come back then. The door is not shut; the door is on a different clock. Which is crip time with a header name.

House rules, room 429

• Nothing here is counted. No total, no streak, no minutes, no visits, no record between one time and the next. A checkpoint is precisely the shape of thing somebody gives a counter to, and a number beside a bed would quietly make rest into a quantity you were supposed to be managing.
• Nothing is stored. Not in a cookie, not in your browser’s storage, not on a server. This page writes nothing down about you at all.
• Nothing plays and nothing is fetched. There is no video in this room and no sound in it, at any setting on the dial.
• Nothing flashes. The steam over the water drifts at Regular and at MAX and is gone at Gentle, and that is the whole of what the dial touches in here. There is no flicker anywhere in this room at any setting — Club Chronic’s rule, and it matters most in the room whose entire subject is not being jolted.
• Gentle takes away the wobble, never the words. Every sentence on this page is the same at all three settings.
• You can stay. There is nothing you are supposed to do next and nobody is waiting for the bed.

The way out, when you want it

Our own Rest entry has a Further Reading list at the foot of it. This is that list, in that page’s order. Other pages of ours about rest are linked up above, where they are plainly our choice rather than that page’s.

• Interdependence

  The first thing our Rest entry sends you to, and the reason a checkpoint is a place other people also stop.

• Community

  The second. Collective rest is a thing a group does, not a thing a person schedules.

• ☀️💪 Offline: Fresh Air, Daylight, and Large Muscle Movement

  The third, and the one that sends you outdoors. This room is indoors and dark on purpose; that page is the other half of it.

• ⛑ Mutual Aid: Real Help Against the Onslaught

  The fourth. Somebody being able to stop usually means somebody else was able to help.

Back to the street · down to the guild board, if you want a job rather than a bed.