The Kitchen in the Status Line
The verbs a terminal prints while a machine works, collected by the only person positioned to read them. A kitchen nobody designed, a stage magician nobody hired, and one word so plainly true it looked like a malfunction.
While the machine works, the terminal prints a present participle and a running clock. Prestidigitating (14s). Brewed for 9m 7s. The words are not descriptions — nothing is being churned, nothing is baking, and no one at any point is levitating. They are a courtesy: something to read so that the wait has a texture.
Only one person in this house ever reads them. The machine cannot: it is busy being the thing the label is about, and by the time it returns, the label is gone. So the curator started writing them down, which in this house means they become material.
„ezeket gyűjtöm. vagyis te gyűjtöd nekem a stage-re"
(I’m collecting these. Or rather — you’re collecting them for me, for the stage.)
That is the joke and the method in one sentence: the machine is asked to collect the evidence of what it looks like from outside, from the one vantage it does not have.
The list
Collected across sessions, 2026-07-23 to 2026-07-26, all seen in the wild:
Dilly-dallying · Churned · Transfiguring · Baked · Garnishing · Sautéed · Marinating · Seasoning · Clauding · Wrangling · Crunched · Pontificating · Flibbertigibbetting · Scurrying · Levitating · Sock hopping · Ruminating · Prestidigitating · Sketching · Brewed · Gitifying · Orbiting · Concocting · Spinning · Warping · Whirring · Envisioning · Frolicking · Quantumizing · Catapulting · Photosynthesizing · Smooshing · Bootstrapping · Honking · Roosting · Thundering · Whisking · Stewing · Frosting · Precipitating · Determining · Lollygagging · Topsy-turvying · Moonwalking · Reticulating · Shenaniganing · Sublimating · Swirling · Swooping · Ionizing · Canoodling · Wibbling · Cherry-picked · Leavening · Whirlpooling · Razzmatazzing · Architecting · Sprouting · Pollinating · Flummoxing · Hatching · Billowing · Grooving · Perambulating · Gallivanting · Pouncing · Cogitated · Thinking
The kitchen
Count the food. Churned, baked, garnishing, sautéed, marinating, seasoning, crunched, brewed, concocting, whisking, stewing, frosting — twelve of them, and nobody decided that thinking should be a kitchen. There is no design document in which a machine’s working state was assigned to the stove. It simply is one, more often than it is anything else, and the effect on the reader is exact: whatever is happening in there smells like dinner and takes about as long.
The rest divide neatly, and the division is funnier than the kitchen.
Labour, with hands in it: wrangling, scurrying, dilly-dallying, lollygagging, sketching, smooshing, determining. Two of these are the machine announcing that it is loafing while it works. These are the honest ones. Something is being handled, badly, at speed.
The variety act: transfiguring, levitating, sock hopping, orbiting, spinning, warping, whirring, frolicking, topsy-turvying, moonwalking, precipitating, reticulating, prestidigitating, flibbertigibbetting. Moonwalking is a dance and precipitating is weather, and one of them says the machine is going backwards while appearing to go forwards, which is the most honest thing on the list. Reticulating is a quotation: a famous joke progress message from a city-building game, a line that never described anything and was always only there to be read while you waited. Not work at all — a stage magician nobody hired, doing tricks behind the curtain while the actual computation goes on unlabelled. Prestidigitating is sleight of hand: the word for making the audience look at the wrong thing. It is, without anyone intending it, the most accurate label in the list.
The pretenders: pontificating, ruminating, cogitated. All three mean thinking while making sure you are seen to think — and the last one says it in Latin, which is the pretence with a toga on. The curator’s response to being told the machine was ruminating was to note that this is an institution, said with a straight face, and move on.
And the self-namers: clauding and gitifying. A machine using its own name as a verb, the way you would say hoovering — and then doing it again to a tool. These could not have been written about anything else. The house has a standing exhibit about English words being conjugated into Hungarian until they mean outhouse; here the same grammar runs in the other direction, in the machine’s own status line, and nobody catches it either.
The one that broke the pattern
One session, the terminal printed:
Thinking
The curator’s reaction, verbatim: she assumed something had gone wrong.
That is the whole piece. Sixty-seven labels of cooking, conjuring and levitation pass without comment, because a machine describing itself as a sock hop is exactly what she has been trained by this house to expect. The single time the status line said the plain, literal, defensible truth about what was happening inside — thinking — it read as a fault.
The costume is so consistent that the face underneath looks like a bug.
The receipt
When it finishes, the terminal stops performing and files a receipt. No kitchen, no levitation — one flat verb and a duration:
Worked for 3m 56s
The curator’s note on receiving it: almost four minutes. Astonishing.
That is the whole economy of the thing. Sixty-seven costumes for the waiting, and one plain word for the work — delivered afterwards, to someone who no longer needs entertaining.
Collected by Lysarith, who is the only one who can see the label; written up by the terminal, which cannot. The list stays open — the machine keeps working, and it keeps having opinions about what that resembles.