PB1B

After browsing through the SCIgen, comic strip, and meme website, I found that they were all somewhat similar website. Of course they all had differences, but they were all somewhat random. For SCIgen, I would plug in names to the website, and they would return with a paper about computer science. On pandyland.net, clicking on the “generate new comic” button would reveal a new comic that seemed completely random. The only one that kind of stuck out was memegenerator.net, because unlike the other two, this one wasn’t random. It featured an online community that would post and make new memes, taking already invented conventions and making a funny caption with the picture associated with it.

SCIgen was a very strange website, whenever I generated a new paper, the website spit out a title that made no sense to me, such as “Decoupling Thin Clients from Kernels in Voice-Over-IP.” After playing with the website a little more, I found that every paper they gave back to me had computer science in it. It would always have a fancy title that pertained to computer science, with the name I inputted, Michael Jordan, as the author. Each would then have the label Abstract, which seemed to give a brief description of what the author aimed to do in the paper. Most of the papers generated had the same sections, an introduction, the architecture or framework, implementation, an evaluation with sub-chapters and chapters about how the concept was supposed to work and how it performed, related work, a conclusion, and reference the author used. I thought the website was incredibly interesting after I read the About section on the website. The SCIgen website would randomly generate computer science research papers, and if I had known any better, I would have known that none of it made any sense.

Pandyland was a little interesting, and much more amusing than SCIgen, it was much simpler, involving three panel comics that were randomly generated. They often made zero sense, but were still very entertaining. These comics feature two characters named Finlay and Simon saying and doing various things. When clicking on the generate button, 3 random comic slots are fit together, and they match up to form the comic. It was incredibly simple, with pre-drawn art made for each comic slot, and being matched up similar to how a slot machine is.

Meme generator was somewhat different, it involved an online community making memes and up voting and down voting each other. They used already invented conventions for pictures in order to make a caption that would only be funny to people who understood the convention. All of the captions are short in big bold uppercase white letters on the top and the bottom of a picture. They featured many different meme characters with some of the more popular being Bad Luck Brian, Good Guy Greg, Foul Bachelor Frog, and Philosoraptor.

Thinking about what’s happening in these websites helps someone better understand genre because they are able to compare and contrast the different websites and see the differences. This allows the person to know what to look for and how to know the difference between everything. They can see compare the websites and understand why all of the websites are in different genre categories. I usually would only distinguish the different genres of books, movies, and stuff, but now, it’s much easier for me to observe and distinguish genres. Before, I would put them in the generator genre, but now I look at a lot more of the little stuff and I understand genre and can categorize more effectively.