PB1B

The Plugging and the Chugging

We had our orders: Plug and Chug. Plug and Chug until we understand what the hell was going on. Simple orders when we set out, we didn’t know the hell we were getting into. Me, Colonel Mustard, and Sergeant Pepper have written over 1,000,000 * 10^-6 computer science papers in less than an hour, and we are writing more as we speak. They don’t seem to suspect our presence; our infiltration has gone unnoticed. Everything is going according to plan. It hasn’t been easy, but we have gathered the following information. However, I urge any readers to question if they want to continue reading. The words that follow are not for the feint of heart. If you despise the laughter of children or are allergic to cats, do not read on. This is your last chance to turn back. Alright, this is the information we have lost a lot of good men to obtain:

There seems to be a defined chain of command. First, there is the Abstract. This acts as the epidermis of their network. It covers the entirety of the paper but at a very thin level. It strips away all the complexities of the paper, and simply explains the fundamental idea of the behind it. Next is the Table of Contents. It is the male nipple of their network; we don’t know what it’s used for. It may be a hyperlink to webpage, or perhaps there are words hidden beneath it in either really small font, or written in the same color as the background. In our opinion, it cannot be trusted. Next is the introduction, the bellybutton of the network. It starts the flow of information in the essay—like the umbilical cord—however, it’s not very deep. It gives an outline of the paper, and tells the reader what to expect to the from the paper. The difference between the introduction and the abstract is that the introduction gives clues towards the structure of the paper, while the abstract only concerns itself with content. Next is the framework, followed by implementation evaluation— subcategories Hardware and Software and Experimental Results— then related works, and finally conclusion. I am to lazy to write blurbs for each of these; however, I am not to lazy to not write about how these pieces form a genre(wicked double negative action there). Simulation Terminated.

Now then, what I got from this genre generator was how you can have the proper skeleton of a genre, filled in with buzzwords and fancy punctuation, and still not fall into that genre. It might look like it belongs there, but it could still be nonsense. None of the papers I generated made a lick of sense, but they followed most if not all the conventions of a good research paper. To me, this says that a genre can’t be solely defined by its conventions. It is the conventions that form the skeleton of the genre, while the meat still defines it. 

Pandyland Comics: where dreams come true. Not for me. My experience in Pandyland was wading through tens of comics up to my hips in puke, vomit, and dead cats. As my mind was starting to close in on me, I realized that there seemed to be some sort of pattern developing. Each comic generally started with some sort of opening frame, followed by a transitionary frame, then finally followed by a conclusion. Each frame is animated and most had some sort of words associated with them. It is really quite simple. The interesting question that it raises: are these all that one needs to fit into the comic genre? My argument would be yes. It may not be on the same level as Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, but it is still a comic strip. This seems like an oversimplification, even to me, but I can’t poke any holes in it. However, this is a quite a contrast from what was found in the first genre generator, where although it may have fit into the skeleton, it failed to exemplify the genre. I think this means that even the process with which we analyze genres changes with the genre, which is something I never really thought about before. 

This brings me to my final topic, what do these websites tell us about genres? As I have said, I don’t think that these websites reveal an elaborate, definitive revelation about genres. Instead, I think they fit together, like a jigsaw puzzle, to form a slightly less blurry picture of what defines genre. They show that we have to use different tools to analyze each genre we look at, we have to look both at the format and the content of a genre to classify it, and we have to think logically rather than formulaically to define a genre….Buzzwords!!!