Mass spec theatre

[kaberett]

(1) I will, as usual, very happily answer questions!
(2) Want a drabble? Give me a prompt.
(3) Want a poem? I'm less convinced I can extrude these on demand, but try me (as specific or vague a prompt as you like!)

Comments

[auntsarentgents]

Coffee this afternoon? (No worries if you are too busy)

[kaberett]

Yes! I think the machine's stable enough for that to be a thing :-) When? SCR?

[aella_irene]

Prompt for either: "you're the heroine of someone else's romance"

[kaberett]

just because
the story's there
narrative pull like gravity wells
does not mean you must
spend your days spinning
(yarn to tell the tale)
in the distant orbit of a binary star
while comets unnoticed weep ice for your tragedy.

make your own wells
build your own frames
grow beans up them and plant pictures inside
there is poetry
even in folding laundry
even in sweeping floors
even in exhausted wrung-out washing up
especially in the curation of compost.

you are yourself alone
and all else is stardust

[ceb]

Prompt: My Travels Through A Mass Spectrometer

[Dicebox] At Least According To Molly

[kaberett]

In terms of gigs Griffen's had as an itinerant factory worker, lab tech is definitely more interesting than average. Sure, it means becoming intimately familiar with everything from vacuum pumps to electron multipliers, but the upside is the job mostly involves long breaks interspersed with moments of great excitement (high vacuum, high temperatures, high currents and high frequencies will do that). It calls on rather more of zir education than ze's normally willing to let on about, but hey: ze still gets bored (and thus into trouble) easily; when looked at that way, many things beat assembly lines.

[flippac]

Prompt: "How the Laundry recruited me"

[Laundryverse] Doggerell

[kaberett]

You know the generalities, of course: you fuck around with computers, you find weird shit, and then weird shit finds you. For me the embarrassing specifics involve pastiches of Poe - there's only so many times you can get earwormed with Abort, Retry, Ignore before deciding you can do better - and transient tumblr fame, at least in the bits that glom onto #creepypasta.

I thought I'd done a pretty well at disguising the truths: as misdirection goes, Poe isn't quite up there with Lovecraft, but he isn't bad.

Turns out the Laundry disagreed.

[shewhostaples]

Prompt for anything you like: this is who I was, half a lifetime ago.

[pome!] Perspectives

[kaberett]

Half a lifetime ago, I was a star
and the first ocean and the stratosphere and
a C3 photosynthetic organism
and a lava flow and a bird,
a meteorite and a mouse.
Half a lifetime ago I was curled in on myself,
foetal, as my mother watched the Berlin wall fall
and I was not yet//me.
Half a lifetime ago
I believed myself happy
and I wished with all my heart that the world would never change
because I could not conceive of "better",
only "worse": that old familiar friend.
Half a lifetime ago I was myself
the breath before this last.
Half a lifetime passes quicker than a thought.
Half-lives twine around us: an all-pervading clock.

[mair_in_grenderich]

I can't work out quite what the question I want to frame is, but I like how you talk about food, so, um, leek and potato soup?

[kaberett]

My mother - via her siblings - calls it "slug sinews", because of the very particular consistency and also the colour. I know you're supposed to end up with something delicate and white and refined and probably sieved, but in this as in so much else I hew fairly close to my maternal line: food waste is an abomination, there's no reason not to eat leek greens, and there's few things as nice as lumps of potato boiled in milk - so I never blend it as much as I might.

I season it with nutmeg and with bay leaf, of course, and with my parev chicken-flavoured stock, because what the other side of the family has given me - despite their nonobservance - is a great appreciation for the respects in which kashrut means I can get something close enough in flavour to the chicken-noodle-soup of my childhood without actually compromising on the vegetarianism.

Normally I eat it hot with crusty bread and aggressive chunks of cheddar. In this weather, I'm decanting it from the cauldron in the refrigerator into a watertight container, sticking it in the fridge at work, then drinking it direct from the bucket still cold. It turns out to be a really easy way to get me to eat a meal, and was inspired by my discovery in Paris that you can just buy litre glass bottles of gazpacho soup that you then pour into a bowl and eat.

