December Daily: fantasy professions

[resonant]

mific - Top five fantasy professions/jobs

About work: In Samuel Delany's Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, one of the settings is a world where everyone spends maybe twenty hours a week at a Job₁, which is the kind of work that requires education and training and sometimes faces you with problems that you have to take home with you, and then ten or so at a Job₂, which is work that's necessary and important but can be hung up with your apron at the end of the day. I think a system like that would be fantastic. There are lots of things I could enjoy doing if I didn't have to do them all day, every day.

5. I like to imagine cooking for people. But I don't imagine it the way any cooking-related work looks in the real world -- more like being a hobbit, or a little mouse in an apron from a Beatrix Potter book, or a personal chef from one of those wacky movies where you're hired by a family of perfectly awful people and you cook them the food they need rather than the food they think they want and then all is miraculously fixed.

4. This week I saw a video on Reddit from someone who worked in a cat cafe. Wasn't clear to me what they did in a cat cafe, but imagine if part of your job was to pet cats all day.

3. My father was in city planning for a while. You never could get him to talk about his work, but sometimes he'd slip and tell me something fascinating. "There's a formula to rate how successful a set of street solutions is," he said in about 1980, "and it boils down to how many miles per hour a car can average going through it, which is why this city is such a mess." I think it would be really interesting to do urban planning hypothetically, but if you had to work with real people, real competing government agencies, real budgets, etc., it would be frustrating.

2. Project management sounds like a lot of fun to me. I wouldn't want to do it at a megacorporation like the one I work for now, because your bit of the process is too small and it's too hard to get to know the full context of it, but the same kind of work in a smaller context (working for a remodeling firm, maybe) sounds really fun and interesting.

1. Sometimes I've imagined living in a little housing development founded and built for the purpose of sharing resources -- like you've got twelve small houses built around a common building, and the individual houses are just big enough for privacy because if you want to do large-scale cooking or crafts or gardening or whatever, there are spaces you can use in the common house. And not everyone has to have a car, because twelve households could probably do fine sharing five cars and one van. And of course if you were going to make such a thing, someone would have to coordinate the use of all those shared resources, coordinate the people who kept them maintained and cleaned and repaired, connect residents to services they needed, etc. -- now that would be a really interesting job.



Leave me a comment to add a prompt to the calendar. The current list is below the cut.





4 runpunkrun - Top five things you like to have at/on hand
5 mergatrude - Top five things you have overheard
6 storiesforsorries - Top five due South fanfics
7 norah - Top five things you would tell your 25-year-old self
8 kitewithfish - Top five lines from movies or TV that have just made it into your day to day speech
9 libitina - top five beverages you wouldn't make for yourself
10 lunabee - Top five colors to wear
11 minutia_r - top five pieces of fandom history
12 celli - Top five TV episodes of all time
13
14 minoanmiss - Top five poets? top five titles?
15
16
17 dine - Top five ice cream flavors
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19 china_shop - Top five devices/appliances/bluetooth thingies/whatever :-)
20
21
22
23 fox - Top five Advent carols, maybe
24 fox - Top five Christmas carols
25 break for Christmas
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29
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31

Comments

[clevermanka]

Oh to be a hobbit-esque Hunca Munca, preparing food for people in an intentional community. 🧡

[resonant]

Yes, you've exactly captured the spirit of it!

[duffy]

Dec. 13: Top 5 OTPs in television or movies. Could be romantic or friendship. (Canon is NOT a requirement!)

[resonant]

Ooh!

[the_future_modernes]

Because I have had interesting times with roommates, shared kitchens give me the heebie jeebies. But if folks actually clean up after themselves, fab! I do like Samuel Delaney's job ideas though. How about what the the top five things you look forward to as you grow older?

[dorinda]

Dec. 20: Top 5 comfort movies? Or comfort reads, if you'd rather.

[resonant]

I'll give the movies some thought, but I may have to default to the books.

[sara]

I think it would be really interesting to do urban planning hypothetically, but if you had to work with real people, real competing government agencies, real budgets, etc., it would be frustrating.

Land management is All A Bit Much many days. Some days I look forward to retirement and other days I remind myself that I would probably last about two years before I waded back in to something.

[resonant]

I'm sure there are people who enjoy the compromise, the push and pull of goods that are in competition with each other, the complex negotiations. Or at least are realistic about the necessity of them. I'm afraid that sometimes I can see a beautiful solution in my head that would work perfectly if it weren't for all these people. Possibly this is my supervillain origin story.

[minoanmiss]

I really love your answers. I've had a couple of friends who've lived in housing developments like that (more townhouses than separated houses, but with larger shared spaces for entertaining, including kitchens and gardens). They do look really nifty to me.

[resonant]

I'm jealous of your friends! When I had a house with a yard, it seemed irrational to me that all up and down the street were people who owned (and had to store and maintain) lawnmowers and weed whackers and snowblowers and so on. Couldn't we just share?

[mific]

The Samuel Delaney idea is very much a fantasy I had some time ago when working at an especially complex and taxing job. I used to imagine being a librarian, but not the complex role of real librarians, just reshelving books. I liked the calm organisation and simplicity of it.
And I saw an article about one of those shared housing developments like in 5. just the other day. They look great!

[resonant]

Reshelving books does sound relaxing, and also satisfying to the desire to put things in order.

I worked at our library for a very short time before I found a full-time job, but I had the public-facing job, and that's extrovert work.

[nnozomi]

This is great. Especially 3, 2, and 1--I have a thing about "administration saves the world" in fic or fiction in general, and I would adore a novel set entirely in any of these three settings in a fantasy or SF context.

[resonant]

Ooh, so would I.

Part of the appeal of Discworld, for me, is the machinations of the Patrician using his tyrannical power to quietly manipulate people into acting in their own best interest whether they want to or not.

[jesse_the_k]

The Centenal Cycle trilogy by Malka Older doesn't save all the world, but it's bureaucrats in personal jets and election hanky-panky and the world organized into 100,000-people units.

[copracat]

I'm going to create your perfect job: part-time facilities manager for a string of cat cafes. On Thursdays you cook in one of the cafes.

[resonant]

Glorious! Can we have a library attached?

[copracat]

Yes. Establishing the library is your first project.

[resonant]

Bliss!

[lunabee34]

Your answers are so fascinating. Love them.

[resonant]

It was a great question -- kind of challenging to answer, actually.

You will notice the complete absence of anything relating to my education, which was in journalism.

[norah]

I am loving these! The Delaney sounds great. In my experience most jobs, even great jobs, are about 20% actual engaging work that requires expertise and problem-solving and then about 80% email, meetings, paperwork, reporting, spreadsheets, and anxiety; the 80% is the part I bring home and that keeps me up at night.

[resonant]

Spreadsheets And Anxiety would be a great title for something.

Some days my current job is literally 100% meetings. Boy, those are easier now that everyone works from home. Play solitaire and listen for my name ...