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Comment by tylerchilds | Hacker News Reader

> There's one big difference between 1987's Luna Luna and today's: Children aren't allowed on the rides.

> Haring biographer Gooch doesn't think the artist would have approved of children just watching his carousel turn.

it sounds cool, but also like a “fun museum”— not a museum to have fun in, but to observe a bygone era where fun was permitted for a single season, before being boxed away for decades until it returned as pieces to be seen, not touched, felt, or enjoyed, except in the mind’s eye, if at all.

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Suppose if we enabled people to create more and toil less we may have more fun.

Instead, we seem to have taken the route to make people toil more, chained to a computer or factory line, while the machines churn out digital imitations and any real artifacts of some bygone creatives become so precious they can only be treated as museum pieces because its the only way anyone will see what humans are capable of doing in that capacity in some hopefully not misguided hope that we will enlighten people in the future to make wiser choices.

> but to observe a bygone era where fun was permitted for a single season

That is not quite fair. Fun is permitted. There are plenty of funfairs and similar thril rides everywhere. They are both widely available, cheap, and by and large reasonably safe.

Just whoever decided to hold this exhibition didn’t let people ride these particular rides. We can only speculate why. Probably a combination of wishing to not let the pieces be damaged, and not willing to go through the process of satisfying modern safety standards.

I’m sure that there are wider societal conclusions we can draw from that, but “bygone era where fun was permitted” is not one of them.

>They are both widely available

okay. i'm with you.

>cheap,

by what definition of cheap are we using? compared to the national debt? compared to college tuition? but the local state fair is anything but cheap where the price of a corn dog in coupons is $12.

>and by and large reasonably safe.

and again, i'm going to have a bit of a quibble.

overall, I think the fair experience in your area is different from my experience

> again, i'm going to have a bit of a quibble.

Than have the quibble? I can't even tell if you think that fairgrounds are unreasonably safe or reasonably unsafe. :D You can't just declare your willingness to quibble, and not even clarify what you are disagreeing with.

> by what definition of cheap are we using?

Widely available to everyday regular people as entertainment? Crowds of regular people show up and can afford them.

As opposed to private jets and helicopters where you don't see the same crowds.

Or moon bases where the crowds are even more sparse.

I'm talking about orders of magnitudes here.

i’m looking at the entire life of these pieces.

the intention of the artists was for these to be enjoyed, my “season” reference is the one extended run these had in their original form before being relegated to boxes for decades.

fun was only permitted on these for a season, literally. i’m a fan of art and art museums, but i’m also a clown and an entertainer and there’s a sadness to this that i’m articulating— in san francisco specifically, busking is also a casualty of the bygone era of fun.

the data point i’ll use for that is when i tell people i “busk”, i need to define it. i don’t even put out a hat to avoid being a “pan handler”, but the game has become “where do the police not want independent artists”, which is a sad state of play, that’s not my choosing.

if the carnival won’t let kids play, at least hire some clowns to be props instead of running empty carousels like a more dystopian sequel to Children of Men.

> if the carnival won’t let kids play

But this is not a carnival. It is some weird museum piece which happens to exhibit former carnival fair equipment. On the other hand there are many many carnivals and similar entertainment all around. That's what I'm saying. The era of fun is not gone. You can ride carnival rides. Just not these ones.

If there were no more carnivals, then you would be right that the era of fun has been gone. That is not the case.

> fun was only permitted on these for a season, literally.

And that is true about these rides. But you can't leap from that to the general and declare a whole era to be gone.

another personal anecdote about the end of the era of fun.

this past summer, disneyland, me a 35 year old adult male.

not trying to get into the parks, trying to get to a character breakfast at the grand california hotel with the rest of the family.

we were staying at the disneyland hotel.

the shortest path was through downtown disney. we had to go through security; i had a kavu sling bag, with nothing in it but a cheap bamboo flute.

the elaborate version of this story is a standup bit, but the fact is security wouldn’t let me through without surrendering my flute. we were late to breakfast as we had to walk around security to get to the other hotel, since there was no way i was giving up my silly little toy flute to a rent a cop, defending disney’s ban on musical instruments in the parks.

my first hand experience is that i couldn’t concealed carry a bamboo flute through downtown disney. fun is dead.

What an absolutely perfect encapsulation of the times we live in.

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