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
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14 minoanmiss - Top five poets? top five titles?
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17 dine - Top five ice cream flavors
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19 china_shop - Top five devices/appliances/bluetooth thingies/whatever :-)
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23 fox - Top five Advent carols, maybe
24 fox - Top five Christmas carols
25 break for Christmas
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Comments

[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.