PB1B

The first pattern I noticed while cycling through the SCIgen website was definitely all the titles of each article were generally the same. The larger sized bold letters and the over use of large, scientific words such as “Autonomous Modalities” or “Decoupling Checksums” was common. Also, each article followed the same structure, an abstract, introduction, a few sections that go into ‘detail’, along with a conclusion followed by a reference section. In each of the articles, there were also a lot of abbreviations that just took the first 3 letters of any 3 words that were in a row. Another convention these article shared was the diagrams. Though there was a mixture of charts and graphs, generally they all had positive increasing slopes. Finally, the last thing I noticed was the use of in-paragraph citations. Though the citations looked like they were used correctly, when going to look in the reference section, the article referred to had absolutely nothing to do with the sentence.

The second website, pandyland.net, was probably really difficult for me to find conventions for until I started to think simply. As a college student, I’m so used to thinking about complex questions and situations that it took me a while to really analyze the basics of each comic. The first convention that struck me was that every statement written was very vague so that it could go along with any sequence of comics it was a part of.  There were no real story lines, so each comic could be seen as individual aspects. I noticed however that the funniest ones flowed and fit together better. Another convention of the comics was the setting and the characters, each comic had the same characters and they were both always wearing the same thing all the time. The setting of all the comics seemed to be in a room with a purplish floor and a light blue wall.  Another major thing I noticed among the comics were a lot of dark jokes (sexuality, suicide/death, depression) between the two characters.

The third website we were asked to look at was a meme generator. This was just as hard, if not harder for me to find conventions for than pandyland. The only thing I generally noticed was the writing. In nearly all memes, the writing is capitalized and bold faced. Most of the time, the set-up of the meme is written on the top and the funny/ironic part in on the bottom part of the image. All memes have some sort of relatable background image that makes the writing on the meme make sense. For example, Fry from Futurama is known on the cartoon as pretty much being brainless and stupid. The meme of him holding cash saying “Shut up and take my money” is always shown with an image of some sort of dumb invention or idea. With knowing the background of why the meme has that specific image, it adds more humor to it. Another think I notice about all the memes is that the genre has tones depending on the meme used. Two example are the grumpy cat meme, which will make you read everything with somewhat of an attitude, and the condescending Wonka meme which will have you read the meme in a sarcastic tone.

The genre generator I chose to analyze is movies on http://www.randomlists.com/random-movies. The one thing I noticed right away was that all the movies that popped up on the website were relatively new.  Although movies have been around since at least the 1900s, none of the movies were aged before 2010. Another convention I seen through this generator was that all of the movies were teen-adult aged movies. I did not see any children’s movies at all. The last convention I found between the movies was that they were all American, English speaking films. There were no foreign made movies or movies in any other language.