Learning to make gazpacho is, as it happens, next on my list.

[silveradept]

A prompt: For SCIENCE!

[snippet about the Thames, which is really more about science-propitiating-dragons]

[kaberett]

The river-that-is-a-dragon recalls the Industrial Revolution with satisfaction: her coalfires burned fierce and her city was wreathed in smoke, the chimney stacks signalling invitation and engineering and promise, and she spread her ashen wings across fields that all would know her might.

She remembers this effluent as she laps at chemical run-off, as she slips the very tips of her claws through the cracks of her tunnels into cellars filled with metal and light. For now - for now, she nuzzles ever-so-gently against the laboratories, and drinks deep of this particular flavour of knowledge.

[alexseanchai]

Prompt: volcanoes. :)

[pome!] Volcanoes

[kaberett]

what is it that you look for in a window
except glass
and at times an elegant frame?

eyes may perhaps poetically be
the windows to the soul
and certainly they are elegantly framed--

what I mean
when I talk
about windows into the Earth--
is that through
a glass darkly, through
a dark glass,
through a caldera framed
by Pele's hair,
punctuated by explosive tears,
I see more
clearly
than I behind my glasses dared
except in dream

[exor674]

prompt: character of your choice finds an adorable kitten

[Elementary, accidentally not a drabble] Moments of glad gracelessness

[kaberett]

"You know," says Joan, stepping over him to reach the fridge, "I'm surprised you haven't threatened to turn her into mittens yet."

He is stretched full-length across the floor, gazing intently at the tableau arranged before him. The kitten is crouching, perplexed, in an improbably small cardboard box. A foot and a half away, Clyde is almost entirely retracted and emanating a definite air of suspicion. "She is not yet large enough for more than a single mitten," he responds, "and I am a pragmatic man. Rest assured, Watson, the bell will toll for her."

She turns around with the orange juice, and looks consideringly at the pair of them, scruffy and standoffish and sharing, or so it seems, a slightly perplexing eagerness to please tortoises. Shy, exasperated fondness spills over into a smile, and she doesn't bother suppressing it as she splashes through sunlight back to her desk and the case file du jour.

Prompt radiation

[hairyears]

A prompt: "Here we go again..."

[pome!] Here we go

[kaberett]

again beloved of sunlight
blessed by sunrise
by the un/familiarity of sky
of grass of blood
that washes tidal through
the rivers of our veins
along paths we've made of
past of present of future
chosen in joyful un/certainty, because
this may always be our last day
our last sunrise our last heartbeat
and every waking is strange, every waking
is wondrous, every breathing moment
the tightrope duality
of first & last, making anew
the act of living
again & again & again

Poetry Prompt

[jjhunter]

"Size of the Image Over Size of the Subject"? :oD

Re: Poetry Prompt

[kaberett]

Beloved, brilliant and bold:
your hands and words spread wide as wings
and in their wise your self
is, at least in part, described
& amplified. Howsoever broad or mean your shadow
it is nonetheless a gift I'm glad
to drink of deep, to sort through
with my finger-roots, to learn
from live from grow from
the echoes of your flight
unseen and overhead.

[thefairymelusine]

Poem prompt: pyrrhic victory. Or, better still, pyrrhic failure. (If a pyrrhic victory is a technical victory in which all was lost, a pyrrhic failure must be a failure out of which more was gained.

[poem]

[kaberett]

I refuse to strip my life
of inefficiency and superfluity.
If winning is to ruthlessly remove
the quiet nonsense from the corners of my day
the catching edges that define my thoughts
the silences I sip from cups of tea--
then let me lose. Oh, let me lose--
and let everyone who follows after see
the seeds of change I've planted in the world
fed by the heartsblood of your victory.

A Ward Winning Software

[hairyears]

Would you mind if I had a go at a 'How I got recruited by the Laundry' fic?


It's one of those mini-muse ideas that *tickles*.

Re: A Ward Winning Software

[kaberett]

Have fun! :-)

A Ward-winning software

[hairyears]

Would you mind if I had a go at a 'How I got recruited by the Laundry' fic?


It's one of those mini-muse ideas that *tickles*